A Self-Taught Programmer on Building a Business, Overcoming Fear, and Productivity Systems

Chris Oliver [00:00:00] That was the first time where I was like, I wasn't at the office making money. I was at the movies. Making money like that is awesome. So it's

Vance Crowe [00:00:08] True capitalism. Yeah, digital

Chris Oliver [00:00:09] Capitalism.

Vance Crowe [00:00:10] Yeah.

Chris Oliver [00:00:10] Yeah. So I was like, this is what like owning a business really feels like or should, where you're not trading your time for money, right? So that I was really hooked at that moment and I was like, whoa, this is sweet. This is the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:32] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. This is a very special 10th episode of the Vance Crow podcast. And so to celebrate I decided to invite one of my closest friends, a man named Chris Oliver on in to have a conversation. You know, it's a little bit difficult to have a conversation with somebody that you know as well as I know Chris. I've known him for about as long as I've lived in St. Louis about eight or nine years. And ever since we became friends, I have always turned to Chris whenever I've had a challenge with my business with trying to expand my speaking career. And I bring him these challenges often with a solution that I have in mind. And he always has kind of a zen way of unpacking what I'm thinking about and giving me a new way to think about it. And that's what I think is so interesting about today's interview. You'll hear us talk about some of the basics, what is a computer programmer and what do they do all day? But you'll quickly notice how Chris, the way that he explains things, opens up concepts in a really deep and interesting way. Chris is an adventurer and an entrepreneur both doing computer programming here in St. Louis, but also out in New York City, out in Germany and has even been invited to Silicon Valley to interview with some of the top venture capital firms in the entire world. He is a very soft spoken but interesting guy and if you stay all the way to the end, you hear some of how he finds his new ideas and new interesting people to listen to. And I think one of Chris's greatest gifts is his ability to find new things on the internet that other people haven't seen before.

Vance Crowe [00:02:04] So I hope you enjoy this 10th episode of the Vance Crow podcast. I'm really glad you're here and enjoy the episode. David, Chris Oliver, one of my closest friends. Somebody I've known for close on a decade, almost 70 years. That's

Chris Oliver [00:02:21] A while.

Vance Crowe [00:02:21] Something like that. Yeah. The business owner here in St. Louis computer programmer. And, and we can talk all about that, but actually I think when I think of you, I actually think of you as probably one of the most adventurous people that I know. And I mean, like I used to live on a ship and travel in Africa, but I remember after we met, you had been working for a company and then suddenly you were like, you know what, I gotta move to New York City. And you were off and then Germany and then San Francisco and you've just been riding the tech wave. So welcome to the podcast. I'm glad you're here and let's, let's

Chris Oliver [00:02:56] Thanks for having me.

Vance Crowe [00:02:57] Oh man, it's, it's, it's pretty cool to have your friends on your podcast. Yeah.

Chris Oliver [00:03:01] But

Vance Crowe [00:03:01] It also makes it a little bit difficult because I already know a lot about your background, but maybe just to get started, because when I put out that I was gonna do this interview, I said I'm gonna interview a computer programmer, what should I ask them? And really it came down to like, what is a computer programmer Like are you, you know, what are you doing in your day-to-day job?

Chris Oliver [00:03:21] Yeah, that's a great question. And it's probably a hard one to kind of imagine for most people. Like my parents had the hardest time understanding what I was doing for a long time. But like you really just sit down and you're, you're kind of translating, like if you give me an idea for some software, like a calendar, right? Something as simple as that. Well you have to translate that into something the computer can understand, which is just ones and zeros. And it knows that here's this, we have a screen connected and we need to draw boxes. And so like you have to remember like the calendar is a series of boxes and a grid, but some of them have dates that are in the current month, some are in the previous month. And you have to go through all of these things and see like, you know, when you think of a calendar, you just think of, you know, it just is a calendar, but when you really have to break it down as a programmer, you have to say like, okay, well the first of the month starts on Wednesday, which means I have to draw boxes for the last several days of the previous month as well. You know, so you have to break all the stuff down finer and finer and think about every little detail of it. Whereas normally you just kind of brush it off and you're like, that's what the month looks like. But you don't realize the nuances and all that. So programming ends up being a lot like, you know, engineering a building or anything like that where you have to worry about like, you know, if you're building a house, like the floor is being supported by this and we have to keep in mind how much weight that must support and all of those things.

Chris Oliver [00:05:01] But when you think about a house, you're like, oh, there's a post there. Like that's just how it is. And yeah, programming is very much that, but you're translating that into commands and rules for the computer to understand, which are actually just pretty simple. But you know, and it ends up being this thing where you're like, when you're designing a house, you're not thinking, you are thinking about physics kind of at the very end. And that's kind of how we are dealing with computers. Like that's the very last thing that you're worried about. You know, I don't have to worry about the ones and zeros and a building in a, you know, building. You don't have to worry about physics as much, but you do have to think about it and keep it in mind. So it's like an interesting, you know, it's just a really interesting set of problems where you're really translating these things from how humans think about it, which tends to gloss over so many things into something that the computer will do. Literally exactly what you tell it to. And if you tell it to do something wrong, it will happily do that, you know? And it's not gonna be like, oh you, I think you meant this.

Vance Crowe [00:06:09] Just do that. I think one of the biggest like roadblocks for me, even as a person that has several friends that are in computer programming is that it seems, because every computer programmer I've ever used is comes fully baked. I already have the calendar, I already have everything. So it seems like everything's already made, all the problems are already fixed. All you need to do is make the pictures go where I want and the, and the text to go where I want. So it's really hard to imagine that there are new programs that you can build, you know, that are unique from scratch are unique. Yeah. That are unique. Unique.

Chris Oliver [00:06:40] Well you have to think about, and and we talked about this a little bit last night talking about Squarespace, like you can buy software like Squarespace where you can drag and drop anything there. But the problem is that if you wanna build something unique, Squarespace has built a certain number of features and very small number of things. 'cause you have infinite possibilities with software. It's like going to the hardware store, like what can you build with everything in here? Kind of infinite things. So the same thing applies to programming. So you end up with a, it's like writing as well where you have a set of words that you can use in the English language. What can you make with that? Literally anything, right? So programming ends up being the same way for that same reason. You have these fundamental tools that you can use in a million different ways. And so something like Squarespace is designed for certain types of sites, but you couldn't build Facebook on Squarespace, you couldn't build Amazon on Squarespace because they haven't built that stuff and in the way it needs to operate. So like if you wanted to build eBay, you have to have sellers, you have to have buyers, you have to have bids, auto bidding, you know, photo uploading and all this stuff. And like it's very hard to build generic software that can just like drag and drop and build something like that. So you have to build, you know, custom stuff to make that even possible. So software ends up being that thing where you have to be very creative because you're trying to think about how do I take this idea and then translate it to something, to something that the computer can understand but also make it flexible so we can change it in the future.

Chris Oliver [00:08:28] 'cause you can also walk yourself into a corner and be like, well we built it this way but now you want this other feature and we have to redo the whole thing 'cause we didn't build it with that in mind.

Vance Crowe [00:08:38] It's like making an Excel spreadsheet where you've got the, the cells going connected and then you're like, oh wait, but if you wanna add that thing in that calculation, I didn't set it up like that. I'm gonna have to reverse

Chris Oliver [00:08:49] Engineer

Vance Crowe [00:08:49] It. Tear up. Exactly. Okay.

Chris Oliver [00:08:50] Yeah, I mean Excel, if anybody's used Excel like you are programming, you just don't have to worry about variables because effectively the cell itself is the variable. So like you were genuinely programming when you're connecting things and doing calculations and tables and all that stuff in Excel. So a lot of people go from Excel into programming because they're like getting to a point where it's hard to do in Excel or just frustrating or something and then they find Python or something and they can go program that and make it a lot cleaner and a lot faster and just, you know, more flexible. So then sometimes that turns into like you build the logic, the calculations and then you build a web interface so that you can go use it in a browser and then all of a sudden you have a product you could sell, which is super cool. So like it gives you a lot of freedom to go do and solve like any problem you could probably imagine, at least if, if it's virtual.

