Overview
This episode is a conversation with Peter Yang right after he left full-time product work, most recently at Roblox, to focus on a solo business built around content, AI tools, and building in public. He talks through the trade-offs, what surprised him in the first days, and why he chose this path now instead of continuing to climb the corporate ladder.
A big thread through the episode is that Peter does not want to become a generic AI commentator. He wants to stay a builder, use AI agents to remove repetitive work, and put his energy into making things, sharing what works, and showing the messy parts too.
Key Takeaways
Peter says the biggest shift is not freedom from work, but freedom to work on the things he actually wants to do. He expected to slow down, maybe play golf or hike more, but says he is working harder now because the work feels self-directed. That sense of agency seems to matter more to him than having less to do.
He is also clear about what he misses from product management: coworkers, in-person problem solving, whiteboards, and the social side of work. What he does not miss is the meeting load. His view is not that all meetings are bad. He draws a line between meetings that help a team solve a real problem and the corporate overhead meetings that repeat information and drain time.
One of the more useful ideas in the episode is how he uses AI as a decision filter, not just a production tool. He says he gave his AI advisor three principles: go where work feels like play, keep the main thing the main thing, and do the simple thing first. He uses that to check new opportunities and avoid getting distracted by inbound requests and shiny objects.
Peter also describes an identity shift. For years he was a PM who made content on the side. Now he is deciding what he wants to be known for, and his answer is builder. That shapes his content strategy: practical demos, workflows, experiments, and lessons from trying to make things work, rather than broad interviews with executives talking in abstractions.
On quality, he is wary of "slop." His standard is simple: would he respect the work, would the people he respects still want to follow him, and would he want to consume it himself. That keeps him from automating past the point where the output loses taste.
Practical Steps
Write down 2-3 principles for how you want to work. Peter’s version was:
- go where work feels like play
- keep the main thing the main thing
- do the simple thing first
Use AI to judge opportunities against those principles. Ask it whether a conference, meeting, or project fits what you said matters.
Look for repetitive tasks you resent doing every week. Peter’s example was podcast research, show notes, social assets, and formatting work. Start there instead of trying to automate everything at once.
Keep a fixed publishing cadence if content is part of your business. Peter says he publishes a newsletter on Wednesday and a podcast or video on Sunday, which gives his week structure.
Create a weekly business report. He says his AI pulls data from sources like YouTube, banking, and competitor research, then sends him a weekly note with insights and adjustments to consider.
If you create content in a technical space, build more and comment less. Peter’s view is that practical work, demos, and failed experiments create more useful and more credible content than abstract opinion.
If you are still in a full-time role, ask whether the next promotion gets you closer to the work you like or farther from it.
Notable Quotes
Peter Yang: "I really love building stuff, whether it's building a blog post or building products, shipping stuff."
Peter Yang: "I really want to be known as a builder."
Peter Yang: "I never want to get into a situation where I don't have control of my time anymore."
Full Transcript
We are live, Peter Yang, thank you so much for making the time to join us on this of all weeks. I think it's a very fun moment to have you. Yeah, it's really good to be here talking to my friends. I cannot wait to dive in. So today we're recording this, it's June 10th, this is going to go live I think on Monday, and I believe today you published a, let's see, you did a bit of a lightning strike, like a personal lightning strike. There's a Substack post, I think a YouTube video you put out, and I think you did an amazing job of just kind of like laying out the thought process and your considerations from stepping out of full-time employment life, most recently at Roblox, into now I think what you're calling this bootstrapped solopreneur chapter of your story, and we're all very excited for you. The PM Country Club that all three of us are kind of part of was got a shout out in your announcement, which was amazing. And Mark and I just wanted to take some time and use this platform that we have to talk to you about this next chapter and what you're most excited to do. And yeah, so I think where I want to kick it off is, how are you feeling now that you're staring at this unstructured abyss of your solopreneur life, and what are you most excited to spend your time on? Yeah, I think I'm very excited to go out on my own. But I think with everything else in life, there's trade-offs. So what I do miss from my PM job and my PM career is just like being in the office with my coworkers, getting on the whiteboards, talking to them, getting lunch with them, sharing memes and stuff. But what I don't miss is all the meetings that I have throughout the entire day. And now, this week, my calendar is basically empty, except for this podcast with you guys and some other podcasts I'm doing. And it's kind of a great feeling. And in some ways, I kind of don't know what to do with my time, because now it's completely empty. And also, I feel like I don't really see anyone in real life anymore, except for my wife and my kids, which is both good and bad, I guess. So it's definitely an interesting time. Yeah. So just to paint a picture, to help me also understand, in this last stretch of your career going into this chapter, you were going into an in-person office three or four days a week. Is that kind of like the life you were living? Okay. Yeah. It's like three days a week, Tuesday to Thursday, and then Monday and Friday, I work from home. Yeah. Got it. Mark, were you going to say something? And I'm curious, is there, like in the first couple of weeks, is there any, like, surprises or things that you didn't expect that you're kind of like, all of a sudden feeling other than like, maybe missing the people like in person or things that you're like, Hey, I think I'm going to be spending more time doing this and I'm doing less of it, like any anything that was kind of surprising about the transition? I thought I would like, you know, take it easy and like go play golf or go hiking afternoons and just like hang out. But I'm actually working harder now than I did even when I had kind of like two jobs, just because I just feel like a lot more agency in what I'm doing. Like I'm only doing stuff that I actually want to do. And I feel like if I could work really hard right now, I can take it to the next level. Is the feeling that kind of like, if you go play golf, all you're doing is taking away time from your creative pursuits and like, the things are actually exciting. Like you want to, you want to be building. So it's like, why would I go play golf if I could actually do the stuff I'm excited about? Yeah, exactly. Like I wanted, like I wrote my post, I really love building stuff, whether it's like building a blog post or building products, shipping stuff. And you know, with all these AI agents, like I can build like three or four different things at once. And it's probably not healthy, but like, even when I'm out, I kind of have it on my phone, checking with these agents to make sure they're still working. And I just have like a lot of different ideas of things that I want to build. So like, I don't want to waste time, I just want to ship stuff. Has that list been growing for a while or is it almost like a new list? Like it's like now that you're looking at it all the time and the optionality, it's like the list is like emerging in your head of all the stuff you want to be doing. I definitely think the latter is emerging because when I was at work, I had like, you know, two or three products I was working on with a team, right? And all my attention was focused on, you know, writing specs, like bug bashing and doing all that kind of stuff for those products. And now I kind of have, I mean, I have my content stuff that I have to keep pushing out and make sure it's high quality, but the remaining time I have, I just kind of like think about what kind of problems can I solve for myself? Like how can I get these agents to streamline all my workflows, make things easier for me so I have more time to think and like to build new things. Yeah. Yeah. Something I think one of the hardest parts of like this, like bootstrapped founder journey and Ben and I talk a lot about it all the time is like prioritizing because like the given that you don't have employees or maybe you have a couple of contractors, but like the most like limited resource that you have is your time. And I feel like actually like deciding what bets you spend your time on is like super hard. And I'm curious, like you always have this foam of like, Oh shit, like, am I doing, am I using my work time or work budget in the most high impact projects? And I'm curious, like maybe like there's two parts. One is like, how do you think about like, what does high impact mean to you? And then like, how do you think about like, you know, when you have this like massive list of things you could be doing, especially you, like someone who has like a massive audience too, like I think the opportunities kind of keep bubbling up too. So how do you think about that? Like, I don't want to be like a cliche, but I kind of use AI to keep me in check. So like my number one AI skill project or whatever, it's like just like personal advisor that I use. And I gave it like three principles. One is to, it's basically what I put out in the post, like go where work feels like play. Second one is keep the main thing, the main thing, and third one is like do the simple thing first. So those are like three principles that I gave it. And then when I have like, you know, when I have a new opportunity, it's like, Oh, should I go to your summer school to attend this AI conference? I asked it like, should I go? And it tells me, no, you should not go because you have like a podcast you have to publish on Sunday or like, it kind of keeps me in check using the principles, right? Because I think, yeah, I think as a creator, as a solopreneur, there's like so many different opportunities, like there's a lot of inbound all the time and there's a lot of shiny objects to go after. And like, I'm not very good