Marc basically pivoted from indie hacking to being a “high agency influencer”, right in time for AGI. His moat is not being the best coder / most technical guy in the room, but rather jumping from "coups" to "coups", leveraging his deeply attaching personality. You always want to see what he is up to next. Not only as an influencer doing stupid things for attention, but as a high agency guy who would research some random thing deeply and build sth around it, pursue a weird obsession for 2 months, move to a new city and explain all the pros & cons, get into HYROX and turn that into a $100k sponsorship stunt etc. His personality is also perfectly suited for that game. He's successful enough / good looking enough / fit enough / makes enough money that the life is clearly aspirational, but never so polished or impressive that you stop relating to him. He's still filming random stuff on his phone, making stupid jokes, talking openly about the 30 things that failed, willing to embarrass himself a bit, doesn't act like he's above anyone. That's a much more powerful balance than it looks, cause you want someone doing things slightly ahead of you, not someone living in a completely different universe. If you're some ambitious / high agency 20-sth, Marc is a much more compelling guy to follow than a world class athlete, billionaire or hyper-specialised expert you can admire but never really imagine becoming, or some brainrot lifestyle influencer whose life is entertaining but gives you basically nothing to copy. With Marc most of the entertainment is watching someone do things you could theoretically do yourself, just with more agency, more speed and less concern for looking stupid. And I increasingly think that's the bundle that will win post AGI. Being the most technically competent person in the room matters less when coding / writing / research / design etc. keeps getting cheaper and commoditised. The scarce bundle shifts more toward agency + taste + personality + distribution: knowing what is worth doing, actually doing it, making people care, then carrying that attention into whatever game you decide to play next.

🎒After a decade, I have made free for everyone now! Well almost free, it's $1 to sign up to avoid getting lots of spam The reason is 1) I have made enough money (from it) 2) charging for a community artificially limits the size, if you put the price at $299 you get 50 new members per month, at $99 you get 200 people, at $29 you get 400 people, etc. And this always annoyed me, I don't want to put a limit but I had to, to be able to make money from it, so it's free now I want it to be it the biggest community for digital nomads, world travelers, sovereign thinkers and network state type people For years it has has a great sponsor with @SafetyWing and I think that's maybe a better model for the future, get much more people in and then just add more sponsors Right now for the record it has 43,252 paid members (so about 300/mo for 12 years!), so it will be interesting to see what it can grow too I think now that AGI is on the horizon (or some say already here), online and offline (IRL) communities will become really important. People are talking more to AI now than to humans, and there was already a loneliness epidemic before AI Making new friends and dating is not so easy for people now. And with remote work and entrepreneurship, people lack a space like an office where people would usually make friends or meet partners I made most of the friends I have now through traveling and living around the world for the last 10+ years (and many via my site too), and I also met my girlfriend through those friends! So I think communities can have a real role in that post-AGI Post-AGI business wise, communities also have a moat where many of my SaaS apps do not. So there is some urgency I feel to make Nomads in to the best community there is for those people. But that's why I have to remove any limitations to its growth now So in a way after 12 years I am switching to the subsidized VC model a bit, but still 100% bootstrapped, kinda like "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" Having enough money now I can afford to do these things and figure out the business model later, which I think will be more sponsors Enjoy and please sign up and tell me what to improve!!! 😊

my rule of thumb for buying anything is simple. if i use it at least twice a day, i buy the best version i can reasonably afford. e.g. the best toothbrush, the best sheets, the best shoes, the best chair, the best headphones, the best phone, etc. maybe more specifically the formula is something like frequency x duration x intimacy with your body/attention. if it touches you, supports you, or mediates reality for hours every day, buy the best version you can afford. this also applies to product development, you should build products that touch ppl’s lives at least twice a day (when i was at g larry page would often say this rule a lot at tgif).

