Lex Fridman Podcast - #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Ryan Schiller, creator of Liebrecht's, 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.

Starting point is 00:00:37 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.

Starting point is 00:01:08 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 and 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. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of As Now. I try to make

Starting point is 00:01:44 these interesting, but I give you time stamps minutes of As Now. I try to make these interesting, but I give you time stamps because I value your time and listen to any experience. So you can skip, but please still check out our sponsors. I'm fortunate to be able to be very selective with the sponsors we take on. So hopefully, if you buy their stuff, you'll find value in it just as I have. Click their links in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This episode is sponsored by a new sponsor, all-form. They make stylish, comfortable, customizable sofas.

Starting point is 00:02:16 For an engineering mind, their module or design pleases my soul. I say they're a new sponsor, but I've had their stuff for quite a while. I have, in fact, their black leather love seat. How great is the term love seat? I think you can't help but step up the depth of human connection between any two people that sit on the love seat. I sat on the all-form love seat with Mr. Michael Mallace and now I'm in love with the works.

Starting point is 00:02:44 Some of the best experiences of my life had to do with just sitting with friends, talking, and the weird friends, the out there friends. I think quote unquote, adult life can kind of carry you down the stream of busyness where you no longer have these all night conversations with weirdos in your life. I think that's probably why I never want to grow up. Anyway, all form is offering 20% off all orders for our listeners. That's you, my dear friend. At allform.com slash Lex. That's allform.com slash Lex. To find your perfect sofa or love seat. Michael Males is not included with your purchase. Finally, they're deciding whether to sponsor

Starting point is 00:03:26 this podcast long-term, so now's the time to buy their stuff if you like it. This episode is sponsored by Magic Spoon. Low carb keto-friendly cereal. It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs and 140 calories in each serving. They have a couple of limited edition flavors this month, cookies and cream and maple waffle.

Starting point is 00:03:53 But my favorite flavors are still cocoa, but these sound pretty good. I haven't tried them yet, I will try. You should too. Yes, I am very much excited to be living in this day and age when we have reusable rockets being launched into space and landing back on Earth. But I think what really excites me is that we can have what used to be a sugar stuffed meal like cereal that's not completely keto friendly. Anyway, Magic Spoon has a 100 happiness guarantee, so if you don't like it, they refund it.

Starting point is 00:04:27 Even Dusty Eski, Sartre and Kamu would be impressed. Go to Magic Spoon.com slash Lex, and use code Lex at checkout to say 5 bucks off your order, that's Magic Spoon.com slash Lex and use code Lex. This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P-H-H-H-H-H-H-E-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H that is the power of conversations. In some sense, that's what podcasting is. When I was younger, I did see it as the ideal of psychotherapy that through this interaction between two humans, you can arrive at something deep and profound that's personal about your particular brain and almost from an engineering perspective,

Starting point is 00:05:21 rewire things. I think there's a lot of ways in which I'll work with human robot interaction in the artificial intelligence base will teach us how to do this kind of re-engineering better. But anyway, better help is easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.

Starting point is 00:05:42 This show is also sponsored by brave a fast privacy preserving browser that feels like Google Chrome, but without the ads or the various kinds of tracking that ads can do. I love using it more than any other browser, including Chrome. I also love Google Chrome, but I love brave even more. You should check out my conversation with Brennan Ike, who's a creator of brave, but also the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla foundation. I mean, this guy's done basically everything, but it's his work on JavaScript actually that's really stuck with me.

Starting point is 00:06:14 In that conversation, I was reminded that changing the world doesn't have to start with a perfect solution. You can start with something to put it nicely that's imperfect and grow in a rate over time. You don't have to start with something pretty, you just have to start. Anyway, get the browser at brave.com slash Lex, and it might become your favorite browser too. That's brave.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and now here's my conversation with Ryan Schiller. Let's start with the basics. What is Librex? What are its founding story and founding principles and looking into 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

Starting point is 00:07:23 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. 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 Ivy community. And actually this week we just open to MIT and Stanford. So now really MIT, yeah, so if MIT and Stanford community is an I expect you to sign up for your MIT account. I started posting.

Starting point is 00:07:58 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. What's that called when you're actually still there? My university. Yeah, I guess, I guess, I guess, what's called at home.

Starting point is 00:08:18 That's my home. Educational home. Started at my educational home of Yale. And then we moved to, 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, for those who don't know, is Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and Penn. I got it on one breath. What's the youngest I believe, Penn?

Starting point is 00:08:47 No, Columbia. I can't say. I'm on camera. We'll edit it in posts. I don't know. I'll say you should have all all ate of them, and then you can just like get it in. Yeah, Penn, Harvard.

Starting point is 00:09:00 There's actually a really nice software that people should check out, like a service, which is 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 see.

Starting point is 00:09:23 I have a friend who's obsessed with deep fakes. Yeah. What's great about I think deep fakes is that it's going to do the opposite of sort of what's happening with our culture where everyone will have possible tonight ability. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the hope for me is there's so many fake things out there that were going to actually be much more skeptical and think and taking multiple sources and actually like reason, like use common sense and use them like deep thinking

Starting point is 00:09:52 to understand like what is true and what is not. Because, 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 source of truth. And when you no longer can trust anything as a source of truth, you start to think on your own, I guess part of the individual. That goes, that takes us way back to like where I came from, the Soviet Union, where you can't really trust anyone source of news. You have to think on your own, you have to talk to your friends. Shroomendism have intellectual autonomy. Do you think?

Starting point is 00:10:25 Think about this as idle 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. We have these like this point cloud of people just swimming around, like billions of them, and they all have certain ideas.

Starting point is 00:10:56 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 may be like multiple truths and it's almost will 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, it's all over the downside of what people, like religious people call, scientism, which is like, one science has declared something is true, you can't no longer question it.

Starting point is 00:11:36 But the reality is, science is a moving mechanism, you're constantly questioning, you're constantly questioning, and then maybe truth should be renamed as a process, not a final destination. The whole point is to keep questioning, keep questioning, keep discovering. Kind of like we're going backwards in time. Back when people were sort of finding their identities and we were less globalized, right? Like people 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?

Starting point is 00:12:14 And so we have all these different like civilizations and societies across the world that created their own truths. You know, we talk about the Jews and the Talmud 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.

Starting point is 00:12:32 Yeah. Harari and Sapiens were wines that even farther back until I gave them times. That's the thing that made us human 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 has power only because we believe in it. And is that truth? I don't know, but it has

Starting point is 00:13:00 power. It's carried in the minds of millions and thereby has power. But back to Librex. So what was 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 a question. They really felt like even outside the classroom it was hard to be vulnerable. And the thing you have to understand about Yale is it's not that big a place. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows you basically. And people come to these schools, first of all, they're home for people. And they want to be themselves.

Starting point is 00:13:41 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.

Starting point is 00:13:59 And then I couldn't talk to my professors. And I remember I talked to one specific global affairs professor and I was taking this class and his area of expertise was in the Middle Eastern conflict. And I went to him and I said, Professor, 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 flesh it out a bit. So, what I learned at Yale is that you can learn all sorts of things from a textbook, and

Starting point is 00:14:31 what you kind of go to Yale to do is to get 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. Exactly. It's an interesting thing. Yeah. It's interact 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 that, yeah, don't get me wrong. It's a place, it's still a place of tremendous brilliance. So I'm talking to his professor, right? And I'm like, I haven't heard you're a Vexpertise and I'm like, are we going to get to it? What's the deal?

Starting point is 00:15:11 And he 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 break away from the class where he would talk to the students and small groups and explain his and explain his perspective his research and have a real debate about it like around a hardness table. And he said I used to do this and then about two years ago,

Starting point is 00:15:36 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 approach the topic and so now I just don't even mention it and it's like you can say whatever you want but I'm not gonna be 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,

Starting point is 00:16:19 a complaint that an idea is painful, or an idea is disrespectful to, you know, or ideas creating an unsafe space. And 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 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

Starting point is 00:16:59 to look at faculty and you have to look at the administration. And like at MIT, for example, the administration does try 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 myself, you know, I want you to take heat for this. They really are criticizing the administration, not the faculty, because the faculty oftentimes are the most brilliant. The bold earth thinkers that you think, whenever you talk about, we need the truth to be spoken.

Starting point is 00:17:41 The faculty are often the ones who are in the possession of the deepest truths in their mind. In that sense, and they also have the capacity to truly educate in the way that you're saying. So it's not broken, like fundamentally, but there's stuff that needs that's not working out well. You kind of took my words. That's what I thought you're 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? The academia in general, I suppose, but Ivy League still, I think it represents some of the best qualities of academia. 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

Starting point is 00:18:30 are in these institutions. I think, like you said, the administration, and I have to be a little careful because, you know, I've been in some of these committees, and I have talked to the administration about these sorts of things. 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 a faculty holding positions

Starting point is 00:19:01 in these committees, right? Yes. But it's 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 it's the mechanism is not working, but I could also say my personal opinion is they lack

Starting point is 00:19:24 courage and one 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

Starting point is 00:20:17 entire faculty. Or you could just say that the faculty need to step up and grow some guts and skill of graceful communication. Really administration. Well, yeah, and the administration. That's right. That's the administration. So the faculty are sometimes more, some of the most brave outspoken people Yes, within the bounds of their career.

