Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Ryan Schiller, creator of Librex, an anonymous

00:00:05.520 | discussion feed for college communities starting at first with Yale, then the Ivy Leagues, and now

00:00:11.440 | adding Stanford and MIT. Their mission is to give students a place to explore ideas and issues

00:00:18.560 | in a positive way, but with much more personal and intellectual freedom than has defined college

00:00:24.880 | campuses in recent history. I think this is a very difficult but worthy project. Quick thank you to

00:00:31.760 | our sponsors, Allform, Magic Spoon, BetterHelp, and Brave. Click their links to support this podcast.

00:00:39.360 | As a side note, let me say that Ryan is a young entrepreneur and genuine human being who quickly

00:00:46.560 | won me over. He's inspiring in many ways, both in the struggle he had to overcome in his personal

00:00:52.800 | life, but also in the fact that he did not know how to code, but saw a problem in this world,

00:00:59.440 | in his community, that he cared about. And for that, he learned to code and built a solution

00:01:05.600 | in the best way he knew how. That's an important reminder for us humans. Let us not only complain

00:01:11.840 | about the problems in the world, let us fix them. I also have to say that there's passion in Ryan's

00:01:18.160 | eyes for really wanting to make a difference in the world. His story, his effort gives me hope for

00:01:24.400 | the future. There is hate in this world, but I believe there's much more love. And I believe

00:01:30.400 | it's possible to build online platforms that connect us through our common humanity as we

00:01:36.400 | explore difficult, personal, even painful ideas together. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,

00:01:44.320 | and here is my conversation with Ryan Schiller. Let's start with the basics. What is Librex?

00:01:51.040 | What are its founding story and founding principles? And looking to the future,

00:01:57.200 | what do you hope to achieve with Librex? - Sure, let me break that down. So what is Librex?

00:02:01.920 | Librex is an anonymous discussion feed for college campuses. It's a place where people

00:02:07.440 | can have important and unfettered discussions and open discourse about topics they care about,

00:02:13.440 | ideas that matter. And they can do all of that completely anonymously with verified members of

00:02:18.320 | their college community. And we exist both on each Ivy League campus and we have an inter-Ivy

00:02:25.520 | community. And actually this week we just opened to MIT and Stanford. - No, really? MIT? Yes.

00:02:33.040 | - And Stanford. So we have MIT and Stanford communities, and I expect you to sign up for

00:02:37.600 | your MIT account and start posting. - What are, for people who are not familiar like me actually,

00:02:43.680 | which are the Ivy Leagues? - Sure. So we started at Yale, which is my,

00:02:48.240 | I don't know, can you call it alma mater? Because I haven't technically graduated.

00:02:52.480 | - Yeah. What's that called when you're actually still there? My university.

00:02:57.040 | - Yeah, I guess we'll just call it home. That's my home.

00:03:00.240 | - Educational home. - Started at my educational home of Yale,

00:03:03.280 | and then we moved to, and we could get into the story of this eventually if you'd like.

00:03:08.880 | And then we went to Dartmouth and then quarantine hit. We opened to the rest of the Ivy League.

00:03:15.200 | And now we have, and the Ivy League for those who don't know is Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth,

00:03:21.920 | Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and Penn. I got it all in one breath. - What's the youngest Ivy League,

00:03:28.240 | Penn? No, Columbia. - I can't say it on camera.

00:03:32.720 | - We'll edit it in post. I don't know. - I'll just say each of all eight of them,

00:03:37.200 | and then you can just like get it in. - Yeah.

00:03:40.320 | - Like Penn, Harvard. - There's actually a really nice

00:03:42.960 | software that people should check out, like a service, it's using machine learning really nicely

00:03:47.840 | for podcast editing, where you can, it learns the voice of the speaker and it can change the words

00:03:56.880 | you said. - It's like some deep fake stuff.

00:03:58.560 | - It's deep fake, but for positive applications. It's very interesting. It's like the only deep

00:04:03.200 | fake positive applications I see. - I have a friend who's obsessed with

00:04:06.000 | deep fakes. What's great about, I think, deep fakes is that it's gonna do the opposite of sort

00:04:11.440 | of what's happening with our culture, where everyone will have plausible deniability.

00:04:15.120 | - Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the hope for me is there's so many fake things out there

00:04:22.320 | that we're going to actually be much more skeptical and think and take in multiple sources

00:04:29.040 | and actually like reason, like use common sense and use deep thinking to understand what is true

00:04:35.360 | and what is not. Because we used to have traditional sources like the New York Times

00:04:41.200 | and all these kinds of publications that had a reputation, there are these institutions,

00:04:46.000 | and they're the source of truth. And when you no longer can trust anything as a source of truth,

00:04:50.960 | you start to think on your own. That gets part of the individual. That takes us way back to

00:04:56.240 | where I came from, the Soviet Union, where you can't really trust any one source of news.

00:05:00.720 | You have to think on your own. You have to talk to your friends.

00:05:03.360 | - Tremendous amount of intellectual autonomy, don't you think? Think about the societal

00:05:08.080 | consequences. - Absolutely. I mean,

00:05:09.920 | we see so much decentralization in all aspects of our digital lives now, but this is like

00:05:16.480 | the decentralization of thought. You could say it's sadly, or I don't think it's sad,

00:05:24.240 | is decentralization of truth, where truth is a clustering thing, where you have this point cloud

00:05:31.520 | of people just swimming around, like billions of them, and they all have certain ideas. And what's

00:05:38.720 | thought of as truth is almost like a clustering algorithm when you just get a bunch of people

00:05:44.000 | that believe the same thing, that's truth. But there's also another truth, and there may be

00:05:48.640 | multiple truths, and it's almost, it would be like a battle of truths. Maybe even the idea of truth

00:05:55.440 | will lessen its power in society, that there is such a thing as a truth. 'Cause the downside of

00:06:02.320 | saying something is true is, it's almost the downside of what people, religious people,

00:06:09.360 | call scientism, which is like, once science has declared something as true, you can't no longer

00:06:16.480 | question it. But the reality is, science is a moving mechanism. You're constantly questioning,

00:06:21.840 | you're constantly questioning, and maybe truth should be renamed as a process, not a final

00:06:31.200 | destination. The whole point is to keep questioning, keep questioning, keep discovering.

00:06:35.440 | >> Kind of like we're going backwards in time to back when people were sort of

00:06:42.240 | finding their identities and we were less globalized, right? People would get together,

00:06:47.840 | and they'd get together around a common value system, common morals, and a common place.

00:06:52.240 | And those would be sort of these clusters of their truth, right? And so we have all these different

00:06:57.200 | civilizations and societies across the world that created their own truths. We talk about the Jews

00:07:03.040 | and the Talmud and Torah, we can look at Buddhist texts, we can look at all sorts of different

00:07:08.080 | truths and how many of them get at the same things, but many of them have different ideas

00:07:12.640 | or different articulations. >> Yeah, Harari and Sapiens rewinds that even farther back into like

00:07:18.240 | caveman times. That's the thing that made us humans special, is we can develop these clusters

00:07:23.200 | of ideas, hold them in our minds through stories, pass them on to each other, and it grows and grows,

00:07:28.480 | and finally we have Bitcoin. Which money is another belief system that has power only because

00:07:38.240 | we believe in it. And is that truth? I don't know, but it has power. It's carried in the minds of

00:07:45.280 | millions and thereby has power. But back to Librex. So what's the founding story, what's the

00:07:53.680 | founding principles of Librex? >> Sure. So I was on campus as a freshman and I was talking to my

00:08:00.000 | friends. Many of them felt like it was hard to raise your hand in class to ask a question. They

00:08:06.320 | really felt like even outside the classroom it was hard to be vulnerable. And the thing you have to

00:08:10.160 | understand about Yale is it's not that big a place. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows

00:08:15.600 | you basically. And people come to these schools, first of all, they're home for people and they

00:08:21.760 | want to be themselves. They want to feel like they can be authentic. They want to make real

00:08:24.640 | friendships. And second of all, it's a place where people go for intellectual vitality to

00:08:29.520 | explore important ideas and to grow as thinkers. And fortunately due to the culture, my friends

00:08:37.280 | expressed that it was very difficult to do that and I felt it too. And then I go and talk to my

00:08:42.320 | professors and I remember I talked to one specific global affairs professor and I was taking his

00:08:48.160 | class and his area of expertise was in the Middle Eastern conflict. And I went to him and I said,

00:08:53.200 | "Professor, we're almost finished this class and we haven't even gotten to sort of... The reason I

00:08:59.440 | originally wanted to take the class was to hear about your perspective on the Middle Eastern

00:09:02.880 | conflict." Because something I'd learned at Yale, and this is maybe a sort of a tangent, but I'll

00:09:07.360 | flesh it out a bit. Something I'd learned at Yale is that you can learn all sorts of things from a

00:09:12.000 | textbook and what you kind of go to Yale to do is to get the opinions of the experts that go

00:09:17.920 | beyond the textbook and to have those more in-depth conversations. And so that's sort of

00:09:22.320 | the added value of going to a place like Yale and taking a course there as opposed to just reading

00:09:26.560 | a textbook. - But also interact with that opinion. - Exactly. - In person, yeah. - To interact with

00:09:31.200 | that opinion, to hear it, to respond to it, to push back on it and to have that with some great

00:09:37.440 | minds. And there really are great minds at Yale, don't get me wrong. It's still a place of tremendous

00:09:42.880 | brilliance. So I'm talking to this professor, right? And I'm like, "I haven't heard your area

00:09:48.240 | of expertise." And I'm like, "Are we going to get to it? What's the deal?" And this is during office

00:09:53.760 | hours, mind you. So we're one-on-one. He says, "Ryan, to be honest, I used to teach this area

00:09:59.440 | every single year. In fact, I would do a section on it, which is like a small seminar, like break

00:10:03.840 | away from the class where he would talk to the students in small groups and explain his perspective,

00:10:10.000 | his research, and have a real debate about it, like around a Harkness table." And he said, "I

00:10:15.680 | used to do this. And then about two years ago, a student reported me to the school and I realized

00:10:22.800 | my job was at risk. And I realized the best course of action was basically just not to broach the

00:10:28.400 | topic. And so now I just don't even mention it." And he's like, "You can say whatever you want, but

00:10:35.760 | I'm not going to be a part of it." And it's a real shame. It's a real loss to all of the students

00:10:40.880 | who I think came to the school to learn from these brilliant professors. - In that context of these

00:10:48.560 | world experts, the problem seems to be that reporting mechanism where there's a disproportionate

00:10:56.480 | power to a complaint of a young student, a complaint that an idea is painful or an idea

00:11:04.640 | is disrespectful to, or ideas creating an unsafe space. And the conclusion of that, I mean, I'm not

00:11:13.200 | sure what to do with that because it's a single reporting, maybe a couple, but that has more power

00:11:20.400 | than the idea itself. And that's strange. I don't know how to fix that in the administration,

00:11:27.120 | except to fire everybody. So this is to push back against this storyline that academia is

00:11:33.520 | somehow fundamentally broken. I think we have to separate a lot of things out.

00:11:37.680 | Like one is you have to look at faculty and you have to look at the administration.

00:11:43.840 | And like at MIT, for example, the administration tries to do well, but they're the ones that often

00:11:54.400 | lack courage. They're often the ones who are the source of the problem. When people criticize

00:12:00.640 | academia, and I'll just speak to myself, I'm willing to take heat for this, is they really

00:12:08.160 | are criticizing the administration, not the faculty, because the faculty oftentimes are the

00:12:14.560 | most brilliant, the boldest thinkers that you think. Whenever you talk about, we need the truth

00:12:22.160 | to be spoken, the faculty are often the ones who are in the possession of the deepest truths in

00:12:27.600 | their mind. And in that sense, and they also have the capacity to truly educate in the way that

00:12:32.960 | you're saying. And so it's not broken fundamentally, but there's stuff that's not

00:12:41.040 | working that well and needs to be fixed. - You kind of took my words. That's what I

00:12:44.560 | thought you were gonna ask me if I think the Ivy League is broken. That's totally,

00:12:48.080 | that's exactly it. - So you don't think, yeah. So on the

00:12:50.400 | question, do you think the Ivy League is broken, how do you think about it? The academia in general,

00:12:55.680 | I suppose, but Ivy League still, I think it represents some of the best qualities of academia.

00:13:00.720 | - Yeah, what more is there to say there? I think the Ivy League is producing tremendous

00:13:04.800 | thinkers to this day. I think the culture has a lot that can be improved, but I have a lot of

00:13:11.040 | faith in the people who are in these institutions. I think, like you said, the administration,

00:13:15.600 | and I have to be a little careful because I've been in some of these committees and I have talked

00:13:22.000 | to the administration about these sorts of things. I think they have a lot of stakeholders,

00:13:26.240 | and unfortunately it makes it difficult for them to always serve these brilliant faculty and the

00:13:32.560 | students in the way that they would probably like to. - Yeah, okay, so this is me speaking,

00:13:37.520 | right? The administration, I know the people, and they're oftentimes the faculty holding positions

00:13:42.960 | in these committees, right? - Yes.

00:13:44.400 | - But it's in the role of quote-unquote service, they're trying to do well. They're trying to do

00:13:53.760 | good, but I think you could say the mechanism is not working, but I could also say my personal

00:14:02.000 | opinion is they lack courage, and one, courage, and two, grace when they walk through the fire.

00:14:15.280 | So courage is stepping into the fire, and grace when you walk through the fire is like maintaining

00:14:24.080 | that, as opposed to being rude and insensitive to the lived quote-unquote experience of others,

00:14:32.880 | or just not eloquent at all, as you step in and take the courageous step of saying the difficult

00:14:40.240 | thing, doing it well, doing it skillfully. So both of those are important, the courage and the skill

00:14:45.920 | to communicate difficult ideas, and they often lack them because they weren't trained for it,

00:14:51.120 | I think. So you can blame the mechanisms that allow 19, 20-year-old students to have more power

00:14:58.640 | than the entire faculty, or you could just say that the faculty need to step up and grow some guts

00:15:04.560 | and skill of graceful communication. - And really administration.

00:15:08.000 | - Well, yeah, and the administration, that's right, that's the administration.

00:15:13.040 | - 'Cause the faculty are sometimes some of the most brave, outspoken people

00:15:18.000 | within the bounds of their career. - Yeah, so that's like the founding

00:15:26.960 | kind of spark of a fire that led you to then say, "Okay, so how can I help?"

00:15:33.440 | - Yeah, and I explored a lot, I explored a lot of options. I wrote many articles to my friends,

00:15:39.200 | talked to them, and I realized it sort of needed to be a cultural change, sort of needed to be

00:15:43.440 | bottom-up, grassroots, something. I knew the energy was there because you just look at the

00:15:51.440 | most recent institutional assessment from Yale, this was basically the number one thing that

00:15:56.960 | students, faculty, and alumni all pointed to, to the administration, was cultivating more

00:16:02.560 | conversations on campus and more difficult conversations on campus. So the people on

00:16:07.360 | campus know it. And you look at a Gallup poll, 61% of students on Ivy League campuses are afraid to

00:16:17.760 | speak their minds because of the campus culture. The campus culture is causing a sort of freezing

00:16:25.520 | effect on discourse. - Can you pause on that again?

00:16:27.920 | So what percentage of students feel afraid to speak their mind?

00:16:31.360 | - 61% nationally. And you're talking about places, nothing like the Ivy League, where I'd say,

00:16:39.040 | I'd imagine it would be even worse because of just the way that these communities kind of come

00:16:45.920 | about and the sorts of people who are attracted or are invited to these sorts of communities.

00:16:50.880 | That's nationwide, that college students, and it's going up, that college students are afraid to

00:16:57.680 | say what they believe because of their campus climate. So it's a majority. It's not a conservative

00:17:03.360 | thing, it's not a liberal thing, it's a group thing. We're all feeling it. The majority of

00:17:07.840 | us are feeling it. - And basically,

00:17:08.960 | you don't even necessarily need to have anything to say, you just have a fear.

00:17:16.400 | - That's right. - So when you're teaching,

00:17:19.200 | metaphor is a really powerful thing to explain. And there's just the caution that you feel that's

00:17:26.320 | just horrible for humor. Now, comedians have the freedom to just talk shit, which is why I really

00:17:32.000 | appreciate somebody who's been a friend recently, Tim Dillon, who gives zero, pardon my French,

00:17:39.760 | fucks about anything, which is very liberating, very important person to just tear down the

00:17:46.000 | powerful. But inside the academia, as an educator, as a teacher, as a professor, you don't have the

00:17:53.600 | same freedom. So that fear is felt, I guess, by a majority of students. - And you were getting

00:17:59.360 | at something there too, which is that if you're afraid to speak metaphorically, if you're afraid

00:18:04.960 | to speak imprecisely, it can be very difficult to actually think at all and to think to the

00:18:10.800 | extremities of what you're capable of. Because these are the mechanisms we use when we don't

00:18:15.600 | have quite the precise mathematical language to quite pinpoint what we're talking about yet.

