Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses | Lex Fridman Podcast #172
the following is a conversation with ryan schiller creator of librex an anonymous discussion feed for college communities starting at first with yale then the ivy leagues and now adding stanford and mit their mission is to give students a place to explore ideas and issues in a positive way but with much more personal and intellectual freedom than has defined college campuses in recent history i think this is a very difficult but worthy project quick thank you to our sponsors all form magic spoon better help and brave click their links to support this podcast as a side note let me say that ryan is a young entrepreneur and genuine human being who quickly won me over he's inspiring in many ways both in the struggle he had to overcome in his personal life but also in the fact that he did not know how to code but saw a problem in this world in his community that he cared about and for that he learned to code and built the solution in the best way he knew how that's an important reminder for us humans let us not only complain about the problems in the world let us fix them i also have to say that there's passion in ryan's eyes for really wanting to make a difference in the world his story his effort gives me hope for the future there is hate in this world but i believe there's much more love and i believe it's possible to build online platforms that connect us through our common humanity as we explore difficult personal even painful ideas together this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with ryan schiller let's start with the basics what is librex what are its founding story and finding principles and looking to the future what do you hope to achieve with librex sure let me break that down so what is librex librex is an anonymous discussion feed for college campuses it's a place where people can have important and unfettered discussions and open discourse about topics they care about ideas that matter and they can do all of that completely anonymously with verified members of their college community and we exist both on each ivy league campus and we have an inter-iv community and actually this week we just opened to mit and stanford so now no really mit yes stanford so we have mit and stanford communities and i expect you to sign up for your mit account and start posting what are for people who are not familiar like me actually which are the ivy leagues sure so we started at yale which is my i don't know can you call it alma mater because i haven't technically graduated yeah um what's that called when you're actually still there my university oh yeah i guess very i guess home call it home that's my home educational home started at my educational home of yale and then we moved to um and we could get into the story of this eventually if you'd like and then we went to dartmouth and then quarantine hit we opened to the rest of the ivy league and now we have and the ivy league um for those who don't know is harvard yale princeton dartmouth columbia cornell brown and penn i got it all in one breath what's the youngest eye league pen no colombia i can't say i haven't okay on camera we'll edit it in post i don't know okay each of all all eight of them and then you can just like get it in yeah like pen carver there's actually a really nice software that people should check out like a service uh it's using machine learning really nicely for podcast editing where you can it learns the voice of the speaker and it can change the words you said it's like some deep fake stuff it's deep fake but for positive applications it's very interesting it's like the only deep fake positive applications i've seen i have a friend who's obsessed with defects yeah what's great about i think deep fakes is that it's gonna do the opposite of sort of what's happening with our culture where everyone will have plausible deniability yeah exactly i mean that that's the hope for me is there's so many fake things out there that we're going to actually be much more skeptical and and think and take in multiple sources and actually like reason like use common sense and use them like deep thinking to understand like what is true and what is not because uh you know we used to have like traditional sources like the new york times and all these kinds of publications that had a reputation there are these institutions another the social truth and when you no longer can trust anything as a source of truth you start to think on your own that gets part of the individual that goes that takes its way back to like where i came from the soviet union where you can't really trust any one source of news you have to think on your own you have to talk to your friends tremendous amount of intellectual autonomy don't you think it think about the societal consequences absolutely i mean we see so much decentralization in all aspects of our digital lives now but this is like the decentralization of thought you could say it's sadly or i don't think it's sad is decentralization of truth where like truth is a clustering thing where you have these like this point cloud of people just swimming around like billions of them and they all have certain ideas and what's thought of as truth is almost like a clustering algorithm when you just get a bunch of people that believe the same thing that's truth but there's also another truth and there might be like multiple truths and it's almost it be like a battle of truths maybe even the idea of truth will like lessen its power in society that there is such a thing as a truth because like the downside of saying something is true is uh it's always the downside of what people like religious people call scientism which is like once science has declared something is true you can't no longer question it but the reality is science is a moving mechanism you're constantly questioning you're constantly questioning and maybe truth should be renamed as uh as a process not a not a final destination the whole point is to keep questioning keep questioning keep discovering kind of like we're going backwards in time so like back when back when people were sort of finding their identities and we were less globalized right like people would would get together and they'd get together around common value system common morals and a common place and those would be sort of these clusters of their truth right and so we have all these different like civilizations and societies across across the world that created their own truths you know we talk about the jews and the tom and toro look at buddhist texts we can look at all sorts of different truths and how many of them get at the same things but many of them have different ideas or different articulations yeah harare and sapiens rewinds that even farther back into like caveman times that's the thing that made us humans special is who can develop these clusters of ideas hold them in their minds through stories pass them on to each other and the girls and girls and finally we have bitcoin so which money is another belief system that um that uh that has power only because we believe in it and is that truth i don't know but it has power and it it's it's carried in the minds of millions and thereby has power but back to librex so what uh what's the founding story what's the founding principles of librex sure so i was on campus as a freshman and i was talking to my friends many of them felt like it was hard to raise your hand in class to ask question they really felt like even outside the classroom it was hard to be vulnerable and the thing you have to understand about yells it's not that big a place everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows you basically yeah um and people come to these schools first of all they're home for people and they want to be themselves they want to feel like they can be authentic they want to make real friendships and second of all it's a place where people go for intellectual vitality to explore important ideas and to grow as thinkers and fortunately due to the culture my friends expressed that it was very difficult to do that and i felt it too and then i couldn't talk to my professors and i remember talked to one specific global affairs professor and i was taking his class and his area of expertise was in the middle eastern conflict and i went to him and i said professor we've we're almost finished this class and we haven't even gotten to sort of the reason i originally wanted to take the class was to hear about your perspective on the middle eastern conflict because something i'd learned at yale and this is maybe a sort of a tangent but i'll i'll flush it out a bit something i've learned at yale is that you can learn all sorts of things from a textbook and what you kind of go to yell to do is to get like the opinions of the experts that go beyond the textbook and to have those more in-depth conversations and so that's sort of the added value of going to a place like yale and taking a course there as opposed to just reading a textbook but also interact with that opinion exact person yeah to interact with that with that opinion to hear it to respond to it to push back on it and to have that with some great minds and there really are great minds at yale don't get me wrong it's a place it's still a place of tremendous brilliance um so i'm talking this professor right and i'm like we haven't i haven't heard your area of expertise and i'm like are we going to get to it what's the deal any this is during office hours mind you so we're one on one it says ryan to be honest i used to teach this area every single year in fact i would do a section on it which is like a small seminar like breakaway from the class where he would talk to the students in small groups and explain his and explain his perspective his research and have a real debate about it like around a harkness table and um he said i used to do this and then about two years ago a student reported me to the school and i realized my job was at risk and i realized the best course of action was basically just not to broach the topic and so now i just don't even mention it and he's like you can say whatever you want but i'm not i'm not gonna be a part of it and it's a real shame it's a real loss to all of the students who i think came to the school to learn from these brilliant professors in that context of these world experts the problem seems to be that reporting mechanism where there's a disproportionate power to a complaint of a young student a complaint that an idea is painful or an idea is disrespectful to you know or ideas creating an unsafe space and the the conclusion of that i mean i'm not sure what to do with that because it's a single reporting maybe a couple but that has more power than the idea itself and that's strange i i don't know how to fix that in the administration except to fire everybody so like this is to push back against this storyline that academia somehow fundamentally broken i think we have to separate a lot of things out like one is you have to look at faculty and you have to look at administration and like at mit for example the administration does tries to do well but they're the ones that often lack courage they're often the ones who are the source of the problem when people criticize academia and i'll just speak to my to myself you know i'm willing to take heat for this is they really are criticizing the administration not the faculty because the faculty often times are the most brilliant the the boldest thinkers that you think whenever you talk about we need like the truth to be spoken the faculty are often the ones who are in the possession of the deepest truths in their mind and in that sense and they also have the capacity to truly educate in the way that you're you're saying and so it's not broken like fundamentally but there's stuff that like needs that's not working that well and you just kind of you kind of took my words that's what that's what i thought you were going to ask me if i think the ivy league is broken that's totally that's exactly it so you don't think yeah so on the question do you think the ivy league is broken like what how do you think about it academia in general i suppose but ivy league still i think it represents some of the best qualities of academia yeah what more is there to say there i think the ivy league is producing tremendous thinkers to this day i think the culture has a lot that can be improved but i have a lot of faith in the people who are in these institutions i think like you said the administration and i have to be a little careful because um you know i've been in some of these committees um and i i've talked to the administration about these sorts of things um i think they have a lot of stakeholders and unfortunately it makes it difficult for them to always serve these brilliant faculty and the students in the way that they would probably like to yeah okay so this is me speaking right the administration i know the people and they're oftentimes the faculty holding positions in these committees right yes but it's in in the role of quote unquote service they they're trying to do well they're trying to do good but i think you could say the mechanism is not working but i could also say my personal opinion is they lack courage and want courage and two grace when they walk through the fire so courage is stepping into the fire and grace when you walk through the fire is like maintaining that like like as opposed to being rude and insensitive to the lived quote-unquote experience of others or like you know just not eloquent at all like as you step in and take the courageous step of talking and saying the difficult thing doing it well like doing it skillfully so both of those are important the courage and the skill to communicate difficult ideas and they often lack them because they weren't trained for it i think so you can blame the mechanisms that don't that allow 19 20 year old students to have more power than the entire faculty or you could just say that the faculty need to step up and grow some guts and and skill of graceful communication really administration well yeah and the administration that's right that's the administration okay so the faculty are sometimes some of the most brave outspoken people yes within the balance of their career yeah so uh so that that takes a that's like the founding kind of spark of a fire that uh led you to then say okay so how can i help yeah and i explored a lot i expert a lot of options i wrote many articles to my friends talked to them and i realized it sort of needed to be a cultural change sort of need to be bottom-up grassroots um something i knew the energy was there because you just look at the most recent institutional assessment from yale this was basically the number one thing that students faculty and alumni all pointed to to the administration was cultivating more conversations on campus and more difficult conversations on campus so the people on campus know it um and you look at a gallup poll 61 of students are on ivy league campuses afraid to speak their minds because of the campus culture the campus culture is causing a sort of freezing effect on discourse can you pause on that again so what percentage of students feel afraid to speak their mind 61 nationally and you're talking about you know places nothing like uh the ivy league where i'd say i'd imagine it would be even worse because of just the way that these communities kind of come about and the sorts of people who are attracted or are invited to these sorts of communities that's nationwide that college students and it's going up that college students are afraid to say what they believe because of their campus climate so it's a maturity it's not it's not a conservative thing it's not a liberal thing it's a group thing we're all feeling it the majority of us are feeling it and basically just it doesn't even you don't even necessarily need to have anything to say you just have a fear that's right so when you're like teaching [Music] you know metaphors a really powerful thing to explain you know and there's just the caution that you feel that's just horrible for humor now comedians have the freedom to just talk shit which is why i really appreciate uh somebody's been a friend recently tim dillon who has who gives zero uh pardon my french fucks about anything which is very liberating very important person to just tear down the