Starting point is 00:20:39 Yeah. So, so that takes a, that's like the founding kind of spark of a fire that led you to then say, okay, so how can I help? Yeah, and I export a lot. I export a lot of options. I wrote many articles to my friends, talk to them. And I realized it's sort of need to be a cultural change. Sort of need to be bottom up grassroots. 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.

Starting point is 00:21:28 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? What percentage of students feel afraid to speak their mind? 61% nationally. And that you're talking about places, nothing like the Ivy League, where I'd say, I'd imagine it would be even worse because of just the way that these communities come about

Starting point is 00:22:04 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 majority. 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.

Starting point is 00:22:26 And basically, 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, it all metaphors a really powerful thing to explain, you know, and there's just a 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 somebody who's been a friend recently, Tim Dillon, who has, who gives zero part of my French fox about anything, which is very liberating, very important person to just tear down the powerful. But, you know, inside the academia as an educator, as a teacher, as a professor, you don't have the same freedom.

Starting point is 00:23:12 So, that fear has felt, I guess, by the majority of students. That's sad. You were getting it. Something there too, which is that, 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 mechanisms we use when we don't have quite the precise mathematical

Starting point is 00:23:36 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 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 going to be able to continue to innovate? Are we going to continue to be able to learn? That's what really starts scare me.

Starting point is 00:24:01 So you've explored a bunch of different ideas. You've heard a bunch of different stuff. You wrote a bunch of different stuff. 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 feel alone and there are a lot of other people who feel alone. I believe this thing, and it's not as unpopular as I thought.

Starting point is 00:24:32 You know, 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 didn't have much coding experience, but I 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

Starting point is 00:25:02 interests are, my focus has been throughout my life. The fascinating thing about your story, I think Obviously, that's where my passion, my interests are. My focus has been throughout my life. The fascinating thing about your story, I think it should be truly inspiring to 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.

Starting point is 00:25:21 So you saw a problem. You explored different ideas. And then you just decided you're going to 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. He can take me through the journey of deciding to do that, of like learning to program without a programming background and building the app like detailed.

Starting point is 00:25:50 Like what do you actually, like how do you start? Sure. You want to buy a Mac? I learned you need you to buy a Mac. I'm just going to go step by step, right? I'll be as dumb as possible. Because it was truly, it was truly, you know, like leading by your feet.

Starting point is 00:26:06 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:26:25 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. David, check that out. We also are now available on Android. But we'll get there for the Android users from MIT Stanford or the Ivy League. So back to how it happened.

Starting point is 00:26:46 So I realized I didn't Mac. So when I got Mac, I realized I didn't have an iPhone for testing eventually, got an iPhone. So those were the real robot blocks to start with. From there, I mean, there's almost too much information out there about programming. The question is, where do you start and what's going to be useful to you?

Starting point is 00:27:05 And I, the first thought was I should look at some Yale classes, but it became very clear very quickly that was not the right place to start. That would probably be the right place to start if I wanted to get a job at Amazon, but Michael was slightly different. And I definitely had it in mind that what I was trying to make was I'm trying to prove out an idea.

Starting point is 00:27:28 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 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 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.

Starting point is 00:27:47 And that is, as you'll see what ends up happening. 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, so you got this Mac and you what like go to Google.com and you type in

Starting point is 00:28:06 I'll load X code and that is code yeah, and then I typed it 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. He I mean that turned out to be a very good video. And it's basically like introductory course to Swift. Yeah, I mean, you say introductory. I think most of the people in that class probably had a much better background than I did. The salts were developed or probably. Yes, computer scientists.

Starting point is 00:28:36 And it was slow for me. 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. So it took a little longer, and a lot of time I was tech overflow, but eventually I made a truly minimal viable product. The most minimal, like we're talking, put text on screen, add text to screen,

Starting point is 00:29:01 comment on top of text, make a post, make a response, and anyone with a yell email can do this, and you plug it into a certain cloud server, and you verify people's accounts, and you're off, 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. Yeah. And I'm like, how to make a login page and Swift. I mean, it's that easy. If someone, been dumb before of course I then the first page that pops up was probably pretty damn good page When you 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 I go overflow a few questions and then I got a little further

Starting point is 00:29:57 And then I found some more bugs and then I'm like maybe this isn't the right way to do it 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, but the goal isn't to make great code. 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.

Starting point is 00:30:17 And so you're focusing on the experience, like actually you're just really driving towards that first step, figuring out the first step and really driving towards it. Of course, yet I'll also figure out like concept of like stories 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 experienced the CS now, like, you used to heap that's so interesting here.

Starting point is 00:30:43 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 didn't because it works. Like, I'm trying to make calls and stuff. And they're like, yeah, they're like the hierarchy is really like, I'm like, what? Well, 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

Starting point is 00:31:05 to optimize and have these kind of discussions and 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 on Amazon because you've never finished the login page. Like, it's kind of hilarious,

Starting point is 00:31:32 but that's a really deep lesson, like just get it done and there's, like, what's a heat bro? Is the right, that should be a t-shirt. That's really the right approach to building something that ultimately creates an experience and then you iterate eventually. That's how the greatest,

Starting point is 00:31:53 some of the greatest software products in this world have been built, is 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? What was the first step that it feels like something is working? Did you interact with another friend? Yeah, I think the first step was like, it's one thing to tell someone about an idea,

Starting point is 00:32:19 but it's another thing to put in their hands and kind of see like the way their their eyes kind of look and When I'd go I'd walk around cross 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 So you got to try this is this is pre-quarantine by the way of course So I never do the same post-quarantine by like you got to try So you got to try this like what is it and I'd be like and I explain it's like an anonymous discussion feed for for a Yale campus. And you see their gears turning and they just some people would be like, not interesting. Like fine, not your target demographic, I get it, you'll come eventually.

Starting point is 00:32:54 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 50% of people to like it. You need what? 5% 10% to love it and then they'll tell 5% 10%? Yeah, yeah, Warner Mouth, yeah, and you're good. Of course, the first version was very, very crappy, but seeing people trying, despite all the crapiness, it was sort of enough to be the first step. And since then, all of my kids been stripped out.

Starting point is 00:33:29 I now 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 a code of great. I mean, I'm not an engineer. I never intended to be an engineer. And there's a lot to do that's not engineering. But the point was just to validate the idea, so to speak.

Starting point is 00:33:48 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 has the potential to actually be the very 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 Librex. Yeah, it's literally, it's only been a year since we've had like had actual a lot of people on the app, about a year. Oh wow.

Starting point is 00:34:28 Okay. I mean, there are some crazy moments I could talk about sort of going to Dartmouth because it's one thing to get some traction at your school. People know you and it's your school. 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.

Starting point is 00:34:48 You're invading another territory. It was literally like that. Did you buy it like a Dartmouth sweatshirt? A purposefully, I didn't want to fraud anyone, but I was purposefully nondescripted. I'm claiming. Yeah. No yell stuff, no darkness stuff. Um, just blend in.

Starting point is 00:35:04 Um, I'll get, I darkness stuff. Just blend in. I'll go back there. So what happened was this was like March of last year. So 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 had some cold emails, some warm-ish emails, and I went to people and I was like, basically, can I sleep on your

Starting point is 00:35:35 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 downwind after in finals period, a social after in the finals period. But I, he met 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 dorm, I have a nice floor. And he ended up, today he's still really close, he's really close friend, but anyway,

Starting point is 00:36:00 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 going to be hard to get to campus from the train station because it's really remote. I'm like, I'm sure it's fine.

Starting point is 00:36:23 I'll just get a new Uber. There are no Uber's and Hanovers. What do you think this is, Newham? Newham, sure. So Connecticut, I mean Yale is pretty remote as well, no? Yeah, Yale is, well, I mean, Yale is in New Haven, which is a real city. It has a Uber, it has food, it has a culture,

Starting point is 00:36:41 it has a nightclub even. Like we're talking about a real city. Like it's not New York, it's not Philadelphia, where I'm from, but it's a city. New Hampshire is something very different. Yeah, beautiful campus, I'm sure. Beautiful, oh my gosh, I could talk so much about, I was blown away by Dartmouth.

Starting point is 00:36:59 I started wondering like why I didn't apply. Really genuinely, between the people and the culture, it was a beautiful vacation. So I arrived there, no Uber, but eventually I called this guy who's like the only guy who can get you to Dartmouth and takes a couple hours, but we get there. I sleep on this guy's floor, I wake up.

