Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Ryan Schiller, creator of Librex, an anonymous
00:00:05 discussion feed for college communities starting at first with Yale, then the Ivy Leagues, and now
00:00:11 adding Stanford and MIT. Their mission is to give students a place to explore ideas and issues
00:00:18 in a positive way, but with much more personal and intellectual freedom than has defined college
00:00:24 campuses in recent history. I think this is a very difficult but worthy project. Quick thank you to
00:00:31 our sponsors, Allform, Magic Spoon, Better Help, and Brave. Click their links to support this
00:00:38 podcast. As a side note, let me say that Ryan is a young entrepreneur and genuine human being who
00:00:46 quickly won me over. He’s inspiring in many ways, both in the struggle he had to overcome in his
00:00:52 personal life, but also in the fact that he did not know how to code, but saw a problem in this
00:00:58 world, in his community, that he cared about, and for that he learned to code and built a solution
00:01:05 in the best way he knew how. That’s an important reminder for us humans. Let us not only complain
00:01:11 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 eyes for really wanting to make a difference in the world. His story, his effort, gives me hope
00:01:24 for the future. There is hate in this world, but I believe there’s much more love, and I believe
00:01:30 it’s possible to build online platforms that connect us through our common humanity as we
00:01:36 explore difficult, personal, even painful ideas together. This is the Lex Friedman podcast,
00:01:44 and here is my conversation with Ryan Shiller. Let’s start with the basics. What is Librex?
00:01:51 What are its founding story and founding principles? And looking to the future,
00:01:57 what do you hope to achieve with Librex? Sure, let me break that down. So what is Librex? Librex is
00:02:02 an anonymous discussion feed for college campuses. It’s a place where people can have important and
00:02:09 unfettered discussions and open discourse about topics they care about, ideas that matter,
00:02:14 and they can do all of that completely anonymously with verified members of their
00:02:18 college community. And we exist both on each Ivy League campus, and we have an interivy community,
00:02:26 and actually this week we just opened to MIT and Stanford. No, really? MIT? Yes! So we have
00:02:34 MIT and Stanford communities, and I expect you to sign up for your MIT account and start posting.
00:02:40 What are, for people who are not familiar like me actually, which are the Ivy Leagues? Sure,
00:02:46 so we started at Yale, which is my, I don’t know, can you call it alma mater? Because I haven’t
00:02:51 technically graduated. Yeah, what’s that called when you’re actually still there? My university?
00:02:57 Yeah, I guess we’ll just call it home. That’s my home. Educational home. Started at my educational
00:03:02 home of Yale, and then we moved to, and we could get into the story of this eventually if you’d
00:03:08 like, and then we went to Dartmouth, and then quarantine hit. We opened to the rest of the
00:03:14 Ivy League, and now we have, and the Ivy League, for those who don’t know, is Harvard, Yale,
00:03:20 Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and Penn. I got it all in one breath. What’s the
00:03:27 younger side of the league? Penn? No. Columbia. I can’t say that on camera. We’ll edit it in post.
00:03:34 I don’t know. I’ll just say each of all eight of them, and then you can just like get it in.
00:03:40 Yeah. Penn, Harvard. There’s actually a really nice software that people should check out,
00:03:44 like a service. It’s using machine learning really nicely for podcast editing, where you can,
00:03:50 it learns the voice of the speaker, and it can change the words you said. It’s like some deep
00:03:56 fake stuff. It’s deep fake, but for positive applications. It’s very interesting. It’s like
00:04:00 the only deep fake positive application I’ve seen. I have a friend who’s obsessed with deep fakes.
00:04:05 Yeah. What’s great about, I think, deep fakes is that it’s going to do the opposite of sort of
00:04:10 what’s happening with our culture, where everyone will have plausible deniability. Yeah, exactly. I
00:04:14 mean, that’s the hope for me is there’s so many fake things out there that we’re going to actually
00:04:21 be much more skeptical, and think, and take in multiple sources, and actually like reason,
00:04:29 like use common sense, and use like deep thinking to understand like what is true and what is not.
00:04:34 Because, you know, we used to have like traditional sources like the New York Times, and all these
00:04:40 kinds of publications that had a reputation. There are these institutions, and they’re the source of
00:04:45 truth. And when you no longer can trust anything as a source of truth, you start to think on your
00:04:50 own. That gets part of the individual. That goes, that takes us way back to like where I came from,
00:04:55 the Soviet Union, where you can’t really trust any one source of news. You have to think on your own.
00:05:00 You have to talk to your friends. Tremendous amount of intellectual autonomy, don’t you think?
00:05:04 Think about the societal consequences. Absolutely. I mean, we see so much decentralization in all
00:05:10 aspects of our digital lives now, but this is like the decentralization of thought. Yes. You
00:05:18 could say it’s sadly, or I don’t think it’s sad, is decentralization of truth, where like truth is a
00:05:25 clustering thing, where you have these like this point cloud of people just swimming around, like
00:05:32 billions of them, and they all have certain ideas. And what’s thought of as truth is almost like a
00:05:39 clustering algorithm. When you just get a bunch of people that believe the same thing, that’s truth.
00:05:44 But there’s also another truth, and there may be like multiple truths, and it’s almost will be like
00:05:49 a battle of truths. Maybe even the idea of truth will like lessen its power in society that there
00:05:57 is such a thing as a truth. Because like the downside of saying something is true is it’s almost
00:06:04 the downside of what people like religious people call scientism, which is like once science has
00:06:11 declared something as true, you can’t no longer question it. But the reality is science is a
00:06:18 moving mechanism. You constantly question, you constantly questioning, and maybe truth should be
00:06:23 renamed as a process, not a final destination. The whole point is to keep questioning, keep questioning,
00:06:32 keep discovering. Kind of like we’re going backwards in time. So like back when people were
00:06:40 sort of finding their identities and we were less globalized, right? Like people would get together
00:06:46 and they’d get together around common value system, common morals, and a common place. And those would
00:06:50 be sort of these clusters of their truth, right? And so we have all these different civilizations
00:06:56 and societies across the world that created their own truths. We talk about the Jews and the
00:07:01 Talmud and Torah. We look at Buddhist texts. We can look at all sorts of different truths and how
00:07:07 many of them get at the same things, but many of them have different ideas or different articulations.
00:07:12 Yeah, Harari and sapiens, it rewinds that even farther back into like caveman times. That’s the
00:07:17 thing that made us humans special, is who can develop these clusters of ideas, hold them in
00:07:22 their minds through stories, pass them on to each other, and it grows and grows. And finally, we have
00:07:27 Bitcoin. Which money is another belief system that has power only because we believe in it.
00:07:37 And is that truth? I don’t know, but it has power. And it’s carried in the minds of millions
00:07:44 and thereby has power. But back to Librex. So what’s the founding story? What’s the founding
00:07:51 principles of Librex? Sure. So I was on campus as a freshman, and I was talking to my friends.
00:07:58 Many of them felt like it was hard to raise your hand in class to ask a question. They really felt
00:08:04 like even outside the classroom, it was hard to be vulnerable. And the thing you have to understand
00:08:08 about Yale is it’s not that big a place. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows you,
00:08:13 basically. And people come to these schools, first of all, they’re home for people, and they want to
00:08:19 be themselves. They want to feel like they can be authentic. They want to make real friendships.
00:08:23 And second of all, it’s a place where people go for intellectual vitality to explore important
00:08:28 ideas and to grow as thinkers. And fortunately, due to the culture, my friends expressed that
00:08:35 it was very difficult to do that. And I felt it, too. And then I couldn’t talk to my professors.
00:08:40 And I remember I talked to one specific global affairs professor, and I was taking his class,
00:08:46 and his area of expertise was in the Middle Eastern conflict. And I went to him and I said,
00:08:50 Professor, we’re almost finished this class. And we haven’t even gotten to sort of the reason I
00:08:57 originally wanted to take the class was to hear about your perspective on the Middle Eastern
00:09:00 conflict. Because something I’d learned at Yale, and this is maybe the most important thing,
00:09:04 but I’ll flush it out a bit. Something I’ve learned at Yale is that you can learn all sorts
00:09:11 of things from a textbook. And what you kind of go to Yale to do is to get the opinions of the
00:09:17 experts that go beyond the textbook and to have those more in depth conversations. And so that’s
00:09:22 sort of the added value of going to a place like Yale and taking a course there as opposed to
00:09:26 just reading a textbook. But also interact with that opinion.
00:09:29 Exactly. To interact with that opinion, to hear it, to respond to it, to push back on it,
00:09:34 and to have that with some great minds. And there really are great minds at Yale,
00:09:39 don’t get me wrong. It’s still a place of tremendous brilliance.
00:09:44 So I’m talking to this professor, right? And I’m like, I haven’t heard your area of expertise.
00:09:48 And I’m like, are we going to get to it? What’s the deal? And this is during office hours,
00:09:54 mind you. So we’re one on one. He says, Ryan, to be honest, I used to teach this area every
00:09:59 single year. In fact, I would do a section on it, which is like a small seminar, like breakaway
00:10:04 from the class where he would talk to the students in small groups and explain his perspective,
00:10:10 his research and have a real debate about it, like around a Harkness table. And he said,
00:10:15 I used to do this. And then about two years ago, a student reported me to the school and I realized
00:10:22 my job was at risk. And I realized the best course of action was basically just not to approach the
00:10:28 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 I’m not going to be a part of it. And it’s a real shame. It’s a real loss to
00:10:40 all of the students who I think came to the school to learn from these brilliant professors.
00:10:45 In that context of these world experts, the problem seems to be that reporting mechanism
00:10:54 where there’s a disproportionate power to a complaint of a young student, a complaint that
00:11:01 an idea is painful or an idea is disrespectful to, you know, or ideas creating an unsafe space.
00:11:10 And the conclusion of that, I mean, I’m not sure what to do with that because it’s a
00:11:15 single reporting, maybe a couple, but that has more power than the idea itself. And that’s
00:11:23 strange. I don’t know how to fix that in the administration except to fire everybody. So like
00:11:29 this is to push back against this storyline that academia is somehow fundamentally broken.
00:11:35 I think we have to separate a lot of things out. Like one is you have to look at faculty and you
00:11:42 have to look at the administration. And like at MIT, for example, the administration does, tries
00:11:51 to do well, but they’re the ones that often lack courage. They’re often the ones who are the source
00:11:57 of the problem. When people criticize academia, and I’ll just speak to myself, you know, I’m
00:12:05 willing to take heat for this, is they really are criticizing the administration, not the faculty
00:12:11 because the faculty oftentimes are the most brilliant, the bolder thinkers that you think.
00:12:19 Whenever you talk about we need like the truth to be spoken, the faculty are often the ones
00:12:25 who are in the possession of the deepest truths in their mind in that sense. And they also have
00:12:30 the capacity to truly educate in the way that you’re saying. And so it’s not broken, like
00:12:37 fundamentally, but there’s stuff that like needs, that’s not working that well. It needs to be fixed.
00:12:42 You kind of took my words. That’s what I thought you were going to ask me if I think the Ivy League
00:12:46 is broken. That’s totally, that’s exactly it. So you don’t think, yeah. So on the question,
00:12:50 do you think the Ivy League is broken? Like what, how do you think about it? The academia in general,
00:12:55 I suppose, but Ivy League still, I think it represents some of the best qualities of academia.
00:13:00 What more is there to say there? I think the Ivy League is producing tremendous thinkers to this
00:13:05 day. I think the culture has a lot that can be improved, but I have a lot of faith in the people
00:13:11 who are in these institutions. I think, like you said, the administration, and I have to be a
00:13:16 little careful because I’ve been in some of these committees and I’ve talked to the administration
00:13:22 about these sorts of things. I think they have a lot of stakeholders and unfortunately it makes
00:13:27 it difficult for them to always serve these brilliant faculty and the students in the way
00:13:33 that they would probably like to. Yeah. Okay. So this is me speaking, right? The administration,
00:13:38 I know the people, and they’re oftentimes the faculty holding positions in these committees,
00:13:43 right? Yes. But it’s in the role of quote unquote service. They’re trying to do well.
00:13:52 They’re trying to do good. But I think you could say it’s the mechanism is not working,
00:13:59 but I could also say my personal opinion is they lack courage, and one, courage, and two,
00:14:12 grace when they walk through the fire. So courage is stepping into the fire,
00:14:20 and grace when you walk through the fire is like maintaining that like as opposed to being rude
00:14:29 and insensitive to the lived quote unquote experience of others or like, you know,
00:14:33 just not eloquent at all. Like as you step in and take the courageous step of talking and saying
00:14:39 the difficult thing, doing it well, like doing it skillfully. So both of those are important,
00:14:44 the courage and the skill to communicate difficult ideas, and they often lack them because they
00:14:49 weren’t trained for it, I think. So you can blame the mechanisms that don’t, that allow 19, 20 year
00:14:56 old students to have more power than the entire faculty, or you could just say that the faculty
00:15:02 need to step up and grow some guts and skill of graceful communication. And really administration.
00:15:08 Well, yeah. And the administration. That’s right. That’s the administration.
00:15:13 Because the faculty are sometimes some of the most brave outspoken people within the bounds
00:15:19 of their career. Yeah. So that takes a, that’s like the founding kind of spark of a fire that
00:15:30 led you to then say, okay, so how can I help? Yeah. And I explored a lot. I explored a lot
00:15:35 of options. I wrote many articles to my friends, talked to them, and I realized it sort of needed
00:15:41 to be a cultural change. Sort of need to be bottom up, grassroots. Something, I knew the energy was
00:15:48 there because you just look at the most recent institutional assessment from Yale. This was
00:15:55 basically the number one thing that students, faculty, and alumni all pointed to, to the
00:15:59 administration was cultivating more conversations on campus and more difficult conversations on
00:16:05 campus. So the people on campus know it. And you look at a Gallup poll, 61% of students are on
00:16:16 Ivy League campuses, afraid to speak their minds because of the campus culture. The campus culture
00:16:23 is causing a sort of freezing effect on discourse. Can you pause on that again? So what percentage
00:16:28 of students feel afraid to speak their mind? 61% nationally. And then you’re talking about,
00:16:35 you know, places, nothing like the Ivy League where I’d say, I’d imagine it would be even worse
00:16:40 because of just the way that these communities kind of come about and the sorts of people who
00:16:47 are attracted or are invited to these sorts of communities. That’s nationwide that college
00:16:53 students, and it’s going up, that college students are afraid to say what they believe because of
00:16:58 their campus climate. So it’s a majority. It’s not a conservative thing. It’s not a liberal thing.
00:17:05 It’s a group thing. We’re all feeling it. The majority of us are feeling it.
00:17:08 And basically just, it doesn’t even, you don’t even necessarily
00:17:13 need to have anything to say. You just have a fear.
00:17:17 That’s right.
00:17:17 So when you’re like teaching, you know, metaphor is a really powerful thing to explain,
00:17:23 you know, and there’s just the caution that you feel that’s just horrible for humor. Now,
00:17:28 comedians have the freedom to just talk shit, which is why I really appreciate somebody who’s
00:17:34 been a friend recently, Tim Dillon, who gives zero, pardon my French, fucks about anything,
00:17:41 which is very liberating, very important person to just tear down the powerful.
00:17:46 But, you know, inside the academia as an educator, as a teacher, as a professor,
00:17:52 you don’t have the same freedom. So that fear is felt, I guess, by a majority of students.
