The following is a conversation with Ryan Schiller, creator of Librex, an anonymous discussion
feed for college communities starting at first with Yale, then the Ivy Leagues, and now adding
Stanford and MIT. Their mission is to give students a place to explore ideas and issues
in a positive way, but with much more personal and intellectual freedom than has defined college
campuses in recent history. I think this is a very difficult but worthy project. Quick thank you
to our sponsors. All form, magic spoon, better help, and brave. Click their links to support this
podcast. As a side note, let me say that Ryan is a young entrepreneur and genuine human being
who quickly won me over. He's inspiring in many ways, both in the struggle he had to overcome in
his personal life, but also in the fact that he did not know how to code, but saw a problem in this
world in his community that he cared about. And for that, he learned to code and built the solution
in the best way he knew how. That's an important reminder for us humans. Let us not only complain
about the problems in the world. Let us fix them. I also have to say that there's passion in Ryan's
eyes for really wanting to make a difference in the world. His story, his effort gives me hope
for the future. There is hate in this world, but I believe there's much more love. And I believe
it's possible to build online platforms that connect us through our common humanity as we explore
difficult, personal, even painful ideas together. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. And here is
my conversation with Ryan Schiller. Let's start with the basics. What is Librex? What are its
founding story and founding principles? And looking to the future, what do you hope to achieve with
Librex? Sure, let me break that down. So what is Librex? Librex is an anonymous discussion feed
for college campuses. It's a place where people can have important and unfettered discussions and
open discourse about topics they care about, ideas that matter. And they can do all of that
completely anonymously with verified members of their college community. And we exist both on
each Ivy League campus and we have an inter-IV community. And actually this week, we just
opened to MIT and Stanford. So now we have... No, really? MIT? Yes. So we have MIT and
Stanford communities and I expect you to sign up for your MIT account and start posting.
What are, for people who are not familiar, like me, actually, which are the Ivy Leagues?
Sure. So we started at Yale, which is my... I don't know, can you call it alma mater? Because I
haven't technically graduated. Yeah. What's that called when you're actually still there?
My university. Yeah, I guess... home. Call it home. That's my home. Educational home. Started
my educational home of Yale. And then we moved to... And we could get into the story of this
eventually, if you'd like. And then we went to Dartmouth and then quarantine hit. We opened to
the rest of the Ivy League and now we have... And the Ivy League, for those who don't know, is
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Brown and Penn. I got it all in one
breath. What's the youngest Ivy League, Penn? No, Columbia. I can't say that on camera.
We'll edit it in post. I don't know. I'll just say each of them, all eight of them. And then you
can just like get it in like Penn, Harvard. There's actually a really nice software that
people should check out, like a service, which is using machine learning really nicely for
podcast editing, where you can... It learns the voice of the speaker and it can change the words
you said. It's like some deep fake stuff. It's deep fake, but for positive applications. It's
very interesting. It's like the only deep fake positive application I see. I have a friend who's
obsessed with deep fakes. What's great about, I think, deep fakes is that it's going to do the
opposite of sort of what's happening with our culture, where everyone will have plausible
deniability. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the hope for me is there are so many fake things out
there that we're going to actually be much more skeptical and think and take in multiple sources
and actually reason, like use common sense and use my deep thinking to understand what is true
and what is not. Because we used to have traditional sources like the New York Times and all these
kinds of publications that had a reputation. There are these institutions and they're the
source of truth. And when you no longer can trust anything as a source of truth, you start to think
on your own. That gets part of the individual. That takes us way back to where I came from,
the Soviet Union, where you can't really trust any one source of news. You have to think on
your own. You have to talk to your friends. Tremendous amount of intellectual autonomy.
Don't you think? Think about the societal consequences. Absolutely. I mean, we see
so much decentralization in all aspects of our digital lives now, but this is like the
decentralization of thought. Yes. You could say it's sadly, or I don't think it's sad,
is decentralization of truth where like truth is a clustering thing where you have these like
this point cloud of people just swimming around like billions of them and they all have certain
ideas. And what's thought of as truth is almost like a clustering algorithm when you just get
a bunch of people that believe the same thing. That's truth, but there's also another truth.
And there might be like multiple truths and it's almost would be like a battle of truths.
Maybe even the idea of truth will like lessen its power in society that there is such a thing as a
truth. Because like the downside of saying something is true is it owns the downside of what people
like religious people call scientism, which is like once science has declared something is true,
you can't no longer question it. But the reality is science is a moving mechanism. You're constantly
questioning, you're constantly questioning. And maybe truth should be renamed as a process,
not a final destination. The whole point is to keep questioning, keep questioning, keep discovering.
Kind of like we're going backwards in time. So like back when people were sort of finding their
identities and we were less globalized, right? Like people would get together and they'd get
together around common value system, common morals in a common place. And those would be sort of
these clusters of their truth, right? And so we have all these different like civilizations and
societies across the world that created their own truths. We talk about the Jews and the Talmud
and Torah. We look at Buddhist texts. We can look at all sorts of different truths and how many of
them get at the same things, but many of them have different ideas or different articulations.
Yeah, Harari and Sapiens rewinds that even farther back into like caveman times. That's the thing
that made us human special is who can develop these clusters of ideas, hold them in their minds
through stories, pass them on to each other, and they grows and grows. And finally, we have Bitcoin.
Which money is another belief system that has power only because we believe in it.
And is that truth? I don't know, but it has power. And it's carried in the minds of millions
and thereby has power. But back to Librex. So what was the founding story? What's the
founding principles of Librex? Sure. So I was on campus as a freshman and I was talking to my friends.