powerful but you know inside the the academia as a as an educator as a teacher as a professor you don't have the same freedom so that fear is felt i guess by a majority of students it's um you were getting at something there too which is that um if you're afraid to speak metaphorically if you're afraid to speak imprecisely it can be very difficult to actually think at all and to think to the extremities of what you're capable of because these are the these are the mechanisms we use when we don't have quite the precise mathematical language to quite pinpoint what we're talking about yet this is the beginning this is the creative step that leads to new knowledge and so that really scares me is that if i'm not allowed to sort of excavate these things these ideas with people in the sort of messy sloppy way that we do as humans when we're first being creative are we how are we going to be able to continue to innovate are we going to continue to be able to learn that's what really started to scare me so you've explored a bunch of different ideas you wrote a bunch of different stuff uh how did lee brooks come about it basically came to me that it had to be kind of a grassroots movement and it had to be something that changed culturally and it had to be relatively personal people meeting people people finding out that no i'm not the only one on campus who feels this way i i feel alone and there are a lot of other people who feel alone i i believe this thing and it's not as unpopular as i thought you know the basically creating heterodoxy of thought and it's creating that moment where you realize that your politics are personal and that your politics are shared by a lot of people on campus and so i just started coding it i i didn't have much coding experience but uh went headfirst in and figured how hard could it be you know i mean this is really fascinating so i talked to a lot of software engineers ai people obviously that's where my passion my uh like interests are my focus has been throughout my life the fascinating thing about your story i think it should be truly inspiring to like people that want to change the world is that you don't have a background in programming you don't have even maybe a technical background so you saw a problem you explored different ideas and then you just decided you're gonna learn how to build an app like without a technical background like you didn't try to that's so bold that is so beautiful man um can you take me through the journey of of deciding to do that of like learning to program without a programming background and building the app like detail like what do you actually like how do you start sure i mean you want to uh you want to buy a mac i learned you knew you had to buy them i'm just going to go step by step right i'll be as dumb as possible because it was it was truly it was truly you know yeah like leading by your feet so you need a computer for this well yeah i had a pc at the time and i was android at the time and i realized you know i realized it should be like an ios app and so um you know that was a decision but you know i knew kids these days they're always on their phone and you know i wanted you to be able to say a passing thought you know in class make a passing like you're walking around and you have a thought and you can express it or you're in the dining hall and you have your phone out you can express it so it was clear to me it should be an ios app by the way yeah android is great definitely check out we also are now available on android but we'll get there um for the you android users from mit stanford or the ivy league so back to how it happened so i realized i had mac so went out and got back um and i realized i need an iphone for testing eventually got an iphone um so those are the real robot blocks to start with um from there i mean there's there's almost too much information out there about programming the question is like where do you start and what's going to be useful to you and i i my first thought was i should look at some yell classes but it became very clear very quickly that that was not the right place to start um that would probably be the right place to start if i wanted to get a job at amazon but michael was slightly different yeah and i i definitely had it in mind that what i was trying to make was i'm trying to prove out an idea i'm not trying to make a finished product i'm just trying to get to the first step because i figured if i keep if i keep getting to the next step at least i won't die now you know like at least things will move forward i'll learn new things maybe i'll meet new people i'll show a degree of seriousness about what i'm doing and things will come together and that is as you'll see what ends up happening um so i start with swift right and i find this video from the stanford professor that had like a million views that was like how to make basically swift apps like perfect and you just like uh so you got this mac and you what like go to google.com and you type in download xcode and that's code yeah and then i type in on youtube like stanford ios swift enter first youtube video has a million views i'm like it has to be good at stanford as a million views i got lucky i mean that turned out to be a very good video it's basically like introductory course to swift yeah i mean you say introductory i think most of the people in that class um probably had a much better background than i did software developers probably yeah computer scientists and it was slow for me um i i don't think i realized it fully at the time just how far behind i was from the rest of the class because i was like wow it seems like people are picking this up really quickly um so it took a little longer and you know a lot of time on stack overflow but eventually i made a truly minimal viable product the most minimal like we're talking you know put text on screen add text to screen comment on top of text you know make a post make a response and anyone with a yell email can do this and you plug it into a certain a cloud server and you verify people's accounts and you you're off you have you have to figure out how to like the whole idea of like having an account so there's a permanence like you can create an account with an email verify it verify it okay so that that's not you know and that's literally how i thought about it right like so what do i need to do and i'm like well first thing i need is a login page and i'm like how to make a login page in swift i mean it's that easy if someone this has been done before of course and the first page that pops up was probably a pretty damn good page it wasn't that bad it wasn't perfect but like maybe it got me 80 of the way there yeah and then i came into some bugs and then you know i asked stack overflow a few questions and then i got a little further and then i found some more bugs and then i'm like maybe this isn't the right way to do maybe i should do it this way and yeah i'm sure my code isn't great but the goal isn't to make great code the great wasn't the goal wasn't to make scalable code it was to understand is this something my friends will use like what is the reaction going to be if i put it in their hands and am i capable of making this thing and that's awesome and so you're focusing on the the experience like actually just really driving towards that first step figuring out the first step and really driving towards it of course you have to also figure out like concept of like storage like database you know something funny what's that i just made the database structure with no knowledge of databases whatsoever and i start showing it to my friends who have an experience in cs and they're like you used a heap that's so interesting you're like why did you decide to store it in this way i'm like bro i don't even know what a heap is yeah i just did it because it works like i'm trying to make calls and stuff and they're like uh yeah they're like the hierarchy is really like i'm like what there's a deep profound lesson in there that i don't know how much you've interacted with computer science people since but they tend to optimize and have these kind of discussions and what leads what results is over optimization it's like worrying is this really the right way to do it and then you go as opposed to doing the first thing on stack overflow you go down this like rabbit hole of what's the actual proper way to do it and then you're like you wake up five years later working on amazon working at amazon because you've never finished the login page like it's kind of hilarious but that that's a really deep lesson like just get it done and and there's like what what's a heat bro is is the right that should be a t-shirt uh that that's really the right approach to building something that ultimately creates an experience and then you iterate eventually that's how the great some of the greatest software products in this world have been built as you create it quickly and then just iterate what was by the way in your mind the thing that you're chasing as a prototype like what what was the first step that it feels like something is working like do you see you interacting with another friend yeah i think the first step was like it's one thing to tell someone about an idea but it's another thing to put in their hands and kind of see like the way their their eyes kind of look um and when i'd go i'd walk around across campus which is part of yale and i'd literally just go up to people and run up to them and be like try this try this you got to try this this is pre-quarantined by the way of course this would never like what is it and i'd be like and i'll explain it's like an anonymous discussion feed for a yale campus yeah and you see their gears turning and they just some people would be like not interested yeah i'm like fine not your target demographic i get it you'll come eventually um but some people like you could see it they got it they're like yes and that's when i was like okay okay there is and you don't need i mean you don't need fifty percent of people to like it yeah you need what five percent ten percent to love it and then they'll tell five percent ten percent yeah word of mouth yeah and you're good um of course the first version was very very crappy but seeing people trying despite all the crappiness wasn't it was sort of enough to be the first step and you know since since then all of my code's been stripped out i now um have friends who basically have told me don't bother with the coding part you do you do the rest you just make sure that we can code because they want to code great i mean i'm not an engineer yeah i never intended to be an engineer and there's a lot to do that's not engineering yes but the point was just to validate the idea so to speak when was the moment that you felt like we've created something special maybe a moment where you're proud of that this is a this is this has the potential to actually be the very uh implementation of the idea that i initially had there's so many there's so many little moments it's like and i bet there'll still be moments in the future that make that make it hard to like totally say like yeah we should say this is a this is still very early years of libre yeah it's literally it's only been a year since we've had like actual like a lot of people on the app yeah about a year oh wow okay i mean there's some crazy moments i could talk about sort of going to dartmouth because it's one thing to like get some traction at your school yeah people know you and you know it's it's your school you know it's another thing to go to another school and where no one knows you and sign up 90 of the campus overnight wow so tell me that story you're invading another territory it was literally like that did you buy it like a dartmouth sweatshirt purposefully i didn't want to defraud any fraud anyone but i was purposefully non-descript in my clothing yeah no yell stuff no dartmouth stuff um just blend in um i'll get i'll go back there so what happened was this was like march of last year um so almost almost a year ago today and i really wanted to see if we could go from sort of one campus to two campuses so i didn't know anyone at dartmouth campus but i kind of i had some cold emails some warm-ish emails um and i went to people and i was like basically can i sleep on your floor for two days during finals period yeah i had a lot of people who said this is crazy like no one's gonna no one wants to download an app during finals period a social afternoon's period but i emailed a few people i was like you know can i sleep on your floor and one of them was crazy enough to say sure come to my come to my door i have a nice floor um and he ended up today he's still really close he's a really close friend but anyway i take a train knowing nothing about this guy besides his first and last name and i arrive and dartmouth is really really remote way more remote than you think to the point where i'm like he's like he warned me he's a really hospitable guy he warned me like it's gonna be hard to get to campus from the train station because it's really remote and i'm like i'm sure it's fine i'll just get an uber there are no ubers in hanovers what do you think this is new hampshire so uh connecticut i mean uh yale is pretty remote as well no yeah yell is um well i mean yells in new haven which is a real city it has ubers it has food it has a culture it has a nightclub even yeah like we're talking about real city like it's not new york it's not philadelphia where i'm from but it's a city uh new hampshire is something very different yeah beautiful campus i'm sure beautiful oh my gosh i could tell i could talk so much about i was blown away by dartmouth i i started wondering like why i didn't apply legitimately um between the people and the culture it was it was a it was a beautiful vacation so i arrived there no uber but eventually i call this guy who's like the only guy who can get you to dartmouth and it takes a couple hours but we got there i sleep on this guy's floor i wake up i ask him if there's any printing he's like oh dartmouth happens to have free printing in the copy room um i print out like 2 000 posters until the guy in the copy room literally goes to he's like kid i don't know what you're doing but you need to get out of here i'm like all right i'm going i'm going um on the limits i knew yeah i found the limit um and i think a lot of startup is about finding the limits that's a little piece of advice um socially yeah he's like you gotta get out of here and i um i then go to every single dorm door i put a poster under every single dorm door advertising the app with a with a qr code yeah i walk around campus saying hi to everyone and telling them about the app i go from table to table in the cafeteria introduce myself say hi and tell them download the app it's exhausting day so many steps so much crouching down to slip the poster into the dorm door my legs were burning um but by the end of it you know 24 hours later i'm sitting on a i'm sitting in a bus and i'm just pressing the refresh button on the account creation panel it's like going up by hundreds yeah and i'm like oh my gosh this in a sense i mean certainly your like initial seed is powerful just a piece yeah but then the word of mouth is what carries it forward and what was the explanation you gave to the app it's uh anonymity a fundamental part of it like saying this is a chance for you to speak your mind about your experiences on campus yeah i think people get it you don't need to what i've realized is you don't need to tell people why to try it yeah they know yeah it it there's a hunger for this exactly yeah so i all i do is i'm very factual i said and this is where i kind of ended up coining the kind of the line that i now use to say it because i said it so many times in those 24 hours i just said it's an anonymous discussion feed for dartmouth and they're like yes [Laughter] like they've been waiting for it you know some people are more skeptical but a lot of people were like great i'm excited to try this i'm excited to meet people and connect and i mean the way dartmouth's taken to is incredible everything from professors writing poems during finals period to be like um good luck in finals period you're gonna rise like a phoenix or whatever so like yeah it's crazy to i heard about uh two women meeting on librex and starting a finance club um at dartmouth to significant others um meaning there's an article