00:17:57 And you were getting at something there too, which is that
00:18:00 if you’re afraid to speak metaphorically, if you’re afraid to speak imprecisely,
00:18:05 it can be very difficult to actually think at all and to think to the extremities of what you’re
00:18:10 capable of, because these are the mechanisms we use when we don’t have quite the precise
00:18:15 mathematical language to quite pinpoint what we’re talking about yet. This is the beginning. This is
00:18:20 the creative step that leads to new knowledge. And so that really scares me is that if I’m not
00:18:26 allowed to sort of excavate these things, these ideas with people in the sort of messy, sloppy way
00:18:30 that we do as humans when we’re first being creative, are we going to be able to continue
00:18:36 to innovate? Are we going to continue to be able to learn? And that’s what really starts to scare me.
00:18:41 So you’ve explored a bunch of different ideas. You ordered a bunch of different stuff.
00:18:45 How did lead bricks come about?
00:18:47 Basically, it came to me that it had to be kind of a grassroots movement and it had to be something
00:18:53 that changed culturally. And it had to be relatively personal, people meeting people,
00:18:58 people finding out that, no, I’m not the only one on campus who feels this way. I feel alone. And
00:19:05 there are a lot of other people who feel alone. I believe this thing. And it’s not as unpopular as
00:19:10 I thought. Basically, creating heterodoxy of thought. And it’s creating that moment where
00:19:17 you realize that your politics are personal and that your politics are shared by a lot of people
00:19:23 on campus. And so I just started coding it. I didn’t have much coding experience, but went
00:19:30 headfirst in and figured how hard could it be? I mean, this is really fascinating. So I talked to a
00:19:37 lot of software engineers, AI people. Obviously, that’s where my passion, my interests are.
00:19:44 My focus has been throughout my life. The fascinating thing about your story, I think it
00:19:50 should be truly inspiring to people that want to change the world, is that you don’t have a
00:19:56 background in programming. You don’t have even maybe a technical background. So you saw a problem,
00:20:06 you explored different ideas, and then you just decided you’re going to learn how to build an app
00:20:12 without a technical background. That’s so bold. That is so beautiful, man. Can you take me through
00:20:22 the journey of deciding to do that, of learning to program without a programming background,
00:20:29 and building the app? Detail, how do you start?
00:20:33 Sure. You want to buy a Mac? I’m just going to go step by step. I’ll be as dumb as possible.
00:20:42 Because it was truly leading by your feet.
00:20:48 So you need a computer for this?
00:20:49 Oh, yeah. I had a PC at the time, and I was Android at the time. And I realized it should
00:20:54 be an iOS app. And so that was a decision. But I knew kids these days, they’re always on their
00:21:01 phone. And I wanted you to be able to say a passing thought in class. You’re walking around,
00:21:08 and you have a thought, and you can express it. Or you’re in the dining hall, and you have your
00:21:11 phone out, you can express it. So it was clear to me it should be an iOS app.
00:21:14 By the way, Android is great. Definitely check it out.
00:21:18 We also are now available on Android, but we’ll get there,
00:21:21 for the new Android users from MIT, Stanford, or the Ivy League. So back to how it happened. So I
00:21:27 realized I need a Mac. So I went out and got a Mac. And I realized I need an iPhone for testing
00:21:34 eventually. Got an iPhone. So those were the real robot blocks to start with. From there, I mean,
00:21:41 there’s almost too much information out there about programming. And the question is, where
00:21:45 do you start, and what’s going to be useful to you? And my first thought was I should look at some
00:21:52 Yale classes. But it became very clear, very quickly, that that was not the right place to start.
00:21:58 That would probably be the right place to start if I wanted to get a job at Amazon,
00:22:01 but my goal was slightly different. And I definitely had it in mind that what I was
00:22:07 trying to make was I’m trying to prove out an idea. I’m not trying to make a finished product.
00:22:11 I’m just trying to get to the first step. Because I figured if I keep getting to the next step,
00:22:18 at least I won’t die now. At least things will move forward. I’ll learn new things. Maybe I’ll
00:22:23 meet new people. I’ll show a degree of seriousness about what I’m doing. And things will come
00:22:27 together. And that is, as you’ll see, what ends up happening. So I start with Swift. And I find
00:22:35 this video from the Stanford professor that had a million views that was how to make, basically,
00:22:39 Swift apps perfect. And you just like, so you got this Mac, and you go to google.com,
00:22:46 and you type in Xcode. And then I type in on YouTube like Stanford, iOS, Swift, enter.
00:22:57 First YouTube video has a million views. I’m like, it has to be good at Stanford has a million
00:23:01 views. I got lucky. I mean, that turned out to be a very good video. It’s basically like
00:23:07 introductory course to Swift. Yeah. I mean, you say introductory. I think most of the people in
00:23:12 that class probably had a much better background than I did software developers probably computer
00:23:18 scientists. And it was slow for me. I don’t think I realized it fully at the time just how far
00:23:23 behind I was from the rest of the class because I was like, wow, it seems like people are picking
00:23:27 this up really quickly. So it took a little longer and you know, a lot of time on Stack Overflow.
00:23:32 But eventually I made a truly minimal viable product. The most minimal like we’re talking,
00:23:38 you know, put text on screen, add text to screen, comment on top of text, you know,
00:23:44 make a post, make a response. And anyone with a Yale email can do this. And you plug it into
00:23:52 a certain cloud server and you verify people’s accounts. And you you’re off you have to figure
00:23:59 out how to like the whole idea of like having an account. So there’s a permanence like you can
00:24:05 create an account with an email, verify it, verify it. OK, so that that’s not, you know,
00:24:12 and that’s literally how I thought about it. Right. Like, so what do I need to do? And I’m
00:24:15 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 I mean, it’s that easy. If someone this has been done before, of course. And then the first page
00:24:25 that pops up is probably a pretty damn good page when it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t perfect. But
00:24:30 like maybe it got me 80 percent of the way there. And then I came into some bugs and then, you know,
00:24:35 I asked Stack Overflow a few questions and then I got a little further and then I found some more
00:24:40 bugs. And then I’m like, maybe this isn’t the right way to do. Maybe I should do it this way.
00:24:43 And I’m sure my code isn’t great, but the goal isn’t to make great code. The goal wasn’t to
00:24:48 make scalable code. It was to understand, is this something my friends will use? Like,
00:24:53 what is the reaction going to be if I put it in their hands and am I capable of making this thing?
00:24:58 And that’s awesome. And so you’re focusing on the experience, like actually just really driving
00:25:04 towards that first step, figuring out the first step and really driving towards it. Of course,
00:25:08 you have to also figure out like this concept of like storage, like database.
00:25:13 You know something funny?
00:25:14 What’s that?
00:25:15 I just made the database structure with no knowledge of databases whatsoever.
00:25:19 And I start showing it to my friends who have an experience in CS and they’re like,
00:25:23 you used to heap. That’s so interesting. You’re like, why did you decide to store it in this way?
00:25:28 I’m like, bro, I don’t even know what a heap is. I just did it because it works. Like I’m trying
00:25:35 to make calls and stuff. And they’re like, yeah, they’re like, the hierarchy is really like,
00:25:39 I’m like, what?
00:25:40 Well, there’s a deep profound lesson in there that I don’t know how much you’ve interacted
00:25:44 with computer science people since, but they tend to optimize and have these kinds of discussions.
00:25:49 And what leads, what results is over optimization. It’s like worrying, is this really the right way
00:25:55 to do it? And then you go as opposed to doing the first thing on Stack Overflow, you go down this
00:26:00 like rabbit hole of what’s the actual proper way to do it. And then you’re like, you wake up five
00:26:06 years later working on Amazon because you’ve never finished the login page. Like it’s kind of
00:26:13 hilarious, but that’s a really deep lesson. Like just get it done. And there’s like, what’s a heap,
00:26:20 bro? Is the right, that should be a t shirt. That’s really the right approach to building something
00:26:27 that ultimately creates an experience. And then you iterate eventually. That’s how the great,
00:26:34 some of the greatest software products in this world have been built is you create it quickly
00:26:39 and then just iterate. What was, by the way, in your mind, the thing that you were chasing as a
00:26:45 prototype? Like what, what was the first step that it feels like something is working? Like did you
00:26:52 see you interacting with another friend? Yeah. I think the first step was like, it’s one thing to
00:27:00 tell someone about an idea, but it’s another thing to put in their hands and kind of see like the way
00:27:04 their, their eyes kind of look. And when I’d go, I’d walk around cross campus, which is part of
00:27:11 Yale, and I’d literally just go up to people and run up to them and be like, try this, try this,
00:27:15 you got to try this. This is pre quarantine, by the way, of course, this would never be the same
00:27:19 post quarantine, but like, you got to try this, you got to try this. Like, what is it? And I’d be
00:27:22 like, and I explain it’s like an anonymous discussion feed for our Yale campus. And you see
00:27:27 their gears turning and they just, some people would be like, not interested. I’m like, fine,
00:27:32 not your target demographic. I get it. You’ll come eventually. But some people like you could see it,
00:27:38 they got it. They’re like, yes. And that’s when I was like, okay, okay, there is, and you don’t need,
00:27:46 I mean, you don’t need 50% of people to like it. You need what, 5%, 10% to love it. And then
00:27:53 they’ll tell 5%, 10%. Yeah, word of mouth. And you’re good. Of course, the first version was
00:28:00 very, very crappy, but seeing people trying despite all the crappiness wasn’t, it was sort of enough
00:28:05 to be the first step. And since then, all of my code has been stripped out. I now have friends
00:28:12 who basically have told me, don’t bother with the coding part. You do the rest. You just make sure
00:28:17 that we can code because they want to code. Great. I mean, I’m not an engineer. I never intended to
00:28:22 be an engineer. And there’s a lot to do that’s not engineering. But the point was just to validate
00:28:27 the idea, so to speak. When was the moment that you felt like we’ve created something special?
00:28:33 Maybe a moment where you’re proud of that this is, this has the potential to actually be the very
00:28:44 implementation of the idea that I initially had. There’s so many little moments. It’s like,
00:28:51 and I bet there’ll still be moments in the future that make it hard to like totally say, like. Yeah,
00:28:58 we should say this is, this is still very early days of Librex. It’s only been a year since we’ve
00:29:04 had like actual, like a lot of people on the app. Yeah. About a year. Oh wow. Okay. I mean,
00:29:09 there’s some crazy moments I could talk about sort of going to Dartmouth because it’s one thing to
00:29:14 like get some traction at your school. People know you and you know, it’s your school, you know,
00:29:20 it’s another thing to go to another school and where no one knows you and sign up 90% of the
00:29:25 campus overnight. Wow. So tell me that story. You’re invading another territory. It was literally
00:29:31 like that. Did you buy it like a Dartmouth sweatshirt? Purposefully, I didn’t want to fraud
00:29:37 anyone, but I was purposefully nondescript in my clothing. Yeah. No Yale stuff, no Dartmouth stuff.
00:29:43 Just blended. I’ll go back there. So what happened was this was like March of last year. So almost,
00:29:54 almost a year ago today. And I really wanted to see if we could go from sort of one campus to two
00:30:00 campuses. So I didn’t know anyone at Dartmouth’s campus, but I kind of, I had some cold emails,
00:30:10 some warmish emails. And I went to people and I was like, basically, can I sleep on your floor for
00:30:16 two days during finals period? I had a lot of people who said, this is crazy. Like no one’s
00:30:21 going to, no one wants to download an app during finals period, a social app during finals period.
00:30:26 But I emailed a few people. I was like, you know, can I sleep on your floor? And one of them
00:30:31 was crazy enough to say, sure, come to my, come to my dorm. I have a nice floor. And he ended up,
00:30:37 today, he’s still really close. He’s a really close friend. But anyway, I take a train,
00:30:42 knowing nothing about this guy besides his first and last name. And I arrive and Dartmouth is
00:30:50 really, really remote, way more remote than you think to the point where I’m like, he’s like,
00:30:56 he warned me. He’s a really hospitable guy. He warned me like, it’s going to be hard to get to
00:31:00 campus from the train station because it’s really remote. And I’m like, I’m sure it’s fine. I’ll
00:31:04 just get an Uber. There are no Ubers in Hanover. What do you think this is?
00:31:09 This is New Hampshire. So, Connecticut, I mean, Yale is pretty remote as well, no?
00:31:14 Yeah. Yale is, well, I mean, Yale is in New Haven, which is a real city. It has Ubers. It has food.
00:31:21 It has culture. It has a nightclub even. Like, we’re talking about a real city. Like, it’s not
00:31:26 New York. It’s not Philadelphia, where I’m from, but it’s a city. New Hampshire is something very
00:31:32 different. Yeah. Beautiful campus, I’m sure. Beautiful. Oh, my gosh. I could talk so much
00:31:37 about, I was blown away by Dartmouth. I started wondering like why I didn’t apply.
00:31:42 Legitimately, between the people and the culture, it was a beautiful vacation. So,
00:31:49 I arrived there, no Uber, but eventually I call this guy who’s like the only guy who can get you
00:31:54 to Dartmouth and it takes a couple hours, but we get there. I sleep on this guy’s floor. I wake up.
00:32:00 I ask him if there’s any printing. He’s like, oh, Dartmouth happens to have free printing in
00:32:03 the copy room. I print out like 2000 posters until the guy in the copy room literally goes to me,
00:32:10 he’s like, kid, I don’t know what you’re doing, but you need to get out of here. I’m like,
00:32:15 I’m going, I’m going. I found the limits. Yeah, I found the limit. I think a lot of startups
00:32:20 about finding the limits. That’s a little piece of advice. Socially, he’s like, you got to get
00:32:26 out of here. I then go to every single dorm door. I put a poster under every single dorm door,
00:32:34 advertising the app with a QR code. I walk around campus saying hi to everyone
00:32:40 and telling them about the app. I go from table to table in the cafeteria, introduce myself,
00:32:44 say hi and tell them to download the app. It’s an exhausting day. So many steps,
00:32:48 so many crotching down to slip the poster under the dorm door. My legs were burning.
00:32:54 But by the end of it, 24 hours later, I’m sitting in a bus and I’m just pressing the refresh button
00:33:02 on the account creation panels. It’s like going up by hundreds. And I’m like, oh my gosh.
00:33:07 The word of mouth is working in a sense. I mean, certainly your initial seed is powerful.
00:33:14 Just a piece.
00:33:15 Yeah, but then the word of mouth is what carries it forward. And what was the explanation you gave
00:33:20 to the app? Is anonymity a fundamental part of it? Like saying, this is a chance
00:33:27 for you to speak your mind about your experiences on campus.
00:33:32 Yeah, I think people get it. What I’ve realized is you don’t need to tell people
00:33:37 why to try it. They know.
00:33:40 There’s a hunger for this.
00:33:42 Exactly. So all I do is I’m very factual. I said, and this is where I kind of ended up coining the
00:33:50 line that I now used to say it because I said it so many times in those 24 hours.
00:33:55 I just said, it’s an anonymous discussion feed for Dartmouth. And they’re like, yes.