Vance Crowe [00:09:51] So you're teaching now you have your, your business which is, we can describe as you can describe, this is complic complicated, but, but at the core it is you capturing your screen doing coding and then if your face up there where you're looking directly into a camera and you're talking people through complex coding challenges,

Chris Oliver [00:10:14] Is

Vance Crowe [00:10:15] That is would you say that's accurate?

Chris Oliver [00:10:16] Yeah, yeah. I am just trying to, so, so there's this concept of pair programming where two people sit at the same computer and try and work on a problem. So even though you're not there when you're watching my videos, you're not there with me while I'm recording it. It feels that way 'cause you're gonna sit with me and see my screen and I can walk you through everything. And so that turns out to be like a great way to learn to code 'cause you can go and listen to me explain it, but then you can also go and follow along but then modify it for what you're trying to do. So if I'm doing a like those buttons to log in with Twitter, you might say, well I don't want Twitter, I want log in with Facebook and you can go and modify it to connect to Facebook instead. But the concept is all the same. So my videos end up being, you know, rather they're specific as they're recorded, but they're kind of generic in that sense because you can apply it and modify it and it's really teaching you those concepts to have in your head on how to approach a problem. So they end up being kind of educational in that way because they're, you can watch me do something but it might just spark up an idea on how to solve a totally different problem. 'cause you're like, ooh, that's interesting. You know, and that was actually where I ended up learning a lot of my programming. There's another guy years ago who did a thing called Rails casts and I was working at a really small company here with five people and I was doing, you know, a lot of these same features, this guy's publishing videos every week.

Chris Oliver [00:11:57] And there were some times where I'd be given a project and then the day before that guy had published a video on it and I could go watch that and be like, oh this is amazing. Like this is the exact thing I need. And so he did that for a few years and then quit and it was like a year and a half later or something and I was like, I want to stop consulting and I want to run my own business. And worked with a friend on a little side project that we made some decent money but it didn't, it didn't go over well in the long run 'cause he was spending all that money on ads to make the money. So that fell apart. But it gave me,

Vance Crowe [00:12:39] I remember that, I remember that. Yeah, you wanna talk about that? That was a funny

Chris Oliver [00:12:41] Thing. We can talk about that.

Vance Crowe [00:12:42] Yeah.

Chris Oliver [00:12:43] So this is, it is really funny 'cause like his idea was on your phone, mobile apps, there are so many of them that it's become, it's become easier to make $50 or even $5 from an app than it is to make, or or rather $5 from a thousand apps than it is to make one app that makes $5,000. So like what people were doing was buying a template for an iOS app or an Android app or something and then sharing that with a designer who would go theme the solitaire game as like a safari version. And then you would make 10 different copies of that that were like a safari version, a space solitaire or whatever, you know, and then publish all of those and put your ad network in there and attempt to make very little money but just publish a lot of different versions of the exact same thing. And so the problem with doing that was you need reviews to get ranked at all and the search results on the app store. So we built this little thing where you could pay us five bucks and review other people's apps and your app would go up in the queue. So you would get reviews faster the more reviews you gave. And we made like 30 grand from that in, I don't know, six months or something.

Vance Crowe [00:14:08] Were they legit reviews? Were you sitting there playing safari solitaire or We,

Chris Oliver [00:14:13] We tried to make them legit but people were abusing it of course and they were like farming it out too. So they'd get like people in China to do a review and then, And then like you had to submit a screenshot and some people fake them and whatever. And it was almost certainly against Apple's terms of service too. Like it's not something they approve of of course. So we were doing this and it was his idea and stuff and I was like, ah, it'd be fun to build this or whatever. But that was like, I had this moment where I was walking into a movie theater, sat down my phone buzzes and I was like, oh I need to turn my phone off. But I checked the notification and I made 15 bucks and I was like, this movie was free, this is amazing. Like that was the first time where I was like, I wasn't at the office making money, I was at the movies, making money. Like that is awesome. It's

Vance Crowe [00:15:10] True capitalism, digital capitalism. Yeah.

Chris Oliver [00:15:12] Yeah. So I was like, this is what like owning a business really feels like or should, you're not trading your time for money, right? So that I was really hooked at that moment and I was like, whoa, this is sweet. So I had been consulting, working for other startups in St. Louis and around the, the country and stuff and just building software for them. But I was training my time for money, you know, they were paying me to work on stuff and then I'd estimate it and give them a proposal and all that. But I always had to put in an hour to make an hour of money. And that was not, it was just not fulfilling. You know, I got into programming 'cause it was fun and not because I wanted to do it for a job. And so,

Vance Crowe [00:15:59] And even if you're freelancing, yeah,

Chris Oliver [00:16:01] You're

Vance Crowe [00:16:01] Still as much freedom as that is, you're just working hour by hour, however much money you can get paid per hour. It's always based on how many hours are you working.

Chris Oliver [00:16:09] Yeah. And like the only way you can fudge it a little bit is like to tell them, I think this will cost you 1500 bucks and not tie it to your hours, but you might, so you might put in, there was a project I did, I think that was 1500 and I worked on it for three hours. So effectively I made 500 bucks an hour, but I can never go tell someone that I charge 500 bucks an hour. 'cause they'll be like, ha ha ha, no, like I'm not paying that. And I wouldn't pay that and I wouldn't feel comfortable asking for that even. But even then, like you can, you can give your proposal for, this'll be how much it'll cost regardless of time, that can bite you really badly sometimes. But like it's still at the end of the day wasn't, it's not real leverage, you know, you're still training the money for time and stuff. So that app we built really taught me that where I was like, oh man, this is cool. Like I made money going to the movies, this is sweet. So it's really like, and have you ever seen those, those games, like the cookie clicker thing where you like click a button and it like increments this number and says you, you click this button and we'll give you a cookie or whatever and you just sit there clicking this button and then at some point you like, make enough money from these cookies that you've created by clicking this button. And then it, it's like, well you can buy an oven now and make two cookies every time you click this button and it just kind of teaches you about like automation in a

Vance Crowe [00:17:44] Sense. Oh, okay. Sure. All right.

Chris Oliver [00:17:45] So then, then this idea of like building this app was like, we kind of automated this so like we don't have to do any work. Our users do the work and we just make money off of that. Like we built a system and they have to do the work and we just collect money off of this. That's really cool. So after we did that and kind of fell apart, I was like, I need to build something and sell it, you know, like a product for once. So I didn't know how to do any of this stuff and I tried to sit down and record screencasts and programming is a job that's all a hundred percent in your head. So to sit down in front of a camera and a microphone and code and think out loud was damn near impossible. Well

Vance Crowe [00:18:32] Be like trying to teach somebody the English language, just, just

Chris Oliver [00:18:34] Start

Vance Crowe [00:18:34] Just, you know, with

Chris Oliver [00:18:35] Anything else.

Vance Crowe [00:18:36] Yeah,

Chris Oliver [00:18:36] Just go. Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy. And I didn't realize how hard it was gonna be because my brain would like short circuit halfway thinking through something and then I'd be like, oh, what about this? Oh, what about that? And I was like, I realized I was like a squirrel, right? Like just jumping in between things, having no idea really what coherent thoughts I was having. So recording these videos, helping me slow down and actually think through what I was thinking and clarify my thoughts a lot, which was really good. But then at the end of that too was I had these videos that I don't know a hundred thousand people might watch, right? So if I teach one thing, it can be used by anyone in the world who's interested in that. So you could do this thing one time and then have unlimited, you know, number of people watching that just like recording a podcast, right? Like we can record this conversation one time, but it could be listened to a hundred thousand times. Well

Vance Crowe [00:19:38] I remember when you were going through this like phase, 'cause both of us were running our own companies at that time. I hadn't gone to work for Monsanto yet and I remember that we were kind of coming to many realizations, which is why it was such a big benefit early on that we were friends because you were like, if you want to write about something that people are gonna listen to have it be about a problem that you are actually solving. Yeah.