00:18:20.160 | This is the beginning. This is the creative step that leads to new knowledge. And so that really

00:18:25.440 | scares me is that if I'm not allowed to sort of excavate these things, these ideas with people

00:18:31.040 | in the sort of messy, sloppy way that we do as humans when we're first being creative,

00:18:34.720 | are we going to be able to continue to innovate? Are we going to continue to be able to learn?

00:18:39.600 | That's what really starts to scare me. - So you've explored a bunch of different ideas. You

00:18:44.960 | wrote a bunch of different stuff. How did Librex come about? - Basically, it came to me that it had

00:18:51.920 | to be kind of a grassroots movement and it had to be something that changed culturally. And it had

00:18:56.400 | to be relatively personal. People meeting people. People finding out that, "No, I'm not the only one

00:19:02.880 | on campus who feels this way. I feel alone, and there are a lot of other people who feel alone.

00:19:08.640 | I believe this thing, and it's not as unpopular as I thought." Basically creating heterodoxy of

00:19:16.320 | thought. And it's creating that moment where you realize that your politics are personal and that

00:19:22.800 | your politics are shared by a lot of people on campus. And so I just started coding it. I didn't

00:19:29.280 | have much coding experience, but went head first in and figured how hard could it be? - I mean,

00:19:37.040 | this is really fascinating. So I talked to a lot of software engineers, AI people. Obviously,

00:19:42.000 | that's where my passion, my interests are. My focus has been throughout my life. The fascinating

00:19:49.200 | thing about your story, I think it should be truly inspiring to people that want to change the world,

00:19:55.760 | is that you don't have a background in programming. You don't have even maybe a technical

00:20:01.520 | background. So you saw a problem, you explored different ideas, and then you just decided you're

00:20:10.400 | going to learn how to build an app without a technical background. You didn't try to...

00:20:16.720 | That's so bold. That is so beautiful, man. Can you take me through the journey of deciding to

00:20:25.680 | do that, of learning to program without a programming background, and building the app?

00:20:31.120 | Detail, what do you actually... How do you start? - Sure. I mean, you want to buy a Mac. I learned

00:20:38.560 | you had to buy a Mac. I'm just going to go step by step, right? I'll be as dumb as possible.

00:20:42.720 | It was truly leading by your feet. - So you needed a computer for this. - Oh yeah, I had a PC at the

00:20:50.800 | time, and I was Android at the time. And I realized it should be like an iOS app. And so

00:20:56.320 | that was a decision. But I knew kids these days, they're always on their phone. And I wanted you

00:21:02.720 | to be able to say a passing thought in class, make a passing... You're walking around and you have a

00:21:08.400 | thought and you can express it. Or you're in the dining hall and you have your phone out, you can

00:21:12.000 | express it. So it was clear to me it should be an iOS app. - By the way, Android is great.

00:21:17.520 | Definitely check that out. - We also are now available on Android, but we'll get there

00:21:20.880 | for the Android users from MIT, Stanford, or the Ivy League. So back to how it happened. So I

00:21:27.920 | realized I needed a Mac. So went out and got a Mac. And I realized I needed an iPhone for testing

00:21:34.400 | eventually. Got an iPhone. So those were the real robot blocks to start with. From there, I mean,

00:21:41.520 | there's almost too much information out there about programming. The question is like, where do

00:21:45.520 | you start and what's going to be useful to you? And my first thought was I should look at some

00:21:52.640 | Yale classes, but it became very clear very quickly that that was not the right place to start.

00:21:56.640 | That would probably be the right place to start if I wanted to get a job at Amazon, but my goal

00:22:02.320 | was slightly different. And I definitely had it in mind that what I was trying to make was I'm

00:22:08.480 | trying to prove out an idea. I'm not trying to make a finished product. I'm just trying to get

00:22:12.480 | to the first step. Because I figured if I keep getting to the next step, at least I won't die

00:22:20.400 | now. At least things will move forward. I'll learn new things. Maybe I'll meet new people.

00:22:25.440 | I'll show a degree of seriousness about what I'm doing, and things will come together. And that is,

00:22:30.240 | as you'll see, what ends up happening. So I start with Swift, right? And I find this video from the

00:22:36.560 | Stanford professor that had a million views that was like, how to make basically Swift apps perfect.

00:22:41.840 | - And you just like, so you got this Mac and you went like, go to google.com and you type in--

00:22:48.400 | - Download Xcode.

00:22:49.200 | - Xcode.

00:22:50.160 | - Yeah, and then I type it on YouTube like, Stanford iOS Swift, enter. First YouTube video

00:22:58.080 | has a million views. I'm like, it has to be good at Stanford, has a million views.

00:23:01.520 | I got lucky. I mean, that turned out to be a very good video.

00:23:06.000 | - And it's basically like introductory course to Swift.

00:23:08.880 | - Yeah, I mean, you say introductory. I think most of the people in that class

00:23:12.640 | probably had a much better background than I did.

00:23:15.600 | - They're software developers probably. They're computer scientists.

00:23:18.480 | - And it was slow for me. I don't think I realized it fully at the time, just how far behind I was

00:23:24.000 | from the rest of the class. 'Cause I was like, wow, it seems like people are picking this up

00:23:27.520 | really quickly. So it took a little longer and a lot of time on Stack Overflow. But eventually I

00:23:33.600 | made a truly minimal viable product. The most minimal, like we're talking, put text on screen,

00:23:40.400 | add text to screen, comment on top of text, make a post, make a response. And anyone with a Yale

00:23:49.120 | email can do this. And you plug it into a cloud server and you verify people's accounts and you're

00:23:58.400 | off. You have--

00:23:59.040 | - You have to figure out how to, like the whole idea of like having an account. So there's a

00:24:04.400 | permanence, like you can create an account with an email.

00:24:07.920 | - Verify it.

00:24:08.800 | - Verify it. Okay. So that's not, you know--

00:24:12.160 | - And that's literally how I thought about it, right? Like, so what do I need to do? And I'm

00:24:15.520 | like, well, first thing I need is a login page. And I'm like, how to make a login page in Swift?

00:24:21.120 | I mean, it's that easy. If someone, this has been done before, of course--

00:24:24.560 | - And then the first page that pops up was probably a pretty damn good page when you--

00:24:28.000 | - It wasn't that bad. It wasn't perfect, but like maybe it got me 80% of the way there.

00:24:32.560 | - Yeah.

00:24:32.880 | - And then I came into some bugs and then, you know, I asked Stack Overflow a few questions

00:24:37.360 | and then I got a little further and then I found some more bugs. And then I'm like,

00:24:41.680 | maybe this isn't the right way to do it. Maybe I should do it this way. And I'm sure my code

00:24:45.280 | isn't great, but the goal isn't to make great code. The goal wasn't to make scalable code.

00:24:49.440 | It was to understand, is this something my friends will use? Like, what is the reaction

00:24:54.560 | going to be if I put it in their hands? And am I capable of making this thing?

00:24:58.240 | - That's awesome. And so you're just focusing on the experience, like actually just really

00:25:03.760 | driving towards that first step, figuring out the first step and really driving towards it.

00:25:08.240 | Of course, you have to also figure out like this concept of like storage, like database.

00:25:13.360 | - You know something funny?

00:25:14.480 | - What's that?

00:25:15.040 | - I just made the database structure with no knowledge of databases whatsoever.

00:25:19.280 | And I start showing it to my friends who have an experience in CS and they're like,

00:25:23.360 | you used a heap, that's so interesting. You're like, why did you decide to store it in this way?

00:25:28.320 | I'm like, bro, I don't even know what a heap is. I just did it 'cause it works. Like,

00:25:34.880 | I'm trying to make calls and stuff. And they're like, yeah, they're like,

00:25:38.000 | the hierarchy is really like, and I'm like, what?

00:25:40.000 | - Well, there's a deep, profound lesson in there that I don't know how much you've interacted

00:25:44.880 | with computer science people since, but they tend to optimize and have these kinds of discussions.

00:25:49.760 | And what results is over-optimization. It's like worrying, is this really the right way to do it?

00:25:55.600 | And then you go, as opposed to doing the first thing on Stack Overflow, you go down this like

00:26:00.640 | rabbit hole of what's the actual proper way to do it. And then you're like, you wake up five years

00:26:06.960 | later working on Amazon because you've never finished the login page. Like, it's kind of

00:26:13.120 | hilarious, but that's a really deep lesson. Like, just get it done. And there's like, what's a heap,

00:26:20.880 | bro? Is the right, that should be a T-shirt. That's really the right approach to building

00:26:27.520 | something that ultimately creates an experience. And then you iterate eventually. That's how some

00:26:34.880 | of the greatest software products in this world have been built, is you create it quickly and

00:26:39.920 | then just iterate. What was, by the way, in your mind, the thing that you were chasing as a

00:26:45.360 | prototype? Like, what was the first step that it feels like something is working?

00:26:52.000 | Like, is it you interacting with another friend? - Yeah, I think the first step was like,

00:26:58.720 | it's one thing to tell someone about an idea, but it's another thing to put in their hands and kind

00:27:03.600 | of see the way their eyes kind of look. And when I'd go, I'd walk around cross campus, which is

00:27:12.000 | part of Yale, and I'd literally just go up to people and run up to them and be like, try this,

00:27:15.840 | try this, you gotta try this. This is pre-quarantine, by the way, of course. This would

00:27:18.800 | never be the same post-quarantine, but like, you gotta try this, you gotta try this. Like, what is

00:27:22.560 | it? And I'd be like, and I'd explain, it's like an anonymous discussion feed for our Yale campus.

00:27:26.640 | And you'd see their gears turning and they just, some people would be like, not interested. I'm

00:27:32.640 | like, fine, not your target demographic, I get it, you'll come eventually. But some people,

00:27:37.440 | like, you could see it, they got it. They're like, yes. And that's when I was like, okay, okay,

00:27:44.160 | there is, and you don't need, I mean, you don't need 50% of people to like it. You need what,

00:27:51.040 | 5%, 10% to love it, and then they'll tell 5%, 10%. - Yeah, word of mouth, yeah. - And you're good.

00:27:59.360 | Of course, the first version was very, very crappy, but seeing people trying, despite all

00:28:03.920 | the crappiness, it was sort of enough to be the first step. And since then, all of my code's been

00:28:09.920 | stripped out. I now have friends who basically have told me, don't bother with the coding part,

00:28:16.000 | you do the rest, you just make sure that we can code, because they wanna code. Great. I mean,

00:28:20.320 | I'm not an engineer. I never intended to be an engineer, and there's a lot to do that's

00:28:23.760 | not engineering. But the point was just to validate the idea, so to speak. - When was the moment that

00:28:31.120 | you felt like, we've created something special? Maybe a moment where you're proud of that this is,

00:28:38.800 | this has the potential to actually be the very implementation of the idea that I initially had.

00:28:48.160 | - There's so many little moments. And I bet there'll still be moments in the future that make

00:28:55.680 | it hard to totally say. - Yeah, we should say this is still

00:29:00.880 | the very early days of LibreX. - Yeah. It's literally been a year.

00:29:05.280 | - It's only been a year? - Since we've had actual,

00:29:07.200 | a lot of people on the app, yeah, about a year. - Oh, wow, okay.

00:29:10.080 | - I mean, there's some crazy moments. I could talk about going to Dartmouth, 'cause it's one thing to

00:29:15.280 | get some traction at your school. People know you, and it's your school. It's another thing to go to

00:29:22.240 | another school where no one knows you and sign up 90% of the campus overnight.

00:29:27.120 | - Wow, so tell me that story. You're invading another territory.

00:29:31.520 | - It was literally like that. - Did you buy a Dartmouth sweatshirt?

00:29:35.520 | - Purposely, I didn't want to fraud anyone, but I was purposefully non-descript in my clothing.

00:29:42.000 | Yeah, no Yale stuff, no Dartmouth stuff, just blended. I'll go back there. So what happened was

00:29:49.680 | this was like March of last year, so almost a year ago today. And I really wanted to see if we could

00:29:59.600 | go from sort of one campus to two campuses. So I didn't know anyone at Dartmouth's campus, but I

00:30:07.280 | kind of had some cold emails, some warm-ish emails. And I went to people and I was like,

00:30:15.680 | basically, can I sleep on your floor for two days during finals period? I had a lot of people who

00:30:20.560 | said, this is crazy, like no one wants to download an app during finals period, a social app during

00:30:25.360 | finals period. But I emailed a few people, I was like, can I sleep on your floor? And one of them

00:30:31.760 | was crazy enough to say, sure, come to my dorm, I have a nice floor. And he ended up, today he's

00:30:38.880 | still really close, he's a really close friend. But anyway, I take a train knowing nothing about

00:30:44.240 | this guy besides his first and last name. And I arrive and Dartmouth is really, really remote,

00:30:52.480 | way more remote than you think to the point where I'm like, he's like, he warned me, he's a really

00:30:58.560 | hospitable guy. He warned me like, it's gonna be hard to get to campus from the train station

00:31:02.560 | because it's really remote. And I'm like, I'm sure it's fine, I'll just get an Uber. There are no

00:31:06.800 | Ubers in Hanover. What do you think this is? - It's New Hampshire. So Connecticut, I mean,

00:31:13.520 | Yale is pretty remote as well, no? - Yeah, Yale is, well, I mean,

00:31:18.000 | Yale's in New Haven, which is a real city. It has Ubers, it has food, it has culture,

00:31:23.120 | it has a nightclub even. Like we're talking about a real city, like it's not New York,

00:31:27.360 | it's not Philadelphia where I'm from, but it's a city. New Hampshire is something very different.

00:31:33.200 | - Yeah, beautiful campus, I'm sure. - Beautiful, oh my gosh, I could talk

00:31:37.440 | so much about, I was blown away by Dartmouth. I started wondering like why I didn't apply

00:31:42.880 | legitimately. Between the people and the culture, it was a beautiful vacation. So I arrived there,

00:31:50.800 | no Uber, but eventually I call this guy who's like the only guy who can get you to Dartmouth

00:31:55.520 | and it takes a couple hours, but we get there. I sleep on this guy's floor, I wake up, I ask him

00:32:00.720 | if there's any printing. He's like, "Oh, Dartmouth happens to have free printing in the copy room."

00:32:04.400 | I print out like 2000 posters until the guy in the copy room literally goes to me, he's like,

00:32:11.040 | "Kid, I don't know what you're doing, but you need to get out of here." I'm like, "All right,

00:32:15.200 | I'm going, I'm going." - You found the limits.

00:32:17.600 | - I know, yeah, I found the limit. And I think a lot of startups is about finding the limits.

00:32:22.480 | Maybe that's a little piece of advice socially. He's like, "You gotta get out of here." And I

00:32:27.280 | then go to every single dorm door, I put a poster under every single dorm door advertising the app

00:32:34.960 | with a QR code. I walk around campus saying hi to everyone and telling them about the app. I go from

00:32:41.760 | table to table in the cafeteria, introduce myself, say hi, and tell them to download the app.

00:32:46.240 | It's exhausting, there's so many steps, so many crotching down to slip the poster under the dorm

00:32:52.080 | door, my legs were burning. But by the end of it, 24 hours later, I'm sitting in a bus and I'm just

00:33:01.040 | pressing the refresh button on the account creation panel. It's like going up by hundreds.

00:33:05.680 | And I'm like, "Oh my gosh." - The word of mouth is working in a sense.

00:33:10.720 | I mean, certainly your initial seed is powerful. - Just a piece.

00:33:15.040 | - Yeah, but then the word of mouth is what carries it forward. And what was the explanation you gave

00:33:20.320 | to the app? Is anonymity a fundamental part of it? Like saying, "This is a chance for you to speak

00:33:28.080 | your mind about your experiences on campus." - Yeah, I think people get it. What I've realized

00:33:36.000 | is you don't need to tell people why to try it, they know. - There's a hunger for this.

00:33:41.920 | - Exactly. So all I do is I'm very factual, I said, and this is where I kind of ended up coining the

00:33:49.360 | kind of the line that I now use to say it because I said it so many times in those 24 hours. I just

00:33:55.360 | said it's an anonymous discussion feed for Dartmouth. And they're like, "Yes."