Many of them felt like it was hard to raise your hand in class to ask a question. They really felt
like even outside the classroom, it was hard to be vulnerable. And the thing you have to
understand about Yale is it's not that big a place. Everyone knows someone who knows someone
who knows you basically. And people come to these schools, first of all, they're home for people
and they want to be themselves. They want to feel like they can be authentic. They want to make real
friendships. And second of all, it's a place where people go for intellectual vitality to explore
important ideas and to grow as thinkers. And fortunately, due to the culture, my friends
expressed that it was very difficult to do that. And I felt it too. And then I talked to my professors
and I remember I talked to one specific global affairs professor. And I was taking his class
and his area of expertise was in the Middle Eastern conflict. And I went to him and I said,
professor, we've, we're almost finished this class. And we haven't even gotten to sort of
the reason I originally wanted to take the class was to hear about your perspective on the Middle
Eastern conflict, because something I'd learned at Yale, and this is maybe a sort of a tangent,
but I'll, I'll flush it out a bit. Something I've learned at Yale is that you can learn all sorts
of things from a textbook. And what you kind of go to Yale to do is to get like the opinions of
the experts that go beyond the textbook and to have those more in depth conversations. And so
that's sort of the added value of going to a place like Yale and taking a course there as opposed to
just reading a textbook. But also interact with that opinion. Exactly.
In person. Yeah. It's to interact with that, with that opinion, to hear it, to respond to it,
to push back on it and to have that with some great minds. And there really are great minds
at Yale. Don't get me wrong. It's a place, it's still a place of tremendous brilliance.
So I'm talking to this professor, right? And I'm like, we haven't, I haven't heard your area of
expertise. And I'm like, are we going to get to it? What's the deal? And he is during office hours,
mind you. So we're one on one. He says, Ryan, to be honest, I used to teach this area every
single year. In fact, I would do a section on it, which is like a small seminar, like breakaway
from the class where he would talk to the students and small groups and explain his, and explain
his perspective, his research and have a real debate about it, like around a harkness table.
And he said, I used to do this. And then about two years ago, a student reported me to the school.
And I realized my job was at risk. And I realized the best course of action was basically
just not to broach the topic. And so now I just don't even mention it. And he's like,
you can say whatever you want, but I'm not, I'm not going to be a part of it. And it's a real shame.
It's a real loss to all of the students who I think came to the school to learn from these
brilliant professors. In that context of these world experts, the problem seems to be that
reporting mechanism where there's a disproportionate power to a complaint of a young student,
a complaint that an idea is painful or an idea is disrespectful to, you know, or idea is creating
an unsafe space. And the conclusion of that, I mean, I'm not sure what to do with that, because
it's a single reporting, maybe a couple, but that has more power than the idea itself. And that's
strange. I don't know how to fix that in the administration except to fire everybody. So
like this is to push back against this storyline that academia somehow fundamentally broken.
I think we have to separate a lot of things out. Like one is you have to look at faculty and you
have to look at administration. And like at MIT, for example, the administration does tries to do
well, but they're the ones that often lack courage. They're often the ones who are the source of the
problem. When people criticize academia, and I'll just speak to myself, you know, I'm willing to
take heed for this, is they really are criticizing the administration, not the faculty, because the
faculty oftentimes are the most brilliant, the boldest thinkers that you think, whenever you
talk about we need like the truth to be spoken, the faculty are often the ones who are in the
possession of the deepest truths in their mind. And in that sense, and they also have the capacity
to truly educate in the way that you're saying. And so it's not broken, like fundamentally,
but there's stuff that like needs that's not working that well, it needs to be fixed.
You kind of took my words. That's what I thought you were going to ask me if I think the Ivy League
is broken. That's totally, that's exactly it. So you don't think, yeah, so on the question,
do you think the Ivy League is broken? Like what, how do you think about it? The academia in
general, I suppose, but Ivy League, still I think it represents some of the best qualities of academia.
Yeah, what more is there to say there? I think the Ivy League is producing tremendous thinkers to
this day. I think the culture has a lot that can be improved, but I have a lot of faith in the people
who are in these institutions. I think, like you said, the administration, and I have to be a little
careful because, you know, I've been in some of these committees, and I've talked to the administration
about these sorts of things. I think they have a lot of stakeholders, and unfortunately it makes
it difficult for them to always serve these brilliant faculty and the students in the way
that they would probably like to. Yeah, okay, so this is me speaking, right? The administration,
I know the people, and they're oftentimes a faculty holding positions in these committees, right?
Yes. But it's in the role of quote unquote service. They're trying to do well. They're trying to do
good, but I think you could say the mechanism is not working, but I could also say my personal
opinion is they lack courage, and one, courage, and two, grace when they walk through the fire.
So courage is stepping into the fire, and grace when you walk through the fire is like maintaining
that like, as opposed to being rude and insensitive to the lived quote unquote experience of others,
or like, you know, just not eloquent at all, like as you step in and take the courageous step of
talking and saying the difficult thing, doing it well, like doing it skillfully. So both of those
are important, the courage and the skill to communicate difficult ideas, and they often
lack them because they weren't trained for it, I think. So you can blame the mechanisms that don't,
that allow 19, 20 year old students to have more power than the entire faculty,
or you could just say that the faculty need to step up and grow some guts and skill of graceful
communication. And really administration. Well, yeah, and the administration, that's right,
that's the administration. Because the faculty are sometimes not some of the most brave,
outspoken people. Yes. Within the bounds of their career. Yeah. So that takes a,
that's like the founding kind of spark of a fire that led you to then say, okay, so how can I help?
Yeah, and I explored a lot. I explored a lot of options. I wrote many articles to my friends,
talked to them, and I realized it sort of needed to be a cultural change, sort of need to be bottom
up grassroots. Something, I knew the energy was there because you just look at the most recent
institutional assessment from Yale. This was basically the number one thing that students,
faculty, and alumni all pointed to, to the administration was cultivating more conversations
on campus and more difficult conversations on campus. So the people on campus know it.