recently written up at yale as well about two queer women who met on librex and started a relationship which was pretty it was pretty interesting to see people throwing parties pre-covet um yeah it was just amazing to see how when you allow people to be vulnerable and social they connect they people have this natural desire to connect yeah when when you have whatever natural desire to have a voice and then when that voice is is uh paired with freedom that you could truly express yourself and there's something liberating about that and in that sense uh you're like you're connecting is your true self whatever that is what are the most powerful conversation you've seen on the app you mentioned like people connecting the hard part about that is the sorting you know figuring out what's going on which one am i going to put at the top mental sorting out just something to stand out to you sorry i don't mean to do like the top 10 conversations ever of all time ever on the app i just mean like stuff that you remember that stands out to you i remember this one really amazing comment from this he was a mexican international student who spoke out and this this this post was super edgy but yet it got hundreds and hundreds of upvotes within the yale community it was a yale community specific post and we should point out that there's a school specific community now and there's an all-ivy community so this was specifically in the yale community and this was a little while ago but it stuck with me this mexican international student comes to yale and he starts talking about his experience in the um la casa which is the mexican latinx as they would say cultural center at yale and how he doesn't feel welcome there because he's roman catholic basically and international and how he doesn't feel like he fits with their agenda and as a result this place that's supposed to be home for him he feels outcasted and feels more alone than he does anywhere else on campus that's powerful that was powerful to me yeah it's hearing someone someone who should be feeling supported by this culture say actually this is not doing anything for me like this is not helping me yeah this is this is not where i feel at home so what do you make of anonymity because it seems to be a fundamental aspect of the power of the app right but at the same time anonymity on the internet so it protects us right it gives us freedom to have a voice but it can also bring out the dark sides of human nature like trolls or people who want to be malicious want to hurt others purely for the joy of hurting others being cruel for fun and going to the dark places so like what do you make of anonymity as a fundamental feature of social interaction like the pros and the cons yeah just to break that down a bit i would say a lot of those same things about a place like twitter where people are very unanimous um having said that of course there's a different sort of capacity people have when they're anonymous right well in all different sorts of ways so what do i make of anonymity i think it can be incredibly liberating and allow people to be incredibly vulnerable and to connect in different ways both on politics and there was a lot to talk about this year regarding politics and you know personally vulnerable being vulnerable talking about relationships and mental health i think it allows people to have a community that's not performative and of course there's this other side where you know people can sometimes break rules or say things that they wouldn't otherwise say that people don't always agree with or that people might find repugnant and to an extent these can facilitate great conversations and on the other hand we have to have moderation in place and we have to have community guidelines to make sure that the anonymity doesn't overwhelm the purpose which is that anonymity first of all anime is a tool in librex it was not the purpose of librex it is a way that we get towards these authentic conversations given our campus climate and second of all i would say it's a spectrum it's not just it's not just librex is anonymous right um because librex isn't totally anonymous everyone's a verified ivy league student you know exactly what school everyone goes to you only have one account per person at yale meaning if um meaning that i mean what that amounts to is people have more of an ownership in the community and people know that they're connected and they have a common vernacular so the anonymity is a scale and it's a tool but you can also trust i mean this is the difference between reddit anonymity where you can easily create multiple accounts when you have only one account per person or at least it's very difficult to create multiple accounts then you can trust that the anonymous person you're talking to is a human being not a bot i try to be completely unanimous uh now in my all public interactions i try to be as real in every way possible like zero gap between private me and public me why exactly did you it seems like this is an intentional mission what made you want to sort of bridge that gap between the private sphere and public sphere because that's that's unique i know a lot of intellectuals who would make a different decision yeah interesting i had a discussion about with naval about this actually with a few others that have a very clear distinction between public and private something i'm struggling with by the way personally i'm thinking about so one on the very basic surface level is uh if you carry with yourself lies small lies or big lies it's extra mental effort to remember what you uh like to remember what you're supposed to say not supposed to say so that's on a very surface level of like it's just easier to live life when you're have the smaller the gap between the private you and the public you and the second is i think for me from an engineering perspective like if i'm dishonest with others i will too quickly become dishonest with myself and in so doing i will not truly be able to think deeply about the world and come up and build revolutionary ideas there's something about honesty that feels like it's that first principles thinking that's almost like overused as a term but it feels like that requires radical honesty not radical asshole-ishness but radical honesty with yourself with yourself and i feels like it's difficult to be radically honest with yourself when you're being dishonest with the public and also i have a nice feature honestly that um in this current social context so we can talk about race and gender and uh what what are the other topics that are touchy city and um nationality all those things i mean like family structure i maybe i'm ineloquent in the way i speak about them but i honestly when i look in the mirror like i'm not deeply hateful of a particular race or even just hateful particular race um i'm sure i'm biased and i try to like think about those biases and so on and also i don't have any creepy shit in my closet i haven't done it seems like everybody uh it seems like a lot of people got like did a lot of creepy stuff in their life and i i just feel like that's uh really nice and deliberating and especially now you know it's funny because i've gotten a bit of a platform and uh i think it all started when i went this is a fame miss community female comedian whitney cummings and you know i've gotten a lot of amazing women writing me throughout but when when i went on whitney it was like the number of dm's i get on instagram for women is just ridiculous and i think that was a really important moment for me is like i speak and i feel you know i really value love long-term monogamy with like one person and it's like i could see where a lot of guys would now continue that message in public and in private just starts sleeping around and so like that's an important statement for me mentally he's like nope the straight narrow you just go straight and not out of fear but out of like principle and just like live life honestly i just i feel like that's truly liberating uh as a human being forget public all that because then i feel like i'm on sturdy ground when i say uh difficult things and at the same time sorry i'm ranting on this i apologize i'm interested personally so keep going i i honestly believe in the internet in people on the internet that when they hear me speak they can see if i'm full of shit or not like i won't be able to fake it you know like they'll see it through uh yeah i so like i feel like if you're not lying about stuff you have the freedom to truly be yourself and the and the internet will figure it out like we'll figure who you are people have a natural tendency to be able to tell bullshit and it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint right exactly like why why wouldn't why like of all the things that we could evolve to be good at being able to detect honesty seems like one that would be particularly valuable especially in the sorts of societies we developed into and then also from a selfish perspective like a success perspective i think there's a lot of folks that have inspired me uh like the elon is one of them that shows that there's a hunger for genuineness like you can build a business as a ceo and be genuine and like real and do stupid shit every once in a while as long as it's coming from the same place of who you truly are like elon's inspiration with that and then there's a lot of other people i admire that are counter inspirations in the sense like they're very formal they hold back a lot of themselves and it's like i know how brilliant those people are and i think they're not being as effective of leaders public faces of companies as they could be i mean to be honest like not to throw shade but i will it's like mark zuckerberg is an example of that uh jack dorsey's also a bit of an example that i like jack a lot i've talked to him a lot i will talk to him more i think he's a much more amazing person then he conveys through his public presentation i think a lot of that has to do with pr and marketing people having an effect listen it's difficult i think it's really difficult it's probably many of the same difficulties you will face is the pressures but it's it's hard to know what to do but i think as much as possible as an individual you should try to be honest in the face of the world and the company that wants you to be more polished and that being more polished turns into a politician and politician eventually turns into being dishonest dishonest with the world and dishonest with yourself something i noticed which was the people of the people you mentioned those things have had ramifications in terms of letting things go too far get out of hand and you wonder like it's an aspect of lying right you say one lie goes to another lie you push it down does it doesn't matter you can talk it figure it out later you can figure out later pretty soon you've stuck a pretty big hole and i think if we look at twitter and we look at facebook i think it goes without saying what sorts of holes have been dug because of perhaps because of a lack of honesty that goes all the way up to the leaders so yeah there's two problems within the company it it doesn't make you as effective of an a leader i think that's one and two for social media companies i think people need to trust like it doesn't have to be the ceo but it has to be one like this is how humans work we want to look to somebody where like i trust you if you're going to use this social media platform i think you have to trust the set of individuals working at the top of that social uh social person something i realized really quickly one of the lessons throughout the startup was that people don't totally connect to products as much as they connect to people yeah and beautifully but i mean i i don't know if you've how much you've spent on librex you've only been here the last couple weeks like last week but i mean i love the product and one of the one of the aspects of me loving the product is that i was super active and i've been super active throughout the entire time and the amount of support i've received has made that very easy to do yeah um from the community and the fact that i could i mean so i came to boston for this interview right yeah i came to boston i got off the train yeah it's around 5 30 p.m i checked librex someone is writing hey i'm in boston does anyone want to get dinner yeah 30 minutes later i'm getting dinner with them that's amazing and i mean it's incredible first of all as an entrepreneur the amount of stuff i learned from these people and when they reiterate and i hear that they got the message through the product i mean that's incredibly validating but also i mean i think it's just important to be able to put a face to a brand and especially a brand that's built on trust because fundamentally the users are trusting us with some really important discussions and some really um and a movement to some degree it's a community and a movement i'll tell you actually why i didn't use the app very much uh so far is uh there's something really powerful about the way it's constructed which i felt like a bit of an outside because i don't know the communities it felt like it's like it's a really strong community around each of these places yeah and so i felt like i was it made me really wish there was an mit one and so there's both discussions about the deep like community issues within colombia or yale or so on dartmouth and there's also the broader community of the ivy leagues that people are discussing but i could see that actually expanding more and more and more but which is it's a powerful coupling which is the feeling of like this little village this little community we're building together but also the broader issues yeah so you could do both discussions one thing that was important to me is talking about social media as a concept right i think the way people socialize is very much context dependent so we're talking about people understanding each other through language through english yes and these languages are constructed very in a very nuanced way in a very sort of temperamental way right and you kind of need a similar context to be able to have productive conversations so to me it's really important that these these groups they share people something in common a really big lived experience the ivy league or their school community and they have a similar vocabulary they have a similar background they know what's happening in their community and so having social media that is community connected to me was fundamental like you talk about anonymity to me community is the is the thing that when i think about librex i think what makes it different it's the fact that everyone everyone knows what's going on everyone comes from a similar context and people can socialize in a way where they're they understand each other because they're been through use the word lift experience i've been through so many of the sim same lived experiences uh one like clarification is there an easy way if you choose to then connect and meet space in physical space so the i guess the sort of magic of it and i was talking to a bunch of harvard leapfrogsters who i met off the app while i was in boston and um every time they told me this is the my favorite part of the app this is what i love about the app we have this matching system which is an anonymous direct message that you can send to any poster so like i was talking to this guy who um he was really into coin collection and he met other people who were really into coin collection through a post and what they he would make a post about coin collection um and then someone would come to him and they'd be like and they they could direct message him anonymously and it would just show them that his he would just show him their school and then they could just text chat totally anonymously direct message if he accepted the anonymous request do they see the usernames right um there are no usernames on librex it's all just schools names so he made this post about coin collection and he got a direct message yeah i guess so right i didn't know he's because i was just looking at the text yeah that's interesting that's right and i can tell you i can go into why um that's really interesting yeah i can go into it truly is anonymous it's well i mean but you're not by anonymous exactly very different kind of anonymous and the reason the reason that we made that decision yeah it's because we want people