Chris Oliver [00:20:00] You

Vance Crowe [00:20:00] Know, if you just sit down to be like, I'm going to create content, then that's bullshit. Nobody, nobody wants to hear that. But if what you do is you say, I had this problem and now I'm going to think through, how would I explain how I solved it? All of a sudden other people that maybe they don't have that same problem, just like you're describing with the coding. But now I can move down a path that says like, oh there's an, there's already a way to think about this. And that really made me go much more rapidly towards the future.

Chris Oliver [00:20:26] Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's what the podcasts like this are exactly that as well, right? You can watch this and be like, oh that's interesting. I could think about the world this way. You know, like that's a whole different thing you might not have been exposed to. Well

Vance Crowe [00:20:40] You were the one that told on this one too. Like I remember you were like, just start and then fix the camera and then fix the microphones and then just keep fixing and making it better. And I remember being like, because you can, without a problem to solve, you become so dug into there's so many things that I could do that I don't know what to do. So it's way better to be like, how do I record a podcast? And then it's how do I make it better? Yep. And better and better. Yep. And would you say that's the same thing with coding is a hundred teaching it?

Chris Oliver [00:21:09] Yeah. I mean learning to code or like building a business either, either one is like, you just have to literally start with anything. 'cause the problem is you're like, oh I want to build Facebook or something like that. I wanna build Amazon. Well like they didn't know how to build Facebook or Amazon when they started. So like you were in the same shoes as they were when they began. And no one ever talks about that of course. But that's the truth. Like Bezos was an like, he was, what was he in, he

Vance Crowe [00:21:42] Was in like finance fi

Chris Oliver [00:21:44] Yeah, finance stuff and, and he like quit and was like, I'm gonna do this internet thing. And like

Vance Crowe [00:21:49] And he was just books. Yeah. People forget that that like Yeah.

Chris Oliver [00:21:52] And

Vance Crowe [00:21:52] Even when that thing came out, my dad was a book collector and he was like,

Chris Oliver [00:21:56] Oh yeah, who

Vance Crowe [00:21:56] Wants to buy a book on the internet? I wanna hold it. I wanna feel it Now it's like I only go to the bookstore if on my way to a party I need a present. Yeah. And I need it right now.

Chris Oliver [00:22:06] Yeah. Well it's like, you know, books he could get rare books that you might not be able to find at your bookstore. So like there were advantages to that that people started to realize all of a sudden like yeah you might want to feel the book before you buy it, but also if you know the book you're looking for, Then great, you've got it. You can just go order it and it'll show up at your door in a a week or something. And that's like the, the beauty of the leverage that you can do with software like this would be really hard to do if you had to go to every single bookstore in St. Louis to go find that one rare one you're looking for. And it might not even be here, which means you gotta go travel to Kansas City, Chicago, you know, a different city and then go look at all their bookstores and see if you can find it or call them. And you know, it's just an awful long process. You

Vance Crowe [00:23:00] Know what,

Chris Oliver [00:23:00] So like the software allows you to just say, Hey, does this exist? I would like one, yes, it it does perfect. Here's my credit card, you know, send it to me. And like it saves everyone so much time it saves, like it helps the sellers 'cause they don't have to do as much work they can sell like I was doing instead of going to individual companies and saying, I can work for you and solve problems for you, I can now publish these videos and say, yo, if anyone's interested in Rails and learning how to code and Ruby, you know, check these out. You don't even have to talk to me. Like there's so many people, like I was just at this Rails conference earlier, like two months ago and I hadn't been to that really since I had started doing these videos. And like it was weird to go around there and have people,

Vance Crowe [00:23:51] Well we should say you're a rails. Yeah you, you talk specifically about Rails.

Chris Oliver [00:23:54] Yeah. So Rails is a tool to build websites basically. So it's built on a programming language called Ruby and Rails is built on top of Ruby to allow you to build websites. And so some of the biggest websites in the world are built like with that. GitHub is a huge one that developers use Shopify many people have probably heard of, if you ever wanna sell t-shirts or sunglasses or something online, almost certainly you would go to Shopify and set up a store and start selling stuff through there. And all that's built on Rails and Ruby. So yeah, I was at the conference, you know, recently and there's all these people who I would sit down every time for lunch or something and I'd introduced myself and they're like, oh I just heard your voice in the office last week. Someone was watching one of your videos. And I

Vance Crowe [00:24:47] Like, that's bizarre. Yeah,

Chris Oliver [00:24:48] That's insane.

Vance Crowe [00:24:49] Yeah.

Chris Oliver [00:24:50] And I've never met these people, you know, and they've never like reached out to me and they're just like, numbers on my website. But that's like the leverage that I can have by creating this content and just publishing it, you know? And I get paid for it too. So I publish a paid version or a paid video and a free video every other week.

Vance Crowe [00:25:09] Yeah, I, I went and watched some of your, your unpaid videos just to see before we did this at Rails conferences then you're somewhat like a tribal celebrity. You're, you're a well-known

Chris Oliver [00:25:20] It seems so. Yeah, it's pretty funny 'cause you always see those people at conferences that you're like, oh he is that famous person. You know, everyone knows their name and it's weird but I guess I'm on the way up there too, which is really interesting and pretty cool. So now, and and like this is very different from say six years ago when I started and zero people knew who I was. Like we were talking earlier about just starting something new. I had to just go do it because like I wanted to get out of consulting and so I just started to, I, and I tried to record videos, I wanted to make a course and sell that, but I'm a developer and I'm very uncomfortable doing sales or marketing or any of that. I don't even know how to begin, especially back then. So I recorded some videos and I hated listening to my own voice and all this stuff. It was, I was just like the worst person to start doing these courses. And so I had to like force myself to record 15 minutes a day even if I threw it away and it, I threw a lot away. But if I didn't sit for 15 minutes every day and listen to my own voice for a little while, I was never gonna get through it. So I just was like, screw it, like it's 15 minutes, I can sit down and do it. And it was excruciating. Like I hated it. And eventually I recorded like 15 videos and I had five that I was like I guess I'll give 'em away for free to hopefully get people to find my stuff and then I'll sell the other 10 as a course.

Chris Oliver [00:27:01] And I sold one every two weeks for 40 bucks. So my first month I made a total of $80 and I was like, well I'll never pay rent at this. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:27:11] Yeah. But how much were you celebrating when the sale came through?

Chris Oliver [00:27:15] Not a whole lot because I was like this

Vance Crowe [00:27:17] Never, oh bullshit. No way. No way. It

Chris Oliver [00:27:19] Was like it was exciting to, to have someone buy it and a stranger especially. But like at that point you're like, I am. 'cause I had quit consulting and I was gambling on this because I knew my own and, and this is the hard thing I think a lot of people struggle with I did especially is like you have to know your own psychology and then confront it before you talk yourself out of it, right? So I was sitting there like, oh God, like I wanna start this like start a business on the side. And I was doing that for years and years And then when we built that little iOS review thing, that was like, okay, you know what? Like I know myself, I've been doing this for years and never made a dollar. Like we built a few apps but never sold any. And so then I was like, I'm gonna burn the bridges. Like I'm gonna quit consulting a hundred percent. So January 1st, 2014, I was completely done with consulting just like a month before I was talking with some friends about joining their company as a co-founder, a consulting company. And I was like, I can either commit real hard to go continue doing the thing I hate or like burn the bridges and do nothing else and say like if I don't figure this out then at least I tried. And so that was when I was like, I have to do 15 minutes a day and it took me like three months to record 15, like 10 minute videos. Right? It was awful. And then I get to this point where I'm like, cool I made two sales but like I was excited about the sale but then immediately afterwards I was like, I'm never gonna be able to pay rent And like my savings is dwindling.