And you look at the Gallup poll, 61% of students are on Ivy League campuses afraid to speak their
minds because of the campus culture. The campus culture is causing a sort of freezing effect on
discourse. Can you pause on that again? So what percentage of students feel afraid to speak their
mind? 61% nationally. And you're talking about places nothing like the Ivy League where I'd say
I'd imagine it would be even worse because of just the way that these communities kind of come
about and the sorts of people who are attracted or are invited to these sorts of communities.
That's nationwide that college students, and it's going up, that college students are afraid to
say what they believe because of their campus climate. So it's a majority. It's not, it's not a
conservative thing. It's not a liberal thing. It's a group thing. We're all feeling it. The majority
of us are feeling it. And basically just it doesn't even, you don't even necessarily need to have
anything to say. You just have a fear. That's right. So when you're like teaching, you know,
metaphors is a really powerful thing to explain, you know, and there's just the caution that you
feel that's just horrible for humor. Now comedians have the freedom to just talk shit, which is why
I really appreciate somebody who's been a friend recently, Tim Dillon, who has, who gives zero
pardon my French fucks about anything, which is very liberating, very important person to just
tear down the powerful. But you know, inside the academia as an educator, as a teacher, as a professor,
you don't have the same freedom. So that fear is felt, I guess, by a majority of students.
And you were getting at something there too, which is that
if you're afraid to speak metaphorically, if you're afraid to speak imprecisely,
it can be very difficult to actually think at all and to think to the extremities of what you're
capable of, because these are the, these are the mechanisms we use when we don't have quite the
precise smack mathematical language to quite pinpoint what we're talking about yet. This is the
beginning. This is the creative step that leads to new knowledge. And so that really scares me,
is that if I'm not allowed to sort of excavate these things, these ideas with people in the sort
of messy sloppy way that we do as humans when we're first being creative, are we, are we going
to be able to continue to innovate? Are we going to continue to be able to learn? That's what really
started to scare me. So you've explored a bunch of different ideas, you wrote a bunch of different
stuff. How did lead books come about? It basically came to me that it had to be kind of a grassroots
movement and it had to be something that changed culturally. And it had to be relatively personal,
people meeting people, people finding out that, no, I'm not the only one on campus who feels this
way. I feel alone. And there are a lot of other people who feel alone. I believe this thing.
And it's not as unpopular as I thought, you know, the basically creating heterodoxy of thought.
And it's creating that moment where you realize that your politics are personal and that your
politics are shared by a lot of people on campus. And so I just started coding it. I didn't have
much coding experience, but I went headfirst in and figured how hard could it be, you know?
I mean, this is really fascinating. So I talked to a lot of software engineers, AI people. Obviously,
that's where my passion, my interests are. My focus has been throughout my life. The fascinating
thing about your story, I think it should be truly inspiring to people that want to change the world
is that you don't have a background in programming. You don't have even maybe a technical background.
So you saw a problem, you explored different ideas, and then you just decided you're going to learn
how to build an app, like without a technical background. Like you didn't try to,
that's so bold. That is so beautiful, man. Can you take me through the journey of
deciding to do that, of like learning to program without a programming background and building
the app like detailed? Like, how do you start? Sure. I mean, you want to buy a Mac. I learned,
and you had to buy a Mac. I'm just going to go step by step, right? I'll be as dumb as possible,
because it was truly, you know, like leading by your feet. So you need a computer for this?
Oh yeah, I had a PC at the time, and I was Android at the time, and I realized it should be like an
iOS app. And so, yeah, that was a decision, but you know, I knew kids these days, they're always
on their phone, and you know, I wanted you to be able to say a passing thought, you know, in class,
make a passing, like you're walking around and you have a thought and you can express it,
or you're in the dining hall and you have your phone out, you can express it. So it was clear to
me it should be an iOS app. By the way, Android is great. Definitely check out. We also are now
available on Android, but we'll get there for the Android users from MIT, Stanford or the Ivy League.
So back to how it happened. So I realized I needed a Mac, so went out and got a Mac,
and I realized I needed an iPhone for testing eventually, got an iPhone.
So those were the real robots to start with. From there, I mean, there's almost too much
information out there about programming. The question is like, where do you start and what's
going to be useful to you? And I, my first thought was I should look at some Yale classes,
but it became very clear very quickly that that was not the right place to start.
That would probably be the right place to start if I wanted to get a job at Amazon,
but my goal was slightly different. And I definitely had it in mind that what I was
trying to make was I'm trying to prove out an idea. I'm not trying to make a finished product.
I'm just trying to get to the first step because I figured if I keep getting to the next step,
at least I won't die now. Like at least things will move forward. I'll learn new things. Maybe
I'll meet new people. I'll show a degree of seriousness about what I'm doing, and things
will come together. And that is, as you'll see, what ends up happening. So I started with Swift,
right? And I find this video from the Stanford professor that had like a million views that
was like how to make basically Swift apps like perfect. And you just like, so you got this Mac
and you went like go to Google.com and you type in load X code. And then code. Yeah. And then I
typed in on YouTube, like Stanford, iOS, Swift, enter first YouTube video has a million views.
I'm like, it has to be good at Stanford as a million views. I got lucky. I mean, that turned
out to be a very good video is basically like introductory course to Swift. Yeah. I mean,
you say introductory, I think most of the people in that class probably had a much better
background than I did software developers probably computer scientists. And it was slow for me.
I don't think I realized it fully at the time just how far behind I was from the rest of the
class because I was like, wow, seems like people are picking this up really quickly.
So it took a little longer and you know, a lot of time on Stack Overflow, but eventually I made
a truly minimal viable product. The most minimal like we're talking, you know, put text on screen,
add text to screen, comment on top of text, you know, make a post, make a response. And anyone
with a Yale email can do this and you plug it into a certain cloud server and you verify
people's accounts and you you're off. You have to figure out how to like the whole idea of like
having an account. So there's a permanence like you can create an account with an email, verify it,
verify it. Okay, so that that's not, you know, and that's literally how I thought about, right?