I think the hate for Dubai is mostly a Eurocope that can't deal with how dirty and unsafe Europe's cities have become in the last 10 years "Dubai doesn't have culture!!!!!!" True but at least it's safe and clean

one of the strangest things about moving from new york to sf was realizing how often extremely important things happen here in settings that don't feel important at all i lived in new york for four years. i sometimes spent entire days moving icons around in powerpoint, but i was doing it in a skyscraper with great views, surrounded by attractive people in patagonia vests. afterward i'd walk onto a packed street and go to a beautiful restaurant even when the work itself was mundane, everything around it told you it mattered sf is almost the opposite the blue bottle in south park feels like a normal coffee shop. it is also a place where an absurd amount of capital gets allocated sand hill road is one of the most powerful financial centers in the world and looks like a collection of dentist offices you'll meet someone dressed like they just rolled out of bed who can't make eye contact and discover later that they control billions of dollars or have built a product you use every day i've been to parties where almost everyone had raised millions of dollars or built products used by millions of people. in another city, each person would have seemed like a big deal. in sf, they were just standing around a cramped apartment at a "party" that honestly wasn't even that good i used to live in a closet in a slightly dilapidated hacker house with creaky floors and old furniture. people who lived there went on to create companies worth tens of billions of dollars new york puts a lot of effort into making importance visible. sf often seems actively uninterested in doing that some of this is probably because sf is more focused on creation than consumption. some of it is the personality of builders, who often care much more about the thing they're making than the room they're making it in but i think the lack of polish also lowers the barrier to entry. you don't need to look important before doing something important here new york makes ordinary work feel important sf makes important work feel ordinary

Really believe that ADHDs, if they play their cards well, might be the biggest winners of this AI gold rush Cause unlike corporate careers rewarding consistency & compounding, the new world disproportionally rewards curiosity, obsession, rapid switching and intensity The basic problem with ADHD in the old world was that curiosity was expensive. You’d get obsessed with some random idea, spend 3 days learning everything about it, want to build something, then realise you need 6 months to learn how to code / design / whatever (or pay someone who can) and eventually move onto the next thing But AI completely changes that equation because the distance between “wait this would be cool” and actually testing it has collapsed from months to sometimes hours. You can get curious about some niche industry in the morning, understand the basics by lunch, vibe code something in the afternoon and potentially have people testing it that evening. So this disproportionately rewards people whose natural state is basically jumping between rabbit holes, connecting unrelated things and occasionally becoming insanely obsessed with one of them AI is also slowly deleting the boring middle. A lot of ADHD people aren’t necessarily bad at starting things or going insanely deep when something captures their attention, they’re bad at the 200 repetitive steps between “this is exciting” and “this is finished” (boilerplate, formatting, basic debugging, admin, iteration, etc.) And those are increasingly exactly the things you can delegate to AI, which means the economic value of being insanely curious + occasionally obsessive probably goes up, while the cost of being bad at repetitive execution goes down But there’s a massive catch, because AI is also creating the greatest distraction machine ever invented. Every morning there’s a new model, agent, tool, business model or “once in a generation opportunity” to chase, and the same brain that benefits most from cheap experimentation is also the one most likely to spend 5 years being extremely early to everything and compounding absolutely nothing So the actual winning combination might actually be ADHD-style exploration + artificially imposed constraints: explore aggressively, follow weird rabbit holes, test way more things than a normal person would, but once something works force yourself into sprints where you’re simply not allowed to play another game For most of history the economy disproportionately rewarded people who could reliably do the same useful thing for 8 hours a day, 250 days a year. For this weird period of AI, the returns temporarily shift towards people who can obsess over 20 things, connect 2 that nobody else connected, then disappear for 3 days and build the thing