00:34:02 Like they’ve been waiting for it. Some people are more skeptical, but a lot of people were like,
00:34:06 great, I’m excited to try this. I’m excited to meet people and connect. And I mean,
00:34:11 the way Dartmouth is taken to is incredible. Everything from professors writing poems during
00:34:17 finals period to be like, good luck in finals period. You’re going to rise like a Phoenix
00:34:22 or whatever to like, yeah, it’s crazy. To I heard about two women meeting on Librex and
00:34:29 starting a finance club at Dartmouth to significant others meeting. There was an article recently
00:34:37 written up at Yale as well about two queer women who met on Librex and started a relationship,
00:34:41 which was pretty, it was pretty interesting to see people throwing parties pre COVID. Yeah.
00:34:47 It was just amazing to see how, when you allow people to be vulnerable and social,
00:34:51 they connect. People have this natural desire to connect.
00:34:54 Yeah. When, when you have, would have a natural desire to have a voice. And then when that voice
00:35:01 is, is paired with freedom, that you could truly express yourself and there’s something
00:35:08 liberating about that. And in that sense, you’re like, you’re connecting as your true self,
00:35:14 whatever that is. What are the most powerful conversation you’ve seen on the app? You mentioned
00:35:19 like people connecting. The hard part of that, that is the sorting, you know, figuring out which
00:35:23 one, which one am I going to put at the top? Mental sorting out. Just something that stands
00:35:27 out to you. Sorry. I don’t mean to do like the top 10 conversations ever of all time,
00:35:31 ever on the app. I just mean like stuff that you remember that stands out to you.
00:35:35 I remember this one really amazing comment from this. He was a Mexican international student
00:35:43 who spoke out and this, this, this post was super edgy, but yet it got hundreds and hundreds of
00:35:51 upvotes within the Yale community. It was a Yale community specific post. And we should point out
00:35:55 that there’s a school specific community now and there’s an all Ivy community. So this was
00:36:00 specifically in the Yale community. And this was a little while ago, but it stuck with me. This
00:36:06 Mexican international student comes to Yale and he starts talking about his experience
00:36:13 in the La Casa, which is the Mexican Latina X as they would say, cultural center at Yale,
00:36:19 and how he doesn’t feel welcome there because he’s Roman Catholic basically and international
00:36:26 and how he doesn’t feel like he fits with their agenda. And as a result, this place that’s
00:36:31 supposed to be home for him, he feels outcasted and feels more alone than he does anywhere else
00:36:36 on campus. That’s powerful. That was powerful to me. Yeah. It’s hearing someone, someone who should
00:36:42 be feeling supported by this culture say, actually, this is not doing anything for me. Like this is
00:36:50 not helping me. This is not where I feel at home. So what do you make of anonymity?
00:36:59 Because it seems to be a fundamental aspect of the power of the app, right? But at the same time,
00:37:06 anonymity on the internet, so it protects us, right? It gives us freedom to have a voice,
00:37:14 but it can also bring out the dark sides of human nature, like trolls or people who want
00:37:20 to be malicious, want to hurt others purely for the joy of hurting others, being cruel for fun
00:37:28 and going to the dark places. So like, what do you make of anonymity as a fundamental feature
00:37:33 of social interaction, like the pros and the cons? Yeah. Just to break that down a bit,
00:37:38 I would say a lot of those same things about a place like Twitter where people are very
00:37:42 unanonymous. Having said that, of course, there’s a different sort of capacity people have when
00:37:49 they’re anonymous, right? In all different sorts of ways. So what do I make of anonymity? I think
00:37:55 it can be incredibly liberating and allow people to be incredibly vulnerable and to connect in
00:37:59 different ways, both on politics, and there was a lot to talk about this year regarding politics,
00:38:04 and personally being vulnerable, talking about relationships and mental health.
00:38:10 I think it allows people to have a community that’s not performative.
00:38:14 And of course, there’s this other side where people can sometimes break rules or say things
00:38:21 that they wouldn’t otherwise say that people don’t always agree with or that people might
00:38:25 find repugnant. And to an extent, these can facilitate great conversations. And on the other
00:38:31 hand, we have to have moderation in place, and we have to have community guidelines to make sure
00:38:36 that the anonymity doesn’t overwhelm the purpose, which is that anonymity, first of all, anonymity
00:38:42 is a tool in Librex. It was not the purpose of Librex. It is a way that we get towards these
00:38:48 authentic conversations given our campus climate. And second of all, I would say it’s a spectrum.
00:38:57 It’s not just Librex is anonymous because Librex isn’t totally anonymous. Everyone’s a verified
00:39:05 Ivy League student. You know exactly what school everyone goes to. You only have one account per
00:39:11 person at Yale. I mean, what that amounts to is people have more of an ownership in the community
00:39:19 and people know that they’re connected and they have a common vernacular.
00:39:23 So the anonymity is a scale and it’s a tool. But you can also trust, I mean, this is the
00:39:27 difference between Reddit anonymity, where you can easily create multiple accounts.
00:39:33 When you have only one account per person, or at least it’s very difficult to create multiple
00:39:39 accounts, then you can trust that the anonymous person you’re talking to is a human being.
00:39:45 Not a bot.
00:39:46 I try to be completely unanonymous now in my all public interactions. I try to be as real in every
00:39:53 way possible, like zero gap between private me and public me.
00:39:59 Why exactly did you, it seems like this is an intentional mission. What made you want to sort
00:40:04 of bridge that gap between the private sphere and public sphere? Because that’s unique. I know a
00:40:09 lot of intellectuals who would make a different decision.
00:40:13 Yeah, interesting. I had a discussion with Naval about this, actually, with a few others that
00:40:20 have a very clear distinction between public and private.
00:40:24 Something I’m struggling with, by the way, personally, and thinking about.
00:40:27 So one on the very basic surface level is if you carry with yourself lies, small lies or big lies,
00:40:41 it’s extra mental effort to remember what you’re supposed to say and not supposed to say.
00:40:51 So that’s on a very surface level of like, it’s just easier to live life when you have
00:40:57 the smaller the gap between the private you and the public you.
00:41:01 And the second is, I think for me, from an engineering perspective,
00:41:09 like if I’m dishonest with others, I will too quickly become dishonest with myself.
00:41:16 And in so doing, I will not truly be able to think deeply about the world and come up
00:41:22 and build revolutionary ideas. There’s something about honesty that feels like
00:41:26 it’s that first principles thinking that’s almost like overused as a term, but it feels like that
00:41:31 requires radical honesty, not radical asshole and lishness, but radical honesty with yourself,
00:41:38 with yourself. And it feels like it’s difficult to be radically honest with yourself when you’re
00:41:44 being dishonest with the public. And also I have a nice feature, honestly, that in this current
00:41:52 social context, so we can talk about race and gender and what are the other topics that are
00:41:59 touchy?
00:41:52 Ethnicity and nationality.
00:42:03 All those things. I mean, like.
00:42:04 Family structure.
00:42:05 Maybe I’m ineloquent in the way I speak about them, but I honestly, when I look in the mirror,
00:42:12 like I’m not deeply hateful of a particular race or even just hateful particular race.
00:42:19 I’m sure I’m biased and I’ve tried to like think about those biases and so on. And also, I don’t have any
00:42:36 creepy shit in my closet. It seems like a lot of people did a lot of creepy stuff in their life.
00:42:43 I’ve gotten a bit of a platform. And I think it all started when I went to this female comedian, Whitney
00:43:12 Brown, and I was like, you know, I really value love, long term monogamy with like one person. And it’s like, I
00:43:42 really value liberating as a human being. Forget public, all that. Because then I feel like I’m on sturdy ground when I say
00:44:06 difficult things. And at the same time, sorry, I’m ranting on this. I apologize.
00:44:12 Like I won’t be able to fake it. Like they’ll see it through. Yeah. So I feel like if you’re not
00:44:23 lying about stuff, you have the freedom to truly be yourself. And the internet will figure it out.
00:44:30 Like we’ll figure who you are. People have a natural tendency to be able to tell bullshit.
00:44:35 It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, right? Exactly. Like why? Why wouldn’t, why, like, of all the things that we could evolve to be good at,
00:44:45 being able to detect honesty seems like one that would be particularly valuable,
00:44:49 especially in the sorts of societies we developed into. And then also from a selfish perspective,
00:44:54 like a success perspective, I think there’s a lot of folks that have inspired me, like Elon is one of them,
00:45:01 that shows that there’s a hunger for genuineness. Like you can build a business as a CEO and be
00:45:09 genuine and like real and do stupid shit every once in a while, as long as it’s coming from the
00:45:15 same place of who you truly are. Like Elon is inspirational with that. And then there’s a lot of
00:45:19 other people I admire that are counter inspirations in the sense like they’re very formal. They hold
00:45:28 back a lot of themselves. And it’s like, I know how brilliant those people are. And I think they’re
00:45:33 not being as effective of leaders, public faces of companies as they could be. I mean, to be honest,
00:45:41 like not to throw shade, but I will, it’s like Mark Zuckerberg is an example of that. Jack Dorsey is
00:45:49 also a bit of an example of that. I like Jack a lot. I’ve talked to him a lot. I will talk to him
00:45:54 more. I think he’s a much more amazing person than he conveys through his public presentation. I think
00:46:03 a lot of that has to do with PR and marketing people having an effect. This is difficult. I think
00:46:08 it’s really difficult. It’s probably many of the same difficulties you will face as the pressures.
00:46:14 But it’s hard to know what to do. But I think as much as possible as an individual, you should try
00:46:20 to be honest in the face of the world and the company that wants you to be more polished. And
00:46:28 that being more polished turns you into a politician and politician eventually turns into
00:46:33 being dishonest. Dishonest with the world and dishonest with yourself.
00:46:37 Something I noticed, which was of the people you mentioned, those things have had ramifications
00:46:43 in terms of letting things go too far or get out of hand. And you wonder, it’s an aspect of lying,
00:46:51 right? You say one lie goes to another lie. You push it down. It doesn’t matter. You can figure
00:46:57 it out later. You can figure it out later. Pretty soon, you’ve dug a pretty big hole. And I think
00:47:04 if we look at Twitter and we look at Facebook, I think it goes without saying what sorts of holes
00:47:09 have been dug because of, perhaps because of a lack of honesty that goes all the way up to the
00:47:14 leaders. So yeah, there’s two problems within the company. It doesn’t make you as effective of a
00:47:20 leader, I think. That’s one. And two, for social media companies, I think people need to trust,
00:47:28 like it doesn’t have to be the CEO, but it has to be like, this is how humans work. We want to look
00:47:34 to somebody we’re like, I trust you. If you’re going to use a social media platform, I think you
00:47:43 have to trust the set of individuals working at the top of that social. Something I realized
00:47:49 really quickly, one of the lessons throughout the startup was that people don’t totally connect to
00:47:55 products as much as they connect to people. And I mean, I don’t know how much you’ve spent on
00:48:03 Librex. You’ve only been here the last week, but I mean, I love the product. And one of the aspects
00:48:11 of me loving the product is that I was super active and I’ve been super active throughout the
00:48:15 entire time. And the amount of support I’ve received has made that very easy to do from
00:48:22 the community and the fact that I could, I mean, so I came to Boston for this interview, right?
00:48:26 Yeah. I came to Boston. I got off the train. It was around 5.30 PM. I checked Librex. Someone
00:48:34 is writing, hey, I’m in Boston. Does anyone want to get dinner? 30 minutes later, I’m getting
00:48:38 dinner with them. That’s amazing. And I mean, it’s incredible. First of all, as an entrepreneur,
00:48:46 the amount of stuff I learn from these people and when they reiterate and I hear that they got the
00:48:52 message through the product. I mean, that’s incredibly validating, but also, I mean, I think
00:48:57 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 because fundamentally the users are trusting us with some really important discussions and some
00:49:09 really, and a movement to some degree. It’s a community and a movement.
00:49:13 I’ll tell you actually why I didn’t use the app very much so far is there’s something really
00:49:20 powerful about the way it’s constructed, which I felt like a bit of an outsider, because I don’t
00:49:26 know the communities. It felt like it’s a really strong community around each of these places.
00:49:34 And so I felt like I was, it made me really wish there was an MIT one. And so there’s
00:49:39 both discussions about the deep community issues within Columbia or Yale or so on,
00:49:45 and Dartmouth, and there’s also the broader community of the Ivy Leagues that people are
00:49:52 discussing. But I could see that actually expanding more and more and more, but which is,
00:49:57 it’s a powerful coupling, which is the feeling of like this little village, this little community
00:50:02 we’re building together, but also the broader issues. So you could do both discussions.
00:50:08 One thing that was important to me is talking about social media as a concept. I think the way
00:50:16 people socialize is very much context dependent. So we’re talking about people understanding each
00:50:23 other through language, through English. And these languages are constructed in a very nuanced way,
00:50:31 in a very sort of temperamental way, right? And you kind of need a similar context to be able to
00:50:38 have productive conversations. So to me, it’s really important that these groups, they share
00:50:45 something in common, a really big lived experience, the Ivy League, or their school community. And
00:50:51 they have a similar vocabulary, they have a similar background, they know what’s happening
00:50:55 in their community. And so having social media that is community connected to me was fundamental.
00:51:00 Like, you talk about anonymity. To me, community is the thing that when I think about Librex,
00:51:06 I think what makes it different. It’s the fact that everyone knows what’s going on. Everyone
00:51:12 comes from a similar context and people can socialize in a way where they understand each
00:51:18 other because they’ve been through, you used the word lived experience, they’ve been through so
00:51:22 many of the same lived experiences.
00:51:23 One clarification, is there an easy way, if you choose, to then connect in meat space,
00:51:32 in physical space?
00:51:34 So the, I guess the sort of magic of it, and I was talking to a bunch of Harvard Librexers who I
00:51:41 met off the app while I was in Boston. And every time they told me this is my favorite part of the
00:51:46 app, this is what I love about the app. We have this matching system, which is an anonymous direct
00:51:50 message that you can send to any poster. So, like, I was talking to this guy who, he was really
00:51:59 into coin collection. And he met other people who are really into coin collection through a post
00:52:04 and what they he would make a post about coin collection. And then someone would come to him
00:52:09 and they’d be like, and they could direct message him anonymously. And it would just show them that
00:52:13 his it would just show him their school. And then they could just text chat, totally anonymously,
00:52:18 direct message if he accepted the anonymous request.
00:52:22 Do they see the usernames, right?
00:52:23 There are no usernames on Librex. It’s all just school’s names. So he made this post about coin
00:52:30 collection. And he got a direct message.
00:52:34 Yeah, I guess so, right?
00:52:35 No usernames.
00:52:38 I was just looking at the text.
00:52:39 Yeah.
00:52:40 That’s interesting. That’s right.
00:52:42 And I can tell you, I can go into why.
00:52:44 That’s really interesting.
00:52:46 Yeah, I can go into it.
00:52:47 So it truly is anonymous.
00:52:49 Well, I mean, it depends on what you mean by anonymous.
00:52:52 Exactly. It’s a very different kind of anonymous.
00:52:56 And the reason that we made that decision is because we wanted people to connect to ideas.
00:53:02 We want people to connect to things in the moment. We don’t want people to go,
00:53:06 oh, I know this guy. He said this other thing. And we didn’t want people to feel like they were at
00:53:10 risk of being doxxed. So it’s just these are small communities, right? We talked about this. Everyone
00:53:15 knows someone who knows you. And in 2021, it would not take much to be able to figure out who someone
00:53:23 might be just through a couple of posts. So it’s both safety and about the ideas in terms of not
00:53:29 adding usernames. Anyway, we have this anonymous direct message system where you can direct
00:53:34 message the original poster of any post, the OP, if you’re a Redditor, of any post. And that makes
00:53:41 it really easy to meet up because once you guys are one on one, you can exchange a number. You
00:53:46 can exchange a Snapchat. You can exchange an email. Probably not very often, but you could.