to connect to ideas we want people to connect to things in the moment we don't want people to go oh i know this guy he said this other thing and we didn't want people to feel like they were at risk of being doxed so it's these are small communities right yeah we talked about this everyone knows someone who knows you yeah and um in 2021 it would not take much to be able to figure out who someone might be just through a couple of posts um so it's both safety and about the ideas in terms of not adding usernames anyway we have this anonymous direct message system where you can direct message the original poster of any post the op if you're a redditer of any post and you that that makes it really easy to meet up because once you guys are one-on-one you can exchange a number you can exchange a snapchat you can exchange a email probably not very often but you could and then that's how people meet up matching and then a lot of people connect in this way uh let me let me just take a small step into the technical i read somewhere enough it's true that uh one of the reasons you were rejected from ycy combinator in the final rounds is because one of the principles is to refuse to sell user data uh can you speak to that what's uh what why do you think it's important not to sell user data and sort of which draws a clear contrast between other basically any other service on the internet i mean to be honest it's quite simple i mean we talk about this platform people are talking about their most intimate secrets their political opinions you know what how how are they feeling about what's going on in their city you know during the summer um how how are they feeling about um the the political cycle and also their mental health their relationships these are some of the like most intimate thoughts that people were having point blank i don't think it was ethical to pawn them off for a profit i didn't think it was moral i don't think i could sleep at night if that was what i was doing is turning these people's most intimate beliefs and secrets into a currency that i bought and sold there's something very off about that i tend to believe that there is uh some room so like like facebook would just take that data and sell it right but there's some room in transparency giving people the choice on which parts they can i wouldn't even see it as sell but like share with advertisers are you going to give them a profit um so right you have to monetize you have to create an entire system you have to rethink this whole thing right but if as long as you give people control and are transparent and make it easy like i think it's really difficult to delete a facebook account or like delete all your data or deduct it's very difficult so like just make it easy and trust in that if you create a great product people are not going to do it and if if they do it then they're not actually something a deep loving member of the community what's that so we very quickly realized that user privacy was something that um was not only a core value but was something that users really cared about and we added we added this functionality it's just a button that says forget me yeah um you press it yeah like two clicks um it's not that hard we just remove your email from the database um yeah you're good beautiful i think facebook should have that i i honestly so call me crazy but maybe you can actually speak to this but i don't think facebook well now they would but if they did it earlier they would lose that much money if they allow like transparently tell people you could just delete everything they also explained that like in ways that's going to potentially like lessen your experience in the short term like i'll explain that but then there shouldn't be like multiple clicks of a button that don't make any sense uh i i'm uh trying to hold back from ranting about instagram because let me just say real quick because i've been locked out of instagram for a month uh and there's a whole group inside facebook they're like supporters of like lex helplex relax freelance uh i wasn't blocked it was just like a bug in the system somebody was hammering the api with my account and so they kept thinking i'm a bot anyway it's a bug it happens to a lot of people but like first of all i appreciate the love from all the amazing engineers on instagram or facebook love those folks the entire mechanism though is somehow broken i mean that i i put that on the leadership but it's also difficult to operate a large company wants the scales all those kinds of things but it should not be that difficult to do some basic basic things that you want to do which is in the case of facebook that's verify your identity to the app and also in the case of facebook in the case of librex like beco like disappear it if you if you choose there's downsides to disappearing but it should not be a difficult process and yeah i think i think people are waking up to that i think there's a lot of room for an app like librex with its the with with its foundational ideas to redefine what social media should look like you know and like you said i think beautifully anonymity is not the core value it's just the tool you use and who knows maybe anonymity will not always be the tool you use like if you give people the choice who knows what this evolves from the login page you initially created the key thing is the founding principles and again who knows if you give people a really nice way to monetize their data maybe they'll no longer be a thing that you say do not sell user data yeah all those kinds of things but the the basic principles should be there and also a good simple interface design um is goes it goes a really long way like simplicity and elegance which librex currently is clubhouse i'm a lot better by the way i don't i don't mean to uh i don't mean to go too deep into the history but the um it was bad it was i didn't look at the early pictures oh thank goodness i i read somewhere that it was like a white screen like with black like those html bases and download buttons were like these big these big freaking boxes and like i don't i i could go on but um it was my it was my genius design skills um i almost failed art class when i was like in first grade and i think uh i still have similar skills to my first grade self but it's gotten a lot better and thanks to a lot of my friends who have you know sort of chipped in here and there oh i love the idea of a button that just like forget me um yeah i don't know that's that's really moving actually that uh that's actually all people want is they they want i think okay i'll speak to my experience like i would give so much more uh if i could just like disappear if i needed to and i trusted the the community i trusted like the the founders and the principals that's really that's really powerful man like trust and ease of escape yeah uh you've also kind of mentioned moderation which is really interesting so with this anonymity and this community i don't know if you've heard of the internet but there's trolls on the internet so i've heard and uh even if they go to yale and dartmouth there's still people that probably enjoy uh the sort of being the the guerrilla warfare contra revolutionary and just like creating chaos in a place of uh love so how do you prevent chaos from and hatred uh breaking out in librex so the way i think about it is we have these principles um they're pretty simple and they're pretty easy to enforce and then beyond the principles we have a set of moderators moderate from every single ivy league school scheme of diverse moderators to enforce these principles but not only enforce the principles but kind of clue us in to what's happening in their community and how the real-life context of their community translates to the librex context of their community and beyond that we have conversation with them about the standards of the community and we're constantly talking about what needs to be further elucidated and what needs to be tweaked and we're in constant communication with the community now if you want me to get into the principles that underlie librex's moderation policy yeah please maybe you can explain that there's moderators what does that mean how are they chosen and what are the principles under which they operate sure so how are the moderators chosen the moderators are all volunteers they're lead brexiters who reach out to me and respond to the opportunity to become moderator and the way they're chosen um is basically we want to make sure that they're in tune with their community we want to make sure they come from diverse backgrounds and we want to make sure that they're they sort of understand what the community is about and then we ask them some questions about how they would deal with certain scenarios ones that we've had in the past and we feel strongly about and then also ones that are a little more murky where we want to see that they're sort of thinking about these things in a critical way yeah um and from there we choose a set and uh they have the power to um take down posts of course everything at the end of the day pens my review but they can take them down and we can reinstate them if it's if it's a problem but they can take down posts and they can advocate for you know different moderation standards and different moderation policies so for now you're the lioness torvald of this community and so meaning like you're able to like people are actually able to like email you or like text you contact you and get a response like you respond to basically everybody and then you're you're like really you know you're you're living that live on people's floor life currently that's not necessarily this is the early days folks i knew right now he was a billionaire and he was cool and then he was in a mansion uh making uh meets on his barbecue no okay but you know how does it scale um like what i suppose how does the scale is the question i mean with linus uh i don't know if you're familiar with the linux open source community but he still stayed at the top for a while it was really important like leadership there was really important to drive that large scale really productive open source community what do you see your your role as libraries grows and in general what are the mechanisms of scaling here for moderation so i see it open discourse is fundamental to the purpose of the app right so as the i guess you could say founder ceo what have you part of my purpose has to be to enforce the vision right and part of the vision is open discourse and that does come down in part to reasonable moderation and community-guided reasonable moderation so i imagine that will always be something that i'm intimately involved with to some degree now the degree to which the way in which that manifests i imagine will have to change right um and hopefully i'll be able to just like you can hire a cto hopefully i'll be able to be in integrated and hiring people who are who understand the the way that we are sort of operating and the and the reasonable standards of moderation and there can be a sort of hierarchical structure but i think when you have a product whose key purpose is to allow people to have these difficult conversations on campus that need to be had yeah i can never record to that yeah i can never fully i don't think i can fully ever abdicate that responsibility i think it that would be like i mean that would be like bezos abdicating e-commerce right right like that is that's part of the job yeah of course you can run companies in different ways i think that because he might have abdicated quite a bit of the details there hard for me to say because the amazon does so many things i think the probably the better examples like elon with rock is he's still at the core of the engineering he's at the core of the engineering there's some fundamental questions he probably does way too much of the engineering like he's like the lowest level detail but you're saying like the core things that are that make the app work is is the moderation of difficult conversations and by the way i'm 21 years old let's remind us everyone of that um if this thing does scale and if this thing continues to be a positive force in a lot of people's lives who knows what what will happen in the next what i'll learn um i'm still growing definitely as a leader still growing as a thinker still growing as a person i don't i can't pretend that i know how to run a business that is worth you know up ten billion dollars whatever yeah i can't pretend i know how to run a business that's you know going to have millions and millions of users i expect that there are going to be a lot of amazing people who will teach me and a lot of people who have already kind of stepped into my life and helped me out and taught me things and i imagine that i'll learn so much more i just know that moderation is always going to be important to me because i don't think librex is librex unless we have open discourse and moderation reasonable open light touch moderation is at the heart of creating that right so as a creator of this kind of community in place with anonymity and difficult conversations what what do you think about this touchy three words that people have been tossing around and politicizing i would say but as at the core of the founding of this country which is the freedom of speech how do you think about the freedom of speech this particular kind of freedom of expression and uh do you think it's a fundamental human right how do you define it to yourself when you when you're thinking about it i've i went down especially preparing for this conversation down the rabbit hole of like just how unclear it is philosophically what is meant by this kind of freedom uh it's not as easy as people think but it's interesting pragmatically speaking to hear what how you think about it in the context of librex yeah it's a tough one right there's a lot there so i come from the background of being a math major maybe it's important to start with that yeah and i found myself um in the middle of this question of freedom of speech one of the wonderful things is that the library's community is filled with phds and governance majors who have taught me a ton about this sort of thing and i'm still learning i'm still growing i'm still probably going to modify my perspective to some degree hopefully don't worry i imagine i'll always um support free discourse like learning yeah how to speak about stuff is is critical here because it's like i'm i'm learning that this is like a minefield of conversations because the moment you say like even saying freedom of speech is a complicated concept people will be like oh we spotted a communist yeah like they'll say there's nothing complicated about freedom freedom is freedom bro it's it it is complicated first of all if you talk about there's there's different definitions of freedom of speech uh if you if you want to go constitutional if you want to talk about the united states specifically and what's legal it's actually not as exciting and not as beautiful as people think of complicated it's complicated i think there's ideals behind it that we want to see what does that actually materialize itself in the digital world where we're trying to communicate in ways that allows for difficult conversations and also at the same time doesn't result in the silencing of voices not through like censorship but through like just assholes being rude spam spam so it could be just bots racism uh racism going back to the name of the app librex yes libre free um x was support montu for free exchange and the free exchange of what my purpose was to create as many as much inner communication of ideas be them repugnant or otherwise as possible and of course to do that within legal bounds and to do that without causing anyone to be harassed or doxxed so to keep things focused on the ideas not the people and then no bs crap you know stuff and so to me the easiest way to moderate around that because as you said figuring out what is hateful and what is hate speech is really hard was to say no sweeping statements against core identity groups and that seems to work on the whole pretty well to be pretty light touch and hard to do though it's difficult we like to generalize with humans it's difficult but what it comes down to is be specific yeah um and when you think about what are sweeping statements against coordinating groups right oftentimes these are these are sort of hackneyed subjects