message to all ADHDs: you just need to hack your brain's dopamine to finish a week's work in 5 hours. your prefrontal cortex is understimulated. ADHD means your brain has lower baseline dopamine activity so it constantly hunts for stimulation but every productivity system was built for neurotypical brains that can sit down and grind 8 hours. yours can't. yours needs intensity - urgency - rewards here's what actually works with ADHD: - externalise everything: the reward has to be visible and immediate. timers, streaks, session logs. turn invisible effort into something you can see after every sprint - work around people bc ADHD brains respond to perceived observation. working in silence alone is the worst possible setup. when someone can see your output = spikes and focus sharpens (this is why ADHD kids do homework better in the kitchen than their bedroom) - do sprints (cc @aporia9n) only. your dopamine system rewards finishing. 25 to 90 minute blocks with a clear end point. dedicate a part of your year to work, another to chill, rest. split your month - make a leaderboards where you see your friends or colleagues grinding + concrete missions we will never remove dopamine from social media. so we have to inject it into work instead the trick is making your brain crave the work session the way it craves opening X or TikTok. if you want something built for this, try Promethee. it tracks work, gives XP for sessions, and puts you on a leaderboard with other builders. just ask below and i'll give you access code

This is exactly the kind of overnight success story TikTok has every incentive to manufacture (she now has 800k followers btw, in 2 weeks) Take an ordinary 16yo girl filming random makeup/life stories from her bedroom, and make millions of aspiring creators believe they could be next The more ordinary the winner looks, the more people think “fuck, I could do that too”. A 23yo Stanford dropout who builds a $100M company (or someone crossing the Atlantic swimming) doesn't make you think you could do that. A random 16yo girl making videos from her bedroom does. So from a platform perspective, there is every incentive to promote people who appear unexceptional enough to be relatable, and I think TikTok just understood that Also think platforms are increasingly realising that creators are much more monetisable than consumers. An aspiring creator can have a crazy willingness to pay if they genuinely believe they're one viral video away from changing their life. Spending $20, $50 or $200 promoting a post doesn't feel like buying advertising. It feels like buying a lottery ticket with upside of millions TikTok is slowly becoming a casino that sells you chips. Show enough people the occasional ridiculous winner, keep everyone convinced they have potential, then sell them distribution when their own content doesn't take off

A girl named Ellie Ellis has seemingly cracked the TikTok code. She went from just 6 followers on her first video to nearly 400,000 followers just 7 videos later, all by posting GRWM videos. The growth is insane.

Une annonce hors normes. Vous connaissez mon intérêt pour les mangas. Vous savez aussi ma détermination à attirer en France les investissements qui créent des emplois et rendent possibles les projets les plus ambitieux. Avec l’Arabie saoudite, nous faisons une annonce sans précédent. À Cergy-Pontoise, 3 parcs à thème vont voir le jour. 6 milliards d’euros d’investissements. 22 000 emplois créés. Du jamais vu depuis Disneyland Paris. Une nouvelle destination mondiale. Ici, en France. Merci à Qiddiya et à l’Arabie saoudite pour leur confiance en notre pays, en nos talents et en notre avenir. C’est tout le sens de Choose France : aller chercher les projets les plus ambitieux et faire de la France le pays où ils deviennent réalité. Créer des emplois. Faire rayonner la France. Nous n’avons pas fini de surprendre le monde. Très fier de cette réussite.