00:53:53 And then that’s how people meet up. Matching.
00:53:56 And then a lot of people connect in this way. Let me just take a small step into the technical.
00:54:01 I read somewhere, I don’t know if it’s true, that one of the reasons you were rejected from YC,
00:54:06 Y Combinator, in the final rounds is because one of the principles is to refuse to sell user data.
00:54:15 Can you speak to that? Why do you think it’s important not to sell user data?
00:54:24 Which draws a clear contrast between other, basically any other service on the internet.
00:54:30 I mean, to be honest, it’s quite simple. I mean, we talk about this platform. People are talking
00:54:37 about their most intimate secrets, their political opinions. How are they feeling about what’s going
00:54:44 on in their city during the summer? How are they feeling about the political cycle and also their
00:54:54 mental health, their relationships? These are some of the most intimate thoughts that people
00:55:00 were having. Point blank, I don’t think it was ethical to pawn them off for a profit.
00:55:07 I didn’t think it was moral. I don’t think I could sleep at night if that was what I was doing,
00:55:11 is turning these people’s most intimate beliefs and secrets into a currency that I bought and sold.
00:55:20 There’s something very off about that.
00:55:22 Yeah, I tend to believe that there is some room, so like Facebook would just take that data and
00:55:30 sell it, right? But there’s some room in transparency and giving people the choice
00:55:35 on which parts they can, I wouldn’t even see it as sell, but like share with advertisers.
00:55:42 Are you going to give them a profit?
00:55:44 So right, you have to monetize, you have to create an entire system, you have to rethink
00:55:47 this whole thing, right? But as long as you give people control and are transparent and make it
00:55:54 easy, like I think it’s really difficult to delete a Facebook account or like delete all your data.
00:55:59 I’ve tried, it’s very difficult.
00:56:03 So like just make it easy and trust in that if you create a great product,
00:56:07 people are not going to do it. And if they do it, then they’re not actually
00:56:12 a deep loving member of the community. What’s that?
00:56:14 So we very quickly realized that user privacy was something that was not only a core value,
00:56:23 but was something that users really cared about. And we added this functionality. It’s just a
00:56:28 button that says, forget me. You press it, like two clicks. It’s not that hard. We just
00:56:35 remove your email from the database. You’re good.
00:56:40 Beautiful. I think Facebook should have that. I honestly, so call me crazy, but maybe you can
00:56:47 actually speak to this, but I don’t think Facebook, well now they would, but if they
00:56:53 did it earlier, they would lose that much money. If they allow like transparently tell people,
00:56:59 you could just delete everything. They also explained that like in ways that’s going to
00:57:05 potentially like lessen your experience in the short term, like explain that. But then there
00:57:12 shouldn’t be like multiple clicks of a button that don’t make any sense. I’m trying to hold
00:57:20 back from ranting about Instagram because let me just say real quick, because I’ve been locked
00:57:25 out of Instagram for a month. And there’s a whole group inside Facebook that are like supporters of
00:57:31 like Lex, help Lex. Free Lex? Free Lex. I wasn’t blocked. It was just like a bug in the system.
00:57:39 Somebody was hammering the API with my account. And so they kept thinking I’m a bot. Anyway,
00:57:44 it’s a bug. It happens to a lot of people, but like, first of all, I appreciate the love from
00:57:49 all the amazing engineers in Instagram and Facebook. All of those folks, the entire mechanism
00:57:54 though is somehow broken. I mean, I put that on the leadership, but it’s also difficult to operate
00:58:00 a large company once it scales, all those kinds of things, but it should not be that difficult
00:58:06 to do some basic, basic things that you want to do, which is in the case of Facebook,
00:58:15 that’s verify your identity to the app. And also in the case of Facebook, in the case of Librex,
00:58:22 like disappear if you choose. There’s downsides to disappearing, but it should not be a difficult
00:58:31 process. And yeah, I think people are waking up to that. I think there’s a lot of room for an app
00:58:40 like Librex with its foundational ideas to redefine what social media should look like.
00:58:47 You know, and like you said, I think beautifully, anonymity is not the core value. It’s just a tool
00:58:53 you use. And who knows, maybe anonymity will not always be the tool you use. Like if you give
00:59:00 people the choice, who knows what this evolves from the login page you initially created.
00:59:06 The key thing is the founding principles. And again, who knows if you give people a really
00:59:10 nice way to monetize their data, maybe there’ll no longer be a thing that you say, do not sell
00:59:15 user data. Yeah, all those kinds of things. But the basic principles should be there. And also
00:59:22 a good, simple interface design goes a really long way. Like simplicity and elegance, which
00:59:30 Librex currently is. Clubhouse is another app.
00:59:32 It’s gotten a lot better, by the way. I don’t mean to go too deep into the history, but the…
00:59:39 It was bad? I didn’t look at the early pictures.
00:59:41 Oh, thank goodness.
00:59:43 I read somewhere that it was like a white screen, like with black.
00:59:47 The up and down buttons were like these big freaking boxes. And I could go on, but it was
00:59:57 my genius design skills. I almost failed art class when I was in first grade. And I think
01:00:05 I still have similar skills to my first grade self, but it’s gotten a lot better. And thanks
01:00:10 to a lot of my friends who have sort of chipped in here and there.
01:00:14 Oh, I love the idea of a button that just forget me. I don’t know. That’s really moving,
01:00:20 actually. That’s actually all people want, is they want, I think… Okay, I’ll speak
01:00:28 to my experience. I would give so much more if I could just disappear if I needed to.
01:00:34 And I trusted the community. I trusted the founders and the principals. That’s really
01:00:42 powerful, man. The trust and ease of escape. Yeah. You’ve also kind of mentioned moderation,
01:00:51 which is really interesting. So with this anonymity and this community, I don’t know
01:00:58 if you’ve heard of the internet, but there’s trolls on the internet.
01:01:01 So I’ve heard.
01:01:01 And even if they go to Yale and Dartmouth, there’s still people that probably enjoy
01:01:12 sort of being the guerrilla warfare, counter revolutionary, and just like creating chaos
01:01:19 in a place of love. So how do you prevent chaos and hatred breaking out in Librex?
01:01:27 So the way I think about it is we have these principals. They’re pretty simple and they’re
01:01:33 pretty easy to enforce. And then beyond the principals, we have a set of moderators,
01:01:38 moderate from every single Ivy League school, a team of diverse moderators who enforce these
01:01:42 principals, but not only enforce the principals, but kind of clue us in to what’s happening
01:01:47 in their community and how the real life context of their community translates to the Librex
01:01:52 context of their community. And beyond that, we have conversation with them about the
01:01:59 standards of the community. And we’re constantly talking about what needs to be further
01:02:03 elucidated and what needs to be tweaked. And we’re in constant communication with the
01:02:08 community. Now, if you want me to get into the principals that underlie Librex’s moderation
01:02:13 policy.
01:02:14 Yeah, please. Maybe you can explain that there’s moderators. What does that mean? How
01:02:17 are they chosen? And what are the principals under which they operate?
01:02:20 Sure. So how are the moderators chosen? The moderators are all volunteers. They’re Librexers
01:02:26 who reach out to me and respond to the opportunity to become moderator. And the way they’re
01:02:33 chosen is basically we want to make sure that they’re in tune with their community. We want
01:02:39 to make sure they come from diverse backgrounds and we want to make sure that they sort of
01:02:43 understand what the community is about. And then we ask them some questions about how
01:02:47 they would deal with certain scenarios, ones that we’ve had in the past and we feel strongly
01:02:52 about. And then also ones that are a little more murky, where we want to see that they’re
01:02:56 sort of thinking about these things in a critical way. And from there, we choose a set and they
01:03:03 have the power to take down posts. Of course, everything at the end of the day pens my
01:03:10 review, but they can take them down and we can reinstate them if it’s a problem. But
01:03:15 they can take down posts and they can advocate for different moderation standards and different
01:03:20 moderation policies.
01:03:22 So for now, you’re the Linus Torvalds of this community. So meaning like you’re able to,
01:03:29 like people are actually able to like email you or like text you, contact you and get
01:03:37 a response. Like you respond to basically everybody. And then you’re like really, you
01:03:42 know, you’re, you’re living that live on people’s floor life currently. That’s not
01:03:47 necessarily, this is the early days folks. I knew Ryan before he was a billionaire and
01:03:54 he was cool. And then he was in a mansion making meats on his barbecue. No. Okay. But
01:04:02 you know, how does it scale? Like what I suppose, how does it scale is the question. I
01:04:12 mean, with Linus, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Linux open source community,
01:04:17 but he still stayed at the top for a while. It was really important. Like leadership there
01:04:21 was really important to drive that large scale, really productive open source community.
01:04:26 What do you see your role as Librex grows and in general, what are the mechanisms of
01:04:32 scaling here for moderation?
01:04:35 Where I see it, open discourse is fundamental to the purpose of the app, right? So as the,
01:04:42 I guess you could say founder, CEO, what have you, part of my purpose has to be to enforce
01:04:49 the vision, right? And part of the vision is open discourse. And that does come down
01:04:54 in part to reasonable moderation and community guided reasonable moderation. So I imagine
01:05:00 that will always be something that I’m intimately involved with to some degree. Now the
01:05:05 degree to which the way in which that manifests, I imagine will have to change, right? And
01:05:14 hopefully I’ll be able to, just like you can hire a CTO, hopefully I’ll be able to be
01:05:19 in integrated in hiring people who understand the way that we are sort of operating and
01:05:27 the reasonable standards of moderation. And there can be a sort of hierarchical structure.
01:05:32 But I think when you have a product whose key purpose is to allow people to have these
01:05:38 difficult conversations on campus that need to be had, I can never fully, I don’t think
01:05:46 I can fully ever abdicate that responsibility. I think that would be like, I mean, that would
01:05:51 be like Bezos abdicating eCommerce, right? That’s part of the job.
01:05:57 Yeah, of course you can run companies in different ways. I think because he might have
01:06:02 abdicated quite a bit of the details there.
01:06:05 It’s hard for me to say.
01:06:06 Because Amazon does so many things. I think probably the better examples like Elon with
01:06:10 rockets, he’s still at the core of the engineering. He’s at the core of the engineering. There’s
01:06:15 some fundamental questions. He probably does way too much of the engineering. He’s the
01:06:20 lowest level detail. But you’re saying the core things that make the app work is the
01:06:28 moderation of difficult conversations.
01:06:30 And by the way, I’m 21 years old. Let’s remind everyone of that. If this thing does scale
01:06:38 and if this thing continues to be a positive force in a lot of people’s lives, who knows
01:06:44 what will happen in the next, what I’ll learn. I’m still growing definitely as a leader,
01:06:50 still growing as a thinker, still growing as a person. I can’t pretend that I know how
01:06:56 to run a business that is worth up to $1 billion, whatever. I can’t pretend I know how to run
01:07:03 a business that’s going to have millions and millions of users. I expect that there are
01:07:07 going to be a lot of amazing people who will teach me and that a lot of people who have
01:07:11 already kind of stepped into my life and helped me out and taught me things. And I imagine
01:07:17 that I’ll learn so much more. I just know that moderation is always going to be important
01:07:22 to me because I don’t think Librex is Librex unless we have open discourse and moderation,
01:07:28 reasonable, open, light touch moderation is at the heart of creating that, right?
01:07:35 So as a creator of this kind of community in place with anonymity and difficult conversations,
01:07:40 what do you think about this touchy three words that people have been tossing around
01:07:48 and politicizing, I would say, but is at the core of the founding of this country, which
01:07:52 is the freedom of speech? How do you think about the freedom of speech, this particular
01:07:58 kind of freedom of expression? And do you think it’s a fundamental human right? How
01:08:04 do you define it to yourself when you’re thinking about it? I went down, especially
01:08:10 preparing for this conversation down a rabbit hole of like just how unclear it is philosophically
01:08:17 what is meant by this kind of freedom. It’s not as easy as people think, but it’s interesting
01:08:25 pragmatically speaking to hear how you think about it in the context of Librex.
01:08:31 Yeah, it’s a tough one, right? There’s a lot there. So I come from the background of being
01:08:37 a math major. Maybe it’s important to start with that. And I found myself in the middle
01:08:44 of this question of freedom of speech. One of the wonderful things is that the Librex
01:08:49 community is filled with PhDs and governance majors who have taught me a ton about this
01:08:56 sort of thing. And I’m still learning. I’m still growing. I’m still probably going to
01:09:00 modify my perspective to some degree. Hopefully. Don’t worry. I imagine I’ll always support
01:09:08 free discourse. Like learning how to speak about stuff is critical here because it’s like
01:09:17 I’m learning that this is like a minefield of conversations because the moment you say like
01:09:23 even saying freedom of speech is a complicated concept, people will be like, oh, we spotted
01:09:29 a communist. Like they’ll say, there’s nothing complicated about freedom. Freedom is freedom,
01:09:34 bro. It is complicated. First of all, if you talk about there’s different definitions of freedom of
01:09:41 speech. If you want to go constitutionally, if you want to talk about the United States
01:09:45 specifically and what’s legal, it’s actually not as exciting and not as beautiful as what
01:09:52 people think of. It’s complicated. I think there’s ideals behind it that we want to see.
01:09:59 What does that actually materialize itself in the digital world where we’re trying to communicate
01:10:06 in ways that allows for difficult conversations and also at the same time doesn’t result in the
01:10:14 silencing of voices, not through like censorship, but through like just assholes being rude.
01:10:23 Spam.
01:10:24 Spam. So it could be just bots.
01:10:27 Racism.
01:10:28 Racism.
01:10:29 Going back to the name of the app, Librex. Libre, free. X was put onto for free exchange
01:10:39 and the free exchange of what my purpose was to create as much inner communication of ideas,
01:10:46 be them repugnant or otherwise as possible. And of course, to do that within legal bounds
01:10:53 and to do that without causing anyone to be harassed or doxxed. So to keep things
01:10:58 focused on the ideas, not the people. And then no BS crap stuff. And so to me,
01:11:08 the easiest way to moderate around that, because as you said, figuring out what is hateful and what
01:11:13 is hate speech is really hard, was to say no sweeping statements against core identity groups.
01:11:21 And that seems to work on the whole pretty well to be pretty light touch.
01:11:25 And it’s hard to do though.
01:11:27 It’s difficult.
01:11:27 We like to generalize, we humans.
01:11:30 It’s difficult, but what it comes down to is be specific.
01:11:33 And when you think about what are sweeping statements against core identity groups,
01:11:37 oftentimes these are sort of hackneyed subjects. These are things that have been broached and
01:11:43 we’ve heard them before. They don’t really lead anywhere productive. So it goes under
01:11:48 this principle of be specific in the ideas you’re discussing.
01:11:52 So even for like positive and humorous stuff, you try to avoid generalizations.
01:11:57 Against core identity groups.
01:11:58 Core identity groups. Sorry, what are core identity groups?
01:12:01 We’re talking, kind of like,
01:12:02 You know, race, religion.
01:12:06 Okay. Got it. Even positive stuff?
01:12:11 Well, against, negative.
01:12:13 Oh, against. Sorry, against, against. Okay.