Starting point is 00:37:18 I ask him if there's any printing, he's like, oh Dartmouth happens to have free printing in the copy room. I print out like 2000 posters. Until the printing in the copy room. I print out like 2,000 posters. Until the guy in the copy room literally goes to me, he's like, kid, I don't know what you're doing, but you need to get out of here. Like, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going. I just found the limits. I know, yeah, I found the limit.

Starting point is 00:37:37 And I think a lot of startups is about finding the limits. I think that's a little piece of advice. Yeah. Socially, he's like, you gotta get out of here. And I then go to every single dorm door. I think that's a little piece of advice. Socially, he's like, you gotta get out of here. And I then go to every single dorm door. I put a poster under every single dorm door, advertising the app with a QR code.

Starting point is 00:37:55 I walk around campus saying hi to everyone and talking about the app. I go from table to table in the cafeteria, introduce myself, say hi, and thumb down on the app. It's exhausting, they've so many steps, so many it's crouching down to slip the poster into the dorm door, my legs were burning. But by the end of it, 24 hours later,

Starting point is 00:38:15 I'm sitting on a bus, and I'm just pressing the refresh button on the count creation panels. It's like going up by hundreds. I'm like, oh my gosh, there's no word of mouth. It's like going up by hundreds. I'm like, oh my gosh. There's no word of mouth. This is working in a sense. I mean, certainly you're like initial seed is powerful, just a piece.

Starting point is 00:38:33 Yeah, but then the word of mouth is what carries it forward. And what was the explanation you gave to the app? It's an anonymity of 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.

Starting point is 00:38:57 They know. Yeah. It's a hunger for this. Exactly. So all I do is I'm very factual. I said, and this is where I kind of end up pointing the kind of the line that I now used to say it because I said it so many times and that was 24 hours. I just said it's an anonymous discussion feed for Dartmouth. And they're like, yes. Like they've been waiting for it. You know, some people are more skeptical,

Starting point is 00:39:23 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 take into it is incredible. Everything from professors writing poems during finals period to be like, good luck in finals period, you're gonna rise like a phoenix or whatever.

Starting point is 00:39:42 So like, yeah, it's crazy. To, I heard about two women meeting on Librex and starting a finance club at Dartmouth to significant others meeting. 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 interesting to see. People throwing parties pre-COVID. Yeah, it was just amazing to see. People throwing parties, pre-COVID. Yeah, it was just amazing to see how when you allow people to be vulnerable and social, they connect.

Starting point is 00:40:11 People have this natural desire to connect. Yeah, when you have, whatever natural desire to have a voice and then when that voice is paired with freedom, then you could truly express yourself and there's something liberating about that. And in that sense, you're connecting is your true self, whatever that is. What are the most powerful conversations you've seen on the app?

Starting point is 00:40:37 You mentioned people connecting. Hard part of that is the sorting, you know, figuring out which one am I gonna put it to? Mental sorting out. It's just something that's 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. This stands out to you. I remember this one really amazing comment from this. He was a Mexican international student who spoke out and this and this post was super edgy,

Starting point is 00:41:07 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.

Starting point is 00:41:24 This Mexican international student comes to Yale and he starts talking about his experience in the La Casa, which is the Mexican Latin X 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.

Starting point is 00:41:56 That's powerful. That was powerful to me. Yeah, 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?

Starting point is 00:42:25 But at the same time, anonymity on the internet, uh, so it the app, right? But at the same time, an anonymity on the internet, so it protects us, right? It gives us freedom to have a voice, but 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, would he make a fun anemity as a fundamental feature of social interaction, like the pros and the cons? Yeah, just to break that down a bit,

Starting point is 00:42:57 I would say a lot of those same things about a place like Twitter where people are very unannonymous. Yeah. Having said that, of course, there's a different sort of capacity people have when they're anonymous, right? In all different sorts of ways. So what do I make of anonymity?

Starting point is 00:43:13 I think you 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, being vulnerable, talking about relationships and mental health.

Starting point is 00:43:29 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, anonymity is a toolfully in Librex.

Starting point is 00:44:02 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 Librex is anonymous, right? 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, 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

Starting point is 00:44:39 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 and 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 un-anonymous, not one of my public interactions. I try to be as real and every way possible, like zero gap between private, me and public me. Why exactly did you, it seems like this is an intentional mission.

Starting point is 00:45:21 What made you want to sort of bridge that gap between the private sphere and public sphere? Because that's unique. I know a lot of intellectuals who would make a different decision. Yeah, interesting. I had a discussion about when the vol about this actually, when the few others that have a very clear distinction between public and private. Something I'm struggling with, by the way, personally, and thinking about. So one on the very basic surface level is if you carry with yourself lies,

Starting point is 00:45:57 small lies or big lies, it's extramental effort to remember what you, like to remember what you are. Like, to remember what you're supposed to say and not supposed to say. So, that's on a very surface level of like, it's just easier to live life when you 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,

Starting point is 00:46:45 it's that first principle thinking that's almost like overused as a term, but it feels like that requires radical honesty, not radical asshole and lishness, but radical honesty with yourself, with yourself. And I feel 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 in this current social context, so we can talk about race and gender and what are the other topics that are touchy. What's the city and nationality? All those things.

Starting point is 00:47:23 I mean, like, family structure. Maybe I'm in eloquent in the way I speak about them, but I honestly want to look in the mirror, like I'm not deeply hateful of a particular race or even just hateful particular race. 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

Starting point is 00:47:44 in my closet, I'm living like think about those biases and so on. And also, I don't have any creepy shit in my closet, I wasn't. Like, I haven't done it. It seems like everybody, it seems like a lot of people got, like did a lot of creepy stuff in their life. And I just feel like that's really nice and deliberating. And especially now, you know, it's funny because I've gotten a bit of a platform.

Starting point is 00:48:03 And I think it all started when I went, this is a famous, this community, female comedian Whitney Cummings. And, you know, I've gotten a lot of amazing women writing me throughout, but when I went on Whitney, it was like the number of DMs I get on Instagram. When women, it's just ridiculous. And I think that was a really important moment for me. It's like, I speak and I feel, you know, I really value love long-term monogamy with like one person.

Starting point is 00:48:37 And it's like, I could see where a lot of guys would now continue that message in public and in private just start sleeping around. And so that's an important statement from me mentally. He's like, nope. Straightenerical. He's just go straightener. And not out of fear, but out of like principle and just like live life honestly.

Starting point is 00:48:58 And I feel like that's truly liberating as a human being. Forget public, hold that, because then I feel like I'm on sturdy ground when I say difficult things. And at the same time, this is sorry, I'm renting on this apologize. I'm interested in personal stuff.

Starting point is 00:49:18 Keep going. 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 and not. Like, I won't be able to fake it. You know, like they'll see it through. Yeah, I, so,

Starting point is 00:49:41 I feel like if you're not lying about stuff, you have the freedom to truly be yourself 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? Like why would, 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

Starting point is 00:50:08 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, like 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

Starting point is 00:50:35 of who you truly are, like Elon's inspirational 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, not to throw shade but I will, it's like Mark Zuckerberg's an example of that Jack Dorisys also a bit of an example that I like Jack a lot. I've talked to him a lot

Starting point is 00:51:12 I will talk to him more. I think he's a much more amazing peep person than 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. There's probably many of the same difficulties you will face as the pressures, but 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. The dishonest with the world and dishonest with yourself.

Starting point is 00:51:57 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 and figure it out later, you can figure out later. Pretty soon, you've dug 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

Starting point is 00:52:33 So yeah, there's two problems within the company It doesn't make you as effective of a leader. I think that's one and two for social media companies I 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, like, this is how humans work. We want to look to somebody where like, I trust you. If you're going to use a social media platform, I think you have to trust the set of individuals working at the top of that social universe.

Starting point is 00:53:07 So 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. And I mean, I don't know if you have how much you spent on Librex. You've only been here the last couple of weeks, like last week, but I mean, I love the product and one of the aspects of me loving the products that I'm 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 from the community and the fact that I could, I mean, so I came to Boston for the interview, right?

Starting point is 00:53:45 Yeah. I came to Boston. I got off the train. Yeah. It was around 5.30 p.m. I checked Leigh Brex. Someone is writing, hey, I'm in Boston. Does anyone want to get dinner?

Starting point is 00:53:55 Yeah. 30 minutes later, I'm going to dinner with them. That's amazing. And I mean, it's incredible. First of all, as an Ampestriper nor the amount of stuff I learned from these people and when they reiterate and I hear that they got the message through the problem, I mean, that's incredibly validating,

Starting point is 00:54:13 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, it's really an movement to some degree. It's a community and a movement. I'll say you actually why I didn't use the app very much so far is 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.