If you’re in your 20s (and ambitious) do everything to move to those 4 cities Yes people will mog you for paying extortionate rents for such little comfort but who cares, you’re not everyone, you’re on a mission, you’re here for greatness London/NYC/Paris/SF are basically the golden 4. They’re not just big cities, they’re global sorting machines. People move there from all over the world because they want sth badly enough to accept all the downsides. The guy born in London can be lazy. But the 26yo Frenchman, Indian, American, Italian, Nigerian, Lebanese etc who voluntarily accepts the tiny flat, shit commute and absurd rent to be there has already self-selected pretty hard And that selection compounds. I felt it instantly moving from my hometown in France to London. Growing up I was always “the ambitious one” in my friend group. Then you arrive in London and suddenly you feel extremely average. Everyone is trying to do sth. Completely changes your reference point for what a normal person can achieve The other thing is just how many serious games are happening at once. If you know at 22 that you’re going to be a semiconductor engineer forever, maybe there are better specialised places. But most ambitious 24yos have absolutely no clue what game they’ll eventually want to play. In London/NYC/Paris you can accidentally become friends with people in PE, startups, politics, law, media, fashion, pharma, academia etc. Your finance friend dates someone in fashion, their roommate is building a startup, you meet someone in politics at dinner. Suddenly 5 completely different lives feel plausible That’s insanely valuable when you’re young precisely because you don’t yet know which people / industries / opportunities will matter to your 34yo self SF is the weird exception because it’s basically one giant concentrated bet on tech/AI. Much narrower than the other 3, but that game is so asymmetric rn that it deserves its spot. If you want to build at the frontier there’s probably no other place where your reference class changes that aggressively And yh everyone keeps saying the internet made geography irrelevant. Maybe for information. Definitely not for trust/friendship. Anyone can learn from the same people online now, send the same cold DM, follow the same accounts. Much harder to replicate being the guy someone has had 20 dinners with, worked with, travelled with, introduced to friends and randomly bumped into for 5 years When you’re 24 and nobody knows who tf you are, geography can do a lot of the work for you. You get invited because your colleague knows someone. You end up at a dinner because your friend needs a +1. Someone you met 3 years ago leaves and starts a company. Another moves to NYC. Another becomes a partner somewhere. Most of the ROI is completely impossible to predict upfront Basically before you have your own gravity, borrow the city’s At 45, if you’ve built the company / reputation / money / audience / network, you can go live in Tuscany, Mallorca, South of France or wherever and people will come to you. At 24 no one is coming lol. You should probably be where everything is happening And tbh if you have the ability to move I wouldn’t spend 3 years waiting for the perfect job / apartment / timing. Get the shitty room, accept being poorer for a while, figure it out once you’re there. Your 20s are probably the cheapest years of your life to tolerate inconvenience anyway You can optimise sqm, weather and comfort later At 24 I’d rather maximise how many possible lives are available to me

If you’re in your 20s (and ambitious) do everything to move to those 4 cities Yes people will mog you for paying extortionate rents for such little comfort but who cares, you’re not everyone, you’re on a mission, you’re here for greatness London/NYC/Paris/SF are basically the golden 4. They’re not just big cities, they’re global sorting machines. People move there from all over the world because they want sth badly enough to accept all the downsides. The guy born in London can be lazy. But the 26yo Frenchman, Indian, American, Italian, Nigerian, Lebanese etc who voluntarily accepts the tiny flat, shit commute and absurd rent to be there has already self-selected pretty hard And that selection compounds. I felt it instantly moving from my hometown in France to London. Growing up I was always “the ambitious one” in my friend group. Then you arrive in London and suddenly you feel extremely average. Everyone is trying to do sth. Completely changes your reference point for what a normal person can achieve The other thing is just how many serious games are happening at once. If you know at 22 that you’re going to be a semiconductor engineer forever, maybe there are better specialised places. But most ambitious 24yos have absolutely no clue what game they’ll eventually want to play. In London/NYC/Paris you can accidentally become friends with people in PE, startups, politics, law, media, fashion, pharma, academia etc. Your finance friend dates someone in fashion, their roommate is building a startup, you meet someone in politics at dinner. Suddenly 5 completely different lives feel plausible That’s insanely valuable when you’re young precisely because you don’t yet know which people / industries / opportunities will matter to your 34yo self SF is the weird exception because it’s basically one giant concentrated bet on tech/AI. Much narrower than the other 3, but that game is so asymmetric rn that it deserves its spot. If you want to build at the frontier there’s probably no other place where your reference class changes that aggressively And yh everyone keeps saying the internet made geography irrelevant. Maybe for information. Definitely not for trust/friendship. Anyone can learn from the same people online now, send the same cold DM, follow the same accounts. Much harder to replicate being the guy someone has had 20 dinners with, worked with, travelled with, introduced to friends and randomly bumped into for 5 years When you’re 24 and nobody knows who tf you are, geography can do a lot of the work for you. You get invited because your colleague knows someone. You end up at a dinner because your friend needs a +1. Someone you met 3 years ago leaves and starts a company. Another moves to NYC. Another becomes a partner somewhere. Most of the ROI is completely impossible to predict upfront Basically before you have your own gravity, borrow the city’s At 45, if you’ve built the company / reputation / money / audience / network, you can go live in Tuscany, Mallorca, South of France or wherever and people will come to you. At 24 no one is coming lol. You should probably be where everything is happening And tbh if you have the ability to move I wouldn’t spend 3 years waiting for the perfect job / apartment / timing. Get the shitty room, accept being poorer for a while, figure it out once you’re there. Your 20s are probably the cheapest years of your life to tolerate inconvenience anyway You can optimise sqm, weather and comfort later At 24 I’d rather maximise how many possible lives are available to me