01:12:16 Very, very, we’ve learned to be very specific. Very few words, but the community gets it, you know?
01:12:23 Yeah, they get it. I mean, this is the thing. The trouble with rules is as the community grows,
01:12:31 they’ll figure out ways to manipulate the rules.
01:12:33 Absolutely. It’s human nature. It’s creativity.
01:12:36 Yeah.
01:12:37 Something beautiful about it, of course.
01:12:40 From an evolutionary perspective, yes.
01:12:41 Yeah, the fact that people are so creative and so looking to,
01:12:46 because people are genuinely interested in figuring out these things about social media.
01:12:50 And so they’ll 100% see like, where’s the edge? And I mean, part of that’s maintaining some level
01:12:56 of vagueness in your rule set, which has its own set of questions and something we could think about.
01:13:02 And I’m not implying I have all the answers, but there is something really interesting about people
01:13:06 being so engaged that they’re looking to figure out where are those edges and what does that mean?
01:13:11 What does that edge mean, you know?
01:13:14 Well, so one of the things I’m kind of thinking about,
01:13:17 like from an individual user of Librex or an individual user of the internet,
01:13:22 I think about like that one person that is on Reddit saying hateful stuff or positive stuff,
01:13:27 doesn’t matter, or funny stuff. One of the things I think about is the trajectory of that individual
01:13:33 through life and how social media can help that person become the best version of themselves.
01:13:41 I don’t mean from like an Orwellian sense, like educate them properly or something.
01:13:46 I just mean like, we’re all, I believe, we’re all fundamentally good. And I also believe
01:13:53 we all have the capacity to do, to create some amazing stuff in this world,
01:14:01 whether that’s ideas or art or engineering, all those kinds of things, just to be amazing people.
01:14:07 And I kind of think about like, you know, a lot of social media mechanisms bring out the worst
01:14:13 in us. And I try to think like, in the long term, how can the social media or how can a website,
01:14:22 how can a tool that you create can make the best, like you take a trajectory that makes you better,
01:14:28 better and better and like the best version of yourself. So I think about that because like,
01:14:33 you know, Twitter can really take you down some dark trajectories. I’ve seen people just not being
01:14:39 the best version of themselves. Forget the cancel culture and all that kind of stuff. It’s just like
01:14:43 they’re not developing intellectually in the way that’s going to make the best version of themselves.
01:14:49 I think Reddit, I’m not sure what I think about Reddit yet, because one positive side is all the
01:14:55 shit posting I read. It could be just like a release valve for some stress in life. And you
01:15:01 almost have like a parallel life where you’re in meat space. You might be actually becoming
01:15:07 successful and so on and growing and so on, but you just need some times to be angry at somebody.
01:15:11 But I tend to not think that’s possible. I think if you’re shit posting, you’re probably not
01:15:19 spending your time the best way you could. I don’t know. I’m torn on that. But do you think
01:15:25 about that with Librex of creating a trajectory for the Yale, for the Dartmouth, for the students,
01:15:31 to where they grow intellectually?
01:15:33 One thing that I think about a lot is how do you incentivize positive content creation? How do you
01:15:41 incentivize really intellectual content creation? It’s something that, frankly, I think about every
01:15:50 single day. And I think there are ways that… I mean, one thing that’s great about humans is that
01:15:58 they can be incentivized, right? And I think there are ways that you can incentivize people to make
01:16:03 the right kind of content if that’s your goal.
01:16:06 So you think such mechanisms exist for such incentivization?
01:16:10 I do. I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak.
01:16:13 Do you have already concrete ideas in your mind?
01:16:16 I have about three concrete ideas that I’m very, very optimistic about.
01:16:22 You don’t even need to share them. I understand totally. But the fact that you have them,
01:16:26 that’s really good. Because I feel like sometimes the downfall of the social media is that there’s
01:16:33 literally not even a thinking or a discussion about the incentivization of positive long term
01:16:43 content creation. Twitter, I really was excited about this when they said like,
01:16:48 when Jack has talked about creating healthy conversations.
01:16:52 He does seem to care. I’ve listened to him. I mean, he has a very particular way of saying
01:16:57 things. But you get the impression that he’s someone who actually cares about these things
01:17:01 within the limits of his power.
01:17:03 Yeah. And that’s the question, the limits of the power. Librex is growing not just in the number
01:17:10 of communities, but also in the way you’re incentivizing positive conversations, like coupled
01:17:18 with a moderation and so on. So you think there’s a lot of innovation to be had in that area?
01:17:22 There’s a tremendous amount. I think when you think about the reasons people post,
01:17:27 fundamentally, people want to make a positive impact on their community to some degree. Now,
01:17:34 there will always be bad actors. And part of the benefit of our moderation structure is that we
01:17:39 can limit some of those bad actors, no bot accounts, no brigading. At the same time,
01:17:45 the more you incentivize a certain type of behavior, the better it’s going to be. And we
01:17:50 don’t see it as our role as the platform to force the community in a direction. And frankly, I don’t
01:17:58 think it would be good for anyone, the community or the conversations, if we forced a specific type
01:18:03 of conversation. We just need to make the tools to allow people to be good and to incentivize good
01:18:10 behavior.
01:18:10 Yeah, I believe that. You will not need to censor if you allow people at scale to be good. The good
01:18:19 will overpower the assholes.
01:18:21 That’s my fundamental belief. I’m very optimistic about that.
01:18:26 But currently, Librex is small in the sense that it’s a small set of communities that I believe.
01:18:32 And you mentioned to me offline that by design, you’re scaling slowly and carefully.
01:18:38 That’s right.
01:18:38 So how does Librex scale? Is it possible? Facebook also started with a small set of communities
01:18:48 that were schools, and then now grew to be basically the, if not one of the largest social
01:18:55 networks in the world. Do you see Librex as potentially scaling to be beyond even college
01:19:03 campuses, but encompassing the whole world?
01:19:06 It’s a long timeline. I’ll say this. This gets back to where did Facebook go wrong?
01:19:17 Because clearly, they did a lot right. And we can only speculate about what the objectives
01:19:24 were of the founders of Facebook. I’m sure they’ve said some things, but it’s always
01:19:30 interesting to know what the mythology is versus what the truth is of the matter. So
01:19:36 perhaps they’ve been very successful. I mean, they’ve taken over the world to some extent.
01:19:43 At the same time, the goals of Librex are to create these positive communities and
01:19:49 these open conversations where people can have real conversation and connection in
01:19:54 their communities in a vulnerable and authentic way. And so to that end, which I imagine might
01:20:00 be different than the goals of a Facebook, for example, one thing that we want to do
01:20:06 is keep things intimate and community based. So each school is its own community. And perhaps
01:20:13 you could have a slightly broader community. Maybe you could have a, I know the California
01:20:19 system is an obvious one. Packed time might be an obvious one. And we can think about that. But
01:20:24 fundamentally, the unit of community is your school or your school community. So that’s one
01:20:33 difference that I think will help us. The other thing is that we’re scaling intentionally, meaning
01:20:38 that when we expand to a school, we have moderators in place. We have moderators who understand that
01:20:44 school’s environment in a very personal level. And we’re growing responsibly. We’re growing as we’re
01:20:50 ready, both technologically, but also socially. But as we think we have the tools to preserve
01:20:58 the community and to encourage the community to create the sort of content that we want them to
01:21:02 create. And there’s a lot of ways to define community. So first of all, there’s geographic
01:21:09 community as well. But the way you’re kind of defining community with Yale and Dartmouth is the
01:21:16 email, right? That’s what gives you, there’s a power to the email in the sense that that’s how
01:21:24 you can verify, efficiently verify yourself with being a single individual in the university. In
01:21:32 that same way, you can verify your employment at a company, for example, like Google, Microsoft,
01:21:39 Facebook. Do you see potentially taking on those communities? That’d be fascinating,
01:21:45 getting like anonymous community conversations inside Google.
01:21:50 100% crossed my mind. To some extent, this is something where I understand the college
01:21:57 experience. I understand the need. And I’ve never worked at Google. I don’t know if they would hire
01:22:04 me. Hopefully, maybe as a product manager. I think if there’s a community that needs this product,
01:22:14 and has that will, which I think, especially as Librex continues to grow and expand and change
01:22:22 and learn. Because that’s what we’re doing is we’re learning, right? With each community, it’s not just
01:22:27 about growing. It’s about learning from each of these communities and iterating. I think it’s
01:22:35 quite likely there are going to be all sorts of communities that could use this tool to improve
01:22:40 their culture, so to speak. So forgive me, I’m not actually that knowledgeable about the history of
01:22:48 attempts of building social networks to solve the problem that you’re solving. But I was made aware
01:22:55 that there was an app or at least a social network called Yik Yak that had a similar kind of
01:23:07 focus. I think the thing you’ve spoken about that differs between Librex and Yik Yak is that Yik Yak
01:23:14 was defined, am I pronouncing it right even? You good? I’m good. I met the founder so I can confirm.
01:23:21 Okay, you can confirm, cool. That it was constrained to a geographical area versus like to the actual
01:23:29 community and that somehow had fundamental like actual differences in social dynamics that resulted.
01:23:38 But can you speak to the history of Yik Yak? Like how does Librex differ? What lessons have you learned
01:23:45 from that? Oh, and I should say that I guess there was controversial, I don’t know, I didn’t look at
01:23:50 the details, but I’m guessing there’s a bunch of racism and hate speech and all that kind of stuff
01:23:53 that emerged on Yik Yak. Okay, so that’s an example of like, okay, here’s how it goes wrong when you
01:24:01 have anonymity on college campuses. So how does Librex going to do better? Yeah, Yik Yak had a
01:24:09 lot of problems, content problems, but the content problems go deeper than maybe what the press would
01:24:14 reveal. There’s a lot to say and part of it is parsing exactly what to talk about when it comes
01:24:21 to Yik Yak and when you talk about startups, I mean you know this, you know startups, and you
01:24:27 look at the postmortem, it’s almost never what people think it is. And oftentimes these things
01:24:32 are somewhat unknowable and the degree to which people seeking confirmation bias to somebody,
01:24:39 seeking closure, look to find a singular attribute that caused the failure. It feels like the little
01:24:44 details often make all the difference. Yes, and I think the details are so little that as humans
01:24:51 we are not capable of parsing even what they are. But I’ll tell you my perspective on it,
01:24:58 knowing that I am also a human with biases. In this particular case, very significant biases.
01:25:08 So I started building Librex for its own merits. At first I wasn’t aware of Yik Yak, but as I started
01:25:14 to talk to people about this platform I was building, I was made aware of Yik Yak and I
01:25:20 built it from day one with a lot of the issues Yik Yak had in mind. So as you said, the one
01:25:28 difference between Yik Yak is the geographical versus community based aspect. Going along with
01:25:33 that, one thing I realized by researching social media sites is that the majority of
01:25:39 the negative content, the content that’s terrible and breaking all the rules is created by really,
01:25:48 and the people who are not reformable, so to speak, the people who are not showing the best
01:25:54 part of the human experience. It’s a really small minority, right? I remember, I was listening to
01:26:02 the founder of 4ChamMoot talk about this, how like one guy was able to basically destroy
01:26:10 like large swaths of his community. Yeah, that’s part of what makes it exciting for that
01:26:16 minority is how much power they can have. So if you’re predisposed to think in this way,
01:26:22 it’s exciting that you can walk into, like I mentioned the party before, you have a party
01:26:27 of a lot of positive people and it feels, especially if you don’t have much power in this
01:26:35 world, it feels exceptionally empowering to just, to destroy like the lives of many.
01:26:44 Yeah. And if you think this way, it’s a problem. But I’m hopeful that you’re right, that in most
01:26:51 cases it’s going to be a minority of people. I think it is. And that’s what the research has
01:26:56 showed. And one really powerful thing is that we can really actively control who comes in and out
01:27:04 of our community based on the.edu verification. And we can also control who’s not in our community
01:27:10 because we have that lever where each account is associated with a.edu. So that’s the first point
01:27:16 I would point out there. Second point is controlled expansion, meaning that we have community
01:27:22 moderation. We have this panel that allows the moderators to see all of the highly downloaded
01:27:29 content, all of the reported content, all the flagged content and look through it and decide
01:27:34 what they like and what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. And we have, we ping every
01:27:40 moderator when there’s a report. So things are taken down pretty quickly. And we have our
01:27:45 standards and we have, I think above all of that, we have a mission and it’s a community based
01:27:51 mission. Yik Yak was more of a fun app and by its own admission, it was a place where people could
01:27:57 enjoy themselves and could sort of yak. Yik Yak, chit chat. We have a bigger purpose than that,
01:28:05 frankly. And I think that shows in the people who self select to be on that app, to be on Librex
01:28:11 and to be on Yik Yak, respectively. The last thing I’ll say is Yik Yak was very few characters. It
01:28:18 was a Twitter esque platform. And that doesn’t allow for a tremendous amount of nuance. It
01:28:22 doesn’t allow for a tremendous amount of conversation. Librex is much more long form.
01:28:28 And so the kind of posts that you’ll get on Librex can span pages. What people are starting
01:28:36 to realize is that they can reach a lot more people at a lot more pertinent of a time a lot
01:28:41 more quickly by posting their thoughts on Librex than if they went to their school newspaper.
01:28:47 And I think the school newspapers might be a little worried about that. But more importantly,
01:28:52 we’re connecting people in this way where long form communication with nuance that takes into
01:28:57 account everything that’s happening in the community temporally is really available at
01:29:03 Librex and not really communicable in 240 or 480 or whatever the number of characters the yaks were
01:29:11 bound to. And I could talk about the history of Yik Yak if you want me to go further. They started,
01:29:19 I think they were at 12 schools. And then spring break hit. People told their friends,
01:29:25 look at this app. A thousand schools signed up and had active communities. They had a problem
01:29:30 on their hands. And then the high schools come on board. I think a lot of the things you said
01:29:36 ring true to me, but especially the vision one, which I do think having a vision in the leadership,
01:29:42 having a mission makes all the difference in the world. That’s both for the engineers that
01:29:48 are building, like the team that’s building the app, the moderation and users because they kind of,
01:29:54 the mission carries itself through the behavior of the people on the social network.
01:30:02 As a small tangent, let me ask you something about Parler, but it’s less about Parler,
01:30:08 more about AWS. So AWS removed Parler from his platform, you know, for whatever reasons,
01:30:14 it doesn’t really matter. But the fact that AWS would do this was really, really bothered me
01:30:21 personally, because I saw AWS as the computing infrastructure and I always thought that part
01:30:29 could not put a finger on its scale. And I don’t know what your thoughts are. Like,
01:30:34 were you bothered by Parler being removed from AWS? And how does that affect how you think about
01:30:40 the computing infrastructure on which Librex is based?
01:30:45 I was bothered not so much by Parler specifically being taken out of AWS, but more the fact that
01:30:52 something that’s like a highway, something that people rely on, that people build on top of, that
01:30:59 people assume is going to be somewhat position agnostic, like a road that people drive on, is
01:31:06 becoming ideologically sort of discriminatory. And of course, mind you, Amazon can do what it
01:31:13 wants. It’s a private company and I support the rights of private companies. I just, on an ethical
01:31:18 and sort of a deep moral level, I wonder, like, at what point should a company sort of be agnostic
01:31:27 in that regard and let developers build on top of their infrastructure? And where does that
01:31:34 responsibility hold?