these are things that have been broached and we've heard them before they don't really lead anywhere productive so we so it goes under this principle of be specific in the ideas you're discussing so even for like positive and humorous stuff you try to avoid generalizations against core identity core identity groups sorry what are core identity groups we're talking about you know race religion okay got it even positive stuff well against negative against sorry against against okay very very we've learned to be very specific very few words but the community gets it you know yeah they get it i mean this the thing they they um the the trouble with rules is uh as the community grows they'll figure out ways to manipulate the rules absolutely it's human nature it's creativity yeah something beautiful about it of course unlike and from an evolutionary perspective yes yeah the fact that people are so creative and so looking to and because people are genuinely interested in figuring out these things about social media and so they'll 100 percent like see like where's the edge and i mean part of that's maintaining some level of vagueness in your role set yeah which has its own set of questions and something we could think about and i'm not implying i have all the answers but there is something really interesting about people being so engaged that they're looking to figure out where those edges and what does that mean what does that edge mean you know so one of the things i'm kind of thinking about like from an individual user of librex or an individual user of the internet i think about like that one person that is on reddit saying hateful stuff or positive stuff doesn't matter or funny stuff one of the things i think about is the trajectory of that individual through life and how uh social media can help that person become the best version of themselves i don't mean from like an orwellian sense like educate them properly or something i just mean like we're all i believe we're all fundamentally good and i also believe we all have the capacity to do to create some amazing stuff in this world whether that's ideas or art or engineering all those kinds of things just to be amazing people and i kind of think about like you know a lot of social media mechanisms bring out the worse than us and i try to think like in the long term how can as the social media or how can a website how cut to you that you create can make the best like you take a trajectory that makes you a better better and better and like the best version of yourself so i think about that because like you know twitter can really take you down some dark trajectories i've seen people just not being the best version of themselves forget the cancer culture and all that kind of stuff it's just like they're not developing intellectually in the way that's going to make the best version of themselves i think reddit i'm not sure what i think about ready yet because one positive side is all the shit posting i read it could be just like a release valve for for some stress in life and you almost have like a parallel life where you're in meat space you might be actually becoming successful and so on and growing and so on but you just need sometimes to be angry at somebody but i tend to not think that's possible i think if you're shit posting you're probably not spending your time the best way you could i don't know i am i'm torn on that but do you think about that with librex of creating a trajectory for the for the yale for the dartmouth the students to where they grow intellectually one thing that i think about a lot is how do you incentivize positive content creation how do you incentivize well but yeah really intellectual content creation it's something that frankly you know i think about every single day and i think there are ways that i mean one thing that's great about humans is that they can be incentivized right and i think there are ways that you can incentivize people to make the right kind of content if that's your goal do you think such mechanisms exist for such incentivization i do i don't want to let the cat out of the bag sure so to speak so you have already idea like concrete ideas in your mind and i have about three concrete ideas that i'm very very optimistic about yeah and you don't even need to share them the the fact i understand totally but like the fact that you have them that's really good because i feel like sometimes the downfall of the social media is that there's literally not even a thinking or a discussion about the incentivization of positive long-term content creation i mean twitter i really was excited about this when they said like when jack has talked about like creating healthy conversations he does seem to care i've listened to him i mean he's very he has a very particular way of saying things but you get the impression that he's someone who actually cares about these things within the limits of his power yeah and that's the question the limits of the power librex is growing not just in the number of communities but also in the way you're incentivizing positive conversations like coupled with the moderation and so on so you think there's a lot of innovation to be had in that area there's a tremendous amount i think when you think about the reasons people post fundamentally people want to make a positive impact on their community to some degree now there are always be bad actors and part of the benefit of sort of our moderation structure is that we can limit some of those bad actors you know no bot accounts no brigading at the same time the more you incentivize a certain type of behavior the better it's going to be and it's we don't see it as our role as the platform to force the communion in a direction and frankly i don't think it would be good for anyone the community or the conversations if we forced a specific type of conversations uh conversation we just need to make the tools to allow people to be good yeah and to incentivize good behavior yeah i believe that like if you you don't nee you will not need to censor if you allow people at scale to be good the good will overpower the assholes that's that's my fundamental belief i i'm very optimistic about that but currently librex is small in the sense that it's just it's a small set of communities that i believe and you mentioned to me offline that by design you're scaling slowly carefully so how does librex scale is it possible you know facebook also started with a small set of communities that were schools and then now grew to be basically the if not one of the largest social networks in the world do you see librex as potentially scaling to be beyond even college campuses uh but encompassing the whole world it's a it's a long timeline i'll say this let's get step back to like where did facebook go wrong because clearly they did a lot right and we can only we can only speculate about what the objectives were of the founders of facebook um you know i'm sure they've said some things but it's always interesting to know what the what the uh mythology is versus what the truth is of the matter so perhaps they and they've been very successful i mean they they've taken over the world to some extent at the same time the goals of librex are to create these positive communities and these open conversations where people can have real conversation and connection in their communities in a vulnerable and authentic way and so to that end which i imagine might be different than the goals of a facebook for example one thing that we want to do is keep things intimate and community-based so each school is its own community and perhaps you could have a slightly broader community maybe you could have a i know uh the california system is an obvious one pac-10 might be an obvious one and we can think about that um but fundamentally the unit the unit of community is your school or your school community so that that that's one difference that i think will help us the other thing is that we're scaling intentionally meaning that when we expand to a school we have moderators in place we have moderators who understand that school's environment in a very personal level and we're growing responsibly we're growing as we're ready both technologically but also socially you know but as we think we have the tools to um preserve the community and to encourage the community to create this sort of content that we want them to create and you know there's a lot of ways to define communities so first of all there's geographic community as well uh but the way you're kind of defining community with yale and dartmouth is the email right that's what gives you there's a power to the email in the sense that that's how you can verify or efficiently verify yourself with being an a single individual in the university in that same way you can verify your employment at a company for example like google microsoft facebook do you see your uh potentially taking on those communities that'd be fascinating getting like anonymous community conversations inside google 100 crossed my mind to some extent this is this is something where i understand the college experience i understand the need got it and i've i've never i've never worked at google i don't know if they would hire me um hopefully maybe as a product manager uh i i think if there's a community that needs this product and has that and and has that will which i think especially as librex continues to grow and expand and change and learn and because that's what we're doing is we're learning right with each community it's not just about growing it's about learning from these from each of these communities and iterating um i think it's quite likely they're going to be all sorts of communities that could use this tool to improve their culture so to speak so forgive me i'm not actually like that knowledgeable about the history of attempts of building social networks to solve the problem the year solving but i was made aware that there was an app app or at least a social network called yik yak that was had a similar kind of um focus um i think the thing you've spoken about that differs between librex and yikayak is that yike was defined am i pronouncing it right even uh you're good yeah i'm good i met the founder so i can confirm you can confirm cool uh the that it was constrained to a geographical area versus like to the actual community um and that and that somehow had fundamental like actual differences in social dynamics that resulted but can you speak to the history of yik yak like how does lee breaks differ what lessons have you learned from that oh and i should say that i guess there was controversial i don't know i didn't look at the details but i'm guessing there's a bunch of racism and hate speech and all that kind of stuff that emerges there was on you okay so that's an example of like okay here's how it goes wrong when you have anonymity on college campuses so how does zebrax going to do better yeah you guys got a lot of problems content problems but the content problems go deeper than maybe what the press would reveal there's a lot to say and part of it is parsing exactly what to talk about when it comes to you get and when you talk about startups i mean you know this i i you know startups um and you look at the postmortem it's almost never what people think it is and and oftentimes these things are somewhat unknowable and the the degree to which people seeking confirmation bias to something seeking closure yes look to find a singular attribute that caused the failure it feels like the little details often make all the difference yes and i think i think the details are so little that as humans we are not capable of parsing even what they are but i'll tell you i'll tell you my perspective on it um knowing that i'm also a human with biases um in this particular case very significant biases yeah um i um so i started building librex for its own merits i i i i at first i wasn't aware of yik but as i started to talk to people about this platform i was building i i was made aware of the cac and i built it from day one with a lot of the issues you get had in mind the so as you said the one difference between yak is the geographical versus community based aspect going along with that one thing i realized by researching social media sites is that the majority of the negative content the content that's terrible and breaking all the rules is created by really and the people who are not reformable so to speak the people who are not showing the best part of the human yeah experience yeah um it's a really small minority right yeah i remember i was listening to the founder of 4chan moot talk about this how like one guy was able to basically destroy like large swaths of his community yeah that's part of what makes it exciting for that minority is how much power they can have so if you're predisposed to think in this way it's exciting that you can walk into like i mentioned the party before you have a party of a lot of positive people and it feels especially if you don't have much power in this world it feels exceptionally empowering to to uh to destroy like the lives of many yeah and if you think this way it's a problem but i i i i'm hopeful that you're right that in most cases it's going to be a minority of people i think it is and that's what the research has showed and one really powerful thing is that we can really actively control who comes in and out of our community based on the edu verification and we can also control who's not in our community because we have that lever where each account is associated with it.edu um so that's the first point i would put out point out there second point is controlled expansion meaning that we have community moderation we have this panel that allows the moderators to see all of the highly downvoted content all of the reported content all the flagged content and look through it and decide what they like and what's appropriate and what's not appropriate and we have um we ping every moderator when there's a report so things are taken down pretty quickly and we have our standards and we have i think above all of that we have a mission and it's a community-based mission yuk was more of a fun app and by its own admission it was a place where people could enjoy themselves and could sort of yak yeah yeah yeah you know chit chat um we have a we have a bigger purpose than that frankly and i think i think that shows and the people who self-select to be on that app to be on librex and to be on yak respectively the last thing i'll say is yuk yak was very few characters it was a twitter-esque platform and that doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of nuance it doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of conversation um librex is much more long form and so the kind of um posts that you'll get on librex are can spam pages they're like what people are starting to realize is that they can reach a lot more people at a lot more pertinent of a time a lot more quickly by posting their thoughts on librex than if they went to their school newspaper and i think the school newspapers might be a little worried about that but more importantly we're connecting people in this way we're long-form communication with nuance that takes into account everything that's happening in the community temporally is really available at librex and you know not really communicable in 240 or 480 or whatever the number of characters the acts were um bound to and then you know i could talk about the history of the act if you want me to go further um they started i think they were at 12 schools and then spring break it people told their friends look at this app a thousand schools signed up and were had active communities they had a problem on their hands i see and then the high schools come on board yeah i think a lot of the things you said uh ring true to me but especially the vision one which i do think uh having a vision in the leadership having a mission makes all the difference in the world now that that's both for the engineers that are building like the team that's building the app the moderation and users because they kind of the mission carries itself uh through the behavior of the of the people on the social network as a small tangent let me ask you something about um parlor but it's less about parlor more about aws so aws removed parlor from his platform you know for whatever reasons doesn't really matter but the fact that aws would