Like, so what do I need to do? And I'm like, first thing I need is a login page. And I'm like,
how to make a login page in Swift? I mean, it's that easy. If someone this has been done before,
of course, and then the first page that pops up was probably a pretty damn good page.
When it wasn't that bad, it wasn't perfect. But like, maybe it got me 80% of the way there.
And then I came into some bugs. And then, you know, I asked Stack Overflow a few questions.
And then I got a little further. And then I found some more bugs. And then I'm like,
maybe this isn't the right way to do it. Maybe I should do it this way. And I'm sure my code
isn't great. But the goal isn't to make great code. The goal wasn't to make scalable code. It
was to understand, is this something my friends will use? Like, what is the reaction going to be
if I put it in their hands? And am I capable of making this thing? And that's awesome. And so
you're just focusing on the experience, like actually just really driving towards that first
step, figuring out the first step and really driving towards it. Of course, you have to also
figure out this concept of like storage, like database. You know something funny?
What's that? I just made the database structure with no knowledge of databases whatsoever.
And I start showing it to my friends who have an experience in CS and they're like,
use the heap. That's so interesting. You're like, why did you decide to store it in this way? I'm
like, bro, I don't even know what a heap is. I just did it because it works. I'm trying to make
calls and stuff. And they're like, yeah, they're like, the hierarchy is really like, I'm like, what?
There's a deep, profound lesson in there that I don't know how much you've interacted with computer
science people since, but they tend to optimize and have these kind of discussions and what results
is over optimization. It's like worrying, is this really the right way to do it? And then you go,
as opposed to doing the first thing on Stack Overflow, you go down this like rabbit hole
of what's the actual proper way to do it. And then you're like, you wake up five years later
working on Amazon because you've never finished the login page. Like it's kind of hilarious,
but that's a really deep lesson. Like just get it done. And what's a heap, bro? Is the right,
that should be a t-shirt. That's really the right approach to building something that ultimately
creates an experience and then you iterate eventually. That's how the great, some of the
greatest software products in this world have been built, is you create it quickly, and then
just iterate. What was, by the way, in your mind, the thing that you're chasing as a prototype,
like what was the first step that it feels like something is working? Like is it you
interacting with another friend? Yeah, I think the first step was like, it's one thing to tell
someone about an idea, but it's another thing to put in their hands and kind of see like the way
their eyes kind of look. And when I'd go, I'd walk around cross campus, which is part of Yale,
and I'd literally just go up to people and run up to them and be like, try this, try this,
you got to try this. This is pre-quarantine, by the way, of course. This would never be the same
post-quarantine, but you got to try this, you got to try this. Like what is it? And I'd be like,
and I explain, it's like an anonymous discussion feed for our Yale campus. And you see their
gears turning and they just, some people would be like, not interested. I'm like, fine,
not your target demographic, I get it, you'll come eventually. But some people, you could see it,
they got it. They're like, yes. And that's when I was like, okay, okay, there is, and you don't
need, I mean, you don't need 50% of people to like it. You need what, 5%, 10% to love it,
and then they'll tell 5%, 10%? Yeah, worn a mouth, yep. And you're good. Of course, the first version
was very, very crappy, but seeing people trying despite all the crappiness, it was sort of enough
to be the first step. And since then, all of my codes been stripped out, I now have friends who
basically have told me, don't bother with the coding part, you do, you do the rest, you just make
sure that we can code because they want to code. Great. I mean, I'm not an engineer. I never
intended to be an engineer, and there's a lot to do that's not engineering. But the point was just
to validate the idea, so to speak. When was the moment that you felt like we've created something
special? Maybe a moment where you're proud of that this is a, this is, this has the potential to
actually be the very implementation of the idea that I initially had. There's so many, there's
so many little moments. It's like, and I bet there'll still be moments in the future that make,
that make it hard to like, totally say, like. Yeah, we should say this is the, this is still
very early days of Librex. Yeah. It's literally, it's only been a year. Since we've had like,
actual, like a lot of people on the app, yeah, about a year. Oh, wow. Okay. I mean, there's
I mean, there's some crazy moments I could talk about sort of going to Dartmouth because it's
one thing to like, get some traction at your school. Yeah. People know you and you know,
it's, it's your school, you know, it's another thing to go to another school and where no one
knows you and sign up 90% of the campus overnight. Wow. So tell me that story. You're invading another
territory. It was literally like that. Did you buy it like a Dartmouth sweatshirt?
A purposefully, I didn't want to fraud anyone, but I was purposefully nondescript in my clothing.
Yeah. No yell stuff, no Dartmouth stuff. Just blend in. I'll get, I'll go back there. So what
happened was this was like March of last year. So almost, almost a year ago today. And I really
wanted to see if we could go from sort of one campus to two campuses. So I didn't know anyone at
Dartmouth's campus, but I kind of had some cold emails, some warm-ish emails. And I went to people
and I was like, basically, can I sleep on your floor for two days during finals period? Yeah.
I had a lot of people who said, this is crazy. Like no one's going to, no one wants to download an
afternoon finals period, a social afternoon finals period. But I emailed a few people and I was like,
you know, can I sleep on your floor? And one of them was crazy enough to say, sure,
come to my, come to my dorm. I have a nice floor. And he ended up, today he's still really close.
He's a really close friend. But anyway, I take a train knowing nothing about this guy,
besides his first and last name. And I arrive and Dartmouth is really, really remote, way more
remote than you think, to the point where I'm like, he's like, he warned me. He's a really
hospitable guy. He warned me like, it's going to be hard to get to campus from the train station
because it's really remote. And I'm like, I'm sure it's fine. I'll just get an Uber.
There are no Ubers and Hanovers. What do you think this is? New Hampshire. So Connecticut,
I mean Yale is pretty remote as well, no? Yeah. Yale is, well, I mean Yale is in New Haven,
which is a real city. It has Ubers, it has food, it has culture, it has a nightclub even. Yeah.