01:31:36 Yes, it makes you hope that there’s going to be, from a capitalistic sense, competitors to AWS
01:31:43 would say, like, we’re not going to put our finger on the scale. I mean, on the highway is a good
01:31:49 sort of example. It’s like if a privately owned highway said, you know, we’re no longer going to
01:31:56 allow, we’re only going to allow electric vehicles. And a bunch of people in this world would be like,
01:32:03 yes, because electric is good for the environment. And, you know, I think that’s a good example.
01:32:12 You know, yes, but then you have to consider the, like, the slippery slope nature of it, but also
01:32:20 like the negative impact on the lives of many others and what that means for innovation and for,
01:32:25 like, competition, again, in a capitalistic sense. So, there’s some nature, there’s some level to
01:32:32 this hierarchy of our existence that we should not allow to manipulate what’s built on top of it. It
01:32:40 should be truly infrastructure. And it feels like compute is storage and compute is that layer. Like,
01:32:48 it shouldn’t be messed with. I haven’t seen anybody really complain about it, like, in terms
01:32:53 of government. And I’m not even sure government is the right mechanism through policy and regulation
01:32:59 to step in. Because again, they do a messy job of fixing things. But I do hope there’s competitors
01:33:06 to AWS to make AWS then step up. Because I do think, you know, I’m a fan of AWS, except this.
01:33:12 Good service.
01:33:13 It’s a good service until this.
01:33:15 Until, yeah, until they rip out the rug.
01:33:20 And the point is, it’s not that necessarily their decision was a bad one with Parler,
01:33:26 in particular. It’s that, like, the slippery slope nature of it, but also
01:33:32 the, it takes the good actors that are creating amazing products and makes them more fearful.
01:33:38 And when you’re more fearful, it’s the same reason that anonymity is a tool that you don’t create
01:33:43 the best thing you could possibly create. When you’re fearful, you don’t create.
01:33:47 That’s right.
01:33:48 I think we’ve kind of talked about it a little bit. But I wonder if we can kind of revisit it
01:33:54 a little bit. I talked to a guy named Ronald Sullivan, who’s a faculty at Harvard, a law
01:34:00 professor. He was on the legal defense team. He was the lawyer for Harvey Weinstein and Aaron
01:34:07 Hernandez for the double murder case. So he takes on these really difficult cases of unpopular
01:34:13 figures because he believes like that’s the way you test that we believe in the rule of law.
01:34:20 But he was, there’s a big protest in Harvard to get him, basically censor him and to get him to
01:34:30 no longer be faculty dean, all those kinds of things. And it was by a minority of students, but
01:34:38 there’s a huge blowback, obviously in the public, but also inside Harvard, like that’s not okay.
01:34:44 He stands for the very principles at the founding of Harvard and at the principles of the founding
01:34:48 of this country and the law and so on. But the basic argument is that it was about safe spaces,
01:34:57 that it’s unsafe to have somebody who is basically supporting Harvey Weinstein, right?
01:35:05 What do you think about this whole idea of safe spaces on college campuses? Because it feels like
01:35:12 the mission of Librex is pushing back against the idea of safe spaces.
01:35:19 I think safe spaces are fine when they’re within people’s private lives, within their homes,
01:35:23 within their religious organizations. I think the problem becomes when the institution starts
01:35:28 encouraging or backing safe spaces because what are people being safe from? And oftentimes,
01:35:40 it seems like there’s this idea that the harm that’s being attempted to be mitigated is the
01:35:47 harm of confronting opinions you disagree with, opinions you might find repugnant.
01:35:52 And if this is conflated with a need for safety, then that’s where the idea of liberal arts
01:35:58 education sort of dies. Of course, it’s complicated and we still want to have safe
01:36:05 intellectual environments. But the way that I hear the term safe space used today,
01:36:11 I think it doesn’t really have a place within the intellectual context.
01:36:17 Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, this is why Librex is really exciting, is it’s pushing those
01:36:23 difficult conversations. And I’d love to see, ultimately, there does seem to be an asymmetry
01:36:29 of power that results in the concept of safe spaces and hate speech being redefined in the
01:36:39 slippery slope kind of way where it means basically anything you want it to mean. And
01:36:44 it basically is used to silence people, to silence people. They’re like good, thoughtful experts.
01:36:52 Also, beyond that, I would say it has not just a pragmatic purpose, which is the silencing,
01:37:00 but also sort of an ideological purpose, which is, and a linguistic purpose, which is to
01:37:05 conflate words with unsafety and harm and violence, which is what you kind of see on a
01:37:14 cultural linguistic level is happening all around us right now is that this idea that words are harm
01:37:20 is a very dangerous and slippery concept. I mean, you don’t have to slip that far to see
01:37:25 why that’s a problem. Once we start making words into violence and we start criminalizing words,
01:37:30 we get into some really authoritarian territory, things that I think, I mean, myself and my
01:37:37 background, I don’t know how much we have to go into it, but things that my ancestors
01:37:42 certainly would be worried about. What’s your background?
01:37:46 I’m a child of Holocaust survivors and pro grom survivors, so.
01:37:52 Yeah, I mean, me as well from different directions. I come from the Soviet Union, so
01:37:56 there’s, well, like in most of us, hate and love runs through our blood from our history.
01:38:04 You mentioned MIT is being added to Librex. Has it already been added?
01:38:07 Yes, it was added today.
01:38:09 Today, okay. So let me ask you, this is exciting because I don’t know what your thoughts are about
01:38:16 this, but I’ll tell you from my perspective, if you’re, and a lot of MIT folks listen to this,
01:38:22 I would love it if you joined Librex. It’d be interesting to explore conversations
01:38:29 on several topics inside MIT, but one of the most moving that hasn’t been discussed at all
01:38:38 at all, except in little flourishes here and there, is the topic of Jeffrey Epstein.
01:38:47 Now, there’s been a huge amount of, like, impact that the connections of various faculty to Jeffrey
01:38:57 Epstein and the various things that have been said had on MIT, but it feels like the difficult
01:39:04 conversation haven’t had been had. It’s the administration trying to clean up and give a bunch
01:39:11 of BS to try to pretend, like, let’s just hide this part. Like nothing is broken, nothing to see
01:39:18 here. Here’s a bad dude that did some bad things and some faculty that kind of misbehaved a little
01:39:25 bit because they’re a little bit clueless. Let’s all look the other way. Harvard did this much
01:39:31 better, by the way. They completely, it’s almost like people pretend like Harvard didn’t have
01:39:37 anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein. But I think I’d be curious to hear what those conversations
01:39:45 are because there’s conversations on the topic of like, well, obviously sort of sexual assault and
01:39:55 disrespecting women on any kind of level within academia, but just women in general.
01:40:00 That’s an important topic to talk about, various, many sets of difficult conversations. And the
01:40:05 other topic is, you know, funding for research. Like how are, like, what are we okay taking money
01:40:15 from and what are we not okay taking money from? You know, there’s a lot of just interesting
01:40:20 difficult conversations to be had. I’ve worked with people who, you know, refuse to take money
01:40:27 from DOD, Department of Defense, for example, because in some indirect or direct way, you’re
01:40:32 funding military industrial complex, all those kinds of things. I think with Jeffrey Epstein,
01:40:37 it’s even more stark, this contrast of like, well, what is and isn’t ethical to take money from?
01:40:44 And I just think, forget academia, I think there’s just a lot of interesting, deep human
01:40:51 discussions to be had. And they haven’t been. And there’s been somebody, I don’t know if you’re
01:40:55 familiar with Eric Weinstein, who has been outraged by the fact that nobody’s talking about Jeffrey
01:41:02 Epstein. Nobody’s having these difficult conversations. And Eric himself has had a sort of
01:41:10 complicated journey through academia, in the sense that he’s a really kind of renegade thinker in
01:41:16 many kinds of ways. I’m not sure if you know who Eric is, by any chance. Heard the name. Okay. I
01:41:21 actually checked out ZEV. ZEV. It was heartening for me to see that I was not the youngest person
01:41:28 on this podcast. You’re the second youngest. Second youngest.
01:41:34 That’s hilarious. But Eric, he’s kind of a renegade thinker. He’s a mathematical physicist
01:41:45 with, I believe, a PhD at Harvard, and he spent some time at MIT and so on. But he speaks to the
01:41:52 fact that there’s a culture of conformity and so on. And if you’re somebody who’s a bit outside of
01:41:58 the box, a bit weird, in whatever dimension of weird, that makes you actually kind of interesting
01:42:03 that the system kind of wants to make you an outcast, wants to throw you out. And so he kind
01:42:09 of opposes that whole idea. He’s the perfect person to have conversations with in this kind
01:42:14 of Librex kind of context of anonymity. Because I’ll tell you the few conversations that came across
01:42:22 and they were very quickly silenced. And I’m troubled by it. I’m not sure what to think of it.
01:42:30 Is there’s a few threads inside MIT, like on a mailing list, discussing Marvin Minsky. I don’t
01:42:39 know if you know who that is. He’s an AI researcher. He’s a seminal figure in AI before your time, but
01:42:44 one of the most important people in the history of artificial intelligence. And there was a
01:42:50 discussion on a thread that involved the interaction between Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein.
01:43:01 That conversation was quickly shut down. One person was pushed out of MIT, Richard Stallman,
01:43:07 who’s one of the key figures in the, because of that, because he wanted some clarity about the
01:43:13 situation. But he also miss, he spoke, like we mentioned earlier, without grace, right?
01:43:20 But he was quickly punished by the administration because of a few people protesting. And just that
01:43:27 conversation, I guess what bothered me most is it didn’t continue. It didn’t expand. There was no
01:43:36 like complexity. And it was, there was a hunger that was clear behind that conversation, especially
01:43:44 sort of for me, I’d like to understand Marvin Minsky was one of the reasons I wanted to come
01:43:49 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 artificial intelligence. And I thought that his name was dragged through the mud,
01:44:03 through that situation, and without ever being like resolved. And so it’s unclear to me, like,
01:44:11 what am I supposed to think about all this? And the only way to come to a conclusion there is to
01:44:18 keep talking. It’s like the thing we started this conversation with about truth is like,
01:44:24 is conversation. So in that sense, I’d love if people on Librex, perhaps in other places,
01:44:30 but it seems like Librex is a nice platform to discuss Marvin Minsky, to discuss Jeffrey Epstein,
01:44:36 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 people, I’ve always dreamed of being at MIT and it was a dream come true in many ways. And I still
01:44:49 believe that MIT is one of the most special places in this world. Like many other universities,
01:44:54 universities in general is truly special, man. It hurts my heart when people speak poorly of
01:45:01 academia. I understand what they mean. They’re very correct, but there is much more, in my opinion,
01:45:06 that’s beautiful about academia than that’s broken. I mean, I don’t know if you have something to
01:45:12 comment. It doesn’t necessarily need to be about Jeffrey Epstein, but there’s these difficult things
01:45:18 that come up that test the academic community, right? That it feels like conversation is the
01:45:26 only way to resolve it. I think people have a natural need for closure. And it’s not just,
01:45:33 I’m not as plugged into the, what academics are talking about as you would be Lux, but I even…
01:45:38 In case these days, no respect for Minsky. Exactly. I mean, especially in the AI community,
01:45:45 I’m not necessarily a programmer. But what I will say is that people come to Librex and
01:45:53 we always see a huge spike in users whenever there’s a tragedy on campus or something where
01:45:58 people need closure. Recently, there was a suicide just the other day on Yale’s campus,
01:46:05 and people were just coming to pay respects and to say, rest in peace, and speak also about
01:46:13 what might’ve led to an environment where people are drawn to these terrible results.
01:46:23 So just having a conversation is important there, because it brings closure.
01:46:28 People need the space, especially when no one wants to go out and put their head above,
01:46:34 be the longest blade of grass on that one because of the stigma. People need to be able to speak.
01:46:41 Yeah, that fear really bothers me, the fear that silences people. Like, were they self censor? Were
01:46:46 they self silence? Well, you’ve created an amazing place. I’m kind of interested in your struggle and
01:46:58 your journey of creating positive incentives, because it’s a problem in a very different domain
01:47:07 that I’m also interested in. So I love robotics. I love human robot interaction. And so I believe
01:47:16 that most people are good and we can bring out the best in human nature. Social networks is a very
01:47:21 tricky space to do that in. So I’m glad you’re taking on the problem and I’m glad you have the
01:47:25 mission that you do. I hope you succeed. But you mentioned offline that you used to be into chess.
01:47:33 Tell me about your journey through chess. Sure. I was a very competitive tournament player growing
01:47:37 up till about like 13. I got for the chess fans, I got to around 2000. USCF. So I was a competitive
01:47:45 player, especially my age group. And that actually led me to poker. I was I was playing a tournament.
01:47:53 And what happens is when you’re like a very strong 13 year old and you’re playing locally,
01:47:57 if you want a good match, you’re gonna end up playing a lot of adults and you’re gonna end up
01:48:01 playing if you want a good match, you’re gonna end up playing a lot of adults. And I ended up
01:48:04 playing this mid 40s guy who we played a really strong game. He actually beat me. I still I still
01:48:12 remember the game and think I could I should have played that move instead of that one. But after
01:48:16 after the game, we had a postmortem. It was this me I think I was 13 at the time and this 40 year
01:48:20 old like hanging over this chessboard and looking over the moves. And even at that even at my age,
01:48:26 that this guy was absolutely brilliant. Yes. And after after the postmortem, not only by the way,
01:48:31 in chess, but just like in the way he articulates his thoughts, as some people are. After postmortem,
01:48:36 I went and looked him up online, I found out that he was a World Series of Poker Champion.
01:48:41 And his name is Bill Chen. Oh, wow. And I haven’t really kept up with him, except one time there
01:48:47 was another chess tournament when I was around 14. And I followed him into an elevator as he was
01:48:53 leaving the chess hall, like pretending that I was going to go up just because I wanted to,
01:48:57 I just wanted to talk to him. And I suggested a sequel or some changes that he could that I
01:49:01 thought he could make for his book. And he was like, actually, I was thinking of doing the same
01:49:05 thing, which is incredibly validating to my 14 year old or 15 year old self. But I really haven’t
01:49:10 kept up with him. So shout out to him. But and then that he wrote a book called the mathematics
01:49:15 of poker that I started reading. And that, first of all, kickstarted my interest in game theory.
01:49:21 And second of all, in poker. So it started from chess and then poker. And I started with Bitcoin
01:49:28 poker and had a lot of success with that met a lot of amazing friends. Learned a ton about I mean,
01:49:35 I think about entrepreneurship as well as taking risks, reasonable risks, positive expected value
01:49:41 risks. And also just growing as a person and mathematician. And what did you say Bitcoin
01:49:48 poker? Yeah, what’s Bitcoin poker? So you have to understand I was 14 years old, right? Yes. So how
01:49:54 is a 14 year old with wonderful parents who care about him? Yeah. And probably don’t want him
01:49:59 playing poker. Yeah. Going to start playing poker, because I wanted I wanted to challenge I love the
01:50:05 challenge of the competition. And I realized the answer is probably Bitcoin. Because the implications
01:50:12 of that. And they had they had these free roll tournaments, which for those who don’t know what
01:50:17 free rolls are, there’s these promotional tournaments that sites put on where they’ll
01:50:22 put like a few dollars in and then 1000s of people sign up and the winners get like a dollar.