00:33:59.760 | Like they've been waiting for it. Some people are more skeptical, but a lot of people were like,

00:34:06.320 | "Great, I'm excited to try this. I'm excited to meet people and connect." And I mean, the way

00:34:12.240 | Dartmouth's taken to it is incredible. Everything from professors writing poems during finals period

00:34:18.640 | to be like, "Good luck in finals period, you're gonna rise like a phoenix," or whatever,

00:34:23.520 | to like, "Yeah, it's crazy." I heard about two women meeting on Librex and starting a finance

00:34:30.480 | club at Dartmouth, two significant others meeting. There was an article recently written up at Yale

00:34:38.720 | as well about two queer women who met on Librex and started a relationship, which was pretty,

00:34:43.520 | it was pretty interesting to see people throwing parties pre-COVID. Yeah, it was just amazing to

00:34:49.040 | see how when you allow people to be vulnerable and social, they connect. People have this natural

00:34:54.000 | desire to connect. - Yeah, when you have, when they have a natural desire to have a voice,

00:34:58.960 | and then when that voice is paired with freedom, then you could truly express yourself. And there's

00:35:07.840 | something liberating about that. And in that sense, you're connecting as your true self,

00:35:14.240 | whatever that is. What are the most powerful conversation you've seen on the app? You

00:35:18.720 | mentioned people connecting. - The hard part about that is the sorting, figuring out which one am I

00:35:24.480 | gonna put at the top. - Mental sorting. Just something that stands out to you. Sorry, I don't

00:35:28.400 | mean to do the top 10 conversations ever of all time, ever on the app. I just mean stuff that you

00:35:33.920 | remember that stands out to you. - I remember this one really amazing comment from this,

00:35:39.200 | he was a Mexican international student who spoke out, and this post was super edgy,

00:35:48.160 | but yet it got hundreds and hundreds of upvotes within the Yale community. It was a Yale community

00:35:53.600 | specific post. And we should point out that there's a school specific community now, and

00:35:58.080 | there's an all Ivy community. So this was specifically in the Yale community. And this

00:36:02.960 | was a little while ago, but it stuck with me. This Mexican international student comes to Yale,

00:36:09.840 | and he starts talking about his experience in the La Casa, which is the Mexican Latinx,

00:36:16.960 | as they would say, cultural center at Yale, and how he doesn't feel welcome there because he's

00:36:22.880 | Roman Catholic, basically, and international, and how he doesn't feel like he fits with their

00:36:29.120 | agenda. And as a result, this place that's supposed to be home for him, he feels outcasted

00:36:34.240 | and feels more alone than he does anywhere else on campus. - That's powerful. - That was powerful

00:36:39.360 | to me. Yeah. Hearing someone who should be feeling supported by this culture say,

00:36:45.600 | "Actually, this is not doing anything for me. This is not helping me. This is not where I feel

00:36:53.920 | at home." - So what do you make of anonymity? Because it seems to be a fundamental aspect

00:37:02.640 | of the power of the app, right? But at the same time, anonymity on the internet,

00:37:08.400 | so it protects us, right? It gives us freedom to have a voice, but it can also bring out the

00:37:15.840 | dark sides of human nature, like trolls or people who want to be malicious, want to hurt others

00:37:22.800 | purely for the joy of hurting others, being cruel for fun, and going to the dark places. So

00:37:30.400 | what do you make of anonymity as a fundamental feature of social interaction,

00:37:35.040 | like the pros and the cons? - Yeah, just to break that down a bit, I would say a lot of those same

00:37:40.160 | things about a place like Twitter, where people are very unanonymous. Having said that, of course,

00:37:46.000 | there's a different sort of capacity people have when they're anonymous, right? In all different

00:37:52.000 | sorts of ways. So what do I make of anonymity? I think it can be incredibly liberating and allow

00:37:57.040 | people to be incredibly vulnerable and to connect in different ways, both on politics, and there was

00:38:02.000 | a lot to talk about this year regarding politics, and personally, being vulnerable, talking about

00:38:08.400 | relationships and mental health. I think it allows people to have a community that's not performative.

00:38:13.760 | And of course, there's this other side where people can sometimes break rules or say things

00:38:21.440 | that they wouldn't otherwise say that people don't always agree with, or that people might

00:38:25.200 | find repugnant. And to an extent, these can facilitate great conversations. And on the other

00:38:31.600 | hand, we have to have moderation in place, and we have to have community guidelines to make sure

00:38:36.000 | that the anonymity doesn't overwhelm the purpose, which is that anonymity, first of all, anonymity

00:38:42.480 | is a tool in LibreX. It was not the purpose of LibreX. It is a way that we get towards these

00:38:48.560 | authentic conversations given our campus climate. And second of all, I would say it's a spectrum.

00:38:55.600 | It's not just LibreX is anonymous, right? Because LibreX isn't totally anonymous. Everyone's a

00:39:05.200 | verified Ivy League student. You know exactly what school everyone goes to. You only have

00:39:10.400 | one account per person at Yale, meaning that, I mean, what that amounts to is people have more

00:39:18.240 | of an ownership in the community, and people know that they're connected and they have a

00:39:21.200 | common vernacular. So the anonymity is a scale and it's a tool. - But you can also trust, I mean,

00:39:27.120 | this is the difference between Reddit anonymity, where you can easily create multiple accounts.

00:39:32.480 | When you have only one account per person, or at least it's very difficult to create multiple

00:39:39.760 | accounts, then you can trust that the anonymous person you're talking to is a human being.

00:39:45.120 | - Not a bot. - I try to be completely

00:39:48.080 | unanonymous now in my public interactions. I try to be as real in every way possible,

00:39:54.640 | like zero gap between private me and public me. - Why exactly did you, it seems like this is an

00:40:01.280 | intentional mission. What made you want to sort of bridge that gap between the private sphere and

00:40:06.800 | public sphere? 'Cause that's unique. I know a lot of intellectuals who would make a different

00:40:11.920 | decision. - Yeah, interesting. I had a discussion about with Naval about this, actually, with a few

00:40:18.000 | others that have a very clear distinction between public and private. - Something I'm struggling

00:40:24.960 | with, by the way, personally, and thinking about. - So one on the very basic surface level is if you

00:40:36.320 | carry with yourself lies, small lies or big lies, it's extramental effort to remember what you're

00:40:49.600 | supposed to say and not supposed to say. So that's on a very surface level of like, it's just easier

00:40:55.760 | to live life when you have the smaller of the gap between the private you and the public you.

00:41:02.320 | The second is, I think for me, from an engineering perspective,

00:41:08.240 | like if I'm dishonest with others, I will too quickly become dishonest with myself.

00:41:15.840 | And in so doing, I will not truly be able to think deeply about the world and come up and

00:41:22.240 | build revolutionary ideas. There's something about honesty that feels like it's that first

00:41:27.840 | principles thinking that's almost like overused as a term, but it feels like that requires radical

00:41:33.280 | honesty, not radical asshole and lichness, but radical honesty with yourself, with yourself.

00:41:39.360 | And it feels like it's difficult to be radically honest with yourself when you're being dishonest

00:41:46.320 | with the public. And also I have a nice feature, honestly, that in this current social context,

00:41:53.680 | so we can talk about race and gender and what are the other topics that are touchy?

00:42:00.320 | - Ethnicity and nationality.

00:42:03.520 | - All those things. I mean like...

00:42:05.040 | - Family structure.

00:42:06.240 | - Maybe I'm ineloquent in the way I speak about them, but I honestly, when I look in the mirror,

00:42:12.320 | like I'm not deeply hateful of a particular race or even just hateful of a particular race.

00:42:20.720 | I'm sure I'm biased and I've tried to think about those biases and so on. And also I don't have any

00:42:25.680 | creepy shit in my closet about women. It seems like a lot of people did a lot of creepy stuff

00:42:35.120 | in their life. And I just feel like that's really nice and deliberating. And especially now,

00:42:42.720 | it's funny because I've gotten a bit of a platform and I think it all started when I went,

00:42:47.840 | this is a female comedian, Whitney Cummings. And I've gotten a lot of amazing women writing me

00:42:56.480 | throughout, but when I went on Whitney, it was like the number of DMs I get on Instagram

00:43:02.720 | from women is just ridiculous. And I think that was a really important moment for me is like,

00:43:11.600 | I speak and I feel, I really value love, long-term monogamy with one person.

00:43:18.080 | And it's like, I could see where a lot of guys would now continue that message in public and

00:43:26.640 | in private, just start sleeping around. And so that's an important statement for me mentally.

00:43:31.440 | It's like, nope. - Straight and narrow.

00:43:33.840 | - It just goes straight and narrow. And not out of fear, but out of principle and just

00:43:38.880 | live life honestly. And I feel like that's truly liberating as a human being. Forget public,

00:43:47.200 | all that, because then I feel like I'm on sturdy ground when I say

00:43:51.280 | difficult things. And at the same time, sorry, I'm ranting on this, I apologize.

00:43:57.280 | - I'm interested personally, so keep going. - I honestly believe in the internet,

00:44:07.040 | in people on the internet, that when they hear me speak, they can see if I'm full of shit or not.

00:44:12.880 | I won't be able to fake it. They'll see it through. Yeah. So I feel like if you're not

00:44:23.920 | lying about stuff, you have the freedom to truly be yourself and the internet will figure it out.

00:44:30.400 | Will figure who you are. - People have a natural

00:44:33.840 | tendency to be able to tell bullshit. And it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

00:44:37.280 | - Exactly. - Why wouldn't, why,

00:44:39.840 | of all the things that we could evolve to be good at, being able to detect honesty seems like one

00:44:47.680 | that would be particularly valuable, especially in the sorts of societies we developed into.

00:44:51.760 | - And then also from a selfish perspective, like a success perspective, I think there's a lot of

00:44:57.440 | folks that have inspired me, like Elon is one of them, that shows that there's a hunger for genuineness.

00:45:06.080 | Like you can build a business as a CEO and be genuine and like real and do stupid shit every

00:45:14.240 | once in a while, as long as it's coming from the same place of who you truly are.

00:45:18.240 | Like Elon's inspirational with that. And then there's a lot of other people I admire

00:45:23.120 | that are counter-inspirations in the sense like they're very formal, they hold back a lot of

00:45:31.120 | themselves. And it's like, I know how brilliant those people are and I think they're not being

00:45:35.920 | as effective of leaders, public faces of companies as they could be. I mean, to be honest, like,

00:45:42.640 | not to throw shade, but I will, is like Mark Zuckerberg is an example of that.

00:45:49.440 | Jack Dorsey's also a bit of an example of that. I like Jack a lot. I've talked to him a lot.

00:45:54.400 | I will talk to him more. I think he's a much more amazing person than he conveys through his public

00:46:02.400 | presentation. I think a lot of that has to do with PR and marketing people having an effect.

00:46:08.320 | Listen, it's difficult. I think it's really difficult. It's probably many of the same

00:46:11.840 | difficulties you will face is the pressures, but it's hard to know what to do. But I think

00:46:19.120 | as much as possible as an individual, you should try to be honest in the face of the world and the

00:46:25.840 | company that wants you to be more polished. And that being more polished turns you into a

00:46:32.240 | politician and politician eventually turns into being dishonest. Dishonest with the world and

00:46:38.000 | dishonest with yourself. - Something I noticed, which was the people, of the people you mentioned,

00:46:42.000 | those things have had ramifications in terms of letting things go too far, get out of hand. And

00:46:48.480 | you wonder, it's an aspect of lying, right? You say one lie goes to another lie, you push it down,

00:46:55.920 | it doesn't matter. You can figure it out later. You can figure out later. Pretty soon,

00:47:00.320 | you've dug a pretty big hole. And I think if we look at Twitter and we look at Facebook,

00:47:06.480 | I think it goes without saying what sorts of holes have been dug, perhaps because of a lack

00:47:12.720 | of honesty that goes all the way up to the leaders. - So yeah, there's two problems within

00:47:17.280 | the company. It doesn't make you as effective of a leader, I think. That's one. And two,

00:47:24.000 | for social media companies, I think people need to trust, like, it doesn't have to be the CEO,

00:47:30.160 | but it has to be, like, this is how humans work. We want to look to somebody where like,

00:47:36.000 | I trust you. If you're going to use a social media platform, I think you have to trust

00:47:44.960 | the set of individuals working at the top of that social. - Something I realized really quickly,

00:47:50.560 | one of the lessons throughout the startup was that people don't totally connect to products as

00:47:56.480 | much as they connect to people. And I mean, I don't know how much you've spent on Librex,

00:48:03.920 | you've only been here the last couple of weeks, like last week, but I mean, I love the product.

00:48:09.680 | And one of the aspects of me loving the product is that I'm super active and I've been super

00:48:14.640 | active throughout the entire time. And the amount of support I've received has made that very easy

00:48:20.560 | to do from the community and the fact that I could, I mean, so I came to Boston for this interview,

00:48:26.320 | right? I came to Boston, I got off the train, it was around 5.30 PM, I checked Librex, someone

00:48:34.560 | is writing, "Hey, I'm in Boston, does anyone want to get dinner?" 30 minutes later, I'm getting

00:48:38.720 | dinner with them. - That's amazing. - And I mean, it's incredible. First of all, as an entrepreneur,

00:48:45.440 | the amount of stuff I learn from these people and when they reiterate and I hear that they got the

00:48:52.000 | message through the product, I mean, that's incredibly validating. But also, I mean, I think

00:48:57.120 | it's just important to be able to put a face to a brand and especially a brand that's built on trust.

00:49:02.960 | Because fundamentally, the users are trusting us with some really important discussions and some

00:49:09.440 | really, and a movement to some degree. It's a community and a movement. - I'll tell you actually

00:49:14.800 | why I didn't use the app very much so far is there's something really powerful about the way

00:49:22.240 | it's constructed, which I felt like a bit of an outsider 'cause I don't know the communities. It

00:49:28.480 | felt like it's a really strong community around each of these places. And so I felt like I was,

00:49:35.520 | it made me really wish there was an MIT one. And so there's both discussions about the deep

00:49:41.840 | like community issues within Columbia or Yale or so on, Dartmouth. And there's also the broader

00:49:50.640 | community of the Ivy Leagues that people are discussing. But I could see that actually

00:49:54.880 | expanding more and more and more, but which is a powerful coupling, which is the feeling of like

00:50:01.200 | this little village, this little community we're building together, but also the broader issues.

00:50:06.560 | - Yeah. - So you can do both

00:50:08.320 | discussions. - One thing that was important to me is

00:50:10.720 | talking about social media as a concept, right? I think the way people socialize is very much

00:50:19.200 | context dependent. So we're talking about people understanding each other through language,

00:50:25.520 | through English. And these languages are constructed in a very nuanced way, in a very

00:50:32.880 | sort of temperamental way, right? And you kind of need a similar context to be able to have

00:50:39.920 | productive conversations. So to me, it's really important that these groups, they share something

00:50:46.560 | in common, a really big lived experience, the Ivy League or their school community. And they have a

00:50:52.880 | similar vocabulary, they have a similar background, they know what's happening in their community.

00:50:57.120 | And so having social media that is community connected to me was fundamental. Like you talk

00:51:02.800 | about anonymity, to me, community is the thing that when I think about Librex, I think what

00:51:08.480 | makes it different. It's the fact that everyone knows what's going on. Everyone comes from a

00:51:14.160 | similar context and people can socialize in a way where they understand each other because they've

00:51:20.320 | been through, you used the word lived experience, they've been through so many of the same lived

00:51:24.240 | experiences. - One clarification, is there an easy way, if you choose, to then connect and meet space

00:51:33.600 | and physical space? - So I guess the sort of magic of it, and I was talking to a bunch of Harvard

00:51:41.440 | Librexers who I met off the app while I was in Boston. And every time they told me, this is my

00:51:46.800 | favorite part of the app, this is what I love about the app. We have this matching system,

00:51:50.320 | which is an anonymous direct message that you can send to any poster. So I was talking to this guy

00:51:57.120 | who, he was really into coin collection, and he met other people who were really into coin

00:52:04.560 | collection through a post and he would make a post about coin collection. And then someone would come

00:52:09.920 | to him and they'd be like, and they could direct message him anonymously and it would just show

00:52:14.400 | them that his, it would just show him their school. And then they could just text chat,

00:52:19.040 | totally anonymously, direct message if he accepted the anonymous request. - Do they see the usernames?

00:52:24.080 | - There are no usernames on Librex. It's all just schools names. So he made this post about coin

00:52:31.200 | collection and you got a direct message. - Yeah, I guess so, right? - No usernames. - Because I was just looking

00:52:39.760 | at the text. - Yeah. - That's interesting, that's right. - And I can tell you, I can go into why.

00:52:44.960 | - That's really interesting. - Yeah, I can go into it. - So it truly is anonymous. - It's, well, I mean,

00:52:51.120 | - It depends on what you mean by anonymous. - Exactly. - It's a very different kind of anonymous. - And the reason

00:52:56.720 | that we made that decision is because we wanted people to connect to ideas.

00:53:01.760 | We wanted people to connect to things in the moment. We don't want people to go,

00:53:06.160 | "Oh, I know this guy. He said this other thing." And we didn't want people to feel like they were

00:53:10.800 | at risk of being doxed. So it's just, these are small communities, right? - Yeah. - We talked about this.