Like we're talking about a real city. Like it's not New York, it's not Philadelphia where I'm from,
but it's a city. New Hampshire is something very different. Yeah. Beautiful campus, I'm sure.
Beautiful. Oh my gosh. I could tell, I could talk so much about, I was blown away by Dartmouth. I
started wondering why I didn't apply legitimately. Between the people and the culture, it was a
beautiful vacation. So I arrived there, no Uber, but eventually I call this guy who's the only guy
who can get you to Dartmouth and it takes a couple hours, but we get there. I sleep on this guy's
floor, I wake up, I ask him if there's any printing. He's like, oh, Dartmouth happens to have free
printing in the copy room. I print out 2,000 posters until the guy in the copy room literally
goes to me. He's like, kid, I don't know what you're doing, but you need to get out of here.
I found the limits. Yeah, I found the limit. And I think a lot of startups is about finding the
limits. Maybe that's a little piece of advice. Socially, he's like, you gotta get out of here.
And I then go to every single dorm door. I put a poster under every single dorm door,
advertising the app with the QR code. I walk around campus saying hi to everyone
and talking about the app. I go from table to table in the cafeteria, introduce myself,
say hi, and tell them to download the app. It's exhausting. There's so many steps,
so many crouching down to slip the poster into the dorm door. My legs were burning.
But by the end of it, 24 hours later, I'm sitting in a bus and I'm just pressing the refresh button
on the account creation panel. It's like going up by hundreds. And I'm like, oh my gosh,
there's something. The word of mouth is working in a sense. I mean,
certainly your initial seed is powerful. Just a piece.
Yeah, but then the word of mouth is what carries it forward. And what was the
explanation you gave to the app? Is anonymity a fundamental part of it? Like saying,
this is a chance for you to speak your mind about your experiences on campus?
Yeah, I think people get it. What I've realized is you don't need to tell people
why to try it. They know. There's a hunger for this.
Exactly. So all I do is I'm very factual. I said, and this is where I kind of ended up
pointing the kind of the line that I now used to say it because I said it so many times in those
24 hours. I just said it's an anonymous discussion feed for Dartmouth. And they're like, yes.
Like they've been waiting for it. Some people are more skeptical,
but a lot of people were like, great. I'm excited to try this. I'm excited to
meet people and connect. And I mean, the way Dartmouth is taken to it is incredible.
Everything from professors writing poems during finals period to be like,
good luck in finals period. You're going to rise like a Phoenix or whatever to like,
yeah, it's crazy. I heard about two women meeting on Librex and starting a finance club
at Dartmouth to significant others meeting. There was an article recently written up
at Yale as well about two queer women who met on Librex and started a relationship,
which was pretty, it was pretty interesting to see people throwing parties pre-COVID.
Yeah, it was just amazing to see how when you allow people to be vulnerable and social,
they connect. People have this natural desire to connect.
Yeah. When you have, what they have a natural desire to have a voice and then when that voice
is paired with freedom, then you could truly express yourself and there's something
liberating about that. And in that sense, you're like, you're connecting as your true self,
whatever that is. What are the most powerful conversations you've seen on the app? You
mentioned like people connecting. The hard part of that is the sorting, you know,
figuring out which one, which one am I going to put at the top?
Mental sorting out. Just something to stand out to you. Sorry. I don't mean to do like the top
10 conversations ever of all time, ever on the app. I just mean like stuff that you remember
that stands out to you. I remember this one really amazing comment from this,
he was a Mexican international student who spoke out and this post was super edgy,
but yet it got hundreds and hundreds of upvotes within the Yale community. It was a Yale
community specific post. And we should point out that there's a school specific community now
and there's an all IV community. So this was specifically in the Yale community.
And this was a little while ago, but it stuck with me. This Mexican international student
comes to Yale and he starts talking about his experience in the La Casa, which is the Mexican
Latin X as they would say, cultural center at Yale and how he doesn't feel welcome there because
he's Roman Catholic basically and international and how he doesn't feel like he fits with their
agenda. And as a result, this place that's supposed to be home for him, he feels outcasted
and feels more alone than he does anywhere else on campus. That's powerful. That was powerful to me.
Yeah. It's hearing someone, someone who should be feeling supported by this culture say, actually,
this is not doing anything for me. Like this is not helping me. This is not where I feel at home.
So what do you make of anonymity? Because it seems to be a fundamental aspect of the power
of the app, right? But at the same time, anonymity on the internet, so it protects us, right? It
gives us freedom to have a voice, but it can also bring out the dark sides of human nature,
like trolls or people who want to be malicious, want to hurt others purely for the joy of hurting
others, being cruel for fun and going to the dark places. So like, what do you make of anonymity
as a fundamental feature of social interaction, like the pros and the cons?
Yeah. Just to break that down a bit, I would say a lot of those same things about a place
like Twitter where people are very unanonymous. Having said that, of course, there's a different
sort of capacity people have when they're anonymous, right? In all different sorts of ways.
So what do I make of anonymity? I think it can be incredibly liberating and allow people to be
incredibly vulnerable and to connect in different ways, both on politics. And there was a lot
to talk about this year regarding politics and personally being vulnerable, talking about
relationships and mental health. I think it allows people to have a community that's not
performative. And of course, there's this other side where people can sometimes break rules or
say things that they wouldn't otherwise say that people don't always agree with or that people
might find repugnant. And to an extent, these can facilitate great conversations. And on the other
hand, we have to have moderation in place and we have to have community guidelines to make sure
that the anonymity doesn't overwhelm the purpose, which is that anonymity. First of all, anonymity
is a tool in Librex. It was not the purpose of Librex. It is a way that we get towards these
authentic conversations given our campus climate. And second of all, I would say it's a spectrum.
It's not just, it's not just Librex is anonymous, right? Because Librex isn't totally anonymous.