Chris Oliver [00:29:04] Like I don't, I had maybe a year's worth of savings but you know how, how

Vance Crowe [00:29:09] Long you lived a pretty frugal life. I mean like you know, you were not flashy or

Chris Oliver [00:29:14] Well so like here's what happened. I graduated from Southern Illinois University with a computer science degree and then I moved to St. Louis and I worked for the Genome Institute and get paid like 60 KA year. Right? So first job outta college. But the next part was that

Vance Crowe [00:29:31] It's more than double what my first job was.

Chris Oliver [00:29:33] Yeah. So you know, it was like a decent salary, especially in St. Louis for my first job. And the big benefits though were it's the Genome Institute is part of Washington University or Wash U as we all call it. And that allows me to go to grad school for free and my spouse can go to school for free. Like benefits are fantastic, you know, all the benefits of a really nice school or or working for one of them. And I didn't care about any of that. I hated school. Like I contemplated multiple times of dropping out of college because I just wasn't learning anything. Like I had the expectation that college you were on your own we're gonna give you really hard challenges. And I was like, hell yeah, this sounds awesome. And then I get to college and it's like we're taking attendance and you know, you have to go through these like

Vance Crowe [00:30:24] So you didn't learn to code in college?

Chris Oliver [00:30:25] No, I learned to code. I mean I learned some things on how to code in college but my dad actually gave me a programming book in like seventh grade or something. 'cause he had Atari, we didn't have the Atari anymore but he still had this Atari programming book and we had this Magnavox computer that had dos on it. And it turns out that Atari had a very similar basic programming language to the Magnox computer we had. And I was able to mostly translate what was in that book onto what was on that computer. And so I like taught myself that. But the problem when you self-teach yourself, especially when you're in grade school, is you don't know any algebra and programming is all about variables and effectively algebra, right? You're writing,

Vance Crowe [00:31:15] What do you mean you need to know about algebra?

Chris Oliver [00:31:16] You need to understand that you can like, well at least in programming, like if you have a variable, like when you're in math, you have, you know, X and Y and A and B and whatever in programming. Like you have those same variables and you can say X and YX is one, Y is two, whatever, whatever values you wanna put in them. I didn't understand that you could change those variables. So I built, one of my first projects was building a Hangman game and I was like, that seems reasonable but I didn't realize that you could reuse your code. So what happened was I built this hangman game and you could guess one character at a time like you do in hangman. And so my code would split off in different directions. It would see which character you typed in and it said did you get it right? If so we will go down this path and if you got it wrong we'll go down this path. And then on either one of those sides, you have another version of that guess. And if you got it right, you go one way and if you got it wrong you go the other way. Which creates like this giant

Vance Crowe [00:32:24] Enormous yeah decision tree.

Chris Oliver [00:32:25] Yeah. And it's horrible and I'm not smart enough to realize like I can build that one thing and just kind of loop it around and just make one really concise thing in my code. So I ended up building this like it was like 30,000 characters. Like it was a massive novel basically that I had written because I didn't understand how to code and I didn't really understand, you know, programming is some math but it's not as much math as most people think. And if you know, algebra programming's not that hard. So I wrote this thing and it was like huge and I spent months working on it. And then at some point in school I'm learning some things and I'm learning some stuff about coding from you know, articles. I've looked up online and I rewrite it eventually. 'cause the thing was that decision tree was so big that I decided I'm only gonna allow three letter words. So you, I have a very limited decision tree and then I learned some stuff and rewrote it and it went from 30,000 characters or something to 2000 and it supported like any length of word or multiple words or all kinds of things that had colors and all this other stuff. And like it was tiny in comparison. And yeah, programming was very hard to learn and slow when I was teaching myself. And then you also have this like, this perpetual feeling of I don't really know how to code 'cause I didn't learn it formally, right?

Chris Oliver [00:33:58] I didn't go to a school for it or a bootcamp or anything. I was self-taught. And so you always doubt yourself that way and it's really like awful because you probably end up learning stuff that's more practical that way because you're trying to build real things than you would in school where they're giving you just kind of trivial problems, you know, to, to solve and they're not necessarily that practical. So it was really interesting to learn that and then go into computer science in the university and just realize like this is terrible. Like I learned all this a long time ago from the majority of it and then it was like I'm not learning anything here and everyone's not interested in actually learning stuff. And then we, we had a good professor though that Dr. Bouvier who did give us some legitimate things where he was like, we're gonna learn assembly. Which is very, very pretty hard to like wrap your head around because you were more or less writing the ones and zeros that go into the computer. But the ones and zeros are kind of set up in where you translate them to words and, and so it's very low level, pretty hard to learn and one of the challenging classes in the thing. But his thing was like, okay, imagine you're building the lunar rover and you've got a camera and the camera sends you some data and you just have this jumble of ones and zeros and we need to compress that and send it back to earth.

Chris Oliver [00:35:32] So how do you take this image and shrink it? And what you need to do is you need to go through the image and, and the image is a bunch of pixels and the color for every pixel. So what you can do is you can pull out all of the colors in that image and build a little table of all your colors, right? So you build up this little table, a list of colors and then you replace all the pixels in the image with their matching id.

Vance Crowe [00:36:00] Oh wow. For it. So you don't have to handle all colors, you only have to handle the colors that are happen to be in that picture.

Chris Oliver [00:36:05] Yeah, yeah. And so you also, any duplicate colors get shrunk a whole lot. 'cause instead of recording the color two times, which is more data, more text, you can just say this is that color, color one, this is color one, this is color one. So we only have to store color one one time and then no matter how many pixels we have, we just tell it which color it was. You know? So that compresses it and that saves quite a bit of data, especially probably on the moon where it's a lot of grays and you know, dark colors and stuff. It's a simpler, you know, example. But it worked really well and I was like whoa, this is cool. Like I have no problem solving these kinds of problems. Like they're practical and they're fun, like this is something I could see doing in a job. But most of the rest of the stuff we did wasn't really that practical. But the final project, we have two semesters to build a project for one of the departments in the university. So we ended up working for the admissions department. They needed to give tours of campus, you would fill out some information on their website and their, their previous system was this, you'd fill out some information like your name and your email and what day and time you want to come. And then that goes and submits it to a thing that sends them an email and then they copy that email into a spreadsheet and then they have several people working on the spreadsheet, which accidentally copies it sometimes.

Chris Oliver [00:37:40] And then they have two copies that they have to go back and try and merge at some point manually. And we are like, oh we can build this, like we can build something better and fix it with rails. So that was my senior project, a really good practical thing. And so I actually built that and we finish and it's the end of the semester and the departments are, it, it's kind of one of those things where it's an academic project where you might do your senior project but no one ever uses it at the end because you leave, you graduate. But I was like, I really want them to use it. Maybe I can convince them to pay me for it and I'll work on it, you know, on my free time or whatever if they need any changes to it. So I actually convinced the school to pay me five grand a year to continue working on that, which is really cool. So that ended up, I did that for several years, which was neat 'cause it was like, I kind of hacked the system where they paid me for my, you know, senior project and it covered like some pretty decent bills

Vance Crowe [00:38:47] For college. Yeah man, that'd be great.

Chris Oliver [00:38:49] Yeah. So you know, there was always that sort of entrepreneurial thing in me for a long time and I'm, I'm starting this tam for my parents where when I was little and my sister's like five years younger than me, my parents were doing woodworking and making crafts and were going to craft shows and selling these little, you know, Christmas trinkets and, and other things. And I was just like always there had to help, had to, you know, help them set up and then I would go in the back room and watch TV for six hours or whatever and, and I just grew up doing that and I didn't realize it, but like my parents are a hundred percent entrepreneurial, you know, they were doing that to pay for all the expenses of having a child, right? So I didn't notice this until sometime in that senior year of college I found out about Y Combinator in San Francisco, startup tech scene and everything.

Vance Crowe [00:39:50] For people that don't know what that is, what is that?