00:53:15.360 | Everyone knows someone who knows you. - Yeah. - And in 2021, it would not take much to be able to figure

00:53:22.560 | out who someone might be just through a couple of posts. So it's both safety and about the ideas

00:53:28.880 | in terms of not adding usernames. Anyway, we have this anonymous direct message system where you can

00:53:34.160 | direct message the original poster of any post, the OP, if you're a Redditor, of any post. And that

00:53:41.680 | makes it really easy to meet up because once you guys are one-on-one, you can exchange a number,

00:53:46.640 | you can exchange a Snapchat, you can exchange an email. Probably not very often, but you could.

00:53:53.440 | And then that's how people meet up, matching. - And then a lot of people connect in this way.

00:53:58.240 | Let me just take a small step into the technical. I read somewhere, I don't know if it's true,

00:54:03.840 | that one of the reasons you were rejected from YC, Y Combinator, in the final rounds

00:54:08.720 | is because one of the principles is to refuse to sell user data. Can you speak to that?

00:54:16.080 | Why do you think it's important not to sell user data? And sort of, which draws a clear contrast

00:54:26.640 | between other, basically any other service on the internet? - I mean, to be honest, it's quite

00:54:33.840 | simple. I mean, we talk about this platform, people are talking about their most intimate

00:54:39.120 | secrets, their political opinions. How are they feeling about what's going on in their city

00:54:45.520 | during the summer? How are they feeling about the political cycle and also their mental health,

00:54:54.800 | their relationships? These are some of the most intimate thoughts that people were having.

00:55:00.480 | Point blank, I don't think it was ethical to pawn them off for a profit. I didn't think it was

00:55:08.800 | moral. I don't think I could sleep at night if that was what I was doing, is turning these people's

00:55:13.040 | most intimate beliefs and secrets into a currency that I bought and sold. There's something very

00:55:21.680 | off about that. - I tend to believe that there is some room, so like Facebook would just take that

00:55:29.520 | data and sell it, right? But there's some room in transparency and giving people the choice on

00:55:35.600 | which parts they can, I wouldn't even see it as sell, but like share with advertisers. - Are you

00:55:42.240 | gonna give them a profit? - So right, you have to monetize, you have to create an entire system,

00:55:46.960 | you have to rethink this whole thing, right? But as long as you give people control and are

00:55:53.600 | transparent and make it easy, like I think it's really difficult to delete a Facebook account,

00:55:58.000 | or like delete all your data, or to download-- - I've tried, it's very difficult.

00:56:01.520 | - So like just make it easy and trust in that if you create a great product, people are not going

00:56:08.560 | to do it. And if they do it, then they're not actually a deep loving member of the community,

00:56:14.320 | what's that? - So we very quickly realized that user privacy was something that was not only a

00:56:22.800 | core value, but was something that users really cared about. And we added this functionality,

00:56:28.160 | it's just a button that says forget me. You press it, like two clicks, it's not that hard,

00:56:34.720 | we just remove your email from the database. You're good. - Beautiful, I think Facebook should

00:56:42.480 | have that. I honestly, so call me crazy, but maybe you can actually speak to this, but I don't think

00:56:50.320 | Facebook, well now they would, but if they did it earlier, they would lose that much money.

00:56:55.440 | If they allow, like transparently tell people you could just delete everything. They also explain

00:57:02.800 | that like in ways that's going to potentially like lessen your experience in the short term,

00:57:11.200 | like explain that. But then there shouldn't be like multiple clicks of a button that don't make

00:57:18.560 | any sense. I'm trying to hold back from ranting about Instagram, because let me just say real

00:57:25.440 | quick, 'cause I've been locked out of Instagram for a month. And there's a whole group inside

00:57:30.960 | Facebook that are like supporters of like Lex, help Lex. - Free Lex? - Free Lex. I wasn't blocked,

00:57:38.080 | it was just like a bug in the system. Somebody was hammering the API with my account. And so

00:57:42.880 | they kept thinking I'm a bot. Anyway, it's a bug, it happens to a lot of people. But like,

00:57:47.920 | first of all, I appreciate the love from all the amazing engineers in Instagram and Facebook.

00:57:51.840 | Love those folks. The entire mechanism though is somehow broken. I mean, I put that on the

00:57:58.320 | leadership, but it's also difficult to operate a large company once it scales, all those kinds of

00:58:03.360 | things. But it should not be that difficult to do some basic things that you want to do, which is,

00:58:12.080 | in the case of Facebook, that's verify your identity to the app. And also in the case of

00:58:20.400 | Facebook, in the case of LibreX, like disappear, if you choose. There's downsides to disappearing,

00:58:30.320 | but it should not be a difficult process. And yeah, I think people are waking up to that.

00:58:37.360 | I think there's a lot of room for an app like LibreX with its foundational ideas to redefine

00:58:46.320 | what social media should look like. And like you said, I think beautifully, anonymity is not the

00:58:51.520 | core value. It's just the tool you use. And who knows, maybe anonymity will not always be the tool

00:58:59.520 | we use. Like if you give people the choice, who knows what this evolves from the login page you

00:59:04.880 | initially created. The key thing is the founding principles. And again, who knows if you give

00:59:10.000 | people a really nice way to monetize their data, maybe there'll no longer be a thing that you say,

00:59:15.280 | do not sell user data. Yeah, all those kinds of things. But the basic principles should be there.

00:59:20.720 | And also a good, simple interface design goes a really long way, like simplicity and elegance,

00:59:30.080 | which LibreX currently is. Clubhouse is another- - It's gotten a lot better, by the way.

00:59:34.240 | I don't mean to go too deep into the history, but the- - It was bad? I didn't look at the early

00:59:41.120 | pictures. - Oh, thank goodness. - I read somewhere that it was like a white screen, like with black,

00:59:48.640 | HTML basic. - The upvote and downvote buttons were like these big, freaking boxes. And I could go on,

00:59:56.800 | but it was my genius design skills. I almost failed art class when I was in first grade,

01:00:04.960 | and I think I still have similar skills to my first grade self. But it's gotten a lot better,

01:00:09.920 | and thanks to a lot of my friends who have sort of chipped in here and there. - Oh, I love the idea

01:00:15.200 | of a button that just, like, forget me. I don't know, that's really moving, actually. That's

01:00:22.880 | actually all people want, is they want, I think, okay, I'll speak to my experience. I would give

01:00:30.480 | so much more if I could just disappear if I needed to. And I trusted the community, I trusted

01:00:39.280 | the founders and the principals. That's really powerful, man, the trust and ease of escape.

01:00:46.160 | Yeah. You've also kind of mentioned moderation, which is really interesting. So with this anonymity

01:00:54.640 | and this community, I don't know if you've heard of the internet, but there's trolls on the

01:01:00.480 | internet. - So I've heard. - And even if they go to Yale and Dartmouth, there's still people that

01:01:08.240 | probably enjoy the sort of being the guerrilla warfare, counter-revolutionary, and just, like,

01:01:17.920 | creating chaos in a place of love. So how do you prevent chaos and hatred breaking out in Librex?

01:01:27.120 | So the way I think about it is, we have these principals. They're pretty simple,

01:01:34.080 | and they're pretty easy to enforce. And then beyond the principals, we have a set of moderators,

01:01:39.520 | moderators from every single Ivy League school, a team of diverse moderators who enforce these

01:01:43.680 | principals, but not only enforce the principals, but kind of clue us in to what's happening in

01:01:48.320 | their community and how the real life context of their community translates to the Librex context

01:01:54.080 | of their community. And beyond that, we have conversation with them about the standards of

01:02:01.360 | the community, and we're constantly talking about what needs to be further elucidated and what needs

01:02:06.000 | to be tweaked, and we're in constant communication with the community. Now, if you want me to get

01:02:11.760 | into the principals that underlie Librex's moderation policy. - Yeah, please. Maybe you

01:02:16.080 | can explain that there's moderators. What does that mean? How are they chosen, and what are

01:02:20.080 | the principals under which they operate? - Sure. So how are the moderators chosen?

01:02:25.200 | The moderators are all volunteers. They're Librexers who reach out to me and respond to

01:02:32.000 | the opportunity to become moderator. And the way they're chosen is basically we want to make sure

01:02:38.640 | that they're in tune with their community. We want to make sure they come from diverse backgrounds,

01:02:42.560 | and we want to make sure that they sort of understand what the community is about. And then

01:02:46.640 | we ask them some questions about how they would deal with certain scenarios, ones that we've had

01:02:52.640 | in the past and we feel strongly about, and then also ones that are a little more murky, where we

01:02:56.640 | want to see that they're sort of thinking about these things in a critical way. And from there,

01:03:02.480 | we choose a set, and they have the power to take down posts. Of course, everything at the end of

01:03:10.000 | the day depends on my review, but they can take them down, and we can reinstate them if it's a

01:03:15.680 | problem. But they can take down posts, and they can advocate for different moderation standards

01:03:21.440 | and different moderation policies. - So for now, you're the Linus Torvald of this community.

01:03:26.320 | So meaning like, you're able to, like people are actually able to email you or like-

01:03:34.880 | - Text me. - Text you, contact you, and get a response.

01:03:38.960 | Like you respond to basically everybody. And then you're like really, you know, you're living that

01:03:45.840 | live on people's floor life currently. That's not necessarily, this is the early days, folks.

01:03:51.840 | I knew Ryan before he was a billionaire and he was cool. And then he was in a mansion making

01:03:59.360 | meats on his barbecue. No, okay. But you know, how does it scale? Like what,

01:04:06.960 | I suppose how does it scale is the question. I mean, with Linus, I don't know if you're

01:04:15.200 | familiar with the Linux open source community, but he still stayed at the top for a while. It was

01:04:19.760 | really important, like leadership there was really important to drive that large scale,

01:04:24.480 | really productive open source community. What do you see your role as LibreX grows? And in general,

01:04:32.480 | what are the mechanisms of scaling here for moderation? - The way I see it, open discourse

01:04:37.920 | is fundamental to the purpose of the app, right? So as the, I guess you could say founder, CEO,

01:04:45.200 | what have you, part of my purpose has to be to enforce the vision, right? And part of the vision

01:04:52.640 | is open discourse. And that does come down in part to reasonable moderation and community-guided

01:04:58.640 | reasonable moderation. So I imagine that will always be something that I'm intimately involved

01:05:03.760 | with to some degree. Now the degree to which the way in which that manifests, I imagine will have

01:05:11.920 | to change, right? And hopefully I'll be able to, just like you can hire a CTO, hopefully I'll be

01:05:19.360 | able to be integrated in hiring people who understand the way that we are sort of operating

01:05:27.600 | and the reasonable standards of moderation. And there can be a sort of hierarchical structure,

01:05:33.520 | but I think when you have a product whose key purpose is to allow people to have these difficult

01:05:39.760 | conversations on campus that need to be had. - Yeah, that moderation is core to that.

01:05:44.000 | - I can never fully, I don't think I can fully ever abdicate that responsibility. I think that

01:05:50.560 | would be like, I mean, that would be like Bezos abdicating e-commerce, right? Like that's part

01:05:57.200 | of the job. - Yeah. Of course you can run companies in different ways. I think that,

01:06:02.000 | 'cause he might've abdicated quite a bit of the details there. - It's hard for me to say.

01:06:06.400 | - Because Amazon does so many things. I think probably the better examples like Elon with

01:06:10.880 | rockets, he's still at the core. - Of the engineering.

01:06:13.920 | - He's at the core of the engineering. There's some fundamental questions of what,

01:06:17.680 | he probably does way too much of the engineering. Like he's like the lowest level detail,

01:06:22.800 | but you're saying like the core things that make the app work is the moderation of difficult

01:06:29.520 | conversations. - And by the way, I'm 21 years old. Let's

01:06:33.280 | remind us, everyone of that. If this thing does scale and if this thing continues to be a positive

01:06:41.600 | force in a lot of people's lives, who knows what will happen in the next, what I'll learn.

01:06:47.360 | I'm still growing, definitely as a leader, still growing as a thinker, still growing as a person.

01:06:53.920 | I can't pretend that I know how to run a business that is worth up to $1 billion, whatever. I can't

01:07:02.640 | pretend I know how to run a business that's going to have millions and millions of users. I expect

01:07:07.120 | that there are going to be a lot of amazing people who will teach me and a lot of people who have

01:07:11.920 | already kind of stepped into my life and helped me out and taught me things. And I imagine that I'll

01:07:18.160 | learn so much more. I just know that moderation is always going to be important to me because I

01:07:23.840 | don't think LibreX is LibreX unless we have open discourse and moderation, reasonable, open,

01:07:30.480 | light touch moderation is at the heart of creating that, right?

01:07:34.800 | - So as a creator of this kind of community in place with anonymity and difficult conversations,

01:07:42.720 | what do you think about this touchy three words that people have been tossing around and

01:07:48.240 | politicizing, I would say, but is at the core of the founding of this country, which is the

01:07:52.240 | freedom of speech. How do you think about the freedom of speech, this particular kind of freedom

01:07:59.760 | of expression? And do you think it's a fundamental human right? How do you define it to yourself when

01:08:06.800 | you're thinking about it? I went down, especially preparing for this conversation down a rabbit

01:08:12.480 | hole of like just how unclear it is, philosophically, what is meant by this kind of freedom.

01:08:19.280 | It's not as easy as people think, but it's interesting, pragmatically speaking,

01:08:26.400 | to hear how you think about it in the context of LibreX.

01:08:30.000 | - Yeah, it's a tough one, right? There's a lot there. So I come from the background of being a

01:08:37.120 | math major. Maybe it's important to start with that. And I found myself in the middle of this

01:08:44.320 | question of freedom of speech. One of the wonderful things is that the LibreX community is filled with

01:08:50.800 | PhDs and governance majors who have taught me a ton about this sort of thing. And I'm still

01:08:57.840 | learning. I'm still growing. I'm still probably going to modify my perspective to some degree,

01:09:04.240 | hopefully. Don't worry. I imagine I'll always support free discourse.

01:09:09.760 | - Learning how to speak about stuff is critical here because it's like,

01:09:16.560 | I'm learning that this is like a minefield of conversations. Because the moment you say like,

01:09:23.120 | even saying freedom of speech is a complicated concept, people will be like, "Oh, we spotted

01:09:30.640 | a communist." They'll say, "There's nothing complicated about freedom. Freedom is freedom,

01:09:35.920 | bro." It is complicated. First of all, if you talk about, there's different definitions of

01:09:42.320 | freedom of speech. If you want to go constitution, if you want to talk about the United States

01:09:46.960 | specifically and what's legal, it's actually not as exciting and not as beautiful as people think

01:09:53.760 | of. - Complicated.

01:09:54.800 | - It's complicated. I think there's ideals behind it that we want to see. What does that actually

01:10:01.120 | materialize itself in the digital world where we're trying to communicate in ways that allows

01:10:09.360 | for difficult conversations and also at the same time doesn't result in the silencing of voices,

01:10:18.320 | not through censorship, but through just assholes being rude.

01:10:23.760 | - Spam. - Spam. So it could be just bots.

01:10:26.960 | - Racism. - Racism.

01:10:29.120 | - Going back to the name of the app, LibreX. - Yes.

01:10:32.800 | - Libre, free. X was support Montu for free exchange. And the free exchange of what?

01:10:40.640 | My purpose was to create as much intercommunication of ideas,

01:10:46.480 | be them repugnant or otherwise as possible. And of course to do that within legal bounds

01:10:52.720 | and to do that without causing anyone to be harassed or doxxed. So to keep things focused

01:10:58.800 | on the ideas, not the people. And then no BS crap stuff. And so to me, the easiest way to

01:11:09.280 | moderate around that, because as you said, figuring out what is hateful and what is hate speech is

01:11:14.560 | really hard, was to say no sweeping statements against core identity groups. And that seems to

01:11:21.760 | work on the whole pretty well to be pretty light touch. - It's hard to do though.

01:11:26.960 | - It's difficult. - Because we like to generalize.

01:11:29.200 | We humans. - It's difficult, but

01:11:31.040 | what it comes down to is be specific. And when you think about what are sweeping statements against

01:11:37.760 | core identity groups, oftentimes these are sort of hackneyed subjects. These are things that have

01:11:42.960 | been broached and we've heard them before. They don't really lead anywhere productive. So it goes

01:11:49.840 | under this principle of be specific in the ideas you're discussing. - So even for like positive

01:11:55.520 | and humorous stuff, you try to avoid generalizations. - Against core identity groups.

01:12:00.240 | - Core identity groups. Sorry, what are core identity groups? - We're talking race, religion.

01:12:05.680 | - Okay. Got it. Even positive stuff? - Well, against, negative.