Starting point is 00:54:46 It felt like it's a really strong community around each of these places. 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 community issues within Columbia or Yale or so on, and Dartmouth, and there's also the broader community of the Ivy leagues that people are discussing.

Starting point is 00:55:11 But I could see that actually expanding more and more and more, but which is a powerful coupling, just the feeling of like, that it's a little village, this little community we're building together, but also the broader issues. Yeah, as you could do both discussions. One thing that was important to me is, little village, this little community we're building together, but also the broader issues. Yeah. As you can do both discussions.

Starting point is 00:55:27 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 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 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,

Starting point is 00:56:13 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 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've been through used to lived experience,

Starting point is 00:56:40 they've been through so many of the same lived experiences. One like clarification, is there an easy way if you choose to then connect in meat space and physical space? So I guess the sort of magic of it and I was talking to a bunch of Harvard Librexers who I met off the app while I was in Boston and every time I told them this is the favorite part of the app, this is what I met off the app while I was in Boston, and every time I told me, this is the 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.

Starting point is 00:57:12 So I was talking to this guy who 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 through a post and what they he'd make a post about coin collection 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 the his he would just show him that they're school Mm-hmm, and then they could just text chat Totally anonymously direct message if he accepted the anonymous request. Did I see the user names right? There are no user names only Brex. It's all just school's names. So he made this post about coin collection and

Starting point is 00:57:52 he got it direct message. Yeah, I guess so, right? No, he's just looking at the text. Yeah. That's interesting. That's right. And I can tell you I can go into why. That's really interesting. Yeah, I can go into it. Truly is anonymous. It's well, I mean, but it's not exactly. It's a very different kind of anonymous. And the reason the reason that we made that decision is because we wanted people to connect to ideas. We're on 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 just these are small communities, right? We talked about this. Everyone knows someone who knows you.

Starting point is 00:58:35 And in 2021, it would not take much to be able to figure out who someone might be, just do a couple of posts. So it's both safety and about the ideas in terms of not adding user names. 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 redder of any post, and that makes it really easy to meet up because once you guys are one-on on one, you can exchange a number, you can exchange a Snapchat, you can exchange an email, probably not very often, but you could. And then that's how people meet up. Matching.

Starting point is 00:59:15 And then a lot of people connect in this way. Let me just take a small step into the technical. I read somewhere, I don't know if it's true, that one of the reasons you were rejected from YC, Y-combinator, in the final rounds, is because one of the principles is to refuse to sell user data. Can you speak to that? What's, why do you think it's important not to sell user data, which draws a clear contrast between other, basically, and the 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 going on in their city during the summer? How are they feeling about the political cycle and also their mental health, their relationships?

Starting point is 01:00:14 These are some of the 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 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,

Starting point is 01:00:38 there's something very off about that. I tend to believe that there is some room. So like Facebook would just take that data and sell it, right? But there's some room in transparency and 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? So right, you have to monetize, you have to create the entire system, you have to rethink this whole thing, right? But if as long as you give people control and are transparent, I mean, get easy, I think it's really difficult to delete a Facebook account or delete all your data.

Starting point is 01:01:18 It's very difficult. I tried. 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 they do it, then they're not actually a deep loving member of the community. So we very quickly realized that user privacy was something that was not only a core value, but was something that users really cared about.

Starting point is 01:01:44 And we added this functionality. It's just a button that says, forget me. You press it, like two clicks. It's not that hard, we just remove your email from the database. Yeah. You're good. Beautiful. I think Facebook should have that. I honestly, so call me crazy, but maybe you can actually speak to this,

Starting point is 01:02:07 but I don't think Facebook, well, no, 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 explain that, like,

Starting point is 01:02:22 in ways that's going to, potentially, like, lessen your experience in a short term, like explain that, but then there shouldn't be like multiple clicks of a button that don't make any sense. I'm trying to hold back from ranting about this Instagram. Just let me just say real quick because I've been locked out of Instagram for a month. And there's a whole group inside Facebook that are like supporters of like, help Lex. Free Lex?

Starting point is 01:02:54 Free Lex. I wasn't blocked. It was just like a bug in the system. Somebody was hammering the API with my account. So they kept thinking I'm a bot. Anyway, it's a bug that happens to a lot of people. But like, first of all, I appreciate the love from all the amazing engineers and Instagram and Facebook.

Starting point is 01:03:10 Well, those folks, the entire mechanism, though, is somehow broken. I mean, I put that on the leadership, but it's also difficult to operate a large company once it scales all those kinds of things. But it should not be that difficult to do some basic things that you want to do, which is in a case of Facebook that's verifying your identity to the app, and also in the case of Facebook, in the case of Librex,, disappear. If you choose, there's downsides to disappearing, but it should not be a difficult process. And yeah, I think people are waking up to that. I think there's a lot of room for an app like Liebrecht's, with its foundational ideas to redefine what social media should look like.

Starting point is 01:04:06 And like you said, I think beautifully, an anonymity is not the core value. It's just a 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, the Unishie 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 basic principles should be there.

Starting point is 01:04:39 And also a good, simple interface design is goes goes goes a really long way like simplicity and elegance which a Librex currently is clubhouse is a lot better by the way, I don't I don't mean to I don't mean to go too deep into the history, but the 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. There's these two mouth-based and down-bow buttons were like these big, these big freaking boxes and like, I don't, I don't, I could go on. But it was my, it was my genius design skills.

Starting point is 01:05:20 I almost failed art class when I was like in first grade. And I think I still have some more skills to my first grade self But it's got a lot better and thanks to a lot of my friends who have you know sort of chipped in here in there Oh, I love the idea of a button. I just like forget me I Don't know that's that's really moving actually that That's actually all people want is they they want I think, okay, I'll speak to my experience. Like, I will give so much more if I could just like disappear if I needed to.

Starting point is 01:05:53 And I trusted the community, I trusted like the founders and the principles. That's really powerful, man. Trust and ease of escape. Yeah. You've also kind of mentioned moderation, which is really interesting. With this anonymity and this community, I don't know if you've heard of the internet,

Starting point is 01:06:18 but there's trolls on the internet. So I've heard. Even if they go to Yale and Dartmouth, there's still people that probably enjoy the sort of being the Gorilla Warfare Contra Revolutionary and just like creating chaos in a place of love. So how do you prevent chaos from and hatred breaking out and leabrics?

Starting point is 01:06:46 So the way I think about it is we have these principles. 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, seem 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 Lieberk's context of their community. And beyond that, we have conversation with them about the standards of the community, and we're constantly talking

Starting point is 01:07:22 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 Liebrecht'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 Librexers who reach out to me and respond to the opportunity to become a moderator. And the way they're chosen is basically we want to make sure that they're in tune with their

Starting point is 01:07:58 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. And from there we choose a set and they have the power to 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 a problem. But they can take down posts and they can advocate for, you know, different moderation standards

Starting point is 01:08:39 and different moderation policies. So for now, you're the line as 12 all does community. And so meeting like you're able to like people are actually able to like email you or like text me text you contact you and get a response like you respond to basically everybody. And then you're like really, you know, you're you're living that, living people's floor life currently. That's not necessarily, this is the early days folks. I knew Ryan, he was a billionaire and he was cool.

Starting point is 01:09:15 And then he was in a mansion making meats on his barbecue. No, okay. Okay. But, you know, how does it scale? Like what? I suppose how does it scale? Like what? I suppose how does it scale? Is the question.

Starting point is 01:09:30 I mean, with Linus, 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 role as Librex 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?

Starting point is 01:09:59 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. That does come down in part to reasonable moderation and community guide, 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? And hopefully, I'll be able to just like you can hire a CTO, hopefully, I'll be able to be integrated in hiring

Starting point is 01:10:40 people who understand the way that we are sort of operating and the reasonable standards of moderation and there can be a sort of hierarchical structure. But I think when you've a product whose key purpose is to allow people to have these difficult conversations on campus that need to be had, I can never afford to that. I can never fully, I don't think I can never port 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 baseless abdicating e-commerce right like that is yeah, 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 It's hard for me to say.

Starting point is 01:11:25 Because Amazon does so many things. I think the better example is like Elon will draw as he's still at the core of the engineering. He's at the core of the engineering. There's some fundamental questions about what 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,

Starting point is 01:11:43 that make the app work is the moderation of difficult conversations. And by the way, I'm 21 years old. Let's remind us everyone of that. If this thing does scale, then if this thing continues to be a positive force and a lot of people's lives, who knows what will happen in in the next what I'll learn. 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

Starting point is 01:12:17 worth you know up to $1 billion, 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 that 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?