do this was really really bothered me personally because i saw aws as the computing infrastructure and i always thought that part could not put a finger on its scale and i don't know what your thoughts are like were you bothered by parlor being removed from aws and how does that affect how you think about the computing infrastructure on which librex is based i was bothered not so much by parlor specifically being taken out of aws but more the fact that something that's like a highway something that people rely on that people build on top of that people assume is going to be somewhat position agnostic like a road that people drive on is is becoming ideologically sort of discriminatory i just and of course mind you amazon can do what it wants it's a private company and i support the rights of private companies i just on an ethical and sort of a deep moral level i wonder like at what point should a company sort of be agnostic in that in that regard and let developers build on top of their infrastructure and where to where where does that responsibility hold yes it makes you uh hope that there's going to be from a capitalistic sense competitors to aws would say like we're not going to put our finger on the scale i mean on the highway is a good sort of example it's like if a privately owned highway exactly said uh you know we're no longer going to allow we're only going to allow electric vehicles and a bunch of people in this world would be like yes because electric is good for the environment and uh you know yes but then you have to consider the like the slippery slope nature of it but also like the the negative impact on the lives of many others and what that means for innovation and for like uh competition again in a capitalistic sense so there's some nature there's some level to this hierarchy of our existence that we should not allow to manipulate what's built on top of it it should be truly infrastructure and it feels like compute is uh storage and compute is the that layer like it shouldn't be messed with um i haven't seen anybody really complain about it like in terms of government and i'm not even sure government is the right mechanism through policy and regulation to step in because again they do a messy job of fixing things but i do hope there's competitors to aws to make aws and step up because i do think you know i'm a fan of aws except this service it's a good service until this until yeah until they rip out the the rug and the point is it's not that necessarily their decision was a bad one with parlor in particular it's that like the the slippery slope nature of it but also the it takes the good actors that are creating amazing products and makes them more fearful and when you're more fearful it's the same reason that anonymity is a tool that you don't create the best thing you could possibly create when you're fearful you don't create that's right i think we kind of talked about it a little bit but i wonder if we can kind of revisit it a little bit um i talked to a guy named ronald sullivan who's a faculty at harvard law professor he was on the legal defense team he was the lawyer for harvey weinstein and aaron uh hernandez for the double murder case so he takes on these really difficult cases of on unpopular figures because he believes like that's the way you test that we believe in the rule of law but he was uh there's a big protest in harvard to get him uh to basically censor him and to get him to no longer be faculty dean all those kinds of things and uh it was by a minority of students but it was a huge blow back obviously in the public but also inside harvard like that's not okay he stands for the very principles at the founding of harvard and at the principles of the founding of this country and the law and so on but the the basic argument is that is was about safe spaces that it's unsafe to have somebody who is basically supporting harvey weinstein right what do you think about this whole idea of safe spaces uh on college campuses because it feels like the the mission of librex is pushing back against the idea of safe spaces i think safe spaces are fine when they're within people's private lives within their homes you know within their religious organizations i think the problem becomes when the institution starts encouraging or um backing safe spaces because what are people being safe from and oftentimes it seems like there's this idea that the harm that's being attempted to to be mitigated is the harm of confronting opinions you disagree with opinions you might find repugnant and if this is conflated with a need for safety then that's where the idea of liberal arts education sort of dies um of course it's complicated and we still want to have safe intellectual environments but the way that i hear the term safe space used today i think it doesn't really have a place within like the intellectual context yeah it's funny i mean this is why librex is really exciting is it's pushing those difficult conversations and i'd love to see ultimately there does seem to be an asymmetry of power that results in the concept of safe spaces and hate speech being redefined in a slippery slope kind of way where it means basically anything you want it to mean and uh it basically is used to silence people to silence people they're like good thoughtful experts also beyond that i would say it has not just a pragmatic purpose which is the silencing but also sort of an ideological purpose which is a linguistic purpose which is to conflate words with unsafety and harm and violence which is what you kind of see on a cultural linguistic level is happening all around us right now is that this idea that words are harm it's a very dangerous and slippery concept i mean it's not you don't have to slip that far to see why that's a problem once we start cr making words into violence and we start criminalizing words we get into some really authoritarian territory things that i think i mean myself and my background i don't know how much we have to go into it but uh things in my that my ancestors certainly would be worried about what's your background i'm a child of holocaust survivors and program survivors so yeah i mean me as well from different directions that come from the soviet union so there's uh well like in most of us hate and love runs through our blood from our history you mentioned mit is being added to librex has it already been added yes it was added um today today okay so let me ask this is exciting because um i don't know what your thoughts are about this but i'll tell you from my perspective if you're a lot of mit folks listen to this i would love it if you join librex it'd be interesting to explore conversations on several topics inside mit but one of the most moving that hasn't been discussed at all except in little flourishes here and there is the topic of jeffrey epstein now there's been a huge amount of like impact that the connections of various faculty to jeffrey epstein and the various things that been said had on mit but it feels like the difficult conversation haven't had been had it's the administration trying to clean up and give a bunch of bs to try to pretend like let's just hide this part like nothing is broken nothing to see here there's a bad dude that did some bad things and uh some faculty that kind of uh misbehaved a little bit because they're a little bit clueless let's let's all look the other way harvard did this much better by the way they they completely it's almost like people pretend like harvard didn't have anything to do with jeffrey epstein but i think i'd be curious to to hear what those conversations are because uh the there's conversations on the topic of like uh well obviously sort of sexual assault and disrespecting women on any kind of level within academia but just women in general that's an important topic to talk about very many sets of difficult conversations and the other topic is um you know funding uh for research like how are like what are we okay taking money from and whether we're not okay taking money from you know a lot there's a lot of just interesting difficult conversations to be had i've worked with people who you know refuse to take money from dod department of defense for example because in some indirect or direct way you're funding military industrial complex all those kinds of things i think with jeffrey epstein it's even more stark this contrast of like well what is and isn't ethical to take money from and i just think forget academia i think there's just a lot of interesting deep human discussions to be had and they haven't been and there's been somebody i don't know if you're familiar with eric weinstein who has been outraged by the fact that nobody's talking about jeffrey epstein nobody's having these difficult conversations and eric himself has had a sort of complicated journey through academia in the sense that he's a really kind of renegade thinker in many kinds of ways i'm not sure if you didn't know who eric is by any chance heard the name okay i actually uh checked out zev it was heartening for me to see that i was not the youngest person on the yeah that's hilarious uh but uh but but eric has he's kind of a renegade thinker he's a mathematical physicist uh with a believer phd at harvard and he spent some time at mit and so on but he he speaks to the fact that sort of there's a culture of conformity and so on and if you if you're somebody who's a bit outside the box a bit weird in whatever dimension of weird that makes you actually kind of interesting that the system kind of wants to make you an outcast wants to throw you out and so he kind of opposes that whole idea so he's the perfect person to have conversations with in this kind of librex kind of context of anonymity because i'll tell you the few conversations that came across and they were very quickly silenced and i'm troubled by it i'm not sure what to think of it is there's a few um threads inside mit like on a mailing list discussing uh marvin minsky i don't know if you know how that is he's an ai researcher he's a summonable figure and before your time but one of the most important people in art in the history of artificial intelligence and uh there was a discussion on a on a on a thread that involved uh the interaction between marvel minsky and jeffrey epstein that conversation was quickly shut down uh one person was pushed out of mit richard stallman who's one of the key figures in the because of that because he wanted some clarity about the situation but he also mis he spoke like we mentioned earlier without grace right but he was quickly punished for the administration uh because of a few people protesting and just that conversation uh i guess what bothered me most is it didn't continue it didn't it didn't expand there was no like complexity and and it was there was a hunger that was clear behind that conversation especially sort of for me i'd like to understand marvin minsky was one of the one one of the reasons i wanted to come to mit uh he's passed away but he's one of the key figures in the field that i deeply care about our artificial intelligence and i thought that his name was dragged through the mud through that situation and without ever being like resolved and so it's unclear to me like what am i supposed to think about all this and and the only way to come to a conclusion there is to keep talking it's like the thing we started this conversation with about truth it's like it is conversation so in that sense and i'd love uh if people on librex perhaps in other places but seems like librex is a nice platform to discuss marvel minsky to discuss jeffrey epstein to learn from it to grow from it to see how we can make mit better because i'm still one of the people i've always dreamed of being at mit it was a dream come true in many ways and i still believe that mit is one of the most special places in this world like many other universities universities in general this is truly special man i you know it hurts my heart when people speak poorly of academia i understand what they mean they're very correct but there is much more in my opinion that's beautiful about academia and that's broken i mean i don't know if uh you have something to comment it doesn't necessarily need to be about jeffrey epstein but there's these difficult things that come up that test the academic community right that it feels like conversation is the only way to resolve it i think people have a natural need for closure and it's not just i'm not as plugged into the what academics are talking about as you would be lex but even kids these days no respect for minsky exactly i mean especially in the ai community i'm i'm not not necessarily a programmer um but what i will say is that um people come to librex and we always see a huge spike in users whenever there's like a tragedy on campus or something where people need closure recently there was a suicide just the other day on yale's campus and people were just coming to pay respects and to stay rest in peace and speak also about what might have led to an environment where people are drawn to these terrible results um so just having a conversation is important there because it like it brings you people need the space especially when no one wants to go out and put their head above you know be the longest blade of grass on that one yeah because of the stigma yeah people need to be able to speak yeah that fear really bothers me the fear that silences people like were they self-censored were they self-silence well i'm um you've created an amazing place i i'm kind of interested in your struggle and your journey of creating positive incentives because uh it's a problem in a very different domain that i'm also interested in um so i you know i love about robotics i love human robot interaction and so i believe that most people are good and we can bring out the best in human nature social networks is a very tricky space to do that in so i'm glad you're taking on the problem and i'm glad you have the mission that you do i hope you succeed but uh you mentioned offline that you used to be into chess tell me about your journey through chess sure i was a very competitive tournament player growing up till about like 13. i got for the chess fans i got to around 2000 um uscf so i was a competitive player especially my age group and um that actually led me to poker i was um i was playing a tournament and what happens is when you're like a very strong 13 year old and you're playing locally if you want a good match you're gonna end up playing a lot of adults and i ended up playing this um mid-40s guy who we played a really strong game he actually beat me i i still i still remember the game and and think i could i should have played that move instead of that one but after after the game we had a post-mortem it was this me i think i was 13 at the time and this 40 year old like hanging over this chessboard and looking over the moves and even at that even at my age it occurred to me that this guy was absolutely brilliant yes and after after the post-mortem not only by the way in chess but just like in the way he articulates his thoughts as some people are um after postmortem i went and looked him up online and i found out that he was a world series poker champion and what is it his name is bill chan oh wow and i haven't really kept up with him except one time there was another chess tournament when i was around 14 and i followed him into an elevator as he was leaving the chess hall like pretending that i was going to go up just because i wanted to i just wanted to talk to him and i suggested a sequel or some changes that he could that i thought he could make for his book and he was like actually i was thinking of doing the same thing which was incredibly validating to my 14 year old or 15 year old self um but i really haven't kept up with him so it's a shout out to him but and then that he wrote a book called the mathematics of poker that i started reading and that first of all kick started my interest in game theory and second of all in poker um so it started from chess and then poker and i started with bitcoin poker and had a lot of success with that met a lot of amazing friends um learned a ton about i mean i think about entrepreneurship as well as taking risks reasonable risks positive expected value risks and um also just growing as a person and mathematician and what's did you say bitcoin poker yeah what's bitcoin poker so you have to understand