Chris Oliver [00:39:52] So Y Combinator is a, it, it's almost like a little school that you go to for three months if you're starting a company. So you have an idea, you pitch it to them, if they like it, they'll fly you out and you pitch it to them in person and then if they accept you, they invest like $120,000 into your company. You move to San Francisco for three months, a hundred percent of your time is spent pretty much working on your business and you go and attend these office hours with the advisors and other like successful CEOs and stuff like Zuckerberg comes out there sometimes and give talks or whatever, people like him, you know. So I found out about this because they tend to have a very like interesting community of programmers around them because a lot of the companies they're investing in, at least in the early days were software companies. So I stumbled into that and almost moved to San Francisco, you know, right outta college. 'cause I was like whoa, this is cool. And I didn't end up moving out there because I didn't really find any jobs that were that good. But I actually applied to Airbnb back when there was like 25 people total.

Vance Crowe [00:41:11] Whoa.

Chris Oliver [00:41:12] And they were the interview I did remotely from my room on campus and did a little coding challenge that was basically rebuild their search and all of that for, you know, here's rooms that we have available, this person searched this geographic location, find stuff within five miles and then put together the prices and all of that. And I was like just a beginner programmer then, you know, I'd never done anything real. So they ended up being on the fence and, and they were like, so I think we're gonna tell you no because we're we're on the fence. Which is the right call. Right. So

Vance Crowe [00:41:52] Meaning that when they were hiring you they were like, some of us want you, some of us don't, we're not really sure so we're gonna go with no because we aren't a hundred percent

Chris Oliver [00:41:58] Right. We're

Vance Crowe [00:41:58] Not okay.

Chris Oliver [00:41:58] Yeah. Yep. And I was like, that's fair that I totally would do that too if I was hiring someone and I was on the fence, you know. So that's when I like moved to St. Louis work at the Genome Institute because the other half of this was like, I didn't, all of my family is in Illinois, so moving out to San Francisco I would've no friends. I would know no one out there except for coworkers. And I was just like genuinely kind of afraid of doing that. Are

Vance Crowe [00:42:27] You a pretty shy guy?

Chris Oliver [00:42:28] Yeah, I would say so. Yeah. So that was certainly one of those things that was like too scary for me to do. But moving down to St. Louis was like not a big deal. It's like 45 minutes from campus or whatever. So you know, I, my parents hadn't traveled a whole lot and stuff, but at around the time that I was starting my, it was shortly after I was starting go Rails my business, doing those programming videos. My dad, we went up to Wisconsin on vacation and then my dad was like, had some pain and stuff and then we came back home and then my mom called and was like, your dad passed out in the shower And we took him to the hospital and they found colon cancer and he has to go into surgery. Oh. And so like this was something that we were all like super shocked by 'cause like, you know, he's not that old and it's a colon cancer's pretty serious. And then for him to pass out in the shower it must be pretty bad. So they, they do the surgery and they're like, he should be recovering in say four or five days, something like that. And like two weeks go by and he doesn't look any better, you know, in his room in the hospital. And like the nurses can't say anything, you know, because they're, they don't want to get in trouble or whatever. They can't say anything against what the doctor said or whatever.

Chris Oliver [00:44:01] And we're like, we probably need to get a second opinion. 'cause the doctor said, oh just, you know, keep giving him time, he'll, he'll get better. And he was not getting better and we were like, what the hell is going on? And so it turned out that like he wasn't healing and they had to do another surgery and stuff and so like he's fine now and has no, no cancer or anything, but like there was several months of like, is he gonna make it through this? The first thing was like he may not make through the first surgery or whatever, then he does, but he's not getting better. Then they were able to go and do another surgery but it was so close to the other one that they had to do a, a colostomy bag and everything. And my parents were like, I think most concerned about that, like having to poop in a bag isn't

Vance Crowe [00:44:54] For the rest of your life.

Chris Oliver [00:44:55] Yeah, not fun. But they said like if we give it say six months, we'll go do another surgery and attempt to like get rid of that and if it heals and stuff then you won't ever have to use that for the rest of your life. You know, you won't have to have a colostomy bag. And luckily that all worked out. But you know, my parents were like, I think more worried about that stuff when, when I was like worried about is he gonna be alive or not? Like I don't care if he like has a colostomy bag that happens and it's not very common and it's kind of weird, but it's also like who cares? He's not dead.

Vance Crowe [00:45:33] And then now you're confronting the potential death of your father or

Chris Oliver [00:45:37] Actually

Vance Crowe [00:45:37] Looking at that and saying,

Chris Oliver [00:45:39] Yeah, what

Vance Crowe [00:45:39] Does this mean for me?

Chris Oliver [00:45:40] So like, you know, that was one of those moments of like, life's super short and you need to go, do you need to just go do stuff. So sometime around then I was running outta money and on my own business, you know, making my 80 bucks a a month and I was like, I'm gonna have to get a job. And I had like a year of savings, but about nine months in I was like, I better start interviewing now 'cause it can take some time to get a job. And so I found one of those Y Combinator companies doing the similar stuff and joined them, but I was working remotely for them and they were all in New York City except for one other person. And so there's a lot of those communication troubles with a remote job. If you're not, if everyone does not always communicate online when there are people who are remote, it just doesn't work like too much lost communication. So that was when I left and I was like, you know what? Life's super short if we're gonna make this company succeed, you know, I can't, I'm not doing near what I could if I was in person because they're just not operating that way. So I decided I'm gonna move to New York City.

Vance Crowe [00:46:59] I I remember that so well, you know, for most,

Chris Oliver [00:47:01] And it was just kind of a whirlwind, right? Like I just kind of was like, okay, I'm leaving. Like see yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:47:07] For most of my life I've been the person that's like living somewhere for a while and then I'm like, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave. And you leaving was one of the first times that that had happened to me, particularly as an adult where it was like, this is a guy. I see him at least once a week and now he's just gone. Yeah. And we didn't know if you were ever coming back.

Chris Oliver [00:47:24] Yeah, I didn't know either if I was gonna come back. It was just one of those things where I was like, I've always wanted to live somewhere else so you know, I should do it. 'cause you know, growing through that was like, and, and my parents had always talked about traveling and stuff and just never did. You know, they were always just saving money and stuff and, and I was like, but if you save money until you're old to go travel, then you're old and you can't travel like you could as you were younger. So like well

Vance Crowe [00:47:55] And it's a totally different thing to be in New York City to go visit New York and to actually live there. Yeah,

Chris Oliver [00:48:00] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:48:01] And Germany and all things,

Chris Oliver [00:48:02] That was a huge, a huge shift. 'cause I had to sell my car and my parents, you know, bought, they bought my car 'cause I had ordered it from a mini custom and took like three months to build and we gotta watch it get shipped over and whatever. But I was like, look, this is, you know, this is just a possession. Like I need to not let this like make influence my decisions. Like I can get another car, no big deal, you know, but I can't get my time back so if I want to go do this, I should go do it. So I moved to New York City for about a year and yeah, we, during that time I was working and there's so many little things that you don't realize when you make a move like that. Which is why people in New York City tend to move a lot. You move to whatever's the easiest and most convenient like place or, or you're making decisions as if you lived in St. Louis, which place you would live in, in New York City. So I'm, I move into the one that's like a little bit bigger space 'cause I work from home a fair bit. I wanted to have some space, but it's farther out to be cheaper. But as it turns out, if you work in Manhattan, you're never home. You get on the train in the morning, you go to Manhattan and you come back home and go to bed, you don't even eat at home or anything. So like it, I, I made the decision based on how I lived my life here. And then I was walking in the rain 15 minutes to get to the train to go into Manhattan to walk another 15 minutes in the rain.