01:50:27 And I started there and I worked my way up. And that’s amazing. What’s your sense about from that
01:50:33 time to today of the growth of the cryptocurrency community? I’m actually having like four or five
01:50:40 conversations with Bitcoin proponents, Bitcoin maximalists, and like all these I’m just having
01:50:47 all these cryptocurrency conversations currently, because there’s so many brilliant, like technically
01:50:53 brilliant, but also financially and philosophically brilliant people in those communities. It’s
01:50:58 fascinating with the explosion of impact, like and also, if you look into the future, the possible
01:51:04 revolutionary impact on society in general, but what’s your sense about this whole growth of
01:51:09 Bitcoin? I’m definitely less knowledgeable on the currency. Again, like programming, it was a means
01:51:16 to an end. Yes. Right. What I will say is that there was this amazing community that grew out of
01:51:22 it. And you’d have people who were willing to stake me or have me be their horse and they’re my
01:51:28 backer. For having never met me for literally full Bitcoin tournaments, like full Bitcoin entry fee
01:51:37 tournaments, and I get a percentage of the profits and they get a percentage. And to have that level
01:51:42 of community for that degree of money, I mean, it gives you hope about the potential for, you know,
01:51:48 humans to act in mutual best interest with a degree of trust. Yeah, there’s a really fascinating,
01:51:56 strong community there. But speaking of like bringing out the best of human nature,
01:52:00 it’s a community that’s currently struggling a little bit in terms of their ability to communicate
01:52:07 in a positive, inspiring way. Like the Bitcoin folks, and we talk about this a lot. I honestly
01:52:15 think they have a lot of love in their hearts and minds, but they just kind of naturally,
01:52:22 naturally, because the world has been like institutions and the centralized powers have been
01:52:32 sort of mocking and fighting them for many years that they’ve become sort of worn down and cynical.
01:52:39 And so they tend to be a little bit more aggressive and negative on the internet in the
01:52:44 way they communicate, especially on Twitter. And it’s just created this whole community of
01:52:49 of basically being derisive and mocking and trolling and all this kind of stuff.
01:52:55 But people are trying to, you know, as the Bitcoin community grows, as the cryptocurrency community
01:53:00 grows, they’re trying to revolutionize that aspect too. So they’re trying to find the positive core
01:53:05 and grow and grow in that way. So it’s fascinating because I think all of us are trying to find the
01:53:12 positive aspects of ourselves and trying to learn how to communicate in a positive way online.
01:53:18 It’s like the internet hasn’t been around. Social networks haven’t been around that long. We’re
01:53:22 trying to figure this thing out. Let me ask you the ridiculous question. I don’t know if you
01:53:28 have an answer, but who is the greatest chess player of all time in your view? So since you
01:53:33 like chess. That’s how you define it. But if you’re talking about raw skill, like if you put everyone
01:53:39 across time into a torment together, Carlson would win. I don’t think that’s particularly
01:53:44 controversial. Oh, you mean like with the same exact skill level? Exactly. Now if you talk about
01:53:51 political importance, I think Bobby Fischer is, you know, he’s the only one that people still,
01:53:58 when you go to someone on the street, they know Bobby Fischer because of what he represented,
01:54:02 right? Who do you think is more famous on the street? Garry Kasparov or Bobby Fischer?
01:54:08 Bobby Fischer. In America, Bobby Fischer. You think so? Yes. That’s interesting. I think we’re
01:54:12 gonna have to put that to the test. Yeah, maybe it’s more reflective of the community that I was
01:54:17 a part of, but yeah. Oh, so in the community you’re a part of like Young Minds playing chess,
01:54:22 Bobby Fischer was a superstar in terms of the roots. Yeah, I think so because he’s American
01:54:28 and, you know, he stood up against the big bad Russians at the time and, you know, unfortunately
01:54:35 he had a very bad downfall. But, you know, for our geopolitical situation, he meant a lot. And then
01:54:43 if you talk about compared to contemporaries, actually, I would say Paul Morphy was a bit of
01:54:49 a throwback. He’s one of those geniuses that was just head and shoulders above everyone else.
01:54:56 Is there somebody that inspired your own play, like as a Young Mind? Yeah, I really liked
01:55:00 Mikhail Tal. I think he was very aggressive, right? Yeah, very tactical. Which is funny because I
01:55:10 found that I was better at like sort of slow methodical play than quick tactics, but I just,
01:55:14 I mean, there’s something beautiful about the creativity and that’s something I always latched
01:55:18 onto as being a creative player, being a creative person. I mean, chess doesn’t really reward
01:55:23 creativity as much as a lot of other things, especially entrepreneurial pursuits, which I
01:55:28 think is part of the reason why I sort of grew out of it. But I always was attracted to the
01:55:35 creativity that I did see in chess. So let me ask the flip, the other, because you said poker,
01:55:41 is there somebody that stands out to you as could be the greatest poker player of all time? Like
01:55:46 who do you admire? That’s a more controversial one because these chess players are such like,
01:55:55 first of all, there’s more an objective standard. And second of all, there’s like,
01:55:59 they’re like almost like cultural figures to me. Whereas poker players are more like live,
01:56:05 living. They feel more like, yeah, they feel more accessible. But they also have like
01:56:09 personalities in poker. They have vices, they have quirks, they have humor. Like,
01:56:18 I guess we’ve seen videos of them because it’s such a recent development. I’ll say one person
01:56:23 who I admire so much. And like, if I could like have a dinner list of people that I want to have
01:56:29 dinner with, like maybe it’ll happen now, actually. I would love to have dinner with him. Phil
01:56:35 Galfond, who most people probably won’t know. But on this podcast, but the way, first of all,
01:56:44 he democratized poker learning in like the mathematical nitty gritty, how do you get good
01:56:49 at poker type sense to the entire world in like an unprecedented way. He gave, he had this gift
01:56:57 that he had learned and distilled by working with some of the greatest poker minds. And he
01:57:01 just democratized it through his website. And I learned a ton from him. And not only that,
01:57:09 but you just listen to him think. And it’s almost like a philosophical meditation,
01:57:13 the way that he breaks things down and thinks about these different elements and has such a
01:57:18 holistic thought process. It’s like watching a genius work. And, you know, he’s also just a nice,
01:57:24 fun, sociable guy that like, you can, you can imagine being at your dinner table. So all that
01:57:30 combined. Which is not true for a lot of poker players, right? A lot of them are dark souls.
01:57:34 To say the least, yes. I like, I really like the, what is he, Canadian Daniel Negrano.
01:57:41 He’s also a nice guy. He’s also a nice guy, but he’s also somebody who’s able to express his
01:57:45 thoughts about poker really well, but also in an entertaining way. He seems to be able to predict
01:57:51 cards better than anybody I’ve ever seen. Like what. Did you watch the challenge? Which challenge?
01:57:57 He, he lost like a million dollars recently to Doug Polk. He lost a million dollars to Doug Polk,
01:58:03 heads up online. It’s really interesting. Yeah. It’s, it’s awesome to watch these guys work.
01:58:09 So I know you’re 20, 21. 21. 21. So, so asking you for advice is, is a little bit funny, but,
01:58:19 but at the same time, not because you’ve created a social network. You’ve created a startup from
01:58:25 nothing as we talked about earlier, like without knowing how to program you’ve programmed. I mean,
01:58:30 you’ve taken this whole journey that a lot of people I think would be really inspired by.
01:58:34 So given that, and given the fact that 20 years from now, you probably laugh at the
01:58:40 advice you’re going to give now. Absolutely. I hope so. If I don’t laugh at the advice I give now,
01:58:44 something went desperately wrong, right? Yeah. So do you have advice for people that want to
01:58:51 follow in your footsteps and create a startup, whether it’s in a software app domain or whether
01:58:58 it’s anything else. So I’ll speak specifically about social media apps. Yes. Try to keep it as
01:59:05 narrow as possible so I can laugh as little as possible when I’m 41. And what I would say is that
01:59:13 if you’re like a 21, 22 year old, who’s looking at me and being like, I want to do something like
01:59:18 this. What I would say is you probably know better than just about anyone. And if you have a feeling
01:59:25 in yourself that this is something that I have to do, and this is something I could imagine myself
01:59:31 doing for the next 10 years, because if you’re successful, you are going to have to do it for
01:59:35 the next 10 years. And through the ups and the downs, through the amazing interviews with Lex,
01:59:40 and through the not so amazing articles you might have with other people, right? And you’re going to
01:59:47 have to ride those highs and lows and you have to believe in what you’re doing. But if you have that
01:59:51 feeling, what I would say is listen to as few people as possible, because people are experts
01:59:58 in domains. But when it comes to what’s hot and what makes sense in a social context,
02:00:05 you are the authority as a young person who’s going through these things and living in your
02:00:12 sort of milieu. And I mean, I’ve talked to, at this point, you know, so many experts, so many
02:00:21 investors, VCs. You’d be amazed at the advice I’ve gotten. Advice I’ve gotten.
02:00:29 So there’s like a minefield of bad advice.
02:00:32 That’s the hardest part, I think, for young people. And it’s the thing, when people, like,
02:00:37 I help Yellies all the time who ask, like, I never turn down, when a founder asks me to have a
02:00:43 conversation, I never turn it down. I’m always there for them. And the number one thing I worry
02:00:48 about is that at Yale, we’re taught implicitly and explicitly that you listen to the adult in the
02:00:55 room, you listen to the person with the highest, you know, pay grade. And it’s devastating, because
02:01:02 that’s how innovation dies. And, you know, yeah, it’s intimidating to, like, you talk to VC who
02:01:10 probably means worth a billion dollars, a billion dollars, and they’re going to tell you, you know,
02:01:16 all the, all the successful startups they have funders or even just a successful business owner,
02:01:22 uh, is going to tell you some advice and it’s hard psychologically to think that they might be wrong.
02:01:28 Yeah, but you’re saying that’s the only way you succeed.
02:01:31 The only way you succeed, because if they knew what they were doing, they would have built it
02:01:35 themselves. Um, and what’s especially hard is people go, oh, of course, you know,
02:01:42 I’ll listen to people’s, I’ll listen to their advice, but I’ll know why it’s wrong.
02:01:46 And then I’ll, and I’ll do my own thing. And that sounds great in the abstract, but sometimes you
02:01:50 can’t always even put your finger on why they’re wrong. And I think to have the conviction,
02:01:54 to say, you’re wrong and I can’t tell you why, but I still think I’m right. It’s a rare thing,
02:02:01 especially at like, it’s very counterintuitive. And you might even say it’s hubris or arrogant,
02:02:07 but I think it’s necessary because a lot of these things are, they’re not things that you can really
02:02:13 put into words until you see them in action. Like a lot of them are kind of happy accidents.
02:02:19 Yeah. It’s been, it’s been tough for me, like as a, as a person who, um, like I’m very empathetic.
02:02:25 So I, when people tell me stuff, I kind of want to understand them. And it’s been a painful process,
02:02:33 especially people close to me, basically everything I’ve done, and especially in the
02:02:38 recent few years, a lot of people close to me said not to do, you know, and, uh, like,
02:02:45 my parents too, that’s been a hard one is, is to basically acknowledge to myself that you don’t know,
02:02:55 like, you, you don’t, that everything you’re going to say by way of advice for me is not going to be
02:03:03 helpful. Like, I love my parents very much, but like, they’re just like, they don’t get it.
02:03:10 And, and as you put it beautifully, it’s very difficult to put your finger on exactly why,
02:03:17 because, uh, a lot of advice sounds reasonable. That’s the worst kind. Yeah.
02:03:25 Uh, if it, if it sounds really good, that just means it’s an earworm. Like, that’s like a song
02:03:31 that you hear on the radio and then you’re like, you’re humming it in the car and it’s like,
02:03:35 it’s the same thing. The more, the better it sounds, the more skeptical. Yeah. Reason is a,
02:03:41 is a bad drug. Like, should be very careful because, like, you know, the things that seem
02:03:47 impossible, every, every major innovation, every major business seems impossible at birth. But
02:03:55 even not just the impossible things, I think, you know, you look at like love, for example,
02:03:59 it’s very easy to give advice, to sort of point out all the ways you can go wrong or marriage,
02:04:07 all the divorces that people go through, all the pain of years that you go through the divorce,
02:04:13 like the system of marriage, the marriage industrial complex, all the money that’s wasted,
02:04:19 all those kinds of things. But that advice is useless when you’re in love. I guess the best
02:04:24 the point is to just pat the person on the back and say, go get him, kid. Like, what is it? Good
02:04:30 Will Hunting. I went to see about a girl. Yeah. That’s a good movie. I love that movie. But yeah,
02:04:39 that, that’s, that took me a long time to figure out. I’m still trying to fight through it,
02:04:44 but especially when you’re young, that’s hard. But, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s,
02:04:53 but, uh, nothing in life is, uh, worth accomplishing is easy. So,
02:05:00 but I think it’s really interesting. You make that connection between like startup advice
02:05:03 and like your parents, because it’s the exact same sort of mechanism where when you’re young,
02:05:09 your parents are usually like, right. Right. And the experts are usually right. And, you know,
02:05:14 if you listen to them and you, you, you follow their orders, you’re going to go to a school
02:05:18 like Yale and at a certain point stops making sense. And I’ve, I’ve seen my friends at Yale
02:05:25 go down paths because they just continued listening to their parents that
02:05:29 I know in their heart of hearts is not the right path for them.
02:05:33 Yeah. You know what? That’s how I see like the education system. The whole point is to guide you
02:05:42 to a certain point in your life. And everybody’s point is different. And your task is to,
02:05:51 at that point, to have a personal revolution and create your own path. But no one tells you that.
02:05:57 Nobody tells you that because they’re, they want you to keep following the same path as they,
02:06:00 they’re leading you towards. Like they’re not going to say your whole job is to eventually
02:06:05 rebel. Yeah. That’s how revolution, that’s how rebellion works. You’re not supposed to be told,
02:06:11 but that is the task. They can take you just like you said, and depending who you are,
02:06:16 they can take you really far. But at a certain point you have to rebel. That could be getting
02:06:21 your PhD, that could be in your undergrad, that could be high school. Yeah. It could be any point.
02:06:25 One thing that I think played a pretty pivotal role, and I’ve never really mentioned this,
02:06:32 he might not even know the person about to tell you about, in sort of me actually going out and
02:06:37 making Librex was that I was taking this graduate level math class, my sophomore year. And I met
02:06:45 this, I met this PhD student who was also in it and had considerable citations and also startup
02:06:53 experience. And I think he actually ended up being the CTO of a unicorn later on. I’ve sort of lost
02:06:59 touch with him, but we’re still Facebook friends as it is in the 21st century. So, and I was in a
02:07:06 class and I was telling him, I really want to, I really want to make this thing, but I have no
02:07:10 technical background. And he, this guy’s a computer genius. He worked under Dan Spielman at Yale. So
02:07:19 he’s a good guy. Right. And we were doing some math together. We were doing something on
02:07:23 discrepancy for those of you who really care about math. So combinatorics. And he just turns to me,
02:07:31 he’s like, I think you could do it. Like, what do you mean you think I could do? He’s like,
02:07:35 I think you could do it. And I was like, really? But I respected this guy so much.
02:07:41 His name was Young Duck. Shout out to Young Duck. I respected this guy so much that I was like,
02:07:46 if Young Duck says I can do it and Young Duck is a legit genius and he knows, and he knows me,
02:07:52 because we were in two classes together and we’d spent a lot of time together.