i was 14 years old right yes so how is a 14 year old with wonderful parents who care about him yeah and probably don't want him playing poker yeah um going to start playing poker because i wanted i wanted the challenge i loved the challenge i loved the competition and i realized the answer was probably bitcoin because the implications of that and uh they had they had these uh free world tournaments which for those who don't know what free rules are there's these promotional tournaments that sites put on where they'll put like a few dollars in and then thousands of people sign up and the winners get like a dollar and i started there and i worked my way up and that's amazing what's your sense about from that time to today of the growth of the cryptocurrency community i'm actually having like four or five conversation with bitcoin proponents bitcoin maximus and like all these i'm just having all these cryptocurrency conversations currently because there's so many brilliant like technically brilliant but also financially and philosophically brilliant people in those communities it's fascinating with the explosion of impact like and also if you look into the future the possible revolutionary impact on society in general but what's your sense about this whole growth of bitcoin i'm definitely less knowledgeable on the currency again like programming it was a means to an end yes right um what i will say is that there was this amazing community that grew out of it and you'd have people who were willing to stake me or have me be their horse and they're my backer for having never met me for literally full bitcoin tournaments like full bitcoin entry fee tournaments and i get a percentage of the profits and they get a percentage and to have that level of community for that degree of money i mean it gives you hope about the potential for you know humans to act in mutual best interest with a degree of trust yeah there's a really fascinating strong community there but speaking of like bringing out the best of human nature it's a community that's currently struggling a little bit uh in terms of their ability to communicate in a positive inspiring way like the bitcoin folks and we talk about this a lot they um i honestly think they have a lot a lot of love in their hearts and minds but they just kind of naturally because the world has been like institutions and uh the centralized powers have been sort of mocking and uh fighting them for many years that they've become sort of worn down and cynical and so they tend to be a little bit more aggressive and negative on the internet that's interesting in the way they communicate especially on twitter and it's just created this whole community of basically being derisive and mocking and trolling and all this kind of stuff yeah but people are trying to you know as the as the bitcoin community grows as the cryptocurrency community grows they're trying to revolutionize that aspect too so they're trying to find the positive core and grow uh and and grow in that way so it's it's a it's fascinating because i think all of us are trying to find the positive aspects of ourselves and trying to learn how to communicate in a positive way online it's like the internet has been around social networks haven't been around that long we're trying to we're trying to figure this thing out let me ask you the ridiculous question uh i don't know if you have an answer but who is the greatest chess player of all time in your view so since you like chess talks on how you define it but if you're talking about raw skill like if you put everyone across time into a torment together yeah um carlson would win i don't think that's particularly controversial oh you mean like with the same exact skill level exactly magnus cossack because the object now if you talk about political importance i think bobby fischer is you know he's a he's the only one that people still would use to go to someone on the street they know bobby fischer because he was because of what he represented right who do you think is more famous on the street uh gary kasparov or bobby fischer probably fit in america but efficiently do you think so yes that's interesting i think we're gonna have to put that to the test yeah maybe it's maybe it's more reflective of the community that i was a part of but yeah also in the community you're a part of like young minds playing chess bobby fischer was a superstar in terms of like yeah i think so because he's american and you know he stood up against the big bad russians yes at the time and uh you know unfortunately he had a very bad downfall but um what you know for our geopolitical situation he meant a lot and then if you talk about compared to contemporaries actually i would say paul murphy was a bit of a throwback was he's one of those geniuses that uh was just head and shoulders above everyone else is there somebody that inspired your own play like as a young mind yeah i really like mikhail tall so like you see you were i think he was very aggressive right yeah very tactical yeah um which is funny because i am i found that i was better at like sort of slow methodical play than quick tactics but i just i mean there's something beautiful about the creativity and that's something i always latched on to was being a creative player being a creative person i mean chess doesn't really reward creativity as much as a lot of other things especially entrepreneurial pursuits which i think is part of the reason why i sort of grew out of it but i always was attracted to the creativity that i did see in chess so let me ask the flip the uh the other because he said poker is there somebody that stands out to you as uh could be the greatest poker player of all time like who do you uh admire that's in that and that's a more controversial one because these chess players are such like first of all there's more than objectives objective standard and second of all there's like they're like almost like cultural figures to me whereas poker players are more like live living they feel more like yeah but they feel more accessible but they also have like personalities yeah poker have like phil either their vices they have quirks they have humor like i guess we've seen videos of them yeah because it's such a recent development let's say one person who i admire so much and like if i if i could like have a dinner list of people that i want to have dinner with like maybe it'll happen now actually but i would love to have dinner with him um phil galphond who i don't most people probably won't know yeah but uh on this podcast but the way first of all he democratized poker learning in like the mathematical nitty-gritty how do you get good at poker type sense to the entire world in like an unprecedented way he was he gave he had this gift that he had learned and distilled by working with some of the greatest poker minds and he just democratized it um through his website and um i learned a ton from him and not only that but you just listen to him think and it's almost like a philosophical meditation the way that he breaks things down and thinks about these different elements and has such a holistic thought process it's like watching a genius work and you know he's also just a nice fun sociable guy that like you can you can imagine being at your dinner table yeah all that combined which is not true for a lot of poker players right a lot of them are dark so say the least yes i i like i really like the what is he canadian daniel negrano he's also a nice guy he's also a nice guy but he's also somebody who's able to express his uh thoughts about poker really well but also in an entertaining way he seems to be able to predict cards better than anybody i've ever seen like what uh you watch the challenge which challenge he uh he lost like a million dollars recently to uh doug polk he lost a million dollars to doug polk heads up online it's really interesting yeah it's it's awesome to watch these these guys work so i know you're 20 21 21 21 uh so asking you for advice is uh is a little bit funny but uh but at the same time not because you've created a social network you've created a startup from nothing as we talked about earlier like without knowing how to program you've programmed i mean you've taken this whole journey that a lot of people i think would be really inspired by so given that uh and given the fact that 20 years from now you probably laugh at the advice you're going to give now absolutely i hope so if i don't laugh at the advice i give now something went desperately wrong right yeah uh so do you have advice for people that want to follow in your footsteps and create a startup whether it's in the software app domain or whether it's anything else so i'll speak specifically about social media apps yes um try to keep it as narrow as possible so i can laugh as little as possible when i'm 41. um and what i would say is that if you're like a 21 22 year old who's looking at me and being like i want to do something like this um what i would say is you probably know better than just about anyone and if you have a feeling in yourself that this is something that i have to do and this is something i could imagine myself doing for the next 10 years because if you're successful you are going to have to do it for the next 10 years and through the ups and the downs through the amazing interviews with lex and through the not so amazing articles you might have with other people right um and you're gonna have to ride those highs and lows and you have to believe in what you're doing but if you have that feeling what i would say is listen to as few people as possible because people are experts in domains but when it comes to like what's hot and what's what what makes sense in a social context you are the authority as a young person who's going through these things and living in in your sort of milieu and i mean i've talked to at this point you know so many experts experts so many investors um so you'd be amazed at the advice i've gotten advice i've gotten so there's like a minefield of bad advice that's the hardest part i think for young people and it's the thing when people like i help i help yelli's all the time who asks like i never turn down when a founder asked me to have a conversation i never turn it down i'm always there for them um and the number one thing i worry about is that at yale we're taught implicitly and explicitly that you listen to the adult in the room you listen to the person with the highest you know pay grade and it's devastating because that's how innovation dies and you know yeah it's intimidating to like you talk to vc who probably makes it worth a billion dollars yeah billion dollars and they're going to tell you you know all the all the successful startups they helped fund or even just a successful business owner is going to tell you some advice and it's hard psychologically to think that they might be wrong yeah but you're saying that's the only way way you succeed because if they knew what they were doing they would have built it themselves um and what's especially hard is people go oh of course you know i'll listen to people's i'll listen to their advice but i'll know why it's wrong yeah and then i'll and i'll do my own thing and that sounds great and abstract but sometimes you can't always even put your finger on why they're wrong yeah and i think to have the conviction to say you're wrong and i can't tell you why but i still think i'm right it's a rare thing especially at like it's very counterintuitive and you might even say it's hubris or yeah arrogant but i think it's necessary because a lot of these things are they're not things that you can really put into words until you see them in action like a lot of them are kind of happy accidents yeah it's been it's been tough for me like as a as a person who um like i'm very empathetic so i when people tell me stuff i kind of want to understand them and it's been a painful process especially people close to me basically everything i've done especially in the recent few years a lot of people close to me said not to do yeah and uh like my parents too that's been a hard one it's is to basically acknowledge to myself that you don't know like you you don't that everything you're going to say by way of advice for me is not going to be helpful like i love my parents very much but like they're just like they don't get it and and as you put it beautifully it's very difficult to put your finger on exactly why because uh a lot of advice sounds reasonable that's the worst kind yeah yeah uh if it if it sounds really good that just means it's an ear worm like that's like a song that you hear on the radio and then you're like you're humming it in the car and it's like it's the same thing the more the better it sounds the more skeptical yeah reason is a is a bad drug like should be very careful because like you know the things that seem impossible you ever every major innovation every major business seems impossible at birth but even not just the impossible things i think you know you look at like love for example it's very easy to give advice to sort of point out all the ways it can go wrong or marriage all the divorces that people go through all the pain of years that you go through the divorce like the system of marriage the marriage industrial complex all the money that's wasted all those kinds of things but that advice is useless when you're in love the point uh the point is to just pat the person in the back and say go get him kid like what is it the goodwill hunting and went to see about a girl oh yeah [Laughter] that's a good movie i love that movie but yeah that that's uh that took me a long time to figure out i'm still trying to fight through it but especially when you're young that's hard but uh nothing in life is uh worth accomplishing is easy so but i think it's really interesting you make that connection between like startup advice and like your parents because it's the exact same sort of mechanism where when you're young your parents are usually like right yeah right and the experts are usually right and you know if you listen to them and you you you follow their orders you're gonna go to a school like yale yeah and at a certain point stops making sense and i've i've seen my friends at yale go down paths because they just continued listening to their parents that i know in their heart of hearts is not the right path for them yeah you know what that's how i see like the education system the whole point is to guide you to a certain point in your life and everybody's point is different and your task is to at that point to have a personal revolution and create your own path but no one tells you that nobody tells you that because they're they want you to keep following the same path as they they're leading you towards like they're not going to say your whole job is to eventually rebel yeah that's how revolut that's how rebellion works you're not supposed to be told but that is the task they can take you just like you said and depending who you are they can take you really far but at a certain point you have to rebel that could be getting you know phd that could be in your undergrad that could be high schools yeah it could be any point one thing that i think played a pretty pivotal role and i've never really mentioned this um he might not even know the person about to tell you about um in sort of me actually going out and making librex was that i was taking this graduate level math class um my sophomore year um and i met this uh i met this uh phd student who was also in it and had considerable citations and also startup experience and i think he actually ended up being the cto of a unicorn later on um i've sort of lost touch with him but we're still facebook friends as it is in the 21st century right um so and i was in a class and i was telling him i really want to i really want to make this thing but i have no technical background um and he this guy's a computer genius he worked under dan spielman a ael so yeah he's a good guy right and we were doing some math together um we were doing something on discrepancy for those who really care about math uh so combinatorics um and uh he just turns to me he's like i think you could do it like what do you mean you think i could do is like i think you could do it yeah and i was like really but i respected this guy so much um his name was young duck um shout out to young duck i respected this guy so much that i was