Chris Oliver [00:49:35] And I was like, wow, I don't wanna ever want to do that again. Like that was dumb. And there's just so many little things that you end up learning. Like you don't have a laundry machine, you walk your laundry down the street and someone else does it. Probably messes it up and like it's just gonna be that way if you wanna live there and you're not making 150 K or more. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:49:56] You

Chris Oliver [00:49:56] Know, so that was like a huge kind of culture shock for me. But then as I'm there, our startup decides that we're gonna spend a month in Berlin and just kind of take a month to think about where we're going and what we need to change to get there and all of that. And so that was like that times too because you know, New York was hard enough but everybody speak speaks English there, Germany's a different place because I don't know any German, I learned a little bit of Spanish in high school, which I've mostly forgotten. And then going there, luckily Berlin's one of the more English speaking cities in Germany. So like the, the menus and the restaurants have German and then underneath in small text English for it. So for the most part I was Okay. And

Vance Crowe [00:50:44] What are you as a programmer doing in Germany? Like why is there a benefit in that?

Chris Oliver [00:50:48] Well, it's just to get away, right? So like the, the coolest part about this was maybe a week in or something. You are so far extracted from anything you're comfortable with. There's nothing there that you have that is anything like you, you had at home. You can't go to the store the same, you can't do anything. So you're like so removed from your own life that you get really good perspective looking at how things are going, you know, day to day at home. So I remember just having this weird surreal moment of like looking at my own life from like the sky where I could see myself, wake up, get outta bed, go to the train, go to the Manhattan, go to the office, go to lunch, go back to the office, come back home and I could like picture my life there and see that that's literally all it was. And I wasn't doing anything else. And it was, I didn't enjoy it. The company wasn't doing super well and like I had a super clear perspective on my own life. And like that's really kind of the hardest thing to get where you can't honestly look yourself in the mirror that often unless you're like totally separated from your day-to-day life. You know? That's why people have bad eating habits and they can't kick them and that sort of thing. 'cause they just can't honestly like look at themselves. 'cause they always see it with their excuses tied to it. And so that month in Berlin was like really hard but really amazing.

Chris Oliver [00:52:20] And I'd never been to Europe before or anything like that. So like farthest I'd been was like Toronto and Hawaii, you know, so those are not very far from home basically. So that just ended up giving me a huge perspective and I was like, I have to quit my job. Like I don't like it, it's not going in the right direction, it's just not gonna work out. So I come back and I'm trying to figure out how to leave and get back to my own business, which, so the timeline was I quit my job consulting Start go rails, record videos, make $80 a month for a little while, then run outta money, go get this job at this company. And they bought Go Rails from me. And that was because we're doing very similar things. So they, they didn't want to be conflicting, they, and so they didn't do anything with it. And it was just kind of, I was still working on it. And when I was leaving I was like, I would like this back. And that was crazy because it went from $80 a month to about the time when I joined them was making like 450 a month. Then that year that I was in New York City had grown to say 3,500 a month, which sounds great, but 3,500 a month in New York City and Brooklyn, Manhattan goes virtually nowhere. Right. And I was making like 70 K there and digging into my spending or savings just to live there like, and I was eating super cheap and not spending hardly anything.

Chris Oliver [00:53:57] And it was just 70 k wasn't gonna give you a good life there or whatever. Like it was a struggle. Which sounds crazy 'cause 70 K here in St. Louis is, it'd

Vance Crowe [00:54:07] Be great living here. Yeah,

Chris Oliver [00:54:08] Fantastic. So I realized like I didn't have that many friends there. I'd only been there for a year. Maybe what I should do is now that I have go Rails back, move back to St. Louis and this would be plenty of money to get started here. It'd have to be very frugal, but it would be great. And so I took that gamble and it luckily grew significantly to the point where I was like, okay, this is a livable thing. And then at some point it was like, okay, I might be getting paid now more on my own business than I would get at a job. And it just kind of continues growing over time. As long as you continue doing good work

Vance Crowe [00:54:51] And how is it now

Chris Oliver [00:54:52] And stuff. Yeah, it's fantastic now. So it is kind of fascinating 'cause it's grown from something where I was like at poverty line or lower to something now where I'm like, I'll probably have to hire someone to help me grow from now on. You know? So probably

Vance Crowe [00:55:10] And it's all yours, right? You you get, if you get upside, it's all, it's all your upside. Yeah.

Chris Oliver [00:55:14] And it's, and it's been really interesting to like, 'cause because I can build it and work from home and work whatever hours I want and it can also work with you. So like your job, if you have a job you have to always deliver kind of whatever you're committed to all the time for this, like for my own business, there was a period of time where I achieved like enough money to be comfortable and I started just to narrow down like how little can I work? And I was working like one day a week and making a full salary and I was like, this is kind of awesome, but like mentally I needed that, right? Like I was exhausted and it had taken several years to get to that point, like three years. And I was like, I think I make like 50 or 60 K and I can at least make that with putting in very minimal amount of time and I'm happy to not make more money just to have this like freedom and like be able to work so little. That was really cool. And then over time I like grew out of that where I was like, okay, I'm kind of bored now. I need another challenge. And so I built another product and launched that and just launched another one last week. And so over time then you like figure out what parts of those businesses are working and what you wanna optimize for. So that one I was like, how little time can I put into making videos? And it really helped too to have another project because as I'm working on that I can take lessons I learned and teach them in videos and then that made that even easier and I could focus more on this and grow that and just kind of, you know, I, I had all of the options to go in any direction I wanted so long as they continued to pay the bills, right?

Chris Oliver [00:57:03] So that was a lot of freedom that I ended up with. They didn't understand, you know, when I started, 'cause I turned 30 like in, in at the end of May and I always had these goals of like, and I I, I have a like draft blog post I need to publish on this. But I had a goal of like, I wanna be a millionaire by 30. That was like the, the lofty goal I had. And it's funny because a million dollars when you're in business and thinking about it in terms of like hiring people, million dollars goes almost nowhere. Like a hundred thousand dollars salary is low for a developer,

Vance Crowe [00:57:42] Right?

Chris Oliver [00:57:42] These days.

Vance Crowe [00:57:43] So, and now you've got a business that's generating money at the level that lets you

Chris Oliver [00:57:48] That, that you could do that. Yeah. And, and that's, that was the longest struggle too is like you are first working to build your own salary and you get a bare minimum salary then you work hard to get to a comfortable salary. So you don't feel like, gosh, why am I working so hard? I should just go get a job 'cause it would pay me double and you know, it'd be easier. But then at a point you achieve that and then you're like, okay, well if I work a little bit harder, I can make more money than I could in a normal job. And then if I work a little bit harder then I can hire someone else, cut my salary back down to what was comfortable. But now I do half the work or something. Or like we can do twice as much work and maybe make, you know, three times as much money or something. So you get a lot of leverage over time, but it's very slow and you have to be patient. But yeah, like the, going back to that blog post, like the million dollars was never about the million dollars because I was always thinking about this as the kid. Like I imagine a million dollars allows me to just do anything I wanna do without having to, you know,

Vance Crowe [00:58:55] Go to a job. I that's, that's what a million dollars is. It references the financial independence that people want. Yeah.

Chris Oliver [00:59:02] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:59:02] And so what you're really saying when I wanna have a million dollars is I wanna have enough capital or the value of my work or whatever is enough that I'm not dependent on any one thing.

Chris Oliver [00:59:13] Yeah, you're not, you, you, you have freedom of time, location, whatever and financial freedom or whatever. So like I realized at some point I got that 'cause I ended up with, you know, those where I could work one day a week. I got time freedom then. And then I was like, well now that I make more money I kind of have, you know, location freedom where I could go travel and spend a month a year there and work from there if I wanted. And you ended up with like a lot of these other things you, you also have more responsibilities. 'cause at a job you are like, you don't have to worry about payroll taxes, you know, none of that stuff. No legal things. No, no designers. If, if you're a developer at least and you just worry about the code and you don't have to even do customer support or anything, but you know, as a business owner you have to do all of those things yourself. And you don't have money to go hire a bookkeeper or good lawyer or whatever. And so you gotta kind of be scrappy for a while, but then over time you like find a good bookkeeper or something and eventually you make enough money where like it is worth paying this person to save that time and I make enough money that I can do that responsibly and stuff. And it just takes super long time. But then you get to a level of like freedom that you can't really go back like o only working for yourself will ever give you that much freedom, you know?