01:12:13.120 | - Against, sorry, against, against. Okay. - Very, very, we've learned to be very specific.

01:12:19.360 | Very few words, but the community gets it. - Yeah, they get it. I mean, this is the thing,

01:12:25.040 | the trouble with rules is as the community grows, they'll figure out ways to manipulate the rules.

01:12:33.520 | - Absolutely. It's human nature. It's creativity. - Yeah.

01:12:36.480 | - Something beautiful about it, of course. Unlike in- - From an evolutionary perspective, yes.

01:12:41.760 | - Yeah. The fact that people are so creative and so looking to, and because people are genuinely

01:12:47.440 | interested in figuring out these things about social media. And so they'll 100% like see like,

01:12:53.120 | where's the edge? And I mean, part of that's maintaining some level of vagueness in your rule

01:12:57.600 | set, which has its own set of questions and something we could think about. And I'm not

01:13:02.880 | implying I have all the answers, but there is something really interesting about people being

01:13:06.480 | so engaged that they're looking to figure out where are those edges and what does that mean?

01:13:11.600 | What does that edge mean? - Well, so one of the things I'm kind of

01:13:15.680 | thinking about, like from an individual user of Librex or an individual user of the internet,

01:13:22.000 | I think about like that one person that is on Reddit saying hateful stuff or positive stuff,

01:13:28.240 | doesn't matter, or funny stuff. One of the things I think about is the trajectory of that

01:13:33.680 | individual through life and how social media can help that person become the best version of

01:13:40.720 | themselves. I don't mean from like an Orwellian sense, like educate them properly or something.

01:13:47.120 | I just mean like, we're all, I believe we're all fundamentally good. And I also believe we all have

01:13:55.040 | the capacity to do, to create some amazing stuff in this world, whether that's ideas or art or

01:14:03.600 | engineering, all those kinds of things, just to be amazing people. And I kind of think about like,

01:14:09.280 | you know, a lot of social media mechanisms bring out the worst in us. And I try to think like,

01:14:15.680 | in the longterm, how can the social media or how can a website, how can a tool that you create

01:14:24.640 | can make the best, like you take a trajectory that makes you a better, better and better,

01:14:29.360 | and like the best version of yourself. So I think about that, because like,

01:14:32.960 | you know, Twitter can really take you down some dark trajectories. I've seen people just not being

01:14:39.360 | the best version of themselves. Forget the cancel culture and all that kind of stuff. It's just like,

01:14:43.360 | they're not developing intellectually in the way that's going to make the best version of themselves.

01:14:49.040 | I think Reddit, I'm not sure what I think about Reddit yet. Because one positive side is all the

01:14:55.760 | shitposting on Reddit could be just like a release valve for some stress in life. And you almost have

01:15:02.160 | like a parallel life where in your in meat space, you might be actually becoming successful and so

01:15:08.000 | on and growing and so on. But you just need sometimes to be angry at somebody. But I tend to

01:15:13.600 | not think that's possible. I think if you're shitposting, you're probably not spending your

01:15:20.400 | time the best way you could. I don't know. I'm torn on that. But do you think about that with

01:15:26.960 | Librex of creating a trajectory for the Yale, for the Dartmouth, the students to where they grow

01:15:33.760 | intellectually? - One thing that I think about a lot is how do you incentivize positive content

01:15:40.320 | creation? How do you incentivize really intellectual content creation? It's something that,

01:15:46.960 | frankly, I think about every single day. And I think there are ways that,

01:15:54.640 | I mean, one thing that's great about humans is that they can be incentivized. And I think there

01:16:00.800 | are ways that you can incentivize people to make the right kind of content if that's your goal.

01:16:05.840 | - So you think such mechanisms exist for such incentivization?

01:16:10.000 | - I do. I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak.

01:16:13.680 | - So you have already concrete ideas in your mind?

01:16:16.400 | - I have about three concrete ideas that I'm very, very optimistic about.

01:16:20.560 | - You don't even need to share them. I understand totally. But the fact that you have them,

01:16:26.960 | that's really good. Because I feel like sometimes the downfall of the social media is that there's

01:16:34.000 | literally not even a thinking or a discussion about the incentivization of positive long-term

01:16:42.720 | content creation. I mean, Twitter, I really was excited about this when they said, like,

01:16:48.320 | when Jack has talked about creating healthy conversations.

01:16:52.000 | - Yeah, he does seem to care. I've listened to him. I mean, he has a very particular way of

01:16:57.680 | saying things. But you get the impression that he's someone who actually cares about these things

01:17:02.000 | within the limits of his power. - Yeah. And that's the question,

01:17:05.200 | the limits of the power. LibreX is growing not just in the number of communities, but also in

01:17:12.720 | the way you're incentivizing positive conversations, like coupled with the moderation and

01:17:19.520 | so on. So you think there's a lot of innovation to be had in that area?

01:17:22.480 | - I think there's a tremendous amount. I think when you think about the reasons people post,

01:17:27.920 | fundamentally, people want to make a positive impact on their community to some degree. Now,

01:17:34.480 | there will always be bad actors. And part of the benefit of our moderation structure is that we can

01:17:39.600 | limit some of those bad actors, no body counts, no brigading. At the same time, the more you

01:17:47.280 | incentivize a certain type of behavior, the better it's going to be. And we don't see it as our role

01:17:53.120 | as the platform to force the community in a direction. And frankly, I don't think it would

01:17:59.840 | be good for anyone, the community or the conversations, if we forced a specific type of

01:18:04.800 | conversations, conversation. We just need to make the tools to allow people to be good and to

01:18:10.800 | incentivize good behavior. - Yeah, I believe that. You will not need to censor if you allow people

01:18:18.480 | at scale to be good. The good will overpower the assholes. - That's my fundamental belief. I'm

01:18:24.880 | very optimistic about that. - But currently LibreX is small in the sense that it's a small

01:18:32.000 | set of communities that I believe. And you mentioned to me offline that by design, you're

01:18:37.200 | scaling slowly and carefully. So how does LibreX scale? Is it possible? Facebook also started with

01:18:46.960 | a small set of communities that were schools and then now grew to be basically the, if not one of

01:18:54.480 | the largest social networks in the world. Do you see LibreX as potentially scaling to be

01:19:00.640 | beyond even college campuses, but encompassing the whole world? - It's a long timeline.

01:19:11.120 | I'll say this, this gets back to where did Facebook go wrong? Because clearly they did a

01:19:18.240 | lot right. And we can only speculate about what the objectives were of the founders of Facebook.

01:19:25.840 | I'm sure they've said some things, but it's always interesting to know what the mythology is versus

01:19:34.160 | what the truth is of the matter. So perhaps they've been very successful. I mean, they've

01:19:40.720 | taken over the world to some extent. At the same time, the goals of LibreX are to create these

01:19:47.600 | positive communities and these open conversations where people can have real conversation and

01:19:53.520 | connection in their communities in a vulnerable and authentic way. And so to that end, which

01:19:59.200 | I imagine might be different than the goals of a Facebook, for example, one thing that we want to

01:20:06.160 | do is keep things intimate and community-based. So each school is its own community. And perhaps

01:20:13.760 | you could have a slightly broader community. Maybe you could have a, I know the California

01:20:19.040 | system is an obvious one, Pac-10 might be an obvious one, and we can think about that.

01:20:23.520 | But fundamentally the unit of community is your school or your school community. So that's one

01:20:33.200 | difference that I think will help us. The other thing is that we're scaling intentionally,

01:20:38.240 | meaning that when we expand to a school, we have moderators in place. We have moderators who

01:20:43.600 | understand that school's environment in a very personal level, and we're growing responsibly.

01:20:49.600 | We're growing as we're ready, both technologically, but also socially,

01:20:53.200 | as we think we have the tools to preserve the community and to encourage the community to

01:21:00.960 | create the sort of content that we want them to create. - And there's a lot of ways to define

01:21:06.960 | community. So first of all, there's geographic community as well. But the way you're kind of

01:21:12.720 | defining community with Yale and Dartmouth is the email, right? That's what gives you,

01:21:18.880 | there's a power to the email in the sense that that's how you can verify, efficiently verify

01:21:26.880 | yourself with being a single individual in the university. In that same way, you can verify your

01:21:34.400 | employment at a company, for example, like Google, Microsoft, Facebook. Do you see your

01:21:41.360 | potentially taking on those communities? That'd be fascinating, getting like anonymous community

01:21:48.320 | conversations inside Google. - 100% crossed my mind. To some extent, this is something where

01:21:56.400 | I understand the college experience. I understand the need. And I've never worked at Google.

01:22:02.720 | I don't know if they would hire me. Hopefully, maybe as a product manager.

01:22:07.760 | I think if there's a community that needs this product and has that will, which I think,

01:22:17.280 | especially as LibreX continues to grow and expand and change and learn,

01:22:24.080 | because that's what we're doing is we're learning, right? With each community,

01:22:27.120 | it's not just about growing. It's about learning from each of these communities and iterating.

01:22:33.680 | I think it's quite likely there are going to be all sorts of communities that could use this tool

01:22:39.600 | to improve their culture, so to speak. - So forgive me, I'm not actually that knowledgeable

01:22:47.440 | about the history of attempts of building social networks to solve the problem that you're solving.

01:22:53.520 | But I was made aware that there was an app or at least a social network called Yik Yak

01:23:00.560 | that had a similar kind of focus. I think the thing you've spoken about that differs between

01:23:12.480 | LibreX and Yik Yak is that Yik Yak was defined, am I pronouncing it right even? - You're good.

01:23:18.640 | - I'm good. - I met the founder, so I can confirm.

01:23:21.440 | - Okay, you can confirm, cool. That it was constrained to a geographical area versus

01:23:28.640 | like to the actual community and that somehow had fundamental like actual differences in

01:23:36.800 | social dynamics that resulted. But can you speak to the history of Yik Yak? How does LibreX differ?

01:23:42.960 | What lessons have you learned from that? Oh, and I should say that I guess there was controversial

01:23:49.200 | I don't know, I didn't look at the details, but I'm guessing there's a bunch of racism and hate

01:23:52.640 | speech and all that kind of stuff that emerged on Yik Yak. - Absolutely there was.

01:23:55.760 | - Okay, so that's an example of like, okay, here's how it goes wrong when you have anonymity

01:24:02.880 | on college campuses. So how does LibreX going to do better? - Yeah, Yik Yak had a lot of problems,

01:24:10.800 | content problems, but the content problems go deeper than maybe what the press would reveal.

01:24:16.400 | There's a lot to say and part of it is parsing exactly what to talk about when it comes to Yik

01:24:21.920 | Yak. And when you talk about startups, I mean, you know this, you know startups,

01:24:26.240 | and you look at the postmortem, it's almost never what people think it is. And oftentimes these

01:24:32.640 | things are somewhat unknowable. And the degree to which people seeking confirmation bias to

01:24:38.640 | somebody who's seeking closure, look to find a singular attribute that caused the failure.

01:24:43.360 | - It feels like the little details often make all the difference.

01:24:46.640 | - Yes. And I think the details are so little that as humans, we are not capable of parsing

01:24:53.920 | even what they are, but I'll tell you my perspective on it, knowing that I'm also

01:24:59.920 | a human with biases, in this particular case, very significant biases. So I started building

01:25:09.360 | Librex for its own merits. At first I wasn't aware of Yik Yak, but as I started to talk to people

01:25:15.600 | about this platform I was building, I was made aware of Yik Yak and I built it from day one with

01:25:22.080 | a lot of the issues Yik Yak had in mind. So as you said, the one difference between Yik Yak is

01:25:29.200 | the geographical versus community-based aspect. Going along with that, one thing I realized by

01:25:36.160 | researching social media sites is that the majority of the negative content, the content

01:25:41.840 | that's terrible and breaking all the rules is created by really, and the people who are not

01:25:49.440 | reformable, so to speak, the people who are not showing the best part of the human experience.

01:25:57.280 | It's a really small minority, right? I remember I was listening to the founder of 4chan, Moot,

01:26:04.240 | talk about this, how one guy was able to basically destroy large swaths of his community.

01:26:12.960 | That's part of what makes it exciting for that minority is how much power they can have. So if

01:26:19.760 | you're predisposed to think in this way, it's exciting that you can walk into, like I mentioned

01:26:25.440 | the party before, you have a party of a lot of positive people and it feels, especially if you

01:26:33.680 | don't have much power in this world, it feels exceptionally empowering to destroy

01:26:41.760 | the lives of many. And if you think this way, it's a problem. But I'm hopeful that you're right,

01:26:50.880 | that in most cases it's going to be a minority of people. - I think it is, and that's what the

01:26:55.920 | research has showed. And one really powerful thing is that we can really actively control

01:27:03.520 | who comes in and out of our community based on the .edu verification. And we can also control

01:27:08.320 | who's not in our community because we have that lever where each account is associated with .edu.

01:27:13.840 | So that's the first point I would put out there. Second point is controlled expansion, meaning that

01:27:21.760 | we have community moderation. We have this panel that allows the moderators to see all of the

01:27:27.920 | highly downvoted content, all of the reported content, all the flagged content and look through

01:27:33.360 | it and decide what they like and what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. And we ping every

01:27:40.720 | moderator when there's a report. So things are taken down pretty quickly. And we have our

01:27:45.920 | standards and we have, I think above all of that, we have a mission and it's a community-based

01:27:51.600 | mission. Yik Yak was more of a fun app and by its own admission, it was a place where people

01:27:56.800 | could enjoy themselves and could sort of yak. - Yak, yeah. - Yik Yak, you know, chit chat.

01:28:03.040 | We have a bigger purpose than that, frankly. And I think that shows in the people who self-select

01:28:09.920 | to be on that app, to be on LibreX and to be on Yik Yak, respectively. The last thing I'll say is,

01:28:15.440 | Yik Yak was very few characters. It was a Twitter-esque platform. And that doesn't allow

01:28:21.520 | for a tremendous amount of nuance. It doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of conversation.

01:28:24.880 | LibreX is much more long form. And so the kind of posts that you'll get on LibreX can spam pages.

01:28:33.600 | What people are starting to realize is that they can reach a lot more people at a lot more

01:28:39.760 | pertinent of a time, a lot more quickly by posting their thoughts on LibreX than if they

01:28:46.240 | went to their school newspaper. And I think the school newspapers might be a little worried about

01:28:51.600 | that, but more importantly, we're connecting people in this way where long form communication

01:28:55.360 | with nuance that takes into account everything that's happening in the community temporally

01:29:00.080 | is really available at LibreX and, you know, not really communicable in 240 or 480 or whatever

01:29:09.520 | the number of characters the acts were bound to. And then, you know, I could talk about the history

01:29:15.440 | of Yik Yak if you want me to go further. They started, I think they were at 12 schools.

01:29:20.640 | And then spring break hit, people told their friends, look at this app, a thousand schools

01:29:27.680 | signed up and had active communities. They had a problem on their hands. And then the high schools

01:29:32.400 | come on board. - Yeah. I think a lot of the things you said ring true to me, but especially the

01:29:38.000 | vision one, which I do think having a vision in the leadership, having a mission makes all the

01:29:44.480 | difference in the world. That's both for the engineers that are building, like the team that's

01:29:50.240 | building the app, the moderation and users, 'cause they kinda, the mission carries itself

01:29:56.400 | through the behavior of the people on the social network.

01:30:04.560 | As a small tangent, let me ask you something about Parler, but it's less about Parler and more

01:30:10.320 | about AWS. So AWS removed Parler from its platform, you know, for whatever reasons,

01:30:16.880 | doesn't really matter. But the fact that AWS would do this was really, really bothered me

01:30:23.680 | personally, because I saw AWS as the computing infrastructure. And I always thought that part

01:30:32.320 | could not put a finger on its scale. And I don't know what your thoughts are, like,

01:30:37.040 | were you bothered by Parler being removed from AWS? And how does that affect how you think about

01:30:43.600 | the computing infrastructure on which Lubrix is based? - I was bothered not so much by Parler

01:30:51.120 | specifically being taken out of AWS, but more the fact that something that's like a highway,

01:30:58.720 | something that people rely on, that people build on top of, that people assume is gonna be somewhat

01:31:04.240 | position agnostic, like a road that people drive on, is becoming ideologically sort of discriminatory.

01:31:12.960 | I just, and of course, mind you, Amazon can do what it wants, it's a private company,

01:31:18.480 | and I support the rights of private companies. I just, on an ethical and sort of a deep moral level,

01:31:23.920 | I wonder, like, at what point should a company sort of be agnostic in that regard and let

01:31:33.360 | developers build on top of their infrastructure? And where does that responsibility hold?

01:31:39.520 | - Yes, it makes you hope that there's going to be, from a capitalistic sense,

01:31:45.920 | competitors to AWS who say, like, we're not going to put our finger on the scale.