Starting point is 01:12:54 So as a creator of this kind of community in place with anonymity and difficult conversations, 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 do you think it's a fundamental human right? How do you define it to yourself when you think about it? I went down, especially preparing for this conversation down a rabbit hole of just how unclear it is

Starting point is 01:13:33 with philosophically what is meant by this kind of freedom. It's not as easy as people think, but it's interesting pragmatically speaking to hear how you think about it in the context of Leigh-Berx. 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 in the middle of this question of freedom of speech. One of the wonderful things is that the Librex community is fooled with PhDs and governance majors who have taught me a ton about this sort of thing. I'm still learning, I'm still growing, I'm still probably going to

Starting point is 01:14:20 modify my perspective to some degree. Hopefully, Don't worry. I imagine I'll always support free discourse. Like learning. Yeah. How to speak about stuff is critical here because it's like 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. Like they'll say, there's nothing complicated about freedom. Freedom is freedom, bro. It's, it is complicated. First of all, if you talk about there's different definitions of freedom of speech. If you want to go constitution, if you want to talk about the United States specifically and what's legal, it's actually not as exciting and not as beautiful

Starting point is 01:15:11 as people think of. It's complicated. It's complicated. I think there's ideals behind it that we want to see. What is 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, racism. Going back to the name of the app, Lebrex. Yes.

Starting point is 01:15:51 Lebre, free. X was support onto for free exchange. And the free exchange of what? My purpose was to create as many as much intercommunication 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 doxed so to keep things focused on the ideas, not the people, and

Starting point is 01:16:20 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 you know, it And hard to do though.

Starting point is 01:16:45 It's difficult. We like to generalize with humans. It's difficult, but what it comes down to is be specific. And when you think about what are sweeping statements against core landing groups, right? Oftentimes these are sort of hack-need subjects. These are things that have been broached and we've heard them before. They don't really lead anywhere productive. So it goes under this principle of be specific and the ideas you're discussing.

Starting point is 01:17:12 So even for positive and humor stuff, you try to avoid generalizations against core identity groups. Sorry, what are core identity groups? We're talking. You know, race, religion. Okay. Got it. Even positive stuff. Against, negative.

Starting point is 01:17:31 Oh, 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. The trouble with rules is that the community grows, they'll figure out ways to manipulate the rules. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:17:53 It's human nature. It's creativity. Yeah. Something beautiful about it, of course. Unlike them from an evolutionary perspective, yes. Yeah, the fact that people are so creative and so looking to... And because people are genuinely interested in so looking to and because people are generally

Starting point is 01:18:05 interested in figuring out these things about social media and so they'll 100% 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? Well, 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

Starting point is 01:18:45 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 a social media can help that person become the best version of themselves. I don't mean from like an hour or a well-earned 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.

Starting point is 01:19:25 And I kind of think about like, a lot of social media mechanisms bringing out the worst in us. And I try to think like, in the long term, how can, as the social media, or how can a website,

Starting point is 01:19:41 how can, the create can make the best, like you take a trajectory that makes you a better, better, and better and the best version of yourself. So I think about that, because Twitter can really take you down some dark trajectories.

Starting point is 01:19:56 I've seen people just not being the best version of themselves. Forget the cancel 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 Reddit yet, because one positive side is all the shit posting I read it could be just like a release valve for some stress in life and you almost have like a parallel life where in your in meets space, you might be actually becoming successful and so on and growing and so on,

Starting point is 01:20:27 but you just need some time to be angry at somebody. But I tend to not think that's possible. I think if you're shitposting, you're probably not spending your time the best way you could. I don't know. I am torn on that. But do you think about that with Librex

Starting point is 01:20:45 of creating a trajectory for the for the Yale, for the Dartmouth, for 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. incentivize, well, but 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. So you think such mechanisms exist for such a incentivization? you can incentivize people to make the right kind of content if that's your goal.

Starting point is 01:21:28 Do you think such mechanisms exist for such a incentivization? I do. I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. So we have already idea, like concrete ideas in your mind. I have about your reconcrete ideas that I'm very, very optimistic about. Yeah. And you don't even need to share them. 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

Starting point is 01:21:53 Not even a thinking or a discussion about the incentivization of positive long-term content creation. I mean Twitter. I'd 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

Starting point is 01:22:20 within the limits of his power. Yeah. And that's the question, the limits of the power. Leabrex 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

Starting point is 01:22:45 people post, fundamentally people want to make a positive impact on their community, to some degree. Now, there 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 body counts, no pergating. At the same time, the more you incentivize a certain type of behavior, the better it's going to be. And we don't see this 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 force the specific type of conversations. Conversation, we just need to make the tools to allow people to be good and to

Starting point is 01:23:29 incentivize good behavior. Yeah, I believe that. Like if you, you know, you will not need to censor if you allow people at scale to be good. The good will overpower the assholes. That's my fundamental belief. I'm very optimistic about that. But currently Leibrex is small in the sense that it's a small set of communities that I believe, and you mentioned to me offline that by design, you're scaling slowly. That's right. Carefully. So, how does Librex scale? Is it possible? Facebook also started with a small set of communities

Starting point is 01:24:07 that were at schools. And then now grew to be basically the, if not one of the largest social networks in the world. Do you see Librex has potentially scaling to be beyond even college campuses, but encompassing the whole world. It's a long timeline. I'll say this. This gets back to where the Facebook goes wrong because clearly they did a lot right. We can only speculate about what the objectives were of the founders of Facebook.

Starting point is 01:24:50 I'm sure they've said some things, but it's always interesting to know what the what the 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 ofabrex 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.

Starting point is 01:25:33 Maybe you could have a, I know, the California system is an obvious one, pack time might be an obvious one. And we can think about that. But fundamentally, the unit, the unit of community is your school or your school community. So that's one difference that I think will help us. The other thing is that we're scaling intentionally,

Starting point is 01:25:56 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. But as we think we have the tools to preserve the community and to encourage the community to create the sort of content that we want them to create.

Starting point is 01:26:23 And there's a lot of ways to define community. So first of all, there's geographic community as well. 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 and a single individual in the university. In that same way, you can verify your employment at a company, for example, like Google, Microsoft, Facebook.

Starting point is 01:26:59 Do you see your potentially taking on those communities? That'd be fascinating. Getting like anonymous community conversations inside Google 100% crossed my mind. So some extent this is this is something where I Understand the college experience. I understand the need and I I've never I've never worked at Google. I don't know if they would hire me Hopefully the name's a product manager. I think if there's a community that needs this product and has that and has that will, which I think, especially as Librex continues to grow and expand and change and learn.

Starting point is 01:27:42 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 each of these communities and iterating. 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 that you're solving. But I was made aware that there was an app app or at least a social network called Yik-Yak

Starting point is 01:28:20 that was had a similar kind of focus. I think the thing you've spoken about that differs between Lüberg and Yikak is that Yikak was defined in my pronouncing it right even. I'm good. I met the founder, so I can confirm. You can confirm cool.

Starting point is 01:28:43 The that it was constructed a geographical area versus like to the actual community. And that and that somehow had fundamental like actual differences in social dynamics that resulted. But can you speak to the history of Yekyak? Like how does LeBregs 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 emerged on New York. Okay, so that's an example of like, okay, here's how it goes wrong when you have an animity on college campuses. when you have an anonymity on college campuses. So how does the Brex going to do better?

Starting point is 01:29:27 Yeah, you're getting at 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 your kick. And when you talk about startups, I mean, you know this, I, you know startups.

Starting point is 01:29:46 And you look at the post-mortem, it's almost never what people think it is. And oftentimes these things are somewhat unknowable. And the degree to which people seeking confirmation bias, to something seeking closure, 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 the details are so little that as humans, we are not capable of parsing even what they are. But I'll tell you my perspective on it, knowing that I am also a human with biases.

Starting point is 01:30:20 In this particular case, very significant biases. Yeah. Yeah. So I started building Librex for its own merits. At first, I wasn't aware of Yickek, but I started to talk to people about this platform I was building. I was made aware of Yickek, and I built it from day one with a lot of the issues Yickek had in mind. So as you said, the one difference between you get is the geographical versus community-based aspect.

Starting point is 01:30:51 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 experience. It's a really small minority, right? I remember I was listening to the founder of 4chan Moot talk about this how like one guy was able to basically destroy

Starting point is 01:31:28 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 pretty supposed to think in this way It's exciting that you can walk into like where 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 Just to to the destroy

Starting point is 01:32:00 Like the lives of many and if you think this way, it's a problem. But 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 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

Starting point is 01:32:30 is associated with a .edu. That's the first point out point out point out there. Second point is control expansion, meaning that we have community moderation. We have this panel that allows the moderators to see all of the highly downloaded 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, we ping every moderator when there's a report. So things are taking down pretty quickly.

Starting point is 01:33:03 And we have our standards. And we have, I think above all 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. Yickek was more of a fun app. And by its own admission, it was a place where people couldn't enjoy themselves and could sort of... Yeah. Yickek, you know, Chit-Chit. We have a bigger purpose than that, frankly. And I think that shows in the people who self select to be on that app, to be on Librex and to be on Yic-yac, respectively.