Chris Oliver [01:00:48] And it's such a cool thing. And sadly like in theory everyone is gonna be able to achieve that in the future I think, I hope. But then you see all these Grubhubs and Amazon deliveries where they're renting U-Haul trucks to deliver your packages and stuff and you're like, I don't know, because a lot of this gig or economy thing that people talk about, whether they're working for Uber or Lyft or whatever, they're all kind of working for minimum wage, but they get to work for themselves and work their own hours. And a lot of people are willing to trade that. You know, we won't make a $70,000 a year, but we can work closer to minimum wage, but we can work anytime we want. You know? And so that may be a thing people are willing to trade off for, which is now kind of enabled by the internet where we have that leverage where we can use that and say, I just wanna work at nights so I can spend the time with my kids during the day or whatever. Like you have more time to, or more flexible ways of doing that. So it's kind of cool to see that stuff change, but you know, unless you really own the business, it's not, it's not gonna pay super well.

Vance Crowe [01:02:03] I had a really fascinating conversation with a guy. I got invited out to the American Enterprise Institute and they had like this think tank kind of weekend. Okay. And I got to meet all these really interesting people from all over the country. And I, the guy brought up the point that social media is, so in the United States we pride ourselves on being a meritocracy. Does it have problems? Sure. Right? Yeah. But like it is, can you come up with a program that people wanna buy things from you on your program and then you can make money, right? And, and so it's how good are you at doing your thing? You move up in the hierarchy. And he was saying, well social media isn't like that. It's not a meritocracy, it's an honor culture. And that in effect, in an honor culture, you have honor and shame and there and there's no limiting factor on how much shame you can have because once you've decided that somebody is not a part of your group, you want them gone obliteration to the absolute maximum. And that really made a lot of sense to me. Yeah. About the, about the, like you are playing this zero sum social hierarchy game and what the reason that people band together I think and share articles that have very little substance is because they're like, yeah, yeah, that guy's bad and he's doing bad things and we are on the good side, right? We're all on the good side together.

Chris Oliver [01:03:23] Yeah. Naval talks about that too, where he is like, you know, there, there are several sort of hierarchies that you can work up in and you know, money and business is one thing where if you make good stuff then you make money and you rise up the ranks and everyone else can too. But in the social sphere of things like social media and stuff, it is, you can't get ahead unless someone else goes down or whatever. And so, like they, they talked about that in one of his podcast episodes or something, or on the Joe Rogan episode on,

Vance Crowe [01:03:59] He talks about it in both his podcast and I think the Rogan one. Yeah, it's, it's a great point.

Chris Oliver [01:04:03] It it's very much very similar to that where in order to get higher, like, like social political status, you have to talk down about someone else in order to rise yourself up. And it's just like an awful game to play. And so you should effectively just try not to play it at all, you know? And, and yeah, I

Vance Crowe [01:04:25] I mean I guess maybe that's the answer right there, right? Like yeah,

Chris Oliver [01:04:27] I mean

Vance Crowe [01:04:27] I don't, I don't care about this. The,

Chris Oliver [01:04:29] I mean the thing, the thing that like is always a joke of like, have you seen that meme of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel when they look like young nerds at the computer holding up their like PayPal logo and stuff. And then there's one of like Bezos when he's young starting Amazon Oh yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:04:51] With the banner behind him. Yeah.

Chris Oliver [01:04:51] And he looks like just a young nerd and both of those show them now where they're like buff and like rich and crazy and everything and, and they're like, you know what, whatever they're like he, the first like quote on the first one is like, you know, and he is just like this poor little nerd like, I hope I can do this. And then the next one's like, I can do whatever the heck I want. Like, and like that's exactly the game you should play too. You know, like

Vance Crowe [01:05:21] Speaking of people that we follow, you are the guru of finding awesome new people. I mean, you were the one that turned me on to Peter Thiel zero to one and yeah. Naval ante. But who, who are you listening to lately?

Chris Oliver [01:05:36] Mm. You know, I don't know. I was listening to a lot of Chama, Pauly Hae, but he's kind of, he had an interesting time recently. He's an investor. He was one of the, he's like number 20 at Facebook and was on the growth team. So they were the team that figured out that on Facebook, if you'd got an added 10 friends, seven friends in 10 days or 10 friends in seven days, you basically never left. So they found the data point and were like, whoa, like every single person who achieves this never leaves and we can grow our platform and business to be giant. Once they found that they could focus all their attention on how do we get people to join and add those number of friends and within that time period and voila, you know, we will rocket ship. And so he made a ton of money from Facebook's IPO and stuff and then has gone on to do investing and, and I've always found him interesting because in a similar, similar vein, he talks about investing in companies on sort of the merits to humanity. And there's a lot of people who are doing investing in things like Uber and stuff and they're doing it based on like, we know we can make a lot of money off of this. And his is, his philosophy is like, look, I invested in a company that's gonna put a sensor in your toilet and we'll do a urine sample test every time you pee.

Chris Oliver [01:07:09] So we can detect cancer or other things so far in advance because we're going to test your urine all the time every day. Like how cool is that? Rather than the rare occasions you go to the doctor and they do a urine sample. So those sorts of things are the ones he's like, if this is gonna be good for humanity in general, then those are the ones I should invest in. 'cause if we can make it work, it's gonna be worth, you know, trillions of dollars. You know, we could create something like, it's also kind of funny because you're top three companies or Apple, Microsoft and, and Amazon and those are like just kind of the same company in a sense. You know, apple and Microsoft are very similar. They build software and computers and then Amazon is just selling things and they're, there's not a whole lot of other core things. Like those biggest companies are all very focused on tech and software. So, you know, a healthcare company that creates products like that and makes so much strides and preventative medicine will just be easy to skyrocket into the trillions of dollars, you know, at some point because they're doing something that will just be kind of like literally every toilet should have that, you know, or something like that. So. So

Vance Crowe [01:08:31] How did you find Chamath that, like that's one of the things that's so interesting.

Chris Oliver [01:08:35] This is a great point. I don't know a lot of these people will surface on Hacker News or people I follow on Twitter. So a lot of it tends to be that a lot of these people already are connected. And so if you find one, you'll often eventually find these other ones. But you have to be kind of careful 'cause there's a lot of like not so great information. And I tend to follow those people who are a lot more like philosophical, like Naval is a, which is funny, if you read the conversations about his interview on Joe Rogan, all of the comments are like, this guy's full of crap. Like he is just talking in platitudes and blah blah blah and not really saying

Vance Crowe [01:09:17] Anything, oh, didn't realize the comments didn't like him

Chris Oliver [01:09:19] On, on Hacker News and stuff. It was hilarious. Oh, because they're all like this very engineering focused, they want concrete advice, tactics and whatever. And it's like that is not how, like if you have principles and a philosophy that you follow all the tactics, follow, follow, like they're just naturally going to come out of that because you follow your, your principles. And so these people are like ones who won't ever really get that far 'cause they're looking to, you know, just copy tactics and they're not, they can't be creative then, right? Because they don't have any guiding light that they're following or whatever. You know, you, you, so I tend to gravitate towards those people and they're kind of rare. You

Vance Crowe [01:10:02] Were talking about the 15 minutes of discipline that you had to get yourself front the camera. That actually got me thinking about a strategy that I think I've told you about this, the sticker sprints. Mm. So my friend Nick Cek just was telling me like his, he's kind of off on his own too. So I talked to him and he was like, well when I was going to get my PhD, I figured out that what I needed were blocks of uninterrupted time, But I didn't need it. So it was like a huge block. I needed something that would be accomplishable. So what I do is I turn off all of my email, my text messages, any way to get ahold of me and I set a timer for 45 minutes. And then once I hit the button, then I'm only working on whatever that thing was in front of me. And then at the end of 45 minutes I, I am totally comfortable with being halfway through a sentence, but I stop as close to that as I can because now I've got something to hang onto, like to come back and grab onto.