01:31:50.480 | I mean, on the highway is a good sort of example. It's like if a privately owned highway said,

01:31:57.280 | you know, we're no longer going to allow, we're only going to allow electric vehicles.

01:32:03.680 | And a bunch of people in this world would be like, yes, because electric is good for the environment.

01:32:10.000 | And, you know, yes, but then you have to consider the, like, the slippery slope nature of it,

01:32:20.080 | but also, like, the negative impact on the lives of many others and what that means for innovation

01:32:25.440 | and for, like, competition, again, in a capitalistic sense. So there's some nature,

01:32:30.560 | there's some level to this hierarchy of our existence that we should not allow to manipulate

01:32:38.960 | what's built on top of it. It should be truly infrastructure. And it feels like compute

01:32:44.400 | is storage and compute is that layer, like it shouldn't be messed with. I haven't seen anybody

01:32:52.000 | really complain about it, like in terms of government. And I'm not even sure government

01:32:56.160 | is the right mechanism through policy and regulation to step in. Because again, they do

01:33:01.520 | a messy job of fixing things. But I do hope there's competitors to AWS that make AWS and step up.

01:33:09.200 | Because I do think, you know, I'm a fan of AWS, except this.

01:33:12.560 | - Good service.

01:33:13.200 | - It's a good service until this.

01:33:15.600 | - Until, yeah, until they rip out the rug.

01:33:18.960 | - And the point is, it's not that necessarily their decision was a bad one with Parler

01:33:26.160 | in particular. It's that, like, the slippery slope nature of it, but also, it takes the good actors

01:33:35.920 | that are creating amazing products and makes them more fearful. And when you're more fearful,

01:33:40.480 | it's the same reason that anonymity is a tool that you don't create the best thing you could

01:33:44.880 | possibly create. When you're fearful, you don't create. I think we kind of talked about it a

01:33:51.200 | little bit, but I wonder if we can kind of revisit it a little bit. I talked to a guy named Ronald

01:33:57.360 | Sullivan, who's a faculty at Harvard law professor. He was on the legal defense team. He was the

01:34:05.200 | lawyer for Harvey Weinstein and Aaron Hernandez for the double murder case. So he takes on these

01:34:11.840 | really difficult cases of unpopular figures because he believes, like, that's the way you test,

01:34:18.080 | that we believe in the rule of law. But he was, there's a big protest in Harvard

01:34:25.920 | to get him, basically censor him and to get him to no longer be faculty dean,

01:34:34.000 | all those kinds of things. And it was by a minority of students, but, and there was a huge

01:34:40.400 | blowback, obviously, in the public, but also inside Harvard, like, that's not okay. He stands

01:34:46.240 | for the very principles at the founding of Harvard and at the principles of the founding of this

01:34:50.560 | country and the law and so on. But the basic argument is that, was about safe spaces, that

01:34:59.680 | it's unsafe to have somebody who is basically supporting Harvey Weinstein, right? What do you

01:35:07.840 | think about this whole idea of safe spaces on college campuses? Because it feels like

01:35:14.400 | the mission of Librex is pushing back against the idea of safe spaces.

01:35:20.000 | I think safe spaces are fine when they're within people's private lives, within their homes,

01:35:26.640 | within their religious organizations. I think the problem becomes when the institution starts

01:35:31.520 | encouraging or backing safe spaces, because what are people being safe from? And oftentimes it

01:35:43.040 | seems like there's this idea that the harm that's being attempted to be mitigated is the harm of

01:35:50.800 | confronting opinions you disagree with, opinions you might find repugnant. And if this is

01:35:56.400 | conflated with a need for safety, then that's where the idea of liberal arts education sort of dies.

01:36:02.560 | Of course, it's complicated and we still want to have safe intellectual environments.

01:36:08.800 | But the way that I hear the term safe space used today, I think it doesn't really have a place

01:36:16.400 | within the intellectual context. - Yeah, it's funny. I mean, this is why Librex is really

01:36:24.160 | exciting, is it's pushing those difficult conversations. And I'd love to see,

01:36:27.600 | ultimately, there does seem to be an asymmetry of power that results in the concept of safe spaces

01:36:37.600 | and hate speech being redefined in the slippery slope kind of way, where it means basically

01:36:43.760 | anything you want it to mean. And it basically is used to silence people. To silence people,

01:36:50.720 | they're like good, thoughtful experts. - Also, yeah, on that, I would say it has

01:36:56.640 | not just a pragmatic purpose, which is the silencing, but also sort of an ideological

01:37:02.080 | purpose, which is, and a linguistic purpose, which is to conflate words with unsafety and harm and

01:37:09.600 | violence, which is what you kind of see on a cultural linguistic level is happening

01:37:16.720 | all around us right now, is that this idea that words are harm, it's a very dangerous and slippery

01:37:22.160 | concept. I mean, you don't have to slip that far to see why that's a problem. Once we start

01:37:27.360 | making words into violence and we start criminalizing words, we get into some really

01:37:31.920 | authoritarian territory. Things that I think, I mean, myself and my background, I don't know how

01:37:38.560 | much we have to go into it, but things that my ancestors certainly would be worried about.

01:37:43.200 | - What's your background? - I'm a child of Holocaust

01:37:48.240 | survivors and pro-Grom survivors. - Yeah, I mean, me as well,

01:37:53.760 | from different directions. I come from the Soviet Union. So there's, well, like in most of us,

01:37:59.920 | hate and love runs through our blood from our history. You mentioned MIT is being added to

01:38:06.160 | Librex. Has it already been added? - Yes, it was added today.

01:38:09.840 | - Today, okay. So let me ask you, this is exciting because I don't know what your thoughts are about

01:38:16.960 | this, but I'll tell you from my perspective, if you're, and a lot of MIT folks listen to this,

01:38:22.320 | I would love it if you joined Librex. It'd be interesting to explore conversations

01:38:28.480 | on several topics inside MIT, but one of the most moving that hasn't been discussed at all

01:38:38.560 | except in little flourishes here and there is the topic of Jeffrey Epstein.

01:38:45.440 | Now there's been a huge amount of like impact that the connections of various faculty to Jeffrey

01:38:56.400 | Epstein and the various things that have been said had on MIT, but it feels like the difficult

01:39:03.920 | conversation haven't had been had. It's the administration trying to clean up and give a

01:39:10.160 | bunch of BS to try to pretend like, let's just hide this part. Like nothing is broken, nothing

01:39:16.400 | to see here. Here's a bad dude that did some bad things and some faculty that kind of misbehaved a

01:39:24.240 | little bit because they're a little bit clueless. Let's all look the other way. Harvard did this

01:39:29.520 | much better, by the way. They completely, it's almost like people pretend like Harvard didn't

01:39:37.360 | have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein. But I think I'd be curious to hear what those

01:39:44.560 | conversations are because there's conversations on the topic of like, well, obviously sort of

01:39:53.520 | sexual assault and disrespecting women on any kind of level within academia, but just women

01:39:59.680 | in general. That's an important topic to talk about various, many sets of difficult conversations.

01:40:06.000 | And the other topic is funding for research. Like what are we okay taking money from and what are

01:40:16.640 | we not okay taking money from? There's a lot of just interesting, difficult conversations to be

01:40:21.840 | had. I've worked with people who refuse to take money from DOD, Department of Defense, for example,

01:40:30.240 | because in some indirect or direct way, you're funding military, industrial complex, all those

01:40:35.920 | kinds of things. I think with Jeffrey Epstein, it's even more stark, this contrast of like, well,

01:40:42.000 | what is and isn't ethical to take money from? And I just think, forget academia, I think there's just

01:40:49.200 | a lot of interesting, deep human discussions to be had and they haven't been. And there's been

01:40:54.960 | somebody, I don't know if you're familiar with Eric Weinstein, who has been outraged by the fact

01:41:01.200 | that nobody's talking about Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody's having these difficult conversations.

01:41:06.240 | And Eric himself has had a sort of complicated journey through academia in the sense that he's

01:41:15.840 | a really kind of renegade thinker in many kinds of ways. I'm not sure if you know who Eric is

01:41:20.080 | by any chance. - Heard the name.

01:41:21.280 | - Okay. - I actually

01:41:22.400 | checked out Zev. - Zev.

01:41:24.000 | - It was heartening for me to see that I was not the youngest person on this podcast.

01:41:29.040 | - You're the second youngest. - Second youngest.

01:41:31.360 | - That's hilarious. But Eric, he's kind of a renegade thinker. He's a mathematical physicist.

01:41:46.480 | With I believe a PhD at Harvard and he spent some time at MIT and so on. But he speaks to the fact

01:41:52.800 | that sort of there's a culture of conformity and so on. And if you're somebody who's a bit

01:41:57.840 | outside the box, a bit weird in whatever dimension of weird, that makes you actually

01:42:02.000 | kind of interesting that the system kind of wants to make you an outcast, wants to throw you out.

01:42:07.840 | And so he kind of opposes that whole idea. He's the perfect person to have conversations with

01:42:13.840 | in this kind of Librax kind of context of anonymity. Because I'll tell you the few

01:42:21.040 | conversations that came across and they were very quickly silenced. And I'm troubled by it.

01:42:27.520 | I'm not sure what to think of it. There's a few threads inside MIT, like on a mailing list,

01:42:35.520 | discussing Marvin Minsky. I don't know if you know who that is. He's an AI researcher. He's

01:42:41.680 | a seminal figure in AI before your time, but one of the most important people in art, in the history

01:42:47.280 | of artificial intelligence. And there was a discussion on a thread that involved

01:42:55.440 | the interaction between Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein. That conversation was quickly shut down.

01:43:03.600 | One person was pushed out of MIT, Richard Stallman, who's one of the key figures in the,

01:43:09.360 | because of that, because he wanted some clarity about the situation, but he also miss, he spoke

01:43:17.040 | like we mentioned earlier without grace, right? But he was quickly punished by the administration

01:43:23.760 | because of a few people protesting. And just that conversation,

01:43:27.920 | I guess what bothered me most is it didn't continue. It didn't expand. There was no like

01:43:37.280 | complexity. And there was a hunger that was clear behind that conversation, especially

01:43:44.560 | sort of for me, I'd like to understand Marvin Minsky was one of the reasons I wanted to come

01:43:49.840 | to MIT. He's passed away, but he's one of the key figures in the field that I deeply care about,

01:43:56.400 | artificial intelligence. And I thought that his name was dragged through the mud,

01:44:04.480 | through that situation and without ever being like resolved. And so it's unclear to me, like,

01:44:11.280 | what am I supposed to think about all this? And the only way to come to a conclusion there is to

01:44:18.400 | keep talking. It's like the thing we started this conversation with about truth is like,

01:44:22.880 | it's conversation. So in that sense, I'd love if people on Librex, perhaps in other places,

01:44:30.480 | but it seems like Librex is a nice platform to discuss Marvin Minsky, to discuss Jeffrey Epstein,

01:44:36.800 | to learn from it, to grow from it, to see how we can make MIT better. As I'm still one of the

01:44:42.880 | people, I've always dreamed of being at MIT. It was a dream come true in many ways. And I still

01:44:49.120 | believe that MIT is one of the most special places in this world, like many other universities,

01:44:54.400 | universities in general is truly special, man. It hurts my heart when people speak

01:45:00.160 | poorly of academia. I understand what they mean. They're very correct, but there is much more,

01:45:06.160 | in my opinion, that's beautiful about academia and that's broken. I mean, I don't know if you

01:45:12.240 | have something to comment. It doesn't necessarily need to be about Jeffrey Epstein, but there's

01:45:17.200 | these difficult things that come up that test the academic community, right? That it feels like

01:45:25.120 | conversation is the only way to resolve it. - I think people have a natural need for closure.

01:45:31.760 | And it's not just, I'm not as plugged into what academics are talking about as you would be, Lex,

01:45:37.520 | but I even- - Kids these days, no respect for Minsky.

01:45:41.440 | - Exactly. I mean, especially in the AI community, I'm not necessarily a programmer,

01:45:48.000 | but what I will say is that people come to LibreX and we always see a huge spike in users whenever

01:45:55.920 | there's a tragedy on campus or something where people need closure. Recently, there was a suicide

01:46:02.400 | just the other day on Yale's campus and people were just coming to pay respects and to say,

01:46:09.760 | "Rest in peace," and speak also about what might've led to an environment where people

01:46:17.680 | are drawn to these terrible results. - So just having a conversation is important there.

01:46:27.360 | 'Cause it brings closure. - People need the space,

01:46:30.400 | especially when no one wants to go out and put their head above, be the longest blade of grass

01:46:37.760 | on that one because of the stigma. People need to be able to speak.

01:46:42.080 | - Yeah, that fear really bothers me, the fear that silences people,

01:46:47.280 | like where they self-censor, where they self-silence. Well, you've created an amazing

01:46:57.040 | place. I'm kind of interested in your struggle and your journey of creating positive

01:47:05.840 | incentives because it's a problem in a very different domain that I'm also interested in.

01:47:11.440 | So I love robotics, I love human-robot interaction. And so I believe that most people are good and we

01:47:20.720 | can bring out the best in human nature. Social networks is a very tricky space to do that in.

01:47:25.760 | So I'm glad you're taking on the problem and I'm glad you have the mission that you do.

01:47:29.760 | I hope you succeed. But you mentioned offline that you used to be into chess.

01:47:36.240 | Tell me about your journey through chess. - Sure. I was a very competitive tournament

01:47:40.960 | player growing up till about like 13. For the chess fans, I got to around 2000

01:47:45.360 | USCF. So I was a competitive player, especially my age group. And that actually led me to poker.

01:47:55.840 | I was playing a tournament and what happens is when you're like a very strong 13-year-old and

01:47:59.680 | you're playing locally, if you want a good match, you're going to end up playing a lot of adults.

01:48:03.440 | And I ended up playing this mid-40s guy who we played a really strong game. He actually beat me.

01:48:10.480 | I still remember the game and think, "Oh, I could have actually played that move instead of that

01:48:14.400 | one." But after the game, we had a post-mortem. It was this me, I think I was 13 at the time,

01:48:19.600 | and this 40-year-old hanging over this chess board and looking over the moves. And even at my age,

01:48:25.600 | it occurred to me that this guy was absolutely brilliant. And after the post-mortem, not only

01:48:31.280 | by the way in chess, but just in the way he articulates his thoughts as some people are,

01:48:35.120 | after the post-mortem, I went and looked him up online and I found out that he was a World Series

01:48:39.600 | of Poker champion. - Who is it? - His name is Bill Chen. - Oh, wow. - And I haven't really kept up

01:48:45.440 | with him except one time there was another chess tournament when I was around 14. And I followed

01:48:52.240 | him into an elevator as he was leaving the chess hall, pretending that I was going to go up just

01:48:56.560 | because I just wanted to talk to him. And I suggested a sequel or some changes that I thought

01:49:02.080 | he should make for his book. And he was like, "Actually, I was thinking of doing the same thing,"

01:49:05.680 | which was incredibly validating to my 14-year-old or 15-year-old self. But I really haven't kept up

01:49:11.200 | with him. So it's a shout out to him. And then he wrote a book called "The Mathematics of Poker"

01:49:16.400 | that I started reading. And that, first of all, kickstarted my interest in game theory. And second

01:49:22.080 | of all, in poker. So I started from chess and then poker. And I started with Bitcoin poker and

01:49:28.960 | had a lot of success with that. Met a lot of amazing friends. Learned a ton about, I mean,

01:49:35.920 | I think about entrepreneurship as well as taking risks, reasonable risks, positive expected value

01:49:41.120 | risks. And also just growing as a person and mathematician. - Did you say Bitcoin poker?

01:49:49.360 | - Yeah. - What's Bitcoin poker?

01:49:51.120 | - So you have to understand I was 14 years old, right? - Yes.

01:49:53.520 | - So how is a 14-year-old with wonderful parents who care about him and probably don't want him

01:49:58.960 | playing poker going to start playing poker? Because I wanted the challenge. I love the

01:50:05.600 | challenge. I love the competition. And I realized the answer is probably Bitcoin,

01:50:10.080 | because the implications of that. And they had these free roll tournaments, which for those

01:50:17.040 | of you who don't know what free rolls are, there's these promotional tournaments that

01:50:20.320 | sites put on where they'll put like a few dollars in and then thousands of people sign up and the

01:50:25.760 | winners get like a dollar. And I started there and I worked my way up. - That's amazing. What's

01:50:31.280 | your sense about from that time to today of the growth of the cryptocurrency community? I'm

01:50:38.080 | actually having like four or five conversation with Bitcoin proponents, Bitcoin maximists,

01:50:46.160 | and like all these, I'm just having all these cryptocurrency conversations currently,

01:50:50.240 | because there's so many brilliant, like technically brilliant, but also financially

01:50:55.680 | and philosophically brilliant people in those communities. It's fascinating with the explosion

01:51:00.480 | of impact. And also if you look into the future, the possible revolutionary impact

01:51:05.760 | on society in general. But what's your sense about this whole growth of Bitcoin?