Everyone's a verified Ivy League student. You know exactly what school everyone goes to. You only
have one account per person at Yale, meaning if, meaning that, I mean, what that amounts to is people
have more of an ownership in the community and people know that they're connected and they have a
common vernacular. So the anonymity is a scale and it's a tool. But you can also trust, I mean,
this is the difference between Reddit anonymity, where you can easily create multiple accounts.
When you have only one account per person, or at least it's very difficult to create multiple
accounts, then you can trust that the anonymous person you're talking to is a human being.
Not a bot. I try to be completely anonymous, not in my public interactions. I try to be
as real in every way possible, like zero gap between private me and public me.
Why exactly did you, it seems like this is an intentional mission. What made you want to
sort of bridge that gap between the private sphere and public sphere? Because that's,
that's unique. I know a lot of intellectuals who would make a different decision.
Yeah, interesting. I had a discussion about what Naval about this actually,
with a few others that have a very clear distinction between public and private.
Something I'm struggling with, by the way, personally, I'm thinking about.
So one on the very basic surface level is if you carry with yourself lies, small lies or big lies,
lies, it's extra mental effort to remember what you're like, to remember what you're supposed
to say and not supposed to say. So that's on a very surface level of like, it's just easier
to live life when you have the smaller, the gap between the private you and the public you.
And the second is, I think for me, from an engineering perspective, like if I'm dishonest
with others, I will too quickly become dishonest with myself. And in so doing,
I will not truly be able to think deeply about the world and come up and build revolutionary ideas.
There's something about honesty that feels like it's that first principle's thinking
that's almost like overused as a term, but it feels like that requires radical honesty,
not radical asshole and richness, but radical honesty with yourself, with yourself. And it feels
like it's difficult to be radically honest with yourself when you're being dishonest with the
public. And also, I have a nice feature, honestly, that in this current social context, so we can
talk about race and gender and what are the other topics that are touchy? Necessity and
nationality. All those things. I mean, like, family structure. Maybe I'm ineliquent in the way I
speak about them. But I honestly, when I look in the mirror, like, I'm not deeply hateful of a
particular race, or even just hateful particular race. I'm sure I'm biased and I'm trying to like
think about those biases and so on. And also, I don't have any creepy shit in my closet about
women. It seems like everybody, it seems like a lot of people got like did a lot of creepy
stuff in their life. And I just feel like that's really nice and deliberating. And especially
now, you know, it's funny because I've gotten a bit of a platform. And I think it all started when
I went, this is a famous comedian, female comedian, Whitney Cummings. And, you know, I've gotten a
lot of amazing women writing me throughout. But when I went on Whitney, it was like the number
of DMs I get on Instagram from women. It's just ridiculous. And I think that was a really important
moment for me is like, I speak and I feel, you know, I really value love long term monogamy
with like one person. And it's like, I could see where a lot of guys would now continue that message
in public and in private, just start sleeping around. And so like, that's an important statement
for me mentally. He's like, nope. Go straight in there. And not out of fear, but out of like
principle and just like, live life honestly. And I just, I feel like that's truly liberating
as a human being. Forget public, all that, because then I feel like I'm on sturdy ground
when I say difficult things. And at the same time, sorry, I'm ranting on this. I apologize.
I'm interested personally. So keep going. I honestly believe in the internet,
and people on the internet, that when they hear me speak, they can see if I'm full of
shit or not. Like I won't be able to fake it. Like they'll see it through. Yeah. So
I feel like if you're not lying about stuff, you have the freedom to truly be yourself.
And the internet will figure it out. Like we'll figure who you are.
And people have a natural tendency to be able to just tell bullshit. And it makes
sense from an evolutionary standpoint, right? Exactly. Like why, why wouldn't, why, like
of all the things that we could evolve to be good at, being able to detect honesty seems like one
that would be particularly valuable, especially in the sorts of societies we developed into.
And then also from a selfish perspective, like a success perspective,
I think there's a lot of folks that have inspired me, like Elon is one of them,
that shows that there's a hunger for genuineness. Like you can build a business as a CEO
and be genuine and like real and do stupid shit every once in a while, as long as it's
coming from the same place of who you truly are. Like Elon's inspiration with that. And then
there's a lot of other people I admire that are counter inspirations in the sense like
they're very formal. They hold back a lot of themselves. And it's like, I know how brilliant
those people are. And I think they're not being as effective of leaders, public faces of companies
as they could be. I mean, to be honest, like not to throw shade, but I will is like Mark
Zuckerberg is an example of that. Jack Dorsey is 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 more. I think he's a much more amazing person
than he conveys through his public presentation. I think a lot of that has to do with PR and
marketing people having an effect. Listen, it's difficult. I think it's really difficult. It's
probably many of the same difficulties you will face as the pressures. But it's hard to know what
to do. But I think as much as possible as an individual, you should try to be honest in the
face of the world and the company that wants you to be more polished. And that being more polished
turns you into a politician. And politician eventually turns into being dishonest, dishonest
with the world and dishonest with yourself. Something I noticed, which was of the people you
mentioned, those things have had ramifications in terms of letting things go too far or get out
of hand. And you wonder like, it's an aspect of lying, right? You say one lie goes to another lie.
You push it down. It doesn't matter. You can talk and figure it out later. You can figure out later
pretty soon. You've dug a pretty big hole. And I think if we look at Twitter and we look at
Facebook, I think it goes without saying what sorts of holes have been dug because of,
perhaps because of a lack of honesty that goes all the way up to the leaders.