Chris Oliver [01:10:58] I like that. I

Vance Crowe [01:10:58] Don't, I don't finish it all the out like

Chris Oliver [01:11:00] Intentionally not finishing it.

Vance Crowe [01:11:02] Right.

Chris Oliver [01:11:02] That's interesting.

Vance Crowe [01:11:03] And so then if you do three sets of 45 minutes, you get a sticker and your goal is to build up the number of stickers that you can get in a day day, how money, how much time can you spend,

Chris Oliver [01:11:15] Huh?

Vance Crowe [01:11:15] Doing this focus. And it has been a miracle for me.

Chris Oliver [01:11:19] That's super cool. I haven't, I don't think we've talked about that, but it's very similar to the, have you heard of the Pomodoro technique where

Vance Crowe [01:11:25] This is somewhere around this? Yeah. It's

Chris Oliver [01:11:27] Just, it's very simple. It doesn't really work for me because it doesn't have those, like, those nuances of you should intentionally finish things halfway. I did that last night on, not on purpose, but I left to go hang out with you guys and I was in the middle of coding on something and I left it there half finished and I knew what my next thought was gonna be, but I know I can go home and pick that up exactly where I left off because I, I left it with a thread that I can hang on to versus like completing that thing and then next time I'd have to sit down and figure out what I want to start working on. Well

Vance Crowe [01:12:06] And this hits on interesting, exactly what you were talking about with programming. Like one of the hardest things for people to do in order to become productive or even just to start is to know where to start. Yeah.

Chris Oliver [01:12:16] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:12:16] Like, like that is I think one of the things that holds people back the most. And we've talked about the concept of resistance, right? Like the voice that when you wake up in the morning and you know you should go for a run, but there's this voice that says like it's a little cold out or Oh

Chris Oliver [01:12:33] You did, you

Vance Crowe [01:12:33] Worked too hard yesterday or you should, you know, and that resistance actually occurs throughout your life right? In, in every single area. I think that resistance is the highest and I think it's good to name it on projects where I don't know where to begin. Yeah,

Chris Oliver [01:12:48] Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [01:12:48] So the idea, idea of just like, I'm going to start and be totally fine with not knowing where this thing is going and, and building from there.

Chris Oliver [01:12:56] Absolutely. I, I know I've told you this story before, but there was a guy that he did this thing called rejection therapy. Oh. And it's so amazing it went viral because, so he would record himself and his challenge was to go into say Starbucks and just ask for 10% off, you know, order something but you have to ask for 10% off just out of the blue and like just put yourself in conversations where you know you're gonna be told no and intentionally ask for things that you will be told no. And so he goes into Krispy Kreme one day and asks for this hilarious, like, I would certainly expect to be told no for this. He goes in and he asks for five donuts and he wants them to be the colored in the Olympic rings. And so the lady, instead of saying no, she goes, hold on, gimme a minute. And she goes back and he sits down and he's recording this on his phone and sits down at this table across from the, the cashier register and he's like super freaking out in the video. Like, because

Vance Crowe [01:14:08] Normally they just tell him no.

Chris Oliver [01:14:09] Yeah. And he's like, okay I got it over with, I can leave now and blah blah blah. And he's now like, oh God, I asked her to do this thing. And I like, I wanted her to say no, but she said yes. Like what do I do now? And so she goes and actually cuts the donuts and gets the icing to match all the colors. She googled it to make sure she got it right and then bring some a a box with all of them in there, all colored icing and everything. And he's like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. Thank you so much. This is amazing. Like I am super sorry you know, that you had to do that. And he posted online and like the internet was like, this person needs a raise. And so the internet loved it and he like had this amazing lesson out of there was like, you don't get what you don't ask for, you know, but you also, you also like are worried about rejection and you got so wrapped up and like on want the no that you forgot that you could get a yes on asking for hard things. And so then he like had this fascinating moment that everybody was like that's really interesting, this rejection to therapy thing. And then they like people were contacting Krispy Kareem corporate and like found the lady and her name were like, you guys need to do something for her or whatever. And yeah I think she got promoted or whatever.

Vance Crowe [01:15:30] Oh what a great story. The battery gods have spoken and we are running out of battery. So I wanna actually take a little bit of time. You produce stuff that is for regular people. You have two podcasts and what are their names and where can people find them?

Chris Oliver [01:15:44] Well one of 'em is for programmers. It's called Remote Ruby and I forget it's remote Ruby transistor fm. If you Google it you'll find it. We don't really have domain set up yet for 'em, but that one's for programmers and we just talk about, you know, stuff and interview people that are other programmers and and just kind of explore what it's like to be a developer and all that good stuff and what's changing new things. You name it. That's a fun one. Probably the bigger one because that's what my business revolves around, you know, it fits in well with all those things. And then I have another one called Business Time, which a friend out in California and I who we've never actually met in person, but we've been friends through Grow Rails since like the beginning. He and I do a podcast talking about just running a business. So we're talking about marketing and he's trying to launch a product and, and get something out for genetic counselors and his wife is a genetic counselor and so they're building software for them 'cause they have to manage their licenses and renewals and all that stuff and it gets kind of hairy. So we do that and talk about his building up his business, marketing it and same thing for mine. So it was pretty fun to just kind of explore those things like what should we try and try and give updates on, we did this last week, here's the results we saw and so on. So this next one, 'cause last Monday I launched that new product.

Chris Oliver [01:17:15] This next episode we'll record probably later today we'll dive into kind of the launch of that and how it's done and, and some, you know, edges around there and like what I'm gonna do in the future and that sort of thing. So should be fun.

Vance Crowe [01:17:30] And you are on Twitter?

Chris Oliver [01:17:32] Yep. At exit three XCID three.

Vance Crowe [01:17:36] I'll throw a LinkedIn

Chris Oliver [01:17:37] Pretty much

Vance Crowe [01:17:37] Everywhere. Yeah,

Chris Oliver [01:17:38] That's my domain, my email, Twitter, GitHub. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:17:42] Well Chris, you have been an absolute pivotal person in my life that I'm sure will be around many, many more times. We will bring you back to talk about other fun and exciting things and eventually we'll have Rob on here. He's not

Chris Oliver [01:17:56] The one. Yeah, that'd be fantastic. So

Vance Crowe [01:17:58] Thank you so much for coming by. I appreciate it.

Chris Oliver [01:18:00] Well thanks for having me.

Vance Crowe [01:18:01] Well thanks for sticking around everybody to the very end. This was a great interview with my good friend, computer programmer and entrepreneur, Chris Oliver. I'm so glad you stayed and I hope that you'll hit that like button or consider giving me a review and sharing it with your friends. These types of activities are a small action, but it really spreads to the podcast out. And I have been absolutely astounded with how quickly the podcast has grown. In fact, it's made it easy for me to get some of the next podcast guests on the docket. I have a friend from the west coast that is flying all the way here. He's a dairy farmer and he's gonna talk about some of the issues going on in dairy farming, kind of farming in general, and talking about things like activists in the vegan community. This should be a very interesting interview. Another interesting one is one of St. Louis's most well-known chefs, a James Beard award-winning chef has agreed to come on the podcast. So I'm pretty excited about that. We should be able to get it this month. And also, if you've ever been interested in learning more about the cannabis industry, I have a good friend that has done well in that industry and is going to talk about what it was like starting a firm out in Las Vegas as recreational marijuana became available and what he learned along the way and kind of what his thoughts are on what's gonna happen in the future. So I hope you subscribe and stay tuned. This podcast just keeps getting better and better. And thank you so much to people that have been writing me with your support, with your comments, and with helping me figure out where to take this podcast in ways that my audience wants to see it go.

Vance Crowe [01:19:38] So thanks so much and we'll see you next week.