01:51:10.320 | - I'm definitely less knowledgeable on the currency. Again, like programming, it was a means

01:51:16.560 | to an end. - Yes, got it.

01:51:18.080 | - What I will say is that there was this amazing community that grew out of it, and you'd have

01:51:23.360 | people who were willing to stake me or have me be their horse and they're my backer for having

01:51:30.960 | never met me for literally full Bitcoin tournaments, like full Bitcoin entry fee tournaments.

01:51:38.240 | And I get a percentage of the profits and they get a percentage. And to have that level of community

01:51:42.640 | for that degree of money, I mean, it gives you hope about the potential for humans to

01:51:49.280 | act in mutual best interest with a degree of trust.

01:51:53.760 | - Yeah, there's a really fascinating, strong community there. But speaking of like bringing

01:51:59.200 | out the best of human nature, it's a community that's currently struggling a little bit

01:52:05.280 | in terms of their ability to communicate in a positive, inspiring way. Like the Bitcoin folks,

01:52:11.840 | and we talk about this a lot, I honestly think they have a lot of love in their hearts and minds,

01:52:20.640 | but they just kind of naturally, because the world has been like institutions and the centralized

01:52:30.480 | powers have been sort of mocking and fighting them for many years that they've become sort of

01:52:37.600 | worn down and cynical. And so they tend to be a little bit more aggressive and negative on the

01:52:42.800 | internet in the way they communicate, especially on Twitter. And it's just created this whole

01:52:48.320 | community of basically being derisive and mocking and trolling and all this kind of stuff. But

01:52:55.520 | people are trying to, as the Bitcoin community grows, as the cryptocurrency community grows,

01:53:00.560 | they're trying to revolutionize that aspect too. So they're trying to find the positive core and

01:53:05.920 | grow in that way. So it's fascinating, 'cause I think all of us are trying to find the positive

01:53:13.280 | aspects of ourselves and trying to learn how to communicate in a positive way online. It's like

01:53:19.040 | the internet hasn't been around, social networks haven't been around that long. We're trying to

01:53:23.680 | figure this thing out. Let me ask you the ridiculous question. I don't know if you have an

01:53:28.320 | answer, but who is the greatest chess player of all time in your view? So since you like chess,

01:53:34.000 | you talk about- - That's on how you

01:53:35.520 | define it. But if you're talking about raw skill, like if you put everyone across time into a

01:53:40.720 | tournament together, Carlson would win. I don't think that's particularly controversial.

01:53:45.120 | - Oh, you mean like with the same exact skill level?

01:53:47.520 | - Exactly. - Magnus Carlson, okay.

01:53:50.240 | - Now, if you talk about political importance, I think Bobby Fischer is, he's the only one that

01:53:57.760 | people still, you go to someone on the street, they know Bobby Fischer because of what he

01:54:02.160 | represented, right? - Who do you think is more famous

01:54:04.320 | on the street, Garry Kasparov or Bobby Fischer? - Bobby, in America, Bobby Fischer.

01:54:09.920 | - You think so? - Yes.

01:54:11.360 | - That's interesting. I think we're gonna have to put that to the test.

01:54:14.160 | - Yeah, maybe it's more reflective of the community that I was a part of, but yeah.

01:54:18.240 | - Oh, so in the community you were part of, like, Young Minds, playing chess, Bobby Fischer

01:54:23.440 | was a superstar in terms of the roots. - Yeah, I think so, because he's American

01:54:27.520 | and he stood up against the big bad Russians at the time and unfortunately he had a very bad

01:54:36.400 | downfall. But for our geopolitical situation, he meant a lot. And then if you talk about,

01:54:44.320 | compared to contemporaries, actually, I would say Paul Morphy was a bit of a throwback.

01:54:49.920 | He's one of those geniuses that was just head and shoulders above everyone else.

01:54:55.040 | - Is there somebody that inspired your own play, like, as a Young Mind?

01:54:59.920 | - Yeah, I really liked Mikhail Tal. - So, like, you see, you were,

01:55:04.320 | I think he was very aggressive, right? - Yeah, very tactical.

01:55:06.800 | Which is funny, 'cause I found that I was better at, like, sort of slow methodical play

01:55:12.720 | than quick tactics. But I just, I mean, there's something beautiful about the creativity.

01:55:17.280 | And that's something I always latched onto, was being a creative player, being a creative person.

01:55:21.440 | I mean, chess doesn't really reward creativity as much as a lot of other things, especially

01:55:26.080 | entrepreneurial pursuits. Which I think is part of the reason why I sort of grew out of it. But

01:55:32.800 | I always was attracted to the creativity that I did see in chess.

01:55:36.720 | - So let me ask the flip, the other, 'cause you said poker, is there somebody that stands

01:55:42.560 | out to you as could be the greatest poker player of all time? Like, who do you admire in that role?

01:55:50.160 | - That's a more controversial one, because these chess players are such, like, first of all,

01:55:55.760 | there's more of an objective standard. And second of all, there's, like, they're, like, almost,

01:56:00.160 | like, cultural figures to me. Whereas poker players are more, like, live, living. They feel

01:56:06.000 | more, like, they feel more accessible. - But they also have, like, personalities.

01:56:10.560 | - Yeah. - Like, poker have, like, Phil Ivey

01:56:12.400 | as a personality. - They have vices.

01:56:13.840 | - They have vices, they have quirks, they have humor. Like, I guess we've seen videos of them.

01:56:19.760 | - Yeah. - Because it's such a recent

01:56:21.840 | development. - I'll say one person who I

01:56:23.760 | admire so much, and, like, if I could, like, have a dinner list of people that I want to have dinner

01:56:29.680 | with, like, maybe it'll happen now, actually. (both laugh)

01:56:32.800 | I would love to have dinner with him. Phil Galfond.

01:56:35.920 | - Oh, wow. - Who I don't, most people

01:56:38.240 | probably won't know. - Yeah.

01:56:39.440 | - But, on this podcast, but the way, first of all, he democratized poker learning in, like,

01:56:47.280 | the mathematical nitty-gritty, how do you get good at poker type sense, to the entire world,

01:56:53.200 | in, like, an unprecedented way. He was, he gave, he had this gift that he had learned and distilled

01:56:59.200 | by working with some of the greatest poker minds, and he just democratized it through his website.

01:57:04.720 | And I learned a ton from him. And not only that, but you just listen to him think, and it's almost

01:57:11.840 | like a philosophical meditation, the way that he breaks things down and thinks about these different

01:57:16.640 | elements and has such a holistic thought process. It's like watching a genius work. And, you know,

01:57:23.280 | he's also just a nice, fun, sociable guy that, like, you can imagine being at your dinner table.

01:57:29.200 | - Yeah. - So, all that combined.

01:57:30.960 | - Which is not true for a lot of poker players, right? A lot of them are dark souls.

01:57:34.720 | - To say the least, yes. - I really like the, what is he, Canadian,

01:57:40.000 | Daniel Negrano. - He's also a nice guy.

01:57:42.320 | - He's also a nice guy, but he's also somebody who's able to express his thoughts about poker

01:57:47.600 | really well, but also in an entertaining way. He seems to be able to predict cards

01:57:52.320 | better than anybody I've ever seen. Like, what-- - Did you watch the challenge?

01:57:56.080 | - Which challenge? - He lost, like, a million dollars

01:57:59.440 | recently to Doug Polk. He lost a million dollars to Doug Polk, Heads Up Online. It's really

01:58:05.440 | interesting. - Yeah, it's awesome to watch these guys

01:58:09.280 | work. So, I know you're 21? - 21.

01:58:14.320 | - 21. So, asking you for advice is a little bit funny, but at the same time, not, because you've

01:58:23.840 | created a social network. You've created a startup from nothing. As we talked about earlier,

01:58:29.840 | like, without knowing how to program, you've programmed. I mean, you've taken this whole

01:58:33.840 | journey that a lot of people, I think, would be really inspired by. So, given that, and given

01:58:39.920 | the fact that 20 years from now, you'll probably laugh at the advice you're gonna give now.

01:58:43.280 | - Absolutely, I hope so. If I don't laugh at the advice I give now, something went desperately

01:58:48.400 | wrong, right? - Yeah. So, do you have advice for people

01:58:53.360 | that wanna follow in your footsteps and create a startup, whether it's in the software app

01:58:59.600 | domain or whether it's anything else? - So, I'll speak specifically about social

01:59:04.720 | media apps. - Yes.

01:59:06.240 | - Try to keep it as narrow as possible so I can laugh as little as possible when I'm 41.

01:59:10.720 | And what I would say is that if you're like a 21, 22-year-old who's looking at me and being like,

01:59:19.680 | "I wanna do something like this," what I would say is you probably know better than just about

01:59:25.360 | anyone. And if you have a feeling in yourself that this is something that I have to do,

01:59:31.840 | and this is something I could imagine myself doing for the next 10 years, because if you're

01:59:35.760 | successful, you are gonna have to do it for the next 10 years. And through the ups and the downs,

01:59:40.960 | through the amazing interviews with Lex and through the not-so-amazing articles you might

01:59:46.000 | have with other people, right? And you're gonna have to ride those highs and lows, and you have

01:59:51.920 | to believe in what you're doing. But if you have that feeling, what I would say is listen to as

01:59:56.880 | few people as possible, because people are experts in domains, but when it comes to what's hot and

02:00:04.080 | what makes sense in a social context, you are the authority as a young person who's going through

02:00:11.760 | these things and living in your milieu. And I've talked to, at this point, so many experts,

02:00:21.440 | experts, so many investors, VCs. You'd be amazed at the advice I've gotten.

02:00:30.080 | >> So there's a minefield of bad advice?

02:00:33.760 | >> That's the hardest part, I think, for young people. And it's the thing,

02:00:38.560 | when people, like, I help Yellies all the time who ask, like, I never turn down when a founder

02:00:44.720 | asks me to have a conversation, I never turn it down. I'm always there for them. And the number

02:00:50.400 | one thing I worry about is that at Yale, we're taught implicitly and explicitly that you listen

02:00:57.280 | to the adult in the room, you listen to the person with the highest pay grade. And it's devastating,

02:01:04.560 | 'cause that's how innovation dies. And, you know...

02:01:07.040 | >> Yeah, it's intimidating, too. You talk to VC who probably made--

02:01:13.440 | >> Is worth a billion dollars.

02:01:14.560 | >> Yeah, billion dollars, and they're going to tell you, you know, all the successful startups

02:01:20.720 | they helped fund, or even just a successful business owner is going to tell you some advice.

02:01:26.560 | And it's hard psychologically to think that they might be wrong. Yeah, but you're saying that's

02:01:33.600 | the only way you succeed is just listen to yourself.

02:01:34.720 | >> It's the only way you can succeed, 'cause if they knew what they were doing,

02:01:37.360 | they would have built it themselves. And what's especially hard is people go, "Oh, of course,

02:01:44.160 | you know, I'll listen to people's, I'll listen to their advice, but I'll know why it's wrong.

02:01:48.400 | And then I'll do my own thing." And that sounds greatly abstract, but sometimes you can't always

02:01:53.680 | even put your finger on why they're wrong. And I think to have the conviction to say,

02:01:59.680 | "You're wrong, and I can't tell you why, but I still think I'm right." It's a rare thing,

02:02:05.280 | especially at like, it's very counterintuitive. And you might even say it's hubris or arrogant,

02:02:11.280 | but I think it's necessary, 'cause a lot of these things are, they're not things that you can really

02:02:16.160 | put into words until you see them in action. Like a lot of them are kind of happy accidents.

02:02:22.720 | >> Yeah, it's been tough for me, like as a person who, like I'm very empathetic, so when people

02:02:30.400 | tell me stuff, I kind of want to understand them. And it's been a painful process, especially people

02:02:38.400 | close to me. Basically everything I've done, especially in the recent few years, a lot of

02:02:45.120 | people close to me said not to do. And like my parents too, that's been a hard one, is to basically

02:02:54.800 | acknowledge to myself that you don't know, like you don't, that everything you're going to say

02:03:04.640 | by way of advice for me is not going to be helpful. Like I love my parents very much,

02:03:10.640 | but like, they're just like, they don't get it. And as you put it beautifully,

02:03:17.600 | it's very difficult to put your finger on exactly why, because a lot of advice sounds reasonable.

02:03:26.480 | >> That's the worst kind. If it sounds really good, that just means it's an earworm. Like that's like

02:03:35.760 | a song that you hear on the radio and then you're like, you're humming it in the car and it's like,

02:03:40.160 | it's the same thing. The better it sounds, the more skeptical.

02:03:44.640 | >> Yeah. Reason is a bad drug. Like you should be very careful, because like,

02:03:50.480 | you know, the things that seem impossible, every major innovation, every major business

02:03:57.520 | seems impossible at birth. But even not just the impossible things, I think, you know,

02:04:03.280 | you look at like love, for example, it's very easy to give advice to sort of point out all the ways

02:04:11.280 | it can go wrong, or marriage, all the divorces that people go through, all the pain of years

02:04:17.040 | that you go through, the divorce, like the system of marriage, the marriage industrial complex,

02:04:22.960 | all the money that's wasted, all those kinds of things. But that advice is useless when you're

02:04:28.160 | in love. The point is to just pat the person on the back and say, go get them kid. Like,

02:04:35.280 | what is it? Good Will Hunting, I went to see about a girl.

02:04:38.320 | >> Oh, yeah.

02:04:39.600 | >> That's a good movie.

02:04:42.080 | >> I love that movie.

02:04:42.800 | >> But yeah, that's, that took me a long time to figure out. I'm still trying to fight through it,

02:04:50.400 | but especially when you're young, that's hard. But nothing in life is worth accomplishing is easy.

02:04:59.360 | >> But I think it's really interesting you make that connection between like startup advice

02:05:03.440 | and like your parents, because it's the exact same sort of mechanism, where when you're young,

02:05:09.120 | your parents are usually like, right, right? And the experts are usually right. And you know,

02:05:14.560 | if you listen to them, and you follow their orders, you're going to go to a school like Yale.

02:05:18.800 | >> Yeah.

02:05:19.360 | >> And at a certain point, stops making sense. I've seen my friends at Yale go down paths,

02:05:26.240 | because they just continued listening to their parents that I know in their heart of hearts

02:05:31.440 | is not the right path for them.

02:05:32.960 | >> Yeah, you know what? That's how I see the education system. The whole point is to guide

02:05:41.760 | you to a certain point in your life, and everybody's point is different. And your task is

02:05:50.160 | to at that point, to have a personal revolution and create your own path.

02:05:55.760 | >> But no one tells you that.

02:05:56.800 | >> Nobody tells you that, because they want you to keep following the same path as they're leading

02:06:01.360 | you towards. Like they're not going to say your whole job is to eventually rebel.

02:06:05.920 | >> Yeah.

02:06:07.360 | >> That's how rebellion works. You're not supposed to be told, but that is the task.

02:06:12.800 | They can take you just like you said, and depending who you are, they can take you really

02:06:17.920 | far. But at a certain point, you have to rebel. That could be getting a PhD, that could be in

02:06:22.960 | your undergrad, that could be high school.

02:06:24.400 | >> Yeah, it could be any point. One thing that I think played a pretty pivotal role,

02:06:29.120 | and I've never really mentioned this, he might not even know the person about to tell you about,

02:06:35.280 | in sort of me actually going out and making Librex, was that I was taking this graduate

02:06:39.680 | level math class, I think my sophomore year. And I met this PhD student who was also in it,

02:06:48.880 | and had considerable citations and also startup experience. And I think he actually ended up

02:06:54.880 | being the CTO of a unicorn later on. I've sort of lost touch with him, but we're still Facebook

02:07:00.640 | friends, as it is in the 21st century. And I was in a class and I was telling him, "I really want

02:07:08.720 | to make this thing, but I have no technical background." And this guy's a computer genius,

02:07:15.600 | he worked under Dan Spielman at Yale. So he's a good guy, right? And we were doing some math

02:07:21.680 | together. We were doing something on discrepancy, for those of you who really care about math,

02:07:27.120 | so combinatorics. And he just turns to me, he's like, "I think you could do it." I'm like,

02:07:33.600 | "What do you mean, you think I could do it?" He's like, "I think you could do it." And I was like,

02:07:37.920 | "Really?" But I respected this guy so much. His name was Young Duck. Shout out to Young Duck.

02:07:44.320 | I respected this guy so much that I was like, "If Young Duck says I can do it, and Young Duck is a

02:07:48.720 | legit genius, and he knows, and he knows me." Because we were in two classes together, and we'd

02:07:54.080 | spend a lot of time together. If he thinks I can do it, then who am I to say I can't do it?