Starting point is 01:33:32 The last thing I'll say is Yic-yac 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. Librex is much more long form, and so the kind of posts that you'll get on Leabrex 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,

Starting point is 01:33:59 a lot more quickly, by posting their thoughts on Leabrex than if they went to their school newspaper. And I think the school in those papers might be a little worried about that, but more importantly, we're connecting people in this way. We're in long form communication with nuance that takes into account everything that's happening in the community, temporally, is really available at Leab Brex and you know, not really communicable in 240 or 480 or whatever the number of characters the acts were bound to. And then you know, I could talk about the history

Starting point is 01:34:33 of the Yickeak if you want me to go further. 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 we had active communities, they had a problem on their hands. And then the high schools come on board. Yeah. I think a lot of the things you said ring true to me, but especially the vision one,

Starting point is 01:34:57 which I do think having a vision in the leadership, having a mission, makes all the difference in the world. Now that's both for the engineers that are building, like the team that's building the app, the moderation, and users, because they kinda, the mission carries itself through the behavior of the people on the social network.

Starting point is 01:35:23 As a small tangent, let me ask you something about, um, parlor, but it's less about parlor and 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, um, I saw AWS as a 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, will you bother by a part of 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 it parlors specifically being taken out of AWS, but more the fact that

Starting point is 01:36:13 something that's like a highway, something that people rely on, that people build on top of, that people assume it's going to be somewhat position agnostic. Like a road that people drive on 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 regard and let developers build on top of their infrastructure and where does that responsibility hold? Yes, it makes you hope that there's going to be, from a capitalistic sense, competitors

Starting point is 01:37:04 to AWS would say like, we're not 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, highway is a good sort of example. It's like if I privately owned highway, exactly, said, 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, you know, yes, but then you have to consider the,

Starting point is 01:37:36 like the slippery slope nature of it, but also like the negative impact on the lives of many others. And what that means for innovation and for like competition again in the 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 a and compute is that layer like it shouldn't be messed with 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 to policy and regulation to step in

Starting point is 01:38:18 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. So yeah, until they rip out 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 slippery slope nature of it, but also 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.

Starting point is 01:39:04 When you're fearful, you don't create. I think we've kind of talked about it a little bit, but I wonder if we can kind of revisit it a little bit. 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 Hernandez for the double murder case. So he takes on these really difficult cases of unpopular figures because he believes like that's the way you test that we believe

Starting point is 01:39:38 in the rule of law. But he was, there's a big protest in Harvard to get him, basically censor him to get him to no longer be faculty dean, all those kinds of things. And it was by minority of students, but there was a huge blowback, obviously, in the public, but also inside Harvard, like, that's not okay. He stands for the very principles of the founding of Harvard and at the principles of the founding of this country and the law and so on. But the basic argument is that

Starting point is 01:40:14 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 on college campuses? Because it feels like the mission of Lieberks 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, within their religious organizations.

Starting point is 01:40:47 I think the problem becomes when the institution starts encouraging or 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 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

Starting point is 01:41:19 education sort of dies. 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 as 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 the slippery slope kind of way, where it means basically anything you wanted to mean. And it basically

Starting point is 01:42:06 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 an 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 harmed is very dangerous and slippery concept. I mean, you don't have to slip that far to see why that's a problem. Once we start, come, come making words into violence, and we start criminalizing words,

Starting point is 01:42:48 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 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. I'll come from the Soviet Union. So there's Well, like in most of us hate and love runs through our blood from our history. You mentioned MIT is being at a tele- Brex. Has it already been added? Yes, it was added today. Today. Okay. So let me ask, this is exciting because I don't know what

Starting point is 01:43:34 your thoughts are about this, but I'll tell you from my perspective, if you're in a lot of MIT folks listen to this, I would love it if you join Lieberks. 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 a topic of Jeffrey Epstein. 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.

Starting point is 01:44:21 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 some faculty that kind of misbehaved a little bit because they're a little bit clueless. That's all looked the other way. Harvard did this much better by the way. They completely.

Starting point is 01:44:53 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 hear what those conversations are because there's conversations in the topic of like 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 various many sets of difficult conversations. And the other topic is, you know, funding for research. Like, how are, like, what are we okay taking money from and what are we not okay taking money from? You know, a lot, there's a lot of just interesting, difficult

Starting point is 01:45:39 conversations to be had. I've worked with people who will, 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 what you're seeing is even more stark this contrast of like, well, what is an 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,

Starting point is 01:46:13 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 sort of complicated journey through academia in the sense that he's a really kind of renegade thinker, many kinds of ways. I'm not sure if you know who Eric is by any chance. I heard the name.

Starting point is 01:46:40 I actually checked out Zav. It was heartening for me to see that I was not the youngest person. On the second youngest. That's hilarious. But Eric has he's kind of a runnygate thinker. He's a mathematical physicist with a believe of PhD in Harvard and he's spent some time at MIT and so on. But he speaks to the fact that sort of there's a culture of conformity and so on. And if you're somebody who's a bit outside the box, a bit weird and 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 interesting that the system kind of wants to make you an outcast,

Starting point is 01:47:25 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 there were very quickly silenced. And I'm troubled by it. I'm not sure what to think of it. Is there's a few threads inside MIT, like on a mailing list, discussing Marvin Minsky. I don't know if you know who that is. He's an AI researcher. He's a seminal figure in AI before your time. But one of the most important people in the history of artificial intelligence, and there was a discussion on a thread that involved the interaction between Marvin Minsky

Starting point is 01:48:18 and Jeffrey Epstein. That conversation was quickly shut down. One person was pushed out of MIT, Richard Stalman, who was one of the key figures in the, because of that, because he wanted some clarity about the situation, but he also, he spoke like we were mentioned earlier without grace, right? But he was quickly punished for the administration

Starting point is 01:48:43 because of a few people protesting. And just that conversation, I guess what bothered me most is it didn't continue. It didn't expand. There was no complexity. And there was a hunger that was clear behind that conversation, especially for me, I'd like to understand Marvin Minsk, he was one of the reasons I wanted to come to MIT. He's passed away, but he's one of the key figures in the field that I deeply care about

Starting point is 01:49:14 artificial intelligence. And I thought that his name was dragged to the mud throughout 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 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 is like, it's conversation.

Starting point is 01:49:43 So in that sense, I'd love if people on Liebrek's perhaps in other places, but it seems like Liebrek's is a nice platform to discuss, Marvin Minsky to discuss, Jeffrey Epstein, to learn from it, to grow from it, to see how we can make MIT better. As 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 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 is a truly special, man.

Starting point is 01:50:15 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 than that's broken. I mean, I don't know if you have something to comment, it doesn't necessarily need to be a bodge, Jeffy Epstein, but there's these difficult things

Starting point is 01:50:37 that come up that test the academic community, right? That it feels like conversation is the only way to resolve it. I think people of a natural need for closure. And it's not just, I'm not as plugged into what academics are talking about as you would be like, but even... In case these days, no respect for Minski. Exactly. I mean, especially in the AI community, I'm not necessarily a programmer. But what I will say is that

Starting point is 01:51:10 people come to Liebrecht 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 a else 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. So just having a conversation is important there. Is it like a big, big, big, big, big, big 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.

Starting point is 01:51:58 Yeah, people need to be able to speak. Yeah, that fear really bothers me. The fear that silences people like where they self censor, where they self silence. Well, I'm, you've created an amazing place, I I'm kind of interested in your struggle and your journey of creating positive incentives. Because it's a problem in a very different domain that I'm also interested in. So I, you know, I love 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.

Starting point is 01:52:50 But 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 through on 2000, um. USCF. So I was a competitive player, especially my age group. And that actually led me to poker. I was, 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 going to end up playing a lot of adults and I ended up playing this mid-40s guy who we played

Starting point is 01:53:26 a really strong game. He actually beat me. I still remember the game and I think, oh, I could actually play that move and so that one. But after the game, we had a post-mortem. It was this me. I think I was 13 at the time in this 40-year-old, like hanging over this chessboard and looking over the moves.

Starting point is 01:53:43 Even at my age, it occurred to me that this guy was absolutely brilliant. And after the post-mortem, not only by the way in chess, but just like in the way here articulates his thoughts as some people are. After the post-mortem, I went and looked him up online. I found out that he was a World Series poker champion. And his name is Bill Chen. Oh wow.

Starting point is 01:54:03 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 for tending that I was gonna 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 should make for his book

Starting point is 01:54:21 and he was like, actually I was thinking of doing the same thing, which is incredibly validating to my 14-year-old or 15-year-old self. But I really haven't cut out a cut up with him, so just shout out to him. And then that he've wrote a book called The Mathematics of Poker, and that I started reading. And that first of all, kickstart my interesting game theory and second of all, Impoker. So I 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, learned a ton about, I mean, I think about entrepreneurship as well as taking risks, reasonable risks, positive expected value risks, and also just growing as a person and mathematician and what did you say Bitcoin poker?