at like saying no to things. So I try to get the AI to help me figure out how to say no. That's awesome. And is your main, how do you think about your main thing? Is your main thing, your podcast? Is it your newsletter? Like, like, how do you feel about that main thing? So it's kind of like a interesting question, because I kind of feel like I have an identity crisis now. Because, you know, I've been a PM for like so many years building with the team and stuff. And then when I get invited to these events, I've been invited as press, right? And then I'm with like the reporters and like the Instagram influencers, like they have their self selfie sticks. So I kind of feel like an identity crisis. And what I decided for myself is, I really want to be known as a builder. And I think some of the most interesting content people put out on social media anyway, is just like, they build some stuff, maybe it fails, it doesn't work out. And they kind of share their journey along the way, right? Because people love following along in the journey. People don't like or at least I personally don't like people who just like produce content without actually getting in the weeds and building yourself, you know? So that's kind of what I want to do. And before when I had a job, you know, I had like a ton of meetings all day and my mind was scattered. I was trying to build at 9pm at night, and it was like pretty much impossible to do it. But now like I have my entire morning free from meetings, so I can actually spin up a bunch of Codex agents and just like build a bunch of stuff. And maybe at some point, so I guess what I'm saying is like, hopefully, you know, you should hold me accountable is hopefully you'll start seeing me publish a bunch of tools and open source stuff or products out there. And maybe some of it has like security issues, or like major bugs, but like that as part of the learning process, right? You got to point the reps to actually learn how to do the stuff. Yeah. So what I'm hearing is like the main thing for you is kind of building in public and building useful things, sharing your learnings as you're building, tinkering and hacking on stuff, following your curiosity, and then using your media properties to kind of distribute that content and get it in front of the people that would find it most valuable. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm lucky to be in a position and I made sure this happened before I quit my job is like, you know, I have a bunch of sponsors and other stuff paying the bills, paying the mortgage. So like, you know, I don't feel pressure to like try to monetize whatever I build super fast. And I just want to learn how, like when I talked to all these AI builders that I interviewed, like I asked them, like, Hey, how did you become so good at doing this stuff? And like the most common answer is just like, I struggled and failed with all these agents and I figured it out eventually along the way. And that's kind of my journey to I kind of like, they don't listen to what I want. And I have to build a skill or build something to kind of make them follow what I want. And then slowly the system gets better over time. Hmm. Right. Yeah. Along along those lines. I'm kind of curious. And I know we're still very early on. So, you know, we could check in and set the six months or 12 month mark and see how it played out. But I'm curious if you had to guess, you know, if there's like a pie chart that represents your time on a given week and historically, you know, some chunk of that time went to your full time job and some chunk of that time went to your your podcast, your newsletter and your tinkering. I'm curious if like the new the new pie chart moving forward with all this time that you obviously don't don't need to dedicate to a full time role. Do you imagine spending more time on the podcast and the newsletter? Or do you actually think you'll you'll you'll spend the same amount of time on the podcast and the newsletter, but simply, you know, backfill the rest of that time with your own projects, like in your own building time? Or do you actually want to ramp up the time you spend on the newsletter and the podcast? Yeah. Like, I want to increase the quality of the newsletter and podcast. But at the same time, I'm also actively building skills to streamline a lot of the, you know, manual copy and paste work, right? So like, I now have skills to, like, I have a skill to do research for the podcast, for the guests, and it outputs like a whole doc for me. And then after I record a podcast, it makes like five different assets for me for social media and like YouTube and everything else. And like that would have taken me like a couple hours to do manually. Now I still check it to make sure that you know, it actually has some taste to what it's doing. But like, I feel like I feel like that's the that's the main thing about being an AI builder. Like it's just kind of like setting up systems for yourself to save a lot of the manual work so that you have more time to do other stuff. So I guess to answer your question, I expect to spend around the same amount of time on the podcast and newsletter and hopefully free up my nine to five time to do other activities like to build. And also just like to remind myself to spend on my kids, you know, right, like, like, they come home at three o'clock. And like, no, normally I'll be working, right. And I have to remind myself, actually, it's not always the time to like, stop doing whatever the hell I'm doing right now. And like, go play with them. Yeah. So I used to either be at the office when they got home, or you're at home with the door shut. And now you get to be present. Yeah, I have to remind myself because like, we're all type A, we're all worked on better stuff. Right. So we're all like very type A. One of the reasons I did this is because I want to spend more time with my family. Are your kids like old enough to notice like, what's going on and like, how do they feel about it? Like, are they like? That's a good question. Questions. Yeah, that's a good question. I went to a retreat in Tahoe with a bunch of other folks. And my eight year old was telling everybody that daddy's gonna quit his job. It's pretty funny. So yeah, she's definitely knows, she definitely knows I'm gonna quit my job. Yeah. So my daughter is three and a half. So I don't think she's like old enough to be able to understand this kind of stuff. But did your eight year old understand? Like, do you think at that age, they understand what the what dad's dad's relationship with work means? Like, do they understand that kind of concept? Or how do you think they take it? Um, that's a good question. I mean, they see me like every morning working, right? Like when they wake up, I'm already down here, like trying to run my blog posts and stuff. So hopefully that kind of builds some discipline or like respect from them. But I don't think there's a difference between like sort of partnership versus having a job versus like that kind of stuff. I don't think they understand. Yeah. I see. Hey, like that is around more often, or like he's spending more time with us, or maybe like the job that was in before maybe like, yeah, kind of pulling away more time or and but yeah, maybe they definitely see me more often. Yeah. They'll be home more often. Yeah, I mean, my wife and I both work from home. She has a full time job. I don't. And so I doubt my daughter knows the difference between like me being on my laptop and my wife being on her laptop as like, you know, any anything it's but yeah, if I was going into an office five days a week, and I'm home every day, I'm sure that would be very noticeable. And I'm sure very positive, like who doesn't want their, their parents around more? That's, uh, yeah. Yeah. I kind of back back to your point, Ben, of like, hey, do you think you like asking Peter, do you think you're going to spend more time or less time in the podcast? In a way, like I feel like everything all the time that you're going to spend doing other things is going to make you more effective in your podcast, because now you have more experience kind of testing all these things, you're spending more time with it. And you can have like more nuanced takes on everything you're doing. And I feel like that's actually been a really cool evolution. Like I've been following your content for a long time. And I feel I've been feeling more and more engaged with your content, because I feel like you've gotten really good at like, just giving the really like nuanced practical take like takes on different things like open claw or like, you know, this skill. And I just feel like, Hey, like this is someone who is clearly has tested the edges is using it himself consistently. And I just feel like it's way more trustworthy. And then you just like maybe like, I'm more unique than maybe you just interviewing like a product leader. And I feel like that, like, I just feel like I can relate to that content way more. And I just get a ton more value from it. So I can only imagine that's just going to get more and more valuable. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I feel like I think there's like a quote saying, like, people, people cannot compete with you just being you, right? Or something like that. Right. And I feel like now that before when I had a job, I was just like rushing home to make content or trying to do it on the early mornings on the weekends, I kind of just like barely staying afloat. And now I can go deeper and now I can actually build stuff. So hopefully I do more content around, like, just like me trying to build something and like making mistakes or something, something, right. And I feel like that feels more authentic and real than they're just trying to interview some product leader. Yeah. Cause I don't think, or maybe it's not the right fit for me, but like whenever I try to interview like a CPO or like a VP, like no one already gives a shit, I just don't care. So is that, is that, is that the stat? I mean, there's, there's a few, obviously we were doing the podcast, so we have our own kind of like curiosity about that, the podcasting part of your life. But just to read that back, just want to make sure I'm understanding you. You think that when you interviewed, for example, like I enjoyed your interview with one of the granola co-founders when you had them on, like I've, I've enjoyed your interviews over, over time and I've enjoyed your tutorial kind of like you just, like Mark was saying, like breaking down, like here's what you need to know about this or here's, are you saying that no one, like way less people care about the interviews and like people like the, the how to kind of content that you do on your own solo way more? No, I think people like my interviews with like AI builders or actually showing some sort of workflow that they can copy. I think people, and I stopped making this kind of content. I don't think people like interviews where it's just like some, some exact pontificating about AI or something, you know, this doesn't feel very practical. So I think if I want to differentiate on one thing and just to make it as practical as possible. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Like I feel like the screen-sharing be like, Hey, I can, I can actually walk away with something from this video that I can just like sit down or I can follow along. It feels more actionable than, than just like, Hey, like this person may be sharing 20 years of experience and just having a really hard time relating because you've never, maybe never have an experience what they're doing or, you know, a completely different context or environment. I also feel like what I've been liking to a lot about like your guests recently too is like, you, I feel like you bring people that are maybe less obvious or haven't been around as much, or maybe not as well known, unless you're like very much in the, like, kind of like, you know, AI X and I'm curious, like, what, what are your, maybe like your filters or how do you pick, like, who do you invite into your podcast? I guess it's just like, I like enjoy what they put. Is it something else? Like, how do you like, cause I feel you have really good taste there and I'm curious, like it's not a very scientific process. Like, you know, I spent a lot of time on X for better for worse. And I, I see these AI builders share like some GitHub repo or like some, something that they built. Right. And if I'm super interested by it, I just kind of DM them and be like, Hey, you want to, you want to show how this works on my podcast? And usually they'll agree to do it. Yeah. So the people, the people that I kind of interview are not necessarily like super famous people. Yeah. They always have some sort of workflow or something unique that they can demo. They're like nerd, they're like nerd famous. Like, I feel like there's a lot of people, yeah, hopefully no one, no one gets offended by that. But being nerd, being nerd famous is a huge compliment in my world. So it's like people, I personally want to learn. So it's kind of like a, it's kind of like a hack because it's like people actually like I'm trying to become a better AI builder. So I personally want to learn how these guys work, right. And like using the podcast as an excuse to learn from them and then trying to apply their stuff to my own thing. It's like great. It's like a great loop. Yeah. One thing that Ben and I always worry is like, we have a rule that we'll only invite someone in the podcast. If like one of us is at least like an eight or nine out of 10 excited to have them on. But the tricky thing about it is that the prerequisite of that is that one of us needs to at least have a conversation with them and know how they are on air and how they are engaging conversation. So do you ever, do you ever worry about like, just, you know, inviting this person who like is an ex and then all of a sudden, you know, barely like, you know, look at the camera, can barely talk. Like, yeah. Like do you, do you do like any like vibe check before or you just kind of YOLO it? That doesn't usually happen to me, even though some of them, yeah, it doesn't happen to me. I think there are some episodes I've recorded where I decided not to publish them. And that's actually most of the time because like some company PR person or like some agency pitch me some, some like exec from a company and like they come on and they're mostly just trying to promote their product, you know, and it doesn't feel like as authentic and practical as what I want. So yeah. So that doesn't feel like very organic to me and I usually end up not publishing those. Yeah. We, we we've gone back and forth on like having someone come on and like talk about their product. And I think where we've landed is that if we are genuinely curious in what they're building, then we will outbound to them and be like, Hey, like what you're building. Like we had Tom, this guy working on I don't know if they've already rebranded Mark, if you've been following, but, but, but when they came on Tom Sharman and what's the name of his company? Block. Block. B-L-O-K. And we spent like a whole podcast episode talking about like user, like simulated users and synthetic data and making those kinds of decisions. Cause we're like interested in that as a space. Right. But yeah. I don't think, I think if someone came on and it was like, Mark and I are not trying to talk about what they're building and they keep steering the conversation back to like what they're building, that would feel kind of gross. I think. Yeah. Yeah. It would be like me saying like, Hey, like, and subscribe to my YouTube. Like every other sentence is feels weird. Yeah. It feels weird. Yeah. It's like the people that you listen to an interview and they're like, well, if you buy my book, you know, I wrote, I had this chapter where I talk about this or, you know, like I have this, I have this other chapter where I talk about this. And sometimes I'm like, I'm glad to know that if I want that detail, it's in your book. But also like the reason I'm listening to this conversation with you is cause like you got to spill some of the, spill some of the good stuff, tell some of the stories here. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Mark, you get, were you going to say something? I was going to change gears, but I think one thing that I just really want to get into as well is like kind of how, how you made, how'd you go to this point of like making this decision of, Hey, like you have this, you know, you had this awesome role and that a lot of people would dream to have and doing really well. And also I can like, you've been writing and doing full-time for a long time. Like how has it been like six years or like how long has it been like, you've been kind of doing this like, like being double shift. Yeah. It's been quite a while. I don't, I haven't reflected on how many years, but it's been definitely more than four years. Yeah. You started when you were working where? I was working at a FinTech company and I was very bored, I was very bored. And I have a story about like a bunch of meetings. And I have a story about like a bunch of meetings with PMs aligning on OKRs for four hours. And after that meeting, I decided to just like talk about my experience working at Twitch and writing on Substack. And that was like my very first blog post. And then after that, so that went semi-viral. And then after that, I posted a whole thread about OnlyFans for some reason. And that got like 4,000 likes, like the business behind OnlyFans. And then I was kind of hooked. So then I was like, oh, there's actually people who want to listen to me on X or on Twitter. So I just kept on going and going. You know, it's kind of remarkable that I was able to kind of just like publish every week or every other week without getting paid anything. I just kept on going for like years. That's probably a very good sense that, you know, that's kind of the stuff that actually gives you energy. Right. But how much later did the podcast come? The podcast I've been doing for like, I think a year and a half or maybe a little bit longer. And it's because like, I wanted to get good ideas out of people from my blog post. And I was doing all these Zoom recordings. And the Zoom files were just like sitting there on my computer. So I thought, okay, why don't I just like upload them? Right. Because people want to consume. Some people want to read the post, some people want to watch the video, people want to consume in different ways. Yeah. But it's not like, you know, like five or six years ago and after you were like, man, I hate this alignment PM job, you're like, you're like, okay, I need to start plotting about how to get out of this, like, you know, quote unquote, like rat race. Like, it's not like, it's not like you were just like, like you had a plan, it was more of kind of like organically, you started doing this sort of taking traction and then you kind of started seeing a path be like, oh shit, like I might be able to do this like full time one day if things continue to go the way they go. And I think you can argue that I kind of actually kind of like decided to go full time kind of late, you know, because even last year I was like, you know, making decent enough income to buy a mortgage, doing the creative stuff. And I think I'm actually more risk averse than a lot of people. And maybe if I went full time earlier, I could have like growing even bigger. But I think, and to be honest with you guys, like, even for a long time, like even just like a few months ago, I was still trying to, you know, I was just trying to climb the corporate ladder, right? Because when you're in a company, everyone around you is trying to climb the corporate ladder. So like you kind of get into that mentality of like, hey, like I already got to like make director or I already got to make VP or otherwise I failed in my life, you know? So I was just trying to do it. But I think part of it is just kind of seeing the people who have achieved that and, you know, no disrespect to them, they clearly know how to do their job and become a VP better than me. But like, I just didn't really want the life that they had. Yeah. So, yeah, I think I think one thing I heard when you published your video today was this something along the lines of, you know, the people who make it to VP or C level, they're in meetings all day and the amount of builder time that they actually have, which, you know, I think is something all three of us, I would say, like get a lot of energy out of building and actually an empty calendar is super exciting. I think like my best days have actually probably been days where my calendar is empty and I can just bite off a big problem that I want to solve or that big thing on my to do list that just has struggled to get the time and I finally can bite my teeth into it. And I think what you're saying, Peter, is like if you're playing the corporate ladder game at the majority of big tech companies, at least, let's say you become a slave to your calendar and you're back to back to back to back and you don't get a lot of time. Your kids probably don't see you as much. Yeah. And sounds like you're just not getting excited about winning the game you were playing. Like, why would I why am I playing a game? I don't want to win. Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I guess it's nice to, like, move the athletes to VP or something. But like, like, do I really want to play that game? And also, like, like, I don't want to just shit on meetings entirely. Like, there's tons of meetings that you have as the PM, right? It's like one type where you're actually trying to solve a real problem with your team. And in some ways, your team, like they're really smart people, like designers, engineers, PMs, and you can kind of bounce off each other. And those are the meetings that I actually really enjoy because you're trying to solve a problem, like trying to brainstorm a solution. And it feels like very creative and it feels like you spend your time well. But I feel like in corporate, it's like a lot of times you're in these meetings where it could just be an email or it could just be a Slack message. Right. Or like, and then seeing that clock tick down in those meetings is kind of what killed me. It's kind of like literally just wasting your life, you know? So totally. So that that that's kind of what I recognize that, you know, am I going to have more of this kind of meeting if I keep that going up or less? Yeah. At one point when I was at Facebook, I had this moment where I was like, this is because the way Facebook likes to staff stuff, or at least did back then, is if something's important, there's like at least three different teams or orgs that are all focused on trying to solve it. I don't know if you saw this when you were there, Peter, but like I remember at one point on a given week, I remember being in like the third meeting over the course of like two days about the same exact initiative. But like the people on the call were like, there was like maybe 50 percent overlap where like half the people on that call had been in the other two meetings. And then there's like half the people that were not in the other two meetings or just like repeating a lot of the stuff we said. I feel like that that has to be dying. Like there's no way no one's looking at that and saying, like, we should definitely keep doing that. But well, no, I want those are energy draining for me. I feel like no one actually enjoys being in these meetings, but like I feel it's just the nature of like once a company gets big enough, it just starts happening. It's kind of what I feel like you cannot avoid it. And like I feel like the only way we're going to talk about like how to avoid PM theater, I think maybe your principles and your values, company values can help you avoid it for a little bit. But past a certain point in science, it just starts happening. I haven't seen a single company avoid it. You know, can I ask you a specific thing? I'm curious to hear your take on do you believe there's ever a good reason to have a recurring meeting? So, for example, on my team, we had a recurring meeting that like it's like a team meeting that like probably 70 percent of the time we canceled. Let's talk about. But like if. Yeah, so it might be nice to have it on a counter just so people have that counter slot saved. But like you should not be a slave to it. Right. You should be able to just cancel if something to talk about. So like usually like an hour before the meeting, I'd be like, hey, does anyone have any topics? I always want to cancel it. Right. As opposed to the default being no meeting. And then if someone has something to talk about, to like assemble people to talk. And then the risk there is that you just might not have enough. There might not be a block of time where everyone's available. Yeah. Might not be a lot of time. I mean, my favorite meetings are just like I go walk by an engineer's desk and try to figure out a problem. Like that's kind of my favorite meeting. I'm not sure of my engineer's favorite meeting, but it's my favorite meeting. Were you the PM that comes and just like taps on their shoulder while they're there? Yeah. Like, yeah, they're like hard, you know, trying to do something. I'm like, hey, here's a random idea. I'm like a hundred thousand tokens into this chat. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. And I will say that I will say that recurring one-on-ones I actually find very valuable. Like people keep shit-shitting on one-on-ones. It feels like online. But I feel like one-on-ones are where you can have some real talk about what's going on, depending on like how comfortable you are with the person. Right. And are those one-on-ones with like people that are reporting to you or your manager or like key stakeholders? Yeah. Like one-on-one, like usually the management chain, people that report to me or my one-on-one with my manager or like other stakeholders, like, you know, maybe like a monthly one-on-one with other stakeholders just to stay in touch and like understand each other's motivations. Yeah. Do you do you think sorry, just kind of like shifting back to the current phase now, are there any practices or accountability mechanisms that you are you want to try to bring from your full-time life into this solopreneur chapter, like rituals or things to kind of things that you felt gave you good kind of like maybe constructive scaffolding for being productive? Yeah, that's a good question. So so I'm on this content schedule to publish a post every Wednesday and a video or podcast every Sunday. So I feel like that's kind of a big thing to me now. So I just do it. And then I have AI send me a weekly business report. So like it pulls a bunch of information from my YouTube, like my bank and like it has a bunch of research and it sends me like an email every Friday morning about how things are going. And it's incredibly useful because like I make it give me like top five insights and stuff to adjust. Yeah. So that kind of holds me accountable. And I have another one to kind of work on my health, like it's the same kind of report, but except for my health, like how much I weigh and like what kind of workouts I do. So that's pretty useful. But otherwise, yeah, otherwise I don't really have a ton of accountability. I, you know, just being Taipei, I kind of hold myself accountable. Yeah. I mean, I feel for, you know, for being able to do what you did for such a long period of time, you have to be extremely disciplined and extremely consistent. So, yeah, I'm guessing that that's not going to be a problem. Probably it's going to be way more difficult to like step back and not work as hard and kind of like actually spend time with like family and go out with friends and like the other way around. That would be my guess. I'm curious, like for your business report, like so it sounds like you it takes information, maybe like kind of like key metrics about your channel, like how many views you got, et cetera, like kind of revenue for that month or week. And how does it compare maybe to previous ones? I'm curious. And then like, you know, the AI is smart enough to be like, hey, here are the five things that matter the most. How how do you how does that influence your week at all? Like, are you just like kind of like you just want to know, hey, like everything's on track and is it like maybe what triggers action from your side and what does that look like? It kind of spots trends and insights that I would not have spotted if I didn't pay attention enough. So like I'll give you some specific examples. So I'm trying to grow my subscribers on Substack and like it does a bunch of research for similar AI newsletters. And what I found is that a lot of these other guys were growing like super fast. They're kind of going crazy on notes, they post like maybe it's not good, but they post like five to eight notes every single day, you know, and like I would never have found that trend if I didn't get a actually like read through everything. Right. Like another thing that I found is that on LinkedIn, if you do a bunch of like link aggregation posts, it tends to do better. Like, you know, here's like all the resources that I have. Right. So, yeah, so it kind of finds these trends for me. And then I can decide whether I want to try this or not. But how does the AI know to look into notes? Like I would have never thought about like, yeah, like the correlation between like, I mean, I'm not super into it, but like, you know, but I use Substack and I go, that actually makes a lot of sense. But how did you have that inkling to look for that? Or is that something that I autonomously found? I basically like, hey, you know, here's like three to four other new newsletters who are kind of in the same niche as me. And I just like do your research, like look at the notes, look at all the posts and look at everything. And then I use like the browser and looked at everything and like found a bunch of trends. Yeah. So is this like a scheduled task or like open call? I, I'm using Codex for everything. We talked about this before. I'm using Codex for almost everything now because Codex has the best browser use because like Substack doesn't have any APIs or like public facing stuff. Right. So it just use the browser to browse everything. And then like it summarizes everything for me. Yeah. And do you have sorry, because I'm actually like, I'm like, I'm going to go do this. And I'm really curious, do you do you have Codex running in your laptop or do you have it in your Mac mini? Because like I have a ton of like scheduled tasks that run in my laptop and it's just like it breaks for like special things. Like it's important things like this. Either I use like the cloud routines or but I'm kind of considering moving maybe some stuff to a Mac mini that's always on. How do you manage like reliability? So so for like for a lot of like cron jobs, I still have right right now I'm using Ermis for a lot of stuff. But like I found out that Codex you can actually just load on your Mac mini so you can just open Codex app on your Mac mini and you can set up all your cron jobs there and then it will not turn off. I just keep going. Yeah. And then, you know, I use like private GitHub repos to sync the between the two computers. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I'm thinking because I just I'm just now getting into I've used browser use and cursor like cursors, native browser. It was kind of OK. And then I used a cursor. I'm sorry, cloud co-work using my Chrome browser, which is interesting, but I haven't played with Codex's native browser yet. Sounds like does it also open an external Chrome browser and does stuff or it's all natively like kind of like cursor that has a native browser inside? Cursor is native browser inside, but if it needs your auth, it has to open like an external Chrome browser. But I just find it like that. That's probably my favorite feature of Codex, actually, just the browser use, because I find it like incredibly persistent and like it would not give up until it gets everything that you want to get. So so, yeah, like I rely on the browser use a lot. Yeah, we actually just we're in the process of exploring how we can let's just say we're exploring ways we can grow the distribution for insider loops by working directly with recruiters at companies. And so I had Claude co-work put together like a sheet. I was like, I want you to find, you know, three to five product management focused recruiters at these eight companies and put them all on a sheet. And then I want you to like, you know, put all this information in there. And it's like so adept at like going into Chrome, opening LinkedIn. And it's like very fast to go into all these tabs, finding information and recording everything in in a sheet. And then you could just like manipulate the sheet and give it more tasks from a single co-work chat session, which I think I mean, I'd like to think I've been on top of some of this stuff. But even that is like I'm like, wow, like I this is working way better than I would have expected it to work. And so are you saying you're even more impressed with what Codex can do than what you can do with co-work? I think Claude co-work and Claude are also incredibly impressive, especially with the latest model, Fable. But I think Codex is also basically if you want like some AI tip from me, it's basically like stop using chat between Claude and just switch to either Codex or Cloud Code. Just start using those instead. And then you can get so much more done, you know, so. But when I use Claude, because I use Cloud Code mainly through the cursor app as I use like the Cloud Code plugin, I use the Codex plugin, which I haven't really spent too much time in native Cloud Coding, Claude or in the Codex app. Yeah. And my sense is Cloud Code, at least in that environment, can't do browser use. Am I wrong about that? Like as I haven't used the cursor for a while, so I don't remember. But yeah, I mostly just use the Codex app or sometimes the Cloud Code app. Cloud Code, but the Cloud Code app is like a tab or like a space inside of the Cloud app. There's not like a dedicated Cloud Code app today. Correct. Yeah, it's just a tab. Yeah. And that has full browser use. Yeah, it has full browser use. Yeah. OK, I got to get up. Your boy's lagging. Yeah. I'm falling behind. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, because before I couldn't get into this stuff, right, because I had a job, but like last week I sat down for a whole day and try to I try to automate as much as possible while still while not going too far into slop. So that's what I do. And now I'm kind of convinced that like pretty much any kind of knowledge work, like no matter how many steps are in between, like you can pretty much set up a scale or some sort of automation to like do 80 percent of it through one of these apps. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. So yeah, totally. I'm curious if you have this maybe insecurity or fear, but like I have so much fun doing what you just described of like just like finding something and like optimizing the shit out of it to the point that just like feels so productive. But like sometimes I feel like it's like taking away time from like actually like doing strategic thinking or maybe like just doing the hard thing. It's almost like it feels like a form of procrastination. So like I know I know it's just too early kind of like in just like doing this full time. But like, do you have a sense of like maybe like when is it actually like super high value and like 100 percent worth the time versus someone that's just like, hey, like this is kind of R&D, but like maybe it's not really moving the needle and I should probably just spend that time somewhere else. Probably like you just kind of like take a look at your past week and like, you know, try to think at a high level where you spend the most time on that you prefer not to do and just focus on those. Right. That's kind of how I prioritize. But I will say that, like even thinking about the strategy stuff, like I don't know if I should admit this or not, but like I pretty much do not think about strategy myself. I always like to think it through with AI. Like when the Fable launched yesterday, right, like the one thing I did was like I had this canonical plan document with like my goal for the year and like my principles and like what I want to do. And I kind of just gave it that document and told it to go do a bunch of research and like give me like like slash goal. Here's my goal for the year. And like kind of like go do a bunch of research and kind of give me a plan, a detailed plan. And like that's my plan as you make sense. Right. And then it gave me some really good ideas, too. Like we kind of went back and forth a little bit. But like it gave me a new perspective on things that I didn't think about before. Yeah. If you're enjoying this conversation, please check out the links in the show notes to support the podcast. Mark and I do this out of love, but to keep it going, we also need your support. Thanks. And now back to the episode. This is super interesting and I want to go deeper here. One super technical question is how do you how do you know where you spend your time? Is it just like as simple as like reflecting on like looking at your calendar in the last week? Or do you have a better system to know how like and like I guess like in a way just like how much does precision matter to you when kind of asking those questions? It's not super precise. I just have a gut feeling like like before I did all this stuff, I just like every single week I would like, you know, manually write show notes from my podcast and put it into YouTube description and then copy and paste it over to Spotify. And I had to like fix a lot of line breaks like manually. So I just have a sense of like, oh, I'm doing this again. Like I really don't want to do this. So then I try to use AI to streamline some of it. Do you do you log every time you have one of those realizations that you're doing something repeatedly? Do you like throw it in like a Kanban board somewhere or like do you tell your AI to add it to some kind of master file and track all that? OK, so so now I have pretty much skills and chat set up in codecs for each of my main work work streams. So I have like a podcast one and a newsletter one and a social media one. It's just kind of like ongoing chat threads. Right. And now I pretty much do all the work related to that workflow in that thread. So like if I have to like just do some manual stuff or like it doesn't be wrong, I can just tell it to update the scale to like account for that and hopefully it won't do it again. Yeah. And maybe I build some like simple yes, no evals to check if it's still doing the right job. Are the skills that you develop for. So just to just to make sure I'm clear, are you are you basically doing everything in codecs these days or like how do you when would you ever go back to like is that your daily driver codecs? Yeah. That's like your main go to. It's kind of it's kind of become my daily driver. Yeah. And this is pretty recent as of last week. It's become my daily driver. As of last week. OK. So did you have to do some sort of like context import to kind of get a lot of what Claude knew about you into codecs so that it could just pick up where you left off? So you can you can ask codecs to symlink with Claude, like symlink the agents.md and the skills. So actually all my skills are still in like Claude slash skills. But I asked Claude to symlink to it. So now whenever it's looking for a skill, it refers to that folder and that it makes it easy for me to switch back and forth between codecs and cloud code if I want to. To simplify, symlink is basically just like in agents.md you just have at Claude.md basically or the path or the other way around. I think it's a little bit more complicated than that, but basically, if you're listening to this lecture, just like literally type like, you know, if you're just using cloud or codecs and you want to switch to the other one, just be like, hey, can you symlink to codecs or cloud code? And then AI will figure it out. Yeah, I think it's more complicated. It's like typing, hey, refer to this folder in the text. Symlink being S-I-M, symlink? S-Y-M link. S-Y-M link. OK, cool. That's something I want to look into, too, because like I also like bouncing back and forth between the tools and I always have this like, I always have like a seed of doubt, which is like, are all these skills I built for Claude like available to codecs or, you know, and so that's helpful. I'm going to try to do that. How do you? But you have a, but. Sorry, Mark, just to like finish that. So Peter, you have like one chat thread that keeps running for like weeks, potentially or months, and you're not worried about, I guess, like the noise accumulating in that chat thread, like in that context when it was getting too muddied with stuff that's not that relevant to what you want to work through and therefore the token consumption is kind of going towards things that are maybe like not optimal? Well, okay. Well, first of all, like I have to admit that like, you know, I basically get free tokens, so I don't even think about cost at all, right? So I don't think about cost. But I think I read this article from this codex engineer, like he wrote his article on X saying like, this is how he uses codex. And what he's writing that article is like, the compaction is so good that you just have long running threads because then it has memory of like, you know, summaries of the past conversations and it will get better and better over time. Because yeah, before I would always start a new thread when I want to do something, right? But now I have these like ongoing threads for each work stream that I do. And I haven't found it like going off the rails on the context window or anything. It's been very good. So ergonomically speaking, let's say you had three projects you prioritized. Let's say we're publishing this on Monday. So like next week, let's say there's three projects you're prioritizing. And let's say each of them is going to be its own kind of like independent work stream, but they're all related to your podcast. Are you going to, like, how are you going to pull off a parallelization of three different work streams if you're using only one chat thread for all podcast related work? Okay. No, that's a good question. Yeah. No, no. If I had to, for example, make two podcast episodes at the same time or make progress on that, then I'll probably start two threads. Yeah. I guess the way I parallel process is more like, you know, I'm working on the podcast one episode and I'm working on a new newsletter, like a whole separate, separate thing. I'm trying to build something on the side. So like, it's kind of like three, three different threads. Got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah. I guess as, as the number of things you spent, like for me, I feel like I spend all of my time on like maybe one or two total things now, so I'm putting a lot more effort behind a smaller number of things. So therefore like the idea of a single chat thread being for that whole thing is, it was kind of hard for me to reconcile for my use case. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. You can also, of course, like be like, Hey, can you save, can you save our chat about the band episode so far? Like MD file? I'm not going to talk to Mark next. And then, you know, when we're working on band again, I go, Hey, can you look at the MD file? You can always do that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Do you, do you do anything right now to like manage your memory across everything? Like you have like a, almost like a memory synthesizer skill or something that kind of like reviews everything that you've talked about or, and again, any, something that knows you just quit your job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I, okay. So I'm not sure if this actually helps not, but I have built, I have a memory dot MD for some of my more important skills, like the personal advisor skill and, and like in the skill assets, you're like, Hey, you know, if you learn something new about me, ask me if you want to save it on the memory dot MD, like, you know, and I'll try to summarize when you want to save me like one line. So it's not like super long. Right. So it starts doing that and hopefully it gets to know me better over time, but I think like a call is in clock also have like universal memory, right? So yeah. And I have another skill called I have a skill, I have a skill to edit my skills to like try to prevent it. Cause I'm really worried. Cause I'm not looking at all my skill files all the time. So I'm really worried that I'll just kind of continue to bloat and just like have like 10 pages of crap and then it'll get confused. Right. So I have a skill that's just like, Hey, and all this in the skills, like, Hey, you know, look for like duplicate instructions, try to keep things to one page, like try to remove all the AI slop stuff that you see on there and like, just try to make it as concise as possible. And like, I kind of use that skill to, whenever I want to update a skill, I try to call that skill. Yeah. I've, I've been, I've been having this like idea that like, you know how, you know, startups are so lean. And then over time you get to the point where there's all this, all these features, no one cares about. And like, no one ever kills features. So you have all these like bloating that happens in products. And I've, I, so I recently had this idea, like, because all this AI stuff is generally still so new, we've all been in like the buildup phase. Like we're adding skills, building workflows, adding automations, creating more context, building out memory. And I've been kind of wondering like, what's the equivalent and that's that, that in this world for when you kill, what's, what's the killing a feature version of like these systems or simplifying. And it's, it's maybe like deduplicating, like you're saying, that sounds like it, but I'm curious if either of you have any thoughts on that. Cause it's something I've been thinking about a lot, like how do you avoid all this stuff getting too bloated? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's very hard cause like, like the way that these apps are set up, like they don't, they don't, they almost don't want you to manually edit the markdown files. It's almost a kind of pain in the ass to manually edit the markdown files. And it's just so much easier to be like, Hey, you know, can you like cut it down by half or like get some generic command and the AI will just do it for you. So I, I feel like I've gotten to a point where I give it the input and I look at the output and see if the output makes sense. Right. I don't actually pay, this is bad, but I don't actually pay a ton of attention to what's happening in between. You know, like if the output is not what I want, then I give it some feedback and then it makes a bunch of updates and then I don't actually know what it does. It's like, you're just throwing stuff in the, in the black box and as long as what the black box gives you back, you're happy. I mean, that's how a lot of us are doing it. I don't think you're there. I would say I'm like, I'm on the same boat. Like I'm like, as long as like consistently is giving me good shit. Like I don't, you know, I don't care. Like what's, what's happening in between and you don't, you don't care how the sausage is made. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that I'll say though, like every time I see like a best practice and like, like, Hey, like the cloud that MD shouldn't be longer than like 600 lines or whatever. Like I try to add that to my global cloud or agent file as something to respect. And then I also have like a similar like skill that tells me, Hey, this thing is getting like maybe too bloated, et cetera. But for me, like the, the real signal to go deep into something is when like the output is not, not longer good enough or there's something that just like gets missed and they're like, I need to go deep here. Yeah. And then I do like a kind of surgery with both codex and cloud code, have them fight over the improvement. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. I wonder how long it's going to last. Cause right, right now we still have our human, the loop we were reviewing is work, but at some point, like maybe we trust it enough to just like start posting social media by itself. Uh, like, like, like, like what someone, someone is doing to go unnamed, but it's a slippery slope. It's a slippery slope. I think to like the moment, like for, you know, I, I got all the way to the point with like that, that example I was talking about before, like I got all the way to the point with Claude co-work where it had the sheet readings. Like, would you like me to start draft, like sending the emails for you or like, no, hold on. That's where I'm drawing the line. Like, let me do that part. Um, but yeah, I think, I think it's, it's inevitable that that's where it's heading. Right. Like, you know, some of us are holding onto control, but some other people who are not to be named maybe have completely automated their content creation process. But it's funny cause you can just like see how you get there. Right. Like, like going back to the example that you gave Peter of like, Oh, like my, I just came back to me and told me, Hey, there's like correlation between people that post eight notes a day in their sub stack and people that grow more. If you had a phone, I thought it was like, yeah, like the next obvious step will be like, just go crank eight pieces. Actually. Why would you, why eight? You should do 25 if you actually want to beat these people, like, like, you know, eight is eight. Yeah. Then I'll send me a report, be like, Hey, I posted 20 notes the other day and like, you grew your audience by a thousand. I'd be like, great, great job. I can't keep going. Yeah. Do 50. Yeah. Yeah. And then yeah. And then all of a sudden, yeah, you're the king of slop. But, but actually I'm curious, like how you think about that? Like period. Cause like, it seems like you've automated a lot of this stuff, but at the same time, like it's not slop. Like I don't think you're doing any slop at all. Your content is really good. And also I think you're very aware of it. Like, I think like even in your video today, you're like, Hey, like you're all, it was funny. You're always asking your audience, like, please keep me honest if I start doing slop, like call me out. So like, yeah. How do you think about that balance? Well, like, I think I called my everything like behind the craft. And even when I was a PM, I was like, I really give a shit about the product that's going out the door. Like I would like, like spend a whole day bug bashing it. I would like make sure everything makes sense. Like the little copy makes sense. So I feel like I just care too much about quality. Just to keep pumping out slop. Like I just can't do it, do it, you know, maybe if I can't pay my mortgage, I'll get that spread. But like right now I feel like, I feel like, yeah. Do you have a definition of slop that you've kind of landed on for yourself? Cause obviously it's a big word, right? Like I think it was like the word of the year last year or something, but like for you and as a creator, like where is there a term or is there like a definition that's been useful to you to kind of help yourself calibrate? I think my definition is like, I think there's a difference between even the connections that you make, like how many people follow you versus like the types of people that follow you. Right. If you have a lot of people that follow you or like, you know, pay for your stuff, then maybe you're alienated people to who you actually respect, you know, like if I was pumping out like 50 slop every day, like would you let me stay in the WhatsApp group? I'm not sure. We might want to learn from you, but, but no, I, but, but, but look, no, I think you're, I think you're spot on. Like Mark and I talk a lot about how, you know, if this podcast could have whatever, like a thousand people listening to every episode, but they were like a thousand super high quality people who we would be proud to like spend time with and hang out with, then that's worth way more than, you know, a hundred thousand people if they're all kind of like bottom end of the, you know, less high quality people. Or maybe they're like, or maybe they're bots, they're not even real people, who knows? Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree with that. So the other thing. Yeah, go ahead. So content that doesn't repel like the high quality people that you respect, that you would want to consume and continue consuming your content. You being probably the first one, right? Yeah. And like, do you have to, do I still have like self-respect for myself if I kept on popping on? Like if I was starting talking about like, you know, if I started talking about birds masturbating or something like that, it's like, do I still have respect for myself? You know? That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. No, like the subject matter is something that you want to feel proud of. Because again, and I think it's helpful because you still have this like self-image of, you know, I'm a product builder, I'm a builder, I care about craft, right? And as long as you believe these things about yourself, if you start to see in order to like juice the numbers that the incentives have pulled you towards a type of content that is at odds with your definition of yourself, like how you hope, what you want to be, then that's what sounds like where, where some alarm bells would get triggered. That's like, whoa, hold on. This is like, this is out of bounds now. Yeah. Or like, do I want to consume this content that I'm producing? Like as someone like me? Yeah. Yeah. By the way, like without naming names, if you think about people who have kind of fully bought into Slopland, do you think that their self-definition is simply, do you think they view themselves in a way that's simply like not constraining? It's almost like I'm just the kind of person who creates viral content. Is that like the self-definition that has to be true for them to feel like it's like aligned? Maybe just looking at like how much money they're making or like how big, how fast their audience is growing. It's kind of like, it's kind of like growth hacking, right? Just kind of growth hack their way to whatever their end goal is. And it's clear that their end goal is not like trying to do some super high craft thing. It's just to like make a million dollars a year or something. Yeah. So whatever, whatever, if, so basically I make more money, the bigger my following or the more engagement my content gets. So therefore, if I want to maximize the amount of money I can make, I have to create the most, the largest amount of like, it's like view maxing or engagement maxing in some sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's also like more complicated than that. Like, I don't think like, I think it's like kind of like a gradual, like, you know, like you start maybe smoking weed and you end up like doing heroin type of thing, but like it just happens like gradually. Right. So it's not like one day you're just like, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to take care of any kind of thing. Like maybe that's a bad analogy. Like breaking bad. Like when Walter White, it's like you start with just like one thing and then before you know it, you're like, yeah. Yeah. But I think your sensitivity kind of like, it kind of gets worse and worse because like you're just like, you're just used to like, you know, you kind of lost touch with like what that high craft thing looks like. Right. So I think it's like, it's like this progressive thing and then all of a sudden you're like, that's the worst dude. If you get to a point where you don't, you don't even trust your own intuition and what high quality looks like, like, like you can't, you're like, I don't even know anymore if this is high quality or this is high quality. That's the point where I'd be, I'd be feeling pretty lost because it's like one of the things that we talk a lot about is like having taste, having good judgment, having like a sense of, you know, Peter, I love craft as your, as your brand. Like, cause I, I think craft is what it's all about. I think slop is almost anti-craft is like, yeah, I mean it can be a really good comedian and pump out slop. I guess like talking about like about birds all day or something. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think it's also like, I think I'm guessing there's like two things happening. I think one is like maybe people like, like their bar gets lower a little bit. I think there's also like probably what's happening is like, I think some people can detect, be like, Hey, this is not amazing. But the problem is that they don't know how to create amazing work. Right. And they just kind of lost the muscle and the persistence and the process to get from like okay to great. And they're just like, they just don't want to go through that. They just don't want to go through that journey because that journey is painful. And like they think like, Hey, that's not the highest ROI thing that I can do in the short term. And I think maybe if they take a step back and zoom in and be like, Oh, actually long term, you know, trust and credibility is actually, they probably the biggest asset that I can have. Right. So I think there's also like combination of like, kind of like the, how you spend your time and how long-term you think. Yeah. Like, do I want my kids to see the slow posts? Probably not. Yeah. That's a good school meter, but you know, yeah, yeah. Maybe thinking a little bit, uh, kind of like, but like long-term goals and kind of like what, what success looks like to you and, you know, you were just saying that you're kind of like using the new fable model to help you kind of, you know, and pressurize your goals and maybe even come up with a strategy. Yeah. I'm curious, like in this new stage, like what are you, what are you measuring? And to kind of, you know, make sure you're on track on the things that matter to you. What are the things, what does success look like for Peter in like a year or two years? My goal is like pretty modest, I feel like, or maybe it's not, but like, I just want to make like, I don't know, I want to make like maybe like around a million dollars a year and just like have control of my time and, um, who I meet with and you know, how hard I want to work. Cause people's lives change. Right. Like, like maybe I'll grind for a couple of weeks, but maybe I'll relax for a couple of weeks. I just want to have that flexibility. I never want to get into a situation where, you know, like I don't have control of my time anymore. Yeah. Are the leading indicators. Yeah. Like the, so if that's like an output, um, I think we'd all agree outcome output in this sense doesn't really matter. But like the, as far as like the inputs to that go, is it, um, does it boil down to really just like consistent content that is at the same level of quality that you've been putting out or higher? That includes both the newsletter and the, um, in the podcast and, um, and then it includes and maybe as like inputs to that, it's more like you tinkering and building and, and kind of like, um, working on your own projects to feed, to like almost like inspire you to create better content. So it's like the more, the more activity, the more inputs you have, as far as like getting reps with your hands on like the latest, uh, AI projects and, and, and hacking on things, the more inspired you'll be to create amazing content. And then the more, the more your audience will theoretically grow because people will talk about your content, share it, they'll upgrade and subscribe to your newsletter. And then over, over the course of a year, that's kind of like the path to, um, to, to growing. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking about. I feel like you have to get your hands dirty, you're going to build stuff. And, uh, like my most viral tweets are just like me trying to build something and like getting stuck and then like, you know, complaining about codecs or like some, some app. And then people, people share the same complaints and they're like, Oh, this is so, so true. You know? So yeah, I, I don't want to become just a content aggregator. I want to like try to build my own things and see how it goes. Um, but I, I think that's why I think the overarching goal is important because that's what I want to do right now. Maybe I'll do that for the next year or so. But maybe like, you know, when I'm older, you're like, I don't want to grind as agents anymore. I just want to like go travel or something. So like having that flexibility is like really important to me. Yeah. I would, I would, I would wager that a year from now, just having been myself out of full-time work for, uh, I guess two and a half years now, um, I would wait and I'm, and I've seen a bunch of other people also make this transition. I would wager that a year from now, like the, the, um, the, the chess board that you're looking at will be very hard for you to imagine right now. Like I suspect you're going to be looking at a board and I think it's going to be a much better board than you can imagine, to be honest, uh, or at least a board that has more optionality in it, uh, or more paths become available. Um, so that's, that's what I would guess. I think it's really hard to expect to predict exactly what you'll be doing more than like maybe six to 12 months from now, if I had to guess, um, but it's good that you at least know how you're playing it. You have a very strong default plan. And then I think you'll iterate and adapt based on new learnings as you go. Yeah. And that, that's kind of part of the exciting part of all, like kind of doing this, right. Um, and I, and I guess I kind of like the risk for a lot already, cause like, you know, I have some semi-stable income happening already. So it's not like, I feel like if you're going to go solo, like trying to find a problem market fit, it's like the hardest part. It takes the longest time. So at least I have some problem market fit with my content, TBD, if I can find problem market fit with all the random stuff on the vibe code, but like, at least there's some problem market fit. Yeah. I mean, it's, but it's your R and D right. It's like, um, in a way, like the engine for the thing you do have product market fit for is potentially a series of projects that don't go anywhere, but like, it's very, it's very possible that a graveyard of dead vibe coded projects or like, uh, like passion projects is actually the fastest path for you to grow your main thing that you do have product market fit for. Yeah, exactly. And just, just tie it back to the original being of this conversation. Like I became a PM like, you know, 10 years ago to, to build stuff, right? Like that, that's why I want to be a PM. And uh, like for people listening to this, I feel like it's now easier to build stuff just by yourself or like with a couple of people, then like actually being a PM, depending on where you, where you are as a PM, but like if you're, if you're in like a slow moving company, it's actually easier to just build stuff yourself. So yeah. So I guess I encourage people to think, think through why they actually became a PM or like why they actually decided to pursue this default path. Yeah. I'm curious how, even in your goals, like, how do you think about like, do you add any like personal or like hobbies in there and like, how do you hold yourself accountable for those? Cause like, I actually, that's the thing that I struggled the most with. Like, I just like get so sucked in into like work and my work goals. So like, it's like the easiest thing to like de-prioritize when the time comes. And actually that's something that I've learned a ton from Ben. Like he just like, he's so good at like setting those like hard boundaries and, and like kind of prioritizing those things that are really important, but I'm curious if you've... I definitely get sucked into the work too, don't, don't like that. It's an ongoing struggle, but when you have a kid, Mark, when you have kids, it kind of forces you to like set some boundaries that are really hard to, to create without. Yeah, he's going to have a lot of kids, kids, kids, Mark, they have a lot of personal stuff. I'm going to call my friend, my friend Elon to see if he has any tips. I thought you were going to say if he has any extra kids laying around there. That might work, that might work. Yeah. That might work. But yeah, Peter, what do you, to Mark's question, have any, any, any of those other than to spend more time with your kids? Is there anything more specific that you're kind of like aiming for on the goal set? Dude, I, I waste a lot of time. People think I'm like super productive, but like, like for example, I've been playing like Cyberpunk, this, this video, video game for like, I think I'm at 50 hours since I quit. So like, is that productive? No, probably not. But it's, it's fun. So I waste a lot of time. I don't know. I, I, I feel like I should probably, yeah, I try to take walks outside during the day to like not be cooped up in my room and maybe I'll learn how to pick up golf or something, but yeah. Actually, I'm realizing one of the questions we started talking about in the pre-recording that I wanted to save for the recording is one we haven't asked yet, which is, Mark asked it, which is, is this your first, so this is your first time having some time off really? Like you've always gone from like job to job to job. Now, what's the longest you've ever gone without like working? Working for a full time. Yeah. I literally think it's just been like maybe like max one or two weeks between jobs. So this is the first time I've kind of like truly unemployed. Yeah. Unemployed is how I call it. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. Yeah. But you're saying, I'll tell you, what are you going to tell me? You're going to say something interesting. I just think if you just, okay, look, if you just go from job to job, you don't actually stop to think about what you actually want, you know? And like, I think it's actually good to take a break and slow down a little bit so you can actually think about what you want. Which is to play more video games, like apparently, right? Yeah, exactly. By the way, jokes aside, I do. I do think playing video games is really for me, like I've gone through phases in my life where I've played like lots of, for example, like FIFA, like on an Xbox. It really helps things marinate for me. Like I've found it to be very helpful for like dots connecting because I'm in a very immersive environment that has nothing to do with what I do all day in the real world. And I don't know if you feel the same, but I get, I've had really good ideas while just like playing FIFA or something like about work. Yeah. Is this like a, yeah, it's like super immersive and it's almost like therapy, right? You don't think about your life's problems. You just think about the game and it can be very social to play with other people. It also, it's actually like a great like exercise in problem solving too, right? Like you're just kind of like, it's, you're kind of like breaking down the game, decomposing it and then kind of creating a strategy to, to win. Like every game is like that too. Yeah. I'm yeah. I think like low key, there's a lot of, you know, venture capitalists that like kind of like try to get as much information as like, as you were like as a kid. And then basically the, Hey, like if you were like world-class at a game or something, like I'm going all in on that person. And I think there's like no reason for that. Yeah. If you're world-class at like a, like League of Legends or something like, yeah, you're, you're like, you have a lot of discipline. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think Elon Musk is famous for like being really good, like being the number one or number two in the world at like some games, I forget what, what they are. Probably something. And then Diablo too. Yeah. I think, I think if you, if as a kid you were world-class at anything for what it's worth, like I think that is an indicator of greatness in general. Like if you were the, if you were the number one person in the world that like, I don't know, you ran the number one lemonade stand as like a middle schooler in the whole world. Like there's something. Wow. Like you're, there's probably something pretty special about you as a kid, or you're the number one girl scout cookie salesperson like in the, in the world. Like that's, that's also probably really impressive. Like that's a founder I would back. So yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. It's okay. So let's I know, I know we're starting to run low on time. So Mark, I was thinking we start wrapping. Yeah. Yeah. Like super curious. It's like, like, I think kind of back to what you're saying, Peter is like, why you got into product? You clearly love building. It sounds like there's also some relationships that you really cherish on that job. Like the designer, the engineer, and yeah, it'll be, it'll be curious, like kind of with what you do, like how do you find those relationships to like still kind of bounce ideas on each other? Because I think like, even AI, even though AI is amazing and I like, I use it as a thought partner all the time, like, and since I started working with Ben on, on insider loops, like I feel I haven't been having as much fun and I feel like just my ideas are much better. So like, it's just going to be really interesting to see like kind of how, how that happens. You said you haven't been having as much fun. Sorry. Like I've been having, yeah. Man, I was like, is this how you're telling me about having fun? You should share that feedback in private, man. What the hell? No, no. Way to call me out, bro. Yeah, no, no. Sorry. I meant the other, the, you know, English is not my first language and then also I'm slightly dyslexic, dyslexic. So it happens. It happens sometimes. But, but yeah, I just been having so much fun working with, with Ben and I feel like just my, my ideas and what I'm capable of. I'm curious to see like, if you're going to be able to find that too in some sort of way of shape or form, like that's going to be interesting to see as well. I think that's actually really important. Like I'm already kind of, I already feel kind of lonely just sitting at home talking to my agents. So I feel like, and like in the work environment, like you kind of have a pre-filter group of people, right? They have to go through the interview process, you know, so you kind of know that they're really good. But I think, yeah, I think I probably need to find my own work partner or like people I work with that I get along with. And I think it's a lot harder when you don't have the work environment. Yeah. And I think for us, my learning, my learning from this is like, you know, we did the podcast together and then started working together. So it's not like we jumped into business together necessarily. So my learning was like, if there's people that someone is naturally drawn to just like do fun stuff with together and there's no like, it's not like I need to start a business with this person or something, but it's like people who just find yourself wanting to jam with more about on stuff that, that those people might end up being like down the road, people that you could do stuff, do business with or partner with and stuff. That's really good insight. Yeah. I'll keep that in mind. Yeah. Okay. So let's start wrapping. This was awesome. I don't think I've ever heard an interview with you like the one we just had or like a conversation like this. So like, I feel like I'm excited for your audience to get to see another side of you listening to this. So in closing, if someone's listening to this and there's a chance they haven't followed your content yet, which obviously like 150,000 subscribers, if I'm not mistaken, that's where you're at right now. Yeah. It might be a lot of bots, but yeah, it might be a lot of bots. So in the chance that some of the people listening are not in those 150,000, where can people go and learn more about what you're thinking about these days and secondly, how can they be helpful to you? Okay. Yeah. I post, I post the most random things on Twitter. So just want to go to Twitter to follow me, right? Peter G Yang, Y-A-N-G, that's my handle. And to help me, I think I'm kind of in this customer discovery phase. Like I want to make my newsletter more valuable to people. And I would just love to like, if you're a PM or someone working in corporate or like, you know, someone in tech, just send me a DM or something and give me some feedback about what your problems are and like, you know, how I can help. I would love to kind of talk to customers more. I was like, PM 101, right? Just talking to customers. Yeah. I've never found that to be a bad use of time. There's a limit, you know, like I think that five hours a week talking to customers is different than 30 hours a week talking to customers. But zero hours is always where I start to kind of go in circles in my head. So I think I'm excited for you to touch grass in that sense. Yeah. Now our exciting gratitude corner. So, I mean, Peter, you've had an incredible career and I feel like you're starting like the start of a new era, but you know, you've worked at incredible companies, you've built some awesome products, you've built one of the biggest newsletters and YouTube channels and product. And, you know, do you want to maybe just list one or two people that you want to thank that played a key role in your journey so far? I want to thank my wife, obviously, and like also her parents, like they kind of help a little bit at home and without their help, I would not be able to kind of even have these two jobs for such a long time. So definitely thank them. Let's see. Who else can I thank? I think all the people, I want to thank you, Ben, you know, for putting up with Mark, no, I'm just kidding. It's a big task. It's a big task. Thank you, Ben. No, I want to thank you for kind of like starting that WhatsApp group and inviting some great prod leaders and creators in there, because it's very important to have people who kind of are on the same journey as you to kind of talk to, right? And yeah, I'm just very thankful. I'm thankful for everyone that I met online. And like, I think if I didn't do this, I would just be like some random PM at a company. So I'm very thankful for everyone who pushed me to start doing this kind of stuff. I want to thank the people that forced you to sit through a four hour OKR review meeting and I can just see the snapping moment and Peter's like, I'm going to start writing about this. And OnlyFans too. Let's not forget about OnlyFans. OnlyFans. Shout out to OnlyFans. Check out my secret OnlyFans. I'm just kidding. Yeah. Subscribe to the podcast to get the secret URL to Peter's OnlyFans. Yes. Yes. All right. Well, this was a blast. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this with us. We are happy to be accountability partners slash collaborators at any point of the way. So we're rooting for you and I know you're going to crush it. I'm really excited for you. Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks so much, Mark. Yeah. It's been a pleasure. Awesome. Bye bye, everyone. That is a wrap. All right. Good stuff.