02:07:59.200 | Yeah, that's a lesson for mentorship.

02:08:02.400 | By the way, he has no idea, probably.

02:08:05.360 | Well, and he might not even remember that interaction, which is funny. But the point is

02:08:10.720 | that when a crazy young kid comes up to you with a crazy dream, every once in a while,

02:08:19.760 | you should just pat him on the back and say, "I believe in you." You can do it. If they look up to

02:08:25.760 | you, that means your words have power. And if you say, "No, no, come on, be reasonable. Finish your

02:08:35.840 | schoolwork," kind of thing, that's unreasonable to take that leap. "No, just finish your education,"

02:08:41.040 | blah, blah, blah. Whatever the reasonable advice is, every once in a while, maybe often as a

02:08:47.120 | mentor, you should say, "Go see about a girl in California," or whatever the equivalent is.

02:08:53.680 | That was my moment. That was my Goodwill Hunting moment.

02:08:56.720 | That's your Goodwill Hunting moment. Man, I miss Robin Williams. That was a special guy.

02:09:02.080 | People love it when I ask about book recommendations in general. Of course,

02:09:08.640 | your journey is just beginning, but is there something that jumps out to you,

02:09:12.080 | technical, fiction, philosophical, sci-fi, coloring books, blog posts you read somewhere

02:09:18.240 | that had an impact on your life?

02:09:20.880 | Video games.

02:09:22.320 | Video games that you recommend to others. Minecraft, manual.

02:09:27.120 | Manga.

02:09:28.500 | I mean, yeah, video. You could mention video games too, if there's something that jumps out to you

02:09:33.360 | that just had an impact.

02:09:36.800 | I guess I'll say I really like the book The War of Art, which is a book about creative resistance

02:09:43.440 | and the creative struggle and what it means to be creative. Part of what I see in this conversation

02:09:50.000 | and what you're doing, Lex, is so much of The War of Art's idea is that you just keep writing

02:09:56.000 | and writing and writing until you get to the new crap. You just roll with it, right? That's sort

02:10:04.160 | of what happens when you have three-hour conversations with people is you can only have

02:10:08.720 | so much scripted or societally constructed stuff until you get to the real you.

02:10:14.320 | And you have to show up. I mean, that book is kind of painful.

02:10:19.040 | It's really painful. And it's not something I would recommend for every part of it,

02:10:22.560 | but for what it did in my life at the time. It also kind of normalized, I don't know,

02:10:29.040 | part of my coming-of-age story is part of it's about realizing that I'm a creative person

02:10:35.360 | and person who needs to create. That's sort of a God-given thing, I think, for a lot of people,

02:10:41.840 | but it's something that I don't really feel like I can live without. And part of it was realizing

02:10:46.240 | that even within some of these more rigid structures, it's okay that I don't sort of

02:10:50.160 | fit in with them. And to hear about the struggles of other creatives was something for my own

02:10:55.840 | self-esteem and my own growing up that was really important to me. So I don't think the book itself

02:11:01.360 | might be perfect, but for what it did for my life, it was really impactful.

02:11:06.160 | Yeah, I think exactly. The words may not be exactly right by way of advice, but I think

02:11:13.440 | the journey that a lot of creatives take by reading that book is kind of profound. He also

02:11:20.880 | has another one called "Turning Pro," I think. I mean, he in general espouses taking it seriously.

02:11:27.520 | If you have a creative mind and you want to create something special in this world,

02:11:32.240 | go do it. Don't show up and look at the blank page.

02:11:38.320 | And so many people would tell me, would encourage me either blatantly or through implicit means

02:11:45.680 | to basically take the Apolesis seriously. It's a good signal, by the way.

02:11:50.880 | It's a good signal because my really close friends, the ones who have always supported me,

02:11:57.440 | they never said that because they got it. They understood that that was my path. And they might

02:12:02.160 | be skeptical. They might be like, I mean, one of my friends I remember told me, "I was always

02:12:07.840 | taken aback about why you were so certain this would work out." And he's like, "I finally got

02:12:12.720 | it once I saw it popping off, but before that I just didn't get it." But he still supported me.

02:12:18.160 | And I think it's a really good signal. And actually, just the fact of going through this

02:12:24.400 | process has made me socially feel so much more connected. And I've somewhat consolidated my

02:12:29.920 | social life to some degree, but it's so much more vulnerable connected. And that's part of

02:12:34.640 | the creative process. I have to thank for that, I think. There's something that's unstoppable about

02:12:40.480 | the creative mind. It's right there, that fire. And I guess part of the thing that you're supposed

02:12:48.000 | to do is let that fire burn in whichever direction. - And it's gonna hurt.

02:12:51.760 | - It's gonna hurt. Fire will hurt. But on the topic of video games, you mentioned Stanley

02:12:57.520 | Parable offline. You said you play some video games. Is there a video game that you especially

02:13:04.000 | love that you recommend I play, for example? - Yeah, I'll mention it's actually freely

02:13:09.600 | in keeping with what we've been talking about. It's The Beginner's Guide, which is what I...

02:13:14.880 | It was made by the same guy, Davey Rendon, who made The Stanley Parable, which I briefly saw

02:13:19.760 | you... I just clicked the video and then I went to sleep. It was like 2 a.m. But I briefly saw

02:13:26.640 | that you were looking at. And it's a game that is better treated as art. And I think...

02:13:37.440 | I won't claim to understand the creator, 'cause that would be a cardinal sin

02:13:40.800 | to me as a creative person. But it gets to the heart of a lot of the things that we've been

02:13:49.040 | talking about, which is the creative mind. The game can be interpreted in a lot of ways,

02:13:55.200 | in a feminist way. It could be interpreted as a story of friends. It could be interpreted

02:14:01.440 | as the story of critics versus a creative. The way I like to interpret it, and I don't want to

02:14:07.440 | give away too much, is the story of the creative part of your mind that creates just for the sake

02:14:16.160 | of creating. Meaning the part that creates for no rhyme or reason or clear meaning. It's almost

02:14:24.560 | ethereal. Versus the part that's... You could call it the editor. You could call it the pragmatist.

02:14:32.080 | You could call it the necessary force of ego in our lives. We can't totally be egoless, right?

02:14:38.640 | But we need to be egoless to be creative. And how that sort of internal censure... What role does

02:14:45.200 | it play? And how do we allow our creative minds to be creative? And yet, how do we still become

02:14:50.160 | useful? Because... And it's funny that a video game could have this in.

02:14:55.840 | It's a fascinating tension, which reminds me about the ridiculous question I every once in a while

02:15:02.480 | ask about meaning and death. So this whole ride ends. You're at the beginning of the ride,

02:15:11.280 | but it could end any day, actually. That's kind of the way human life works. You could die today,

02:15:17.360 | you can die tomorrow. Do you think about your own mortality? Do you think about death?

02:15:22.000 | Do you meditate on it? And in that context, as the creative, but a pragmatist too,

02:15:30.560 | as running a startup, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?

02:15:34.720 | Yeah, so, on mortality, right? About three years ago, four years ago now,

02:15:45.440 | I was excited to go to Yale. I was playing six hours of squash a day, which squash is a sport I

02:15:53.040 | love so much. And I was really getting a lot better. And I was even thinking I could maybe

02:15:58.160 | walk onto the Yale team. And I woke up one day, I felt really, really sick. I went and I decided

02:16:11.280 | not to go to squash that day. And I know, I wanted to, I almost did. And you'll see how this story

02:16:18.560 | turns out. You'll decide if I made the right choice. I decided not to go to squash today.

02:16:22.800 | And I decided to get my driver's license, or I had to get my driver's license, because I wanted to

02:16:27.040 | get a driver's license before I, it's just how young I am, before I went off to college, because

02:16:31.600 | otherwise I might never get it. And I'm going back and I successfully got my driver's license,

02:16:36.640 | brahsham. And I go back to my house and I decided I don't want to drive back because I just feel so

02:16:44.960 | sick. Things are spinning. I have the worst headache. I come home, I run back right into my

02:16:50.720 | bed and feeling really sick to the point where I even asked my mom, who is a doctor, I'm like,

02:16:56.640 | should I go to the hospital? And she's like, you can just wait it out. I'm sure it'll get better.

02:17:01.120 | - I like your mom.

02:17:02.960 | - Yeah. And then, you know, and then at one point I look at my arms and they're like

02:17:08.320 | covered in this like red splotchy stuff. Yeah. And I'm like, well, I think, and she's like,

02:17:14.080 | yeah, we have to go. And so I go there and they're like, you have scarlet fever. And

02:17:19.200 | they're like, there's nothing we can do. You should probably just go back home. So I go back home,

02:17:23.120 | six hours later, I wake up in the morning. They'd let me out at like 3 AM. They let me,

02:17:30.160 | I come home in the morning and I feel this, like a spear through my chest.

02:17:34.080 | And I never felt anything like it. And I was, it was very disconcerting when you have a,

02:17:39.680 | cause we're all used to different sorts of pain. Right. And that was the sort of pain I never felt

02:17:43.600 | before. I suppose as an athlete, you're used to like, you know, pain. So I told my parents and

02:17:49.680 | immediately we hopped back in the car, we'd go up to the same hospital I was at six hours ago.

02:17:53.440 | And they initially didn't want to let me in. And I was like, I have chest pain. They're like, oh,

02:17:57.040 | come in. Cause they're like, you're a healthy guy. Wait your turn. And I'm like, no, you don't

02:18:00.560 | understand. I have like a pain in my chest. And then they let me in. They start doing tests on me.

02:18:05.680 | They like put something like in my back, which is really scary. It's a huge needle. And I'm smiling

02:18:11.440 | because it's like one of the ways I reduce stress, I guess, or deal with this sort of thing and make

02:18:16.240 | light of it. But like, no, that, you know, it's definitely very scary in the moment, shocking and

02:18:22.560 | scary. And they go and they do a bunch of tests and they determined that a virus like attacked my

02:18:29.200 | heart and I had myocarditis and pericarditis. And they said I had maybe 25 to 35% chance at

02:18:36.320 | one point of dying. And so I'm sitting in my, they admit me into the hospital. I'm in my bed for about

02:18:45.280 | three weeks. And I'm just, I'm just standing there. And I had this moment also that I remember

02:18:54.320 | very specifically where I was in so much pain that like I was crying, not out of like emotional

02:19:03.840 | standpoint, but actually just purely out of the pain itself. Like I could feel my heart in my

02:19:09.680 | chest. And when I leaned back, I felt it touch my rib cage and feel horrible. So I couldn't go to

02:19:14.640 | sleep and lean back. I had to lean forward all throughout the night. Right. And I'm feeling my,

02:19:19.920 | and I'm feeling my chest. I'm feeling this terrible pain in my chest. I'm crying

02:19:23.680 | unstoppably. And I mean, also, maybe I should mention that at the time I was someone who'd like

02:19:29.680 | refused to take in anything into my body that wasn't natural. And so a lot of the time I tried

02:19:35.280 | to be unmedicated. Eventually I didn't allow them to add a little medication to my body,

02:19:41.440 | but there's just so much uncertainty and pain. And the first time I had to come to terms with

02:19:47.600 | mortality. First of all, I think you still should have gone play squash. I mean, come on. I mean,

02:19:53.520 | yeah. I thought you were serious about this. You still carry that with you sort of.

02:19:59.680 | There is power to realizing the ride can end. Right. Very suddenly. Very suddenly. Yeah.

02:20:10.640 | And painfully. And, you know, it has pragmatic application to like what you,

02:20:18.640 | to trajectories you take through life. Right. Something else that is worth noting is that I,

02:20:25.200 | for the next year, couldn't walk to my classes. So I get to Yale, they put me in a medical single

02:20:32.400 | alone, and I have to get shuttled to all my classes. I have to ask, I had to ask a few

02:20:38.800 | professors to even move classes so I could actually get there. I can't move my book. I

02:20:44.640 | can't lift my book bags. I can't, I can't walk upstairs. I spent like 12 hours a day in my dorm

02:20:52.800 | room, just like staring at the walls and more so, and more than that, all this, like you, I got to

02:21:00.480 | watch my body, like deteriorate and like the muscle like fall off of it. Cause I was, I was

02:21:08.960 | taking these pills and they're kind of catabolic. And for an 18 year old, I mean, I think every 18

02:21:16.080 | year old has feelings about their body, man or woman. And, you know, just seeing this, it's like

02:21:22.240 | you're watching sort of death transpire. And you're also very fatigued because your heart's not at

02:21:28.640 | peak condition and you're thinking about the future. And a lot of the things you enjoy have

02:21:33.120 | kind of been stripped away from you. And I took up a meditation practice, like started with like

02:21:41.040 | five minutes a day. At my peak, I was at like 40 minutes a day, kept it up consistently for about

02:21:47.120 | two years. And I started thinking about like, what do I want to do? And like, what do I care about?

02:21:56.480 | And to get to your point, I think you're asking like, how does this carry forward, right? I think

02:22:02.400 | I realized that, you know, there's an end and I realized that there are things I believe

02:22:08.560 | and things that I believe that might not be so overtly popular, but that I truly think make

02:22:14.640 | the world a better place. And in spite of, and in basically if my conditions provided,

02:22:21.520 | I wanted to make something that, I wanted to do something that would make me feel sort of

02:22:27.360 | whole in that way. - Yeah. I mean, that's an amazing journey to take that time and to come

02:22:32.000 | out on the other end. Now, man, that's amazing. I did not realize like that there was a long-term

02:22:38.400 | struggle. I think that's in the end, if you do succeed, we'll have a profound positive impact

02:22:47.520 | because struggle is ultimately like humbling, but also empowering. So I'm glad to see that.

02:22:55.440 | But from the perspective of the creative, the other ridiculous question about meaning,

02:22:59.840 | do you think about this kind of stuff? Is that the meaning of life for you, the meaning of life for

02:23:10.320 | us descendants of apes in general? - The first thing I'd like to say is that I think part of

02:23:16.480 | like when we talk about the meaning of life, part of it is the fact that we get to struggle with

02:23:20.640 | this question and we get to do it together for a long time. And sometimes I think it's accepting

02:23:28.800 | that there's no meaning at all. And sometimes I think it's accepting that, or even just parsing

02:23:33.760 | the phrase and thinking about the meaning of life. I sometimes, I'm look, I'm very young.

02:23:38.080 | Again, I hope that anything I say now is going to be very different in the future because I think

02:23:45.680 | meaning, life has so many meanings that it'll be crazy to see what I think in 20 years about

02:23:52.560 | the meaning of life. - Yeah, rise from the future, cut them some slack. - Please do. Perspective,

02:23:59.200 | perspective, perspective. Having said that, I think part of what brings meaning to my life

02:24:05.760 | is things like this, where we think about these things with people who are really, really,

02:24:10.560 | really on the ball and we get to connect with these people. That certainly brings meaning to

02:24:15.600 | my life, human connection. - Yeah, this conversation is just another like echo of the thing you're

02:24:22.880 | trying to create in the digital space, right? - Yes. - That's the same kind of magic. From what

02:24:29.600 | I understand about what you're trying to create is the same reason I fell in love with the long

02:24:34.080 | form podcast thing, like as a fan, that's why I listen to long form podcasts, is there's something

02:24:39.760 | deeply human and genuine about the interchange through the voice. But I do think that connection

02:24:48.320 | through text can be even more powerful. Like I think about letters, I still write letters to

02:24:54.960 | Russia, there's something powerful in letters. When you put a lot of yourself in the words you say,

02:25:04.240 | in the words you write, that's powerful. You can really communicate, not just the actual semantic

02:25:11.280 | meaning of the words, but like a lot of who you are through those words and create real connections.

02:25:18.960 | So I hope you succeed there. And listen, Ryan, I think this was an incredible conversation. I'm

02:25:27.680 | glad that people like you are fighting the good fight for bringing out the best in human nature

02:25:34.560 | in the digital space. I think that's a battleground where the good will win, like love will win. And

02:25:41.600 | I'm glad you're creating technology that does just that. So thank you so much for wasting all your

02:25:46.640 | time, for coming down. I can't wait to see what you do in the future. Thanks for talking today.

02:25:51.280 | - Thank you for having me. - Bam.

02:25:52.640 | - How many finger guns have you gotten at the end of the podcast?

02:25:57.200 | - Zero. - Two now.

02:25:59.360 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ryan Schiller, and thank you to all our sponsors,

02:26:06.320 | Allform, Magic Spoon, BetterHelp, and Brave. Click their links to support this podcast.

02:26:12.640 | And now let me leave you with some words from George Washington on March 15th, 1783.

02:26:21.760 | "If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."

02:26:28.640 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:26:33.840 | [END]

02:26:34.560 | George Washington, "Freedom of Speech" - March 15, 1783.

02:26:36.560 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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