Starting point is 01:55:07 Yeah, what's Bitcoin poker? So you've 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. Going to start playing poker because I wanted I wanted the challenge.

Starting point is 01:55:23 I love the challenge. I love the competition. And I realized the answer is probably Bitcoin because the implications of that. And they had, they had these free-roll tournaments, which for those of you who don't know what free roles 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

Starting point is 01:56:02 Reponents Bitcoin Maximus and like 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 of 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.

Starting point is 01:56:35 Yes, right. 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 feed 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.

Starting point is 01:57:12 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 in terms of their community that's currently struggling a little bit in terms of their ability to communicate in a positive and inspiring way. Like the Bitcoin folks, and we talk about this a lot, they, 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 has been institutions and the centralized powers have been sort of mocking and fighting them for many years that they've become sort of worn down and cynical. So they tend to be a little bit more aggressive and negative on the internet in the way they

Starting point is 01:58:03 communicate, especially on Twitter. And it's just created this whole community of basically being delusive and mocking and trolling and all this kind of stuff. But people are trying to, you know, as the big, cool community grows, as the cryptocurrency community grows, they're trying to revolutionize that aspect too.

Starting point is 01:58:22 So they're trying to find the positive core and grow and grow in that way. So 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 landline. It's like the internet has been around social networks

Starting point is 01:58:39 haven't been around a long way. We're trying to figure this thing out. Let me ask you the ridiculous question. 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, you talk on how you define it. But if you're talking about raw skill,

Starting point is 01:58:56 like if you put everyone across time into a tournament together, Carlson would win. I don't think that's particularly controversial. Oh, you mean like with the same exact skill level? Exactly. Magnus Carlson would win. I don't think that's particularly controversial. Oh, you mean like with the same exact skill level. Exactly. Magnus Carlson. Okay. The object.

Starting point is 01:59:08 Now, if you talk about political importance, I think Bobby Fisher is, you know, he's a, he's the only one that people still would use to go to the street. They know Bobby Fisher because he was because what he represented, right? Who do you think is more famous on the street? Garica Sparrow or Bobby Fisher? Bobbyby fit in America by fishing. 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 part of like young minds playing chess bobby fisher was a superstar

Starting point is 01:59:42 In terms of like the roots. I think so. Because he's American and he stood up against the big bad Russians at the time. Unfortunately, he had a very bad downfall. But for a 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, he was one of those geniuses that 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 McHale Tall.

Starting point is 02:00:20 So like you see you were, I think it was very aggressive, right? Yeah, very tactical. Yeah. Which is funny because I found that I was better at 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 onto as being a creative player, being a creative person.

Starting point is 02:00:40 I mean, just 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 other, because you said poker, is there somebody that stands out to you

Starting point is 02:01:01 so it could be the greatest poker player of all time? Could you admire that? That's a more controversial one because these chess players are such, first of all, there's more an 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, they feel more accessible But they also have like personalities yeah, poker have like fill ID

Starting point is 02:01:31 The devices that quarks they've humor like we I guess we've seen videos of them Yeah, because it's such a recent development. It's a one person who I Admires 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. I would love to have dinner with them. Um, Phil Galfont. Wow. Who I don't most people probably won't know.

Starting point is 02:01:57 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 you this gift that he had learned and distilled by working with some of the greatest poker minds and he just democratized it through his website. And I learned a ton from him. I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites,

Starting point is 02:02:28 and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites,

Starting point is 02:02:44 and I've been to a lot of other websites, and I've been to a lot of other websites, work and you know he's also just a nice fun sociable guy that like you can you can imagine being at your dare table. Yeah. All that combined, which is not true for a lot of poker players, right? I like I really like the what is he Canadian day on the grotto. He's also a nice guy. He's also nice guy, but he's also somebody who's able to express his thoughts about poker really well, but also an entertaining way. He seems to be able to predict cards better than anybody I've ever seen. Like what? Do you watch the challenge?

Starting point is 02:03:14 What challenge? He lost like a million dollars recently to Doug Polk. He lost a million dollars to Doug Polk heads up online. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's awesome to watch these guys work. So I know you're 21. 21, 21. So asking you for advice is a little bit funny, but at the same time not because you've

Starting point is 02:03:42 created a social network. You've created a startup from nothing, 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, and given the fact that 20 years from now, you probably laugh at the advice you're going to give now. Absolutely.

Starting point is 02:04:02 I hope so. If I don't laugh at the advice I give now, something went desperately wrong, right? Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 02:04:24 Yes. Try to keep it as narrow as possible so I can laugh as little as possible when I'm 41 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? 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,

Starting point is 02:04:59 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're 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 the 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.

Starting point is 02:05:34 And I mean, I've talked to at this point, you know, so many experts, experts, so many investors, B.C.s. Experts so many investors be sees So you've been 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 ends the thing when people like I help I help Yellies all the time who asked like I never turned down when a founder asked me to have a conversation I never turned it down. I'm always there for them. And the number one thing I worry about is that at Yale were taught implicitly

Starting point is 02:06:13 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 devastating because that's how innovation dies and you know Yeah, it's intimidating to like you talk that VC who probably made worth a billion dollars. Yeah billion dollars and they're going to tell you

Starting point is 02:06:36 You know all the all the successful startups they helped funders or even just a successful business owner It's going to tell you some advice and it's hard psychologically to think that they might be wrong. Yeah, what you're saying, that's the only way you succeed. That's the only way you're so. That's the only way you're so. If they knew what they were doing,

Starting point is 02:06:55 they would have built it themselves. And what's especially hard is people go, oh, of course, I'll listen to their people's, I'll listen to their advice, but I'll know why it's wrong. And then I'll do my own thing, and that sounds great in the abstract, but sometimes you can't always even put your finger on why they're wrong.

Starting point is 02:07:13 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. Mm-hmm. 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

Starting point is 02:07:32 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 It has been it's been taught for me like as a person who Like I'm very empathetic. So's been tough for me, like as a person who, like I'm very empathetic, so 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. You know?

Starting point is 02:08:06 And like my parents too, that's been a hard one. It's basically acknowledged to myself that you don't know, like 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 as you put it beautifully, it's very difficult to put your finger on exactly why. Because a lot of advice sounds reasonable. That's the worst kind. Yeah. If it sounds

Starting point is 02:08:50 really good, that just means it's an earworm. Like that's like a song that you hear on the radio and then you're like, mm-hmm, 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 it is a bad drug like should be very careful because like You know the things that seem impossible Your every 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

Starting point is 02:09:29 all the ways you can go wrong or marriage, all the divorces that people go through, all the pain of years that you go through 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 is just pat the person in the back and say, go get him, kid. What is it? Good will hunting and went to see about a girl. Yeah. That's a good movie.

Starting point is 02:10:00 I love that movie. But yeah, that's, that's, that's it for 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 nothing in life is worth accomplishing is easy. But I think it's really interesting you make that connection between like,

Starting point is 02:10:20 start of 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, right? And the experts are usually right and you know if you listen to them and you follow their orders you're going to go to a school like Yale. And at a certain point, stops making sense and 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.

Starting point is 02:10:52 Yeah, you know what? That's how I see the education system. The whole point is to guide you to a certain point in your life. And'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 want you to keep following the same path as they're leading you towards. Like they're not going to say your whole job is to eventually rebel. Yeah. That's how revolution 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 certain point, you have to rebel. That could be getting you know,

Starting point is 02:11:40 some of the that could be in your undergrad, that could be high school. Yeah. At any point, one thing that I think played a pretty pivotal role and I've never really mentioned this, he might not even know the person about to tell you about in sort of me actually going out and making LeBREX was that, I was taking this graduate level math class to my sophomore year.

Starting point is 02:12:03 And I met this PhD student who is also in it and had considerable citations and also startup experience. I think he actually ends up being the CTO of a unicorn later on. I've sort of lost touch with him, but we're still Facebook friends. As it is in the 21st century. I was in a class and I was telling him, I really wanna make this thing, but I have no technical background.

Starting point is 02:12:31 And he disguised as computer genius. He worked under Dan Speelman, a Yale son. He's a good guy, right? And we were doing some math together. We were doing something on discrepancy for those of you who really care about math, so commentatorics. And he just turned to me and he's like, I think you could do it. Like, what do you mean? You think I could do? He's like, I think you could do it. And I was like, really? But I respected

Starting point is 02:12:57 this guy so much. His name was Young Duck. Shout out to Young Duck. I respect this guy so much that I was like, if Young Duck says I can do it, and Young Duck is a little bit genius, and he knows, and he knows me. We were in two classes together and we'd spend a lot of time together. If he thinks I can do it, then who might've said I can't do it?