02:07:55 If he thinks I can do it, then who am I to say I can’t do it?
02:07:59 Yeah. You know, that’s a lesson for mentorship is like, by the way, he has no idea probably.
02:08:06 Well, he might not even remember that interaction, which is funny. But the point is
02:08:11 that when a crazy young kid comes up to you with a crazy dream, you know, every once in a while,
02:08:19 you should just pat him on the back and say, I believe in you. Like you can do it. If they look
02:08:25 up to you, that means your words have power. And if you say, no, no, come on, be like reasonable,
02:08:32 like, you know, finish your schoolwork kind of thing. Like that’s, that’s unreasonable to take
02:08:39 that leap now. Just finish your education, blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever the reasonable
02:08:43 advice is every once in a while, maybe often as a mentor, you should say, you know, go see about a
02:08:50 girl in California or whatever the equivalent is. That was my moment. That was my good will hunting
02:08:56 moment. That’s your good will hunting moment. Man, I miss Robin Williams. I was a special guy.
02:09:03 People love it when I ask about book recommendations in general. Of course,
02:09:08 your journey is just beginning. But is there something that jumps out to you? Technical,
02:09:12 fiction, philosophical, sci fi, coloring books, blog posts you read somewhere
02:09:18 that had an impact on your life? Video games. Video games that you recommend to others. Minecraft,
02:09:26 manual. Manga. I mean, yeah, video, you could mention video games too,
02:09:31 if there’s something that jumps out to you that just had like an impact.
02:09:36 I guess I’ll say I really liked the book, The War of Art, which is a book about creative resistance
02:09:43 and the creative struggle and what it means to be creative. And part of what I see in this
02:09:49 conversation and what you’re doing, Lex, is so much of The War of Art’s idea is that you just
02:09:55 keep writing and writing and writing until you get to the new crap. And you just roll with it,
02:10:03 right? And that’s sort of what happens when you have like three hour conversations with people is
02:10:07 you can only have so much scripted or societally constructed stuff until you get to the real you.
02:10:15 And you have to show up. I mean, that book is kind of painful.
02:10:18 It’s really painful. And it’s not something I would recommend for every part of it,
02:10:22 but for what it did in my life at the time. It also kind of normalized, I don’t know,
02:10:28 part of my coming of age story is part of it’s about realizing that I’m a creative person and
02:10:35 person who needs to create. That’s sort of a God given thing, I think, for a lot of people.
02:10:41 But it’s something that I don’t really feel like I can live without. And part of it was realizing
02:10:46 that even within some of these more rigid structures, it’s okay that I don’t sort of
02:10:50 fit in with them. And to hear about the struggles of other creatives was something for my own
02:10:55 self esteem and my own growing up that was really important to me. So I don’t think the book itself
02:11:01 might be perfect, but for what it did for my life, it was really impactful.
02:11:06 Yeah, I think exactly. The words may not be exactly right by way of advice, but I think
02:11:13 the journey that a lot of creatives take by reading that book is kind of profound. He also
02:11:20 has another one called Turning Pro, I think. I mean, he in general espouses like taking it
02:11:26 seriously. If you have a creative mind and you want to create something special in this world,
02:11:32 go do it. Don’t show up. Look at that blank page.
02:11:38 So many people would tell me, would encourage me either blatantly or through implicit means
02:11:45 to basically take the Apple S seriously. It’s a good signal, by the way. It’s a good signal
02:11:53 because my really close friends, the ones who have always supported me, they never said that
02:11:58 because they got it. They understood that that was my path. And they might be skeptical. They might
02:12:03 be like, I mean, one of my friends I remember told me, I was always taken aback about why you
02:12:09 were so certain this would work out. And he’s like, I finally got it once I saw it popping off,
02:12:14 but before that, I just didn’t get it. But he still supported me. And I think it’s a really
02:12:20 good signal. And actually just the fact of going through this process has made me socially feel so
02:12:27 much more connected. And I’ve somewhat consolidated my social life to some degree, but it’s so much
02:12:31 more vulnerable, connected. And that’s part of the creative process. I have to thank for that,
02:12:36 I think. There’s something that’s unstoppable about the creative mind. It’s right there,
02:12:42 that fire. And I guess part of the thing that you’re supposed to do is let that fire burn.
02:12:49 In whichever direction. And it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt. Fire will hurt.
02:12:55 But on the topic of video games, you mentioned the Stanley Parable offline.
02:13:00 You said you played some video games. Is there a video game that you especially love that you
02:13:04 recommend I play, for example? Yeah, I’ll mention. It’s actually really in keeping with what we’ve
02:13:10 been talking about. It’s the Beginner’s Guide, which was made by the same guy, Davey Rendon,
02:13:16 who made the Stanley Parable, which I briefly saw you. I just clicked the video and then I went to
02:13:22 sleep. It was like 2 a.m. But I briefly saw that you were looking at. And it’s a game that is
02:13:32 better treated as art. And I think I won’t claim to understand the creator, because that would be
02:13:40 a cardinal sin to me as a creative person. But it gets to the heart of a lot of the things that
02:13:49 we’ve been talking about, which is the creative mind. The game can be interpreted in a lot of
02:13:54 ways in a feminist way. It could be interpreted as a story of friends. It could be interpreted
02:14:01 as the story of critics versus a creative. The way I like to interpret it, and I don’t want to
02:14:07 give away too much, is the story of the creative part of your mind that creates just for the sake
02:14:16 of creating. Meaning the part that creates for no rhyme or reason or clear meaning. It’s almost
02:14:24 ethereal. Versus the part that’s, you could call it the editor. You could call it the pragmatist.
02:14:32 You could call it the necessary force of ego in our lives. We can’t totally be egoless, right?
02:14:38 But we need to be egoless to be creative. And how that sort of internal censure, what role does it
02:14:45 play? And how do we allow our creative minds to be creative? And yet, how do we still become useful?
02:14:52 And it’s funny that a video game could have this in.
02:14:55 It’s a fascinating tension, which reminds me about the ridiculous question that every once in a while
02:15:02 asks about meaning and death. So, this whole ride ends. You’re at the beginning of the ride,
02:15:11 but it could end any day, actually. That’s kind of the way human life works. You could die today,
02:15:17 you could die tomorrow. Do you think about your mortality? Do you think about death?
02:15:22 Do you meditate on it? And in that context, as the creative, but a pragmatist, too,
02:15:29 as running a startup, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
02:15:35 Yeah, so, on mortality, right? About three years ago, four years ago now, I was excited to go to
02:15:46 Yale. I was playing six hours of squash a day, which squash is a sport I love so much. And I was
02:15:53 really getting a lot better. And I was even thinking I could maybe walk onto the Yale team.
02:16:00 And I woke up one day, I felt really, really sick. I went and I decided not to go squash that day.
02:16:11 I wanted to, I almost did. And you’ll see how this story turns out. You’ll decide if I made the right
02:16:20 choice. I decided not to go squash today. And I decided to get my driver’s license, or I had to
02:16:25 get my driver’s license because I wanted to get a driver’s license before I went off to college,
02:16:31 because otherwise I might never get it. And I’m going back and I successfully got my driver’s
02:16:35 license for Hashem. And I go back to my house and I decided I don’t want to drive back because I
02:16:44 just feel so sick. Like things are spinning. I have the worst headache. I come home, I run back
02:16:50 right into my bed and feeling really sick to the point where I even like asked my mom who is a
02:16:55 doctor, I’m like, should I go to the hospital? And she’s like, you can just wait it out and
02:17:00 she’ll get better. And then, you know, and then at one point I look at my arms and they’re like
02:17:08 covered in this like red splotchy stuff. Yeah. And I’m like, mom, I think. And she’s like, yeah,
02:17:14 we have to go. And so I go there and they’re like, you have scarlet fever. And they’re like,
02:17:20 there’s nothing we can do. You should probably just go back home. So I go back home. Six hours
02:17:24 later I wake up in the morning. They’d let me out at like 3 a.m. They let me, I come home in
02:17:30 the morning and I feel this, like a spear through my chest. And I never felt anything like it. And
02:17:37 I was, it was very disconcerting when you have a, cause we’re all used to different sorts of pain,
02:17:41 right? And that was the sort of pain I never felt before. As far as an athlete, you’re used to like,
02:17:46 you know, pain. So I told my parents and immediately we hop back in the car. We go up
02:17:51 to the same hospital I was at six hours ago. And they initially didn’t want to let me in. And I
02:17:55 was like, I have chest pain. They’re like, oh, come in. Cause they’re like, you’re a healthy guy,
02:17:58 wait your turn. And I’m like, no, you don’t understand. I have like a pain in my chest.
02:18:02 And then they let me in. They start doing tests on me. They like put something like in my back,
02:18:07 which is really scary. It’s a huge needle. And I’m smiling because it’s like one of the ways
02:18:12 I reduce stress, I guess, or deal with this sort of thing and make light of it. But like,
02:18:17 you know, that, you know, it’s definitely very scary in the moment, shocking and scary.
02:18:22 And they go and they, they do a bunch of tests and they determined that a virus like attacked
02:18:28 my heart and I had myocarditis and pericarditis. And they said I had maybe 25 to 35% chance at
02:18:35 one point of dying. And so I’m sitting in my, they admit me into the hospital. I’m in the bed,
02:18:43 in my bed for about three weeks. And I’m just, I’m just standing there. And I had this moment
02:18:51 also that I remember very specifically where I was in so much pain that like I was crying,
02:19:01 not out of like emotional standpoint, but actually just purely out of the pain itself. Like I could
02:19:07 feel my heart in my chest. And when I leaned back, I felt it touch my rib cage and feel horrible.
02:19:12 So I couldn’t go to sleep and lean back. I had to lean forward all throughout the night. Right.
02:19:17 And I’m feeling my, and I’m feeling my chest. I’m feeling this terrible pain in my chest.
02:19:21 I’m crying unstoppably. And I mean, also maybe I should mention that at the time I was someone
02:19:28 who like refused to take in anything into my body that wasn’t natural. And so a lot of the time I,
02:19:33 I tried to be unmedicated. Eventually I didn’t allow them to add a little medication to my body,
02:19:40 but there’s just so much uncertainty and pain. And the first time I had to come to terms with
02:19:46 mortality. First of all, I think you still should have gone and played squash. I mean, come on.
02:19:52 I mean, yeah. I thought you’re serious about this. You still carry that with you sort of.
02:20:01 There is power to realizing the ride can end. Right. Very suddenly. Very suddenly. Yeah.
02:20:08 And painfully. And, you know, it, it has pragmatic application to like what you,
02:20:16 to trajectories you take through life. Right.
02:20:19 Something else that is worth noting is that I, for the next year, couldn’t walk to my classes.
02:20:27 So I get to Yale, they put me in a medical single alone, and I have to get shuttled to all my
02:20:35 classes. I have to ask, I had to ask a few professors to even move classes so I could
02:20:39 actually get there. I can’t move my book. I can’t lift my book bags. I can’t, I can’t walk upstairs.
02:20:48 I spent like 12 hours a day in my dorm room, just like staring at the walls and more so. And more
02:20:55 than that, all this, like, you, I got to watch my body, like, deteriorate and like the muscle,
02:21:05 like fall off of it. Cause I was, I was taking these pills and they’re kind of catabolic. And
02:21:11 for an 18 year old, I mean, I think every 18 year old has feelings about their body, man or woman.
02:21:18 And, you know, just seeing this, it’s like, you’re watching sort of death transpire. And it’s like,
02:21:24 and you’re also very fatigued because your heart’s not at peak condition. And you’re thinking about
02:21:30 the future and a lot of the things you enjoy have kind of been stripped away from you.
02:21:35 And I took up a meditation practice, like started with like five minutes a day. At my peak, I was at
02:21:43 like 40 minutes a day, kept it up consistently for about two years. And I started thinking about,
02:21:50 like, what do I want to do? And like, what do I care about? And to get to your point,
02:21:57 I think you were asking, like, how does this carry forward? Right? I think I realized that,
02:22:05 you know, there’s an end and I realized that there are things I believe and things that I believe
02:22:10 that might not be so overtly popular, but that I truly think make the world a better place.
02:22:15 And in spite of, and then basically, if my conditions provided, I wanted to make something
02:22:21 that I wanted to do something that would make me feel sort of whole in that way.
02:22:28 Yeah. I mean, that’s an amazing journey to take that time and to come out on the other end.
02:22:33 Now, man, that’s amazing. I did not realize like that there was a long term struggle.
02:22:37 I think that’s in the end, if you do succeed, will have a profound positive impact because
02:22:45 struggle is ultimately like humbling, but also empowering. So I’m glad to see that. But from the
02:22:53 perspective of the creator of the other ridiculous question about meaning, do you think about this
02:22:58 kind of stuff? Is that the, you know, the meaning of life for you, the meaning of life for us,
02:23:08 descendants of apes in general? The first thing I’d like to say is that I think part of like,
02:23:13 when we talk about the meaning of life, the part of it is the fact that we get to struggle with
02:23:17 this question and we get to do it together for a long time. And we sometimes, I think,
02:23:25 it’s accepting that there’s no meaning at all. And sometimes I think it’s accepting that,
02:23:29 or even just parsing the phrase and thinking about the meaning of life. I sometimes I’m,
02:23:34 look, I’m very young. Again, I hope that anything I say now is going to be very different in the
02:23:41 future because I think life has so many meanings that it’ll be crazy to see what I think in 20
02:23:49 years about the meaning of life.
02:23:50 Yeah, rise from the future, cut them some slack.
02:23:57 Please do. Perspective, perspective, perspective. Having said that, you know, I think part of what
02:24:05 brings meaning to my life is things like this, where we think about these things with people
02:24:09 who are really, really, really on the ball, and we get to connect with these people.
02:24:14 That certainly brings meaning to my life, human connection.
02:24:17 Yeah, this conversation is just another, like, echo of the thing you’re trying to create
02:24:24 in a digital space, right? That’s the same kind of magic. From what I understand about what you’re
02:24:30 trying to create is the same reason I fell in love with the long form podcasting, like as a fan.
02:24:36 That’s why I listen to long form podcasts. Is there something deeply human and genuine
02:24:42 about the interchange through their voice? But I do think that connection through text can be
02:24:49 even more powerful. Like I think about letters. I still write letters to Russia. You know,
02:24:55 there’s something powerful in letters. When you put a lot of yourself in the words you say,
02:25:03 in the words you write, that’s powerful. You can really communicate, not just the actual semantic
02:25:10 meaning of the words, but like a lot of who you are through those words and create real connection.
02:25:18 So I hope you succeed there. And listen, Ryan, I think this is an incredible conversation. I’m
02:25:26 glad that people like you are fighting the good fight for bringing out the best in human nature
02:25:33 in the digital space. I think that’s a battleground where the good will win, like love will win. And
02:25:40 I’m glad you’re creating technology that does just that. So thank you so much for wasting all
02:25:45 your time for coming down. I can’t wait to see what you do in the future. Thanks for talking today.
02:25:50 Thank you for having me. Bam. How many finger guns have you gotten at the end of the podcast?
02:25:56 Zero. Two now. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ryan Shiller. And thank you
02:26:04 to our sponsors, Allform, Magic Spoon, BetterHelp, and Brave. Click their links to support this
02:26:12 podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from George Washington on March 15, 1783.
02:26:20 If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.
02:26:28 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.