So yeah, there's two problems. Within the company, it doesn't make you as effective of a leader,
I think. That's one. And two, for social media companies, I think people need to trust,
like it doesn't have to be the CEO, but it has to be like, this is how humans work. We want to look
to somebody, we're like, I trust you. If you're going to use a social media platform, I think you
have to trust the set of individuals working at the top of that social network. 100%. Something I
realized really quickly, one of the lessons throughout the startup was that people don't
totally connect to products as much as they connect to people. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know if you
how much you spent on Librex, you've only been here the last couple weeks, like last week, but
I mean, I love the product. And one of the aspects of me loving the products is that I was super
active and I've been super active throughout the entire time. And the amount of support I've received
has made that very easy to do from the community and the fact that I could, I mean, so I came to
Boston for this interview, right? Yeah. I came to Boston, I got off the train. Yeah. It was around
5.30pm. I checked Librex. Someone is writing, hey, I'm in Boston. Does anyone want to get dinner?
Yeah. 30 minutes later, I'm getting dinner with them. That's amazing. And I mean, it's incredible.
First of all, as an entrepreneur, the amount of stuff I learn from these people and when they
reiterate and I hear that they got the message through the product, I mean, that's incredibly
validating. But also, I mean, I think it's just important to be able to put a face to a brand,
and especially a brand that's built on trust, because fundamentally, the users are trusting us
with some really important discussions and some really, and a movement to some degree. It's a
community and a movement. I'll tell you actually why I didn't use the app very much so far is
there's something really powerful about the way it's constructed, which I felt like a bit of an
outsider because I don't know the communities. It felt like it's a really strong community around
each of these places. And so I felt like it made me really wish there was an MIT one.
And so there's both discussions about the deep community issues within Colombia or Yale or so
on Dartmouth. And there's also the broader community of the Ivy Leagues that people are
discussing. But I could see that actually expanding more and more and more. But which is a powerful
coupling, which is the feeling of like the little village of this little community we're building
together, but also the broader issues as you could do both discussions. One thing that was
important to me is talking about social media as a concept. I think the way people socialize
is very much context dependent. So we're talking about people understanding each other through
language, through English. And these languages are constructed in a very nuanced way,
in a very sort of temperamental way. And you kind of need a similar context to be able to have
productive conversations. So to me, it's really important that these groups, they share something
in common, a really big lived experience, the Ivy League or their school community,
and they have a similar vocabulary. They have a similar background. They know what's happening
in their community. And so having social media that is community connected to me was fundamental.
Like you talked about anonymity. To me, community is the thing that when I think about Librex,
I think what makes it different. It's the fact that everyone knows what's going on,
everyone comes from a similar context, and people can socialize in a way where they understand
each other because they've been through, used the word lived experience, they've been through
so many of the same lived experiences. One like clarification, is there an easy way if you choose
to then connect and meet space and physical space? So I guess the sort of magic of it. And
I was talking to a bunch of Harvard Librexers who I met off the app while I was in Boston,
and every time they told me this is my favorite part of the app, this is what I love about the app.
We have this matching system, which is an anonymous direct message that you can send to any poster.
So I was talking to this guy who, he was really into coin collection, and he met other people
who were really into coin collection through a post, and he would make a post about coin collection.
And then someone would come to him and they'd be like, and they could direct message him
anonymously, and it would just show him their school. And then they could just text chat,
totally anonymously direct message if he accepted the anonymous request.
Do they see the usernames, right? There are no usernames on Librex.
It's all just school's names. So he made this post about coin collection, and he got a direct
message. Yeah, I guess so, right? Because I was just looking at the text. Yeah. That's
interesting. That's right. And I can tell you, I can go into why. That's really interesting.
Yeah, I can go into. So truly is anonymous. Well, I mean, but it's not exactly. It's a very
different kind of anonymous. And the reason, the reason that we made that decision is because
we wanted people to connect to ideas. We wanted people to connect to things in the moment. We
don't want people to go, oh, I know this guy, he said this other thing. And we didn't want people
to feel like they were at risk of being doxxed. So it's just, these are small communities, right?
We talked about this. Everyone knows someone who knows you. And in 2021, it would not take much
to be able to figure out who someone might be just through a couple of posts. So it's both
safety and about the ideas in terms of not adding usernames. Anyway, we have this anonymous direct
message system where you can direct message the original poster of any post, the OP, if you're
a Redditor of any post. And that makes it really easy to meet up because once you guys are one
on one, you can exchange a number, you can exchange a Snapchat, you can exchange an email,
probably not very often, but you could. And then that's how people meet up, matching.
And then a lot of people connect in this way. Let me just take a small step into the technical.
I read somewhere, I don't know if it's true, that one of the reasons you were rejected from YC,
Y Combinator in the final rounds is because one of the principles is to refuse to sell user data.
Can you speak to that? Why do you think it's important not to sell user data?
And sort of, which draws a clear contrast between other basically any other service on the internet?
I mean, to be honest, it's quite simple. I mean, we talk about this platform,
people are talking about their most intimate secrets, their political opinions. How are they
feeling about what's going on in their city during the summer? How are they feeling about
the political cycle and also their mental health, their relationships?
These are some of the most intimate thoughts that people were having.
Point blank, I don't think it was ethical to pawn them off for a profit. I didn't think it was
moral. I don't think I could sleep at night if that was what I was doing is turning these people's
most intimate beliefs and secrets into a currency that I bought and sold. There's something very
off about that. I tend to believe that there is some room, so like Facebook would just take
that data and sell it, right? But there's some room in transparency and giving people the choice
on which parts they can, I wouldn't even see it as sell, but like share with advertisers.
Are you going to give them a profit? You have to monetize, you have to create an entire system,
you have to rethink this whole thing, right? But as long as you give people control and
are transparent and make it easy, I think it's really difficult to delete a Facebook account,
like delete all your data or to download. I've tried, it's very difficult.
So just make it easy and trust in that if you create a great product, people are not going to
do it. And if they do it, then they're not actually a deep loving member of the community.
So we very quickly realized that user privacy was something that was not only a core value,
but was something that users really cared about. And we added this functionality,
it's just a button that says forget me. You press it, like two clicks. It's not that hard,
we just remove your email from the database. Yeah, you're good.