Starting point is 02:13:18 Yeah, that's a lesson for mentorship is like, oh, he has no idea. Probably. Well, and he might not even remember that interaction, which is funny, but the point is that when a crazy young kid comes up to you with a crazy dream, you know, every once in a while, you should just pat him on 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 schoolwork kind of thing. Like that's unreasonable to take that leap. Now, I'll just finish your education, blah, blah, whatever, whatever the reasonable advice is, every once in a while maybe often as a mentor you should

Starting point is 02:14:06 say you know go see about a girl in in California or whatever the equal. That was my moment. That was my good one hunting moment. That's your good little hunting moment man I miss Robin Williams I was a special guy. I people love it 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've read somewhere that had an impact on your life? Video games. Video games. You recommend to others, Minecraft, manual. Manga. I mean, yeah, video, you could mention video games too. If there's something that jumps out to you that just had like an impact.

Starting point is 02:14:54 I guess I'll say, I really like the book, the The War of Art, which is a book about creative resistance and the creative struggle and what it means to be creative. And part of what I see in this conversation and what you're doing Lex is so much of the word of art's idea is that you just keep writing and writing and writing until you get to the new crap. Yeah. Yeah. And you just roll with it, right?

Starting point is 02:15:22 And that's sort of what happens when you have like three hour conversations with people is, 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.

Starting point is 02:15:37 It's really painful. And it's not something I'd recommend for every part of it, but for what it did in my life at the time. It also kind of normalized, but for what it did in my life at the time, it also kind of normalized, I don't know, part of my coming of age story is part of it's about realizing that I'm a creative person and person who needs to create. 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.

Starting point is 02:16:03 Part of it was realizing that even within some of these more rigid structures, 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 exactly right by way of advice, but I think the journey that a lot of creators take by reading that book is kind of profound. He also has another one called training pro, I

Starting point is 02:16:40 think, I mean, he in general, this boss is 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, you know, show up. And so many people. So many people would like tell me like, would encourage me either blatantly or through like means to basically take the app less seriously. It's a good signal, by the way. It's a good signal because my really close friends, the ones who have always supported me, they never said that because they got it. They understood that was my path.

Starting point is 02:17:19 And they might be skeptical. They might be like, I mean, one of my friends, I remember told me like, I was always like taking a back 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

Starting point is 02:17:43 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. There's something that's like unstoppable about the creative mind. It's like, it's right there, that fire.

Starting point is 02:18:02 And I guess 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. But on top of the video games, you mentioned Stanley Parable offline. Is there, you said you played some video games.

Starting point is 02:18:20 Is there a video game that you especially love? Do you recommend I play, for example? Yeah, 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 Rogen, who made the Stanley Parable, which I briefly saw you, I just clicked the video and then I went to sleep

Starting point is 02:18:41 to see who I am. But I briefly saw that you were looking at. And it's a game that is better treated as art. And I think I won't claim to understand the creator, because that would be a cardinal sin to me as a creative person. But it gets to the heart of a lot of the things that we've been talking about, which is the creative mind. The game can be interpreted in a lot of ways in a feminist way.

Starting point is 02:19:15 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 a way too much, is the story of critics versus a creative. The way I like to interpret it, and I don't wanna give out a way 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.

Starting point is 02:19:41 So almost, it's almost a theory. 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 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?

Starting point is 02:20:04 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? Good, I could have this in. Fascinating attention, which reminds me about the Diccus question every once in a while, ask about meaning and death. So this whole right ends.

Starting point is 02:20:28 You're at the beginning of the ride, but it could end any day, actually, that's kind of the way human life works. You could die today, you could die tomorrow. 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

Starting point is 02:20:47 a pragmatist too, as running a startup, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Yeah, so on mortality, right? About, about three years ago, four years ago now, About three years ago, four years ago now, I was excited to go to Yale. I was playing six hours of squash a day, which squashes the sport I love so much. I was really getting a lot better and I was even thinking I could maybe walk onto the Yale team. I woke up one day, I felt really, really sick. I went and I decided not to go to squash that day. And I know, I wanted to, I almost did.

Starting point is 02:21:35 And you'll see how the story turns out. 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. Or I had to get my driver's license, I had to get my driver's license, I wanted 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. And I'm going back and I successfully got my driver's license, brasham, and 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

Starting point is 02:22:09 and feeling really sick. So the point where I even like asked my mom who is a doctor, I'm like, should I go to the hospital and she's like, you can just wait it out. I'm sure you'll go better. You're healthy now. Like your mom. Yeah. 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, mom, I think, and she's like, yeah, where's to go? And so I go there and they're like, you've scarlet fever. And they're like, there's nothing we can do.

Starting point is 02:22:39 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 of like 3am, they'll 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 very disconcerting when you have a, because we're all used to different sorts of pain, right? And that was sort of pain out, never felt before. I suppose an athlete, you're used to like, you know what I mean. So I tell my parents and immediately we hop back in the car,

Starting point is 02:23:09 we go 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. And I'm like, no, you don't understand. I have like a pain in my chest.

Starting point is 02:23:21 And then they let me in. They start doing tests on me. They put something like in my back, which is really scarce, 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's definitely very scary in the moment. Shocking and scary. And they go and they do a bunch of tests and they determine that a virus like attacked my heart and I had my Acroditis and pericarditis and they said I had maybe 25 to 35% chance at one point of dying and

Starting point is 02:23:57 so I'm sitting in my I they made me into hospital. I'm in the bed in my bed for about three weeks 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,

Starting point is 02:24:28 and when I leaned back, I felt it, touched my ribcage 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 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'd like refused to take in anything

Starting point is 02:24:49 into my body that wasn't natural. And so a lot of the time I tried to be unmedicated. Eventually I didn't allow them to add a little medication into my body, but there's just so much uncertainty and pain and the first time I had to come to terms with mortality. First of all, I think you still should have gone play squash. I mean, come on.

Starting point is 02:25:11 I thought you were serious about this. You still carry that with you. Sort of. The there is power to realizing the ride can end, right? Very suddenly. Very suddenly, yeah. And painfully. And, you know, it has pragmatic application to like what you, to trajectories you take

Starting point is 02:25:38 to 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 Yale, they put me in a medical single alone, and I have to get shuttled to all my classes. I have to ask a few professors to even move classes so I could actually get there. I can't move my book, I can't lift my book bags,

Starting point is 02:26:04 I can't lift my book bags, I can't walk upstairs. I spent like 12 hours a day in my dorm room, just like staring at the walls, and more than that, all this like, I got to watch my body deteriorate and like the muscle like fall off of it because I was taking these pills and they're kind of catabolic. And for an 18-year-old, I mean I think every 18-year-old has feelings about their body, man or woman, and you know just seeing this it's like you're watching sort of dress death transpire and you're also very fatigued because your heart's not at peak condition. And you're thinking about the future.

Starting point is 02:26:49 And a lot of the things you enjoy have kind of been stripped away from you. And I took a meditation practice, like started with like five minutes a day. My peak I was at like 40 minutes a day, kept it up consistently for about two years. 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, try

Starting point is 02:27:19 it? I think I realize that, you know, there's an, 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 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

Starting point is 02:27:50 and to come out on the other end. Now, man, that's amazing. I did not realize that there was a long-term struggle. I think that's in the end, if you do succeed, we'll have a profound positive impact because struggles ultimately like humbling, but also empowering.

Starting point is 02:28:11 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 the meaning of life for you, the meaning of life for us to send us evapes 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, 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.

Starting point is 02:28:48 And sometimes I think it's accepting that or even just parsing the phrase and thinking about the meaning of life. I sometimes look, I'm very young. Again, I hope that anything I say now is going to be very different in the future because I think meaning life has so many meanings that it'll be crazy to see what I think in 20 years about the meaning of life. Yeah, rise from the future, cut them some slack. Please do. Respective. Respective.

Starting point is 02:29:20 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 in the digital space, right? Yeah, that's the same kind of magic from from what I understand about what you're trying to create in the digital space, right? That's the same kind of magic. From what I understand about what you're trying to create is the same reason I fell in love with the long form podcast thing like as a fan.

Starting point is 02:29:54 That's why I listen to long form podcasts. Is there something deeply human and genuine about the interchange through the 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 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 the words, but a lot of who you are through those words and create real connection. So I hope you succeed there. And listen, Ryan, I think this is an incredible conversation.

Starting point is 02:30:45 I'm glad that people like you are fighting the good fight for 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.

Starting point is 02:31:09 Thank you for having me. Bam. Psh. Psh. How many finger guns have you gotten at the end of the podcast? Zero. Two now. Thanks for listening to this conversation

Starting point is 02:31:21 with Ryan Schiller. And thank you to all 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.

Lex Fridman Podcast - #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.