If you’re in your 20s (and ambitious) do everything to move to those 4 cities Yes people will mog you for paying extortionate rents for such little comfort but who cares, you’re not everyone, you’re on a mission, you’re here for greatness London/NYC/Paris/SF are basically the golden 4. They’re not just big cities, they’re global sorting machines. People move there from all over the world because they want sth badly enough to accept all the downsides. The guy born in London can be lazy. But the 26yo Frenchman, Indian, American, Italian, Nigerian, Lebanese etc who voluntarily accepts the tiny flat, shit commute and absurd rent to be there has already self-selected pretty hard And that selection compounds. I felt it instantly moving from my hometown in France to London. Growing up I was always “the ambitious one” in my friend group. Then you arrive in London and suddenly you feel extremely average. Everyone is trying to do sth. Completely changes your reference point for what a normal person can achieve The other thing is just how many serious games are happening at once. If you know at 22 that you’re going to be a semiconductor engineer forever, maybe there are better specialised places. But most ambitious 24yos have absolutely no clue what game they’ll eventually want to play. In London/NYC/Paris you can accidentally become friends with people in PE, startups, politics, law, media, fashion, pharma, academia etc. Your finance friend dates someone in fashion, their roommate is building a startup, you meet someone in politics at dinner. Suddenly 5 completely different lives feel plausible That’s insanely valuable when you’re young precisely because you don’t yet know which people / industries / opportunities will matter to your 34yo self SF is the weird exception because it’s basically one giant concentrated bet on tech/AI. Much narrower than the other 3, but that game is so asymmetric rn that it deserves its spot. If you want to build at the frontier there’s probably no other place where your reference class changes that aggressively And yh everyone keeps saying the internet made geography irrelevant. Maybe for information. Definitely not for trust/friendship. Anyone can learn from the same people online now, send the same cold DM, follow the same accounts. Much harder to replicate being the guy someone has had 20 dinners with, worked with, travelled with, introduced to friends and randomly bumped into for 5 years When you’re 24 and nobody knows who tf you are, geography can do a lot of the work for you. You get invited because your colleague knows someone. You end up at a dinner because your friend needs a +1. Someone you met 3 years ago leaves and starts a company. Another moves to NYC. Another becomes a partner somewhere. Most of the ROI is completely impossible to predict upfront Basically before you have your own gravity, borrow the city’s At 45, if you’ve built the company / reputation / money / audience / network, you can go live in Tuscany, Mallorca, South of France or wherever and people will come to you. At 24 no one is coming lol. You should probably be where everything is happening And tbh if you have the ability to move I wouldn’t spend 3 years waiting for the perfect job / apartment / timing. Get the shitty room, accept being poorer for a while, figure it out once you’re there. Your 20s are probably the cheapest years of your life to tolerate inconvenience anyway You can optimise sqm, weather and comfort later At 24 I’d rather maximise how many possible lives are available to me