like if young duck says i can do it and young doug is a legit genius and he knows and he knows me because we were in two classes together and we spent a lot of time together if he thinks i can do it then who am i to say i can't do it yeah you know that's a lesson for mentorship is like by the way he has no idea probably well he might not even remember that interaction which is funny but the the point is that when a crazy young kid comes up to you with a crazy dream uh you know every once in a while you should just pet him in the back and say i believe in you like you can do it if they look up to you that means your words have power and if you say no no come on be like reasonable like you know finish your school work kind of thing like that's that's unreasonable to take that leap now just finish your education blah blah blah whatever whatever the reasonable advice is every once in a while maybe often as a mentor you should say you know go see about a girl in in california or whatever the equivalent is that was my moment that was my goodwill hunting this is your goodwill hunting moment oh man i miss robin williams i was a special guy people love it uh when i ask about book recommendations in general of course your journey is just beginning but is there something that jumps out to you technical fiction philosophical sci-fi coloring books blog posts you read somewhere that had an impact on your life uh video games that you recommend to others minecraft manual manga i mean yeah video you could mention video games too that if there's something that jumps out to you that just had like an impact um i guess i'll say i really like the book the the war of art um which is a book about creative resistance and the creative struggle and what it means to be creative yeah um and part of what i see in this conversation and what you're doing lex is so much of the war of arts idea is that you just keep writing and writing and writing until you get to the new crap yeah yeah and yeah you just you just you just roll with it right and that's sort of what happens when you have like three-hour conversations with people is yeah you can only have so much scripted or societally constructed stuff until you get to the real you and you have to show up i mean he's that book that book is kind of painful it's really painful and it's not something i would recommend for every part of it but for what it did in my life at the time it also kind of normalized i don't know um i part of my coming of age story is the part of it's about realizing that i'm a creative person and person who needs to create um that's sort of a god-given thing i think for a lot of people but it's something that i don't really feel like i can live without and part of it was realizing that even within some of these more rigid structures it's okay that i don't sort of fit in with them and to hear about the struggles of other creatives was something for my own self-esteem and my own growing up that was really important to me so i don't think the book itself might be perfect but for what it did for my life it was really impactful yeah i think exactly the words may not be uh exactly right by way of advice but i think the journey that a lot of creatives take by reading that book is uh kind of profound he also has another one called turning pro i think i mean he in general espouses like taking it seriously like if you have a creative mind and you want to create something special in this world go do it it's not don't you know show up and so many blank pages so many people would like tell me like would encourage me either blatantly or through like implicit means to like basically take the app less seriously it's a good signal by the way um it's a good signal because my really close friends the ones who have always supported me yeah they never said that because they got it they understood that was that that was my path and they might be skeptical they might be like i mean one of my friends i remember told me like i was always like taken aback about why you were so certain this would work out and he's like i finally got it like once i saw it like popping off but like before that i just didn't get it but like he still supported me and i think i think it's a really good signal and actually just the fact of going through this process has made me socially feel so much more connected and i've somewhat consolidated my social life to some degree but it's so much more vulnerable connected and that's part of the creative process i have to thank for that i think this there's something that's like unstoppable about the creative mind it's like it's right there that fire and i guess part of the part of the thing that you're supposed to do is let that fire burn in whichever direction and it's gonna hurt it's gonna hurt fire will hurt uh but on top of the video game she's mentioned stanley parable offline is there uh you said you played some video games is there a video game that you especially love do you recommend i play for example yeah i'll uh i'll mention it's actually really in keeping with what we've been talking about it's the beginner's guide which is what i it was made by the same guy davey rendon who made the stanley parable which i i briefly saw you i i just clicked the video and yeah then i went to sleep it was at 2am um and then um but i briefly saw you that you were looking at um and it's the it's a game that is better treated as art and i think um i won't claim to understand the creator because that would be a cardinal sin to me of uh as a creative person but uh it gets to the heart of a lot of the things that we've been uh that we've been talking about which is the creative mind um the game can be interpreted a lot of ways in a feminist way it could be interpreted as story of friends it could be interpreted as the story of critics versus a creative the way i like to interpret it and i don't want to give out away too much is the story of the creative part of your mind that creates just for the sake of creating meaning the part that creates for no rhyme or reason or clear meaning it's almost it's almost ethereal um versus the part that's you could call it the editor you could call it the pragmatist you could call it the necessary force of ego in our in our lives we can't totally be egoless right but we need to be egoless to be creative and how that sort of internal censure what role does it play and how do we allow our creative minds to be creative and yet how do we still become useful because and it's funny that a video game right could have this fascinating intention which reminds me about the ridiculous question every once in a while ask about meaning and death so this this whole this whole ride ends you're at the beginning of the ride but it could end any day actually that's that's kind of the way human life works you could die today you can die tomorrow uh do you think about your immortality do you think about death do you meditate on it and in that context as the creative but a pragmatist too as running a startup uh what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing yeah so on mortality right um about about three years ago four years ago now i was uh excited to go to yale i was playing six hours of squash a day which squash is a sport i love so much and i was really getting a lot better and i was even thinking i could maybe walk onto the yell team and uh i woke up one day i felt really really sick i went and i decided not to go squash that day and i know um i wanted to i almost did and you'll see how this story turns out so you'll decide if i made the right choice i decided not to go squash today and i decided to get my driver's license uh where i had to get my driver's license because i want to get driver's license before i you know it's just how young i am before i went off to college because otherwise i might never get it um and i'm going back and i successfully got my driver's license for him and i go back to uh i go back to my house and i decided i don't want to drive back because i just feel so sick like things are spinning i have the worst headache i come home i run back right into my bed and feeling really sick to the point where i even like asked my mom who is the doctor i'm like should i should i go to the hospital and she's like you can just wait it out i'm sure and she'll get better yeah i like your mom yeah um and then you know and then at one point i look at my arms and they're like covered in this like red splotchy stuff yeah and i'm like well i think and she's like yeah we have to go um and so i go there and they're like you have scarlet fever and uh they're like there's nothing we can do you should probably just go back home so i go back home six hours later i wake up in the morning they'd let me out at like 3 a.m um they let me i come home in the morning and i feel this like a spear through my chest and i never felt anything like it and i was it was very disconcerting when you have a because we're all used to different source of pain right and that was sort of pain never felt before i suppose an athlete you're used to like feeling pain um so i tell my parents and immediately we hop back in the car we go up to the same hospital as that six hours ago and they initially didn't want to let me in and i was like i have chest pain they're like oh come in because they're like you're a healthy guy wait your turn i'm like no you don't understand i have like a pain in my chest and then they let me in they start doing tests on me they like put something like in my back which is really scary it's a huge needle and i'm smiling because it's like one of the ways i reduce stress i guess or deal with this sort of thing and make light of it but like know that you know it was definitely very scary in the moment shocking and scary and they go and they they do a bunch of tests and they determined that a virus like attacked my heart and i had myocarditis and pericarditis and they said i had maybe 25 to 35 chance at one point of dying and so i'm sitting in my i they met me into the hospital i'm in the bed in my bed for about three weeks um and i'm just i'm just standing there and i had this moment also that i remember very specifically where i was in so much pain that like i was crying not out of like emotional standpoint but actually just purely out of the pain itself like i could feel my heart in my chest and when i leaned back i felt it touch my rib cage and feel horrible so i couldn't go to sleep and lean back i had to lean forward all throughout the night right and i'm feeling my and i'm feeling my chest i'm feeling this terrible pain in my chest and i'm crying unstoppably and i mean also maybe i should mention that at the time i was someone who like refused to take in anything into my body that wasn't natural and so a lot of the time i i tried to be unmedicated um eventually i i didn't allow them to add a little medication to my body but there's just so much uncertainty and pain and the first time i had to come to terms with mortality uh first of all i think you still should have gone play squash i mean come on i mean yeah i thought you were i thought you're serious about this you still carry that with you sort of there is power to realizing the ride can end right in very suddenly very suddenly yeah and painfully and you know it has pragmatic application to like what you trajectories you take through life right something else that is worth noting is that i for the next year couldn't walk to my classes so i get to yell they put me in a medical single alone and i have to get shuttled to all my classes i have to ask i had to ask a few professors to even move classes so i could actually get there um i can't move my book i can't lift my book bags i can't i can't walk upstairs um i spent like 12 hours a day in my dorm room just like staring at the walls and more so and more than that all this like you i got to watch my body like deteriorate and like the muscle like fall off of it because i was i was taking these pills and they're kind of catabolic um and for an 18 year old i mean i think every 18 year old has feelings about their body um man or woman and you know just seeing this it's like you're watching sort of death transpire and you're also very fatigued because your heart's not at peak condition and you're thinking about the future and a lot of the things you enjoy have kind of been stripped away from you and i um i took a meditation practice like started with like five minutes a day um at my peak i was at like 40 minutes a day kept it up consistently for about two years um and i started thinking about like what do i want to do and like what do i care about and to get to your point i think you're asking like how does this carry forward right i think i realized that you know there's an end and i realized that there are things i believe and things that i believe that might not be so overtly popular but that i truly think make the world a better place and in spite of and then basically if my conditions provided i wanted to make something that i wanted to do something that would make me feel sort of whole in that way yeah i mean that's an amazing journey to take that time and to come out on the other end um no man that's amazing i did not realize like that there was a long-term struggle i think that's in the end if you do succeed will have a profound positive impact because struggle is ultimately like humbling but also empowering so i'm glad to see that but from the perspective of the creator of the other ridiculous question about meaning do you think about this kind of stuff is that uh the you know the meaning of life for you the meaning of life for us descendants of apes in general the first thing i'd like to say is that i think part of like when we talk about the meaning of life the part of it is the fact that we get to struggle with this question and we get to do it together for a long time and we sometimes i think it's accepting that there's no meaning at all and sometimes i think it's accepting that or even just parsing the phrase and thinking about the meaning of life i sometimes i'm look i'm very young um again i hope that anything i say now is going to be very different in the future because i think i mean life has so many meanings that it'll be crazy to see what i think in 20 years about the meaning of life and yeah right from the future cut him some slack please do um perspective perspective having said that you know i think part of what brings meaning to my life is things like this where we think about these things with people who are really really really on the ball and we get to connect with these people that certainly brings meaning to my life human connection yeah this conversation is is just another like echo of the thing you're trying to create uh in a digital space right yes that's the same kind of magic from from what i understand about what you're trying to create is the same reason i fell in love with the long form podcasting like as a fan that's why i listened to long-form podcasts is there something deeply human and genuine about the the interchange through their voice but i do think that connection through text can be even more powerful like i think about letters i still write letters to russia you know there's something powerful in letters when you when you put a lot of yourself in the words you say in the words you write that's powerful you can really communicate not just the actual semantic meaning of of uh of the words but like a lot of who you are through those words and create real connections so i hope you succeed there and listen uh ryan i think this is an incredible conversation i'm glad that people like you are fighting the good fight for uh bringing out the best in human nature in the digital space i think that's a battleground where the good will win like love will win and i'm glad you're creating technology that does just that so thank you so much for wasting all your time for coming down i can't wait to see what you do in the future thanks for talking today thank you for having me bam how many finger guns have you gotten at the end of vodka zero now thanks for listening to this conversation with ryan schiller and thank you to our sponsors all form magic spoon better help and brave click their links to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from george washington on march 15th 1783 if freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter thank you for listening and hope to see you next time