Beautiful. I think Facebook should have that. I honestly, so call me crazy, but maybe you
can actually speak to this, but I don't think Facebook, well, now they would. But if they
did it earlier, they would lose that much money. If they allow like transparently
tell people you could just delete everything. They also explained that like in ways that's going to
potentially like lessen your experience in the short term, like explain that. But then there
shouldn't be like multiple clicks of a button that don't make any sense. I'm trying to hold back
from ranting about Instagram, because let me just say real quick, because I've been locked out of
Instagram for a month. And there's a whole group inside Facebook that are like supporters
of like help Lex. Free Lex? Free Lex. I wasn't blocked. It was just like a bug in the system.
Somebody was hammering the API with my account. And so they kept thinking I'm a bot. Anyway,
it's a bug. It happens to a lot of people. But like first of all, I appreciate the love from all
the amazing engineers in Instagram and Facebook. Love those folks. The entire mechanism though
is somehow broken. I mean, I put that on the leadership, but it's also difficult to operate a
large company once it scales, all those kinds of things. But it should not be that difficult to
do some basic things that you want to do, which is in the case of Facebook, that's verify your
identity to the app. And also in the case of Facebook, in the case of Librex, like, like disappear.
If you if you choose, there's downsides to disappearing, but it should not be a difficult
process. And yeah, I think, I think people are waking up to that. I think there's a lot of room for
an app like Librex with its with its foundational ideas to redefine what social media should look
like. You know, and like you said, I think beautifully anonymity is not the core value. It's
just the tool you use. And who knows, maybe anonymity will not always be the tool you use.
Like if you give people the choice, who knows what this evolves from the login page they initially
created. The key thing is the founding principles. And again, who knows, if you give people a really
nice way to monetize their data, maybe they'll no longer be a thing that you say do not sell user
data. Yeah, all those kinds of things. But the basic principles should be there. And also a good,
simple interface design is goes goes a really long way, like simplicity and elegance, which
Librex currently is. Clubhouse is a lot better, by the way. I don't mean to go too deep into the
history, but the- It was bad. It was- I didn't look at the early pictures. Oh, thank goodness.
I read somewhere that it was like a white screen, like with black. There were-
The up and down vote buttons were like these big, these big freaking boxes. And like, I could go on,
but it was my genius design skills. I almost failed art class when I was in first grade,
and I think I still have similar skills to my first grade self. But it's gotten a lot better,
and thanks to a lot of my friends who have sort of chipped in here and there.
Oh, I love the idea of a button that just like, forget me. I don't know. That's really moving,
actually. That's actually all people want. Is they want, I think- Okay, I'll speak to my experience.
I will give so much more if I could just disappear if I needed to. And I trusted the community.
I trusted the founders and the principals. That's really powerful, man. Trust and ease of escape.
Yeah. You've also kind of mentioned moderation, which is really interesting.
So with this anonymity and this community, I don't know if you've heard of the internet,
but there's trolls on the internet. So I've heard.
And even if they go to Yale and Dartmouth, there's still people that probably enjoy
the sort of being the guerrilla warfare contra-revolutionary and just like creating
chaos in a place of love. So how do you prevent chaos from and hatred breaking out in Librex?
So the way I think about it is we have these principles. They're pretty simple and they're
pretty easy to enforce. And then beyond the principles, we have a set of moderators,
moderate from every single Ivy League school, a team of diverse moderators who enforce these
principles, but not only enforce the principles, but kind of clue us in to what's happening in
their community and how the real life context of their community translates to the Librex context
of their community. And beyond that, we have conversation with them about the standards
of the community. And we're constantly talking about what needs to be further elucidated and what
needs to be tweaked. And we're in constant communication with the community. Now, if you
want me to get into the principles that underlie Librex's moderation policy.
Yeah, please. Maybe you can explain that there's moderators. What does that mean?
How are they chosen? And what are the principles under which they operate?
Sure. So how are the moderators chosen? The moderators are all volunteers. They're Librexers
who reach out to me and respond to the opportunity to become a moderator. And the way they're chosen
is basically we want to make sure that they're in tune with their community. We want to make sure
they come from diverse backgrounds. And we want to make sure that they sort of understand what
the community is about. And then we ask them some questions about how they would deal with
certain scenarios, ones that we've had in the past and we feel strongly about. And then also ones
that are a little more murky, where we want to see that they're sort of thinking about these
things in a critical way. And from there, we choose a set and they have the power to
take down posts. Of course, everything at the end of the day pens my review, but they can take
them down and we can reinstate them if it's a problem. But they can take down posts and they
can advocate for different moderation standards and different moderation policies.
So for now, you're the Linus Torvald of this community. And so meaning like you're able to,
like people are actually able to like email you or like text me, text you, contact you and get a
response. Like you respond to basically everybody. And then you're like really, you know, you're
living that live on people's floor life currently. That's not necessarily, this is the early days,
folks. I knew Ryan before he was a billionaire and he was cool. And then he was in a mansion
making meats on his barbecue. No, okay. But you know, how does it scale? Like what,
I suppose how does it scale is the question. I mean, with Linus, I don't know if you're familiar
with the Linux open source community, but he still stayed at the top for a while. It was really
important like leadership there was really important to drive that large scale, really
productive open source community. What do you see your role as Librex grows? And in general,
what are the mechanisms of scaling here for moderation?
Do I see it open discourses fundamental to the purpose of the app? Right. So as the,
I guess you could say founder, CEO, what have you, part of my purpose has to be to
enforce the vision, right? And part of the vision is open discourse. And that does come down in part
to reasonable moderation and community guided reasonable moderation. So I imagine that will
always be something that I'm intimately involved with to some degree. Now the degree to which,
the way in which that manifests, I imagine will have to change, right? And hopefully I'll be able to,
just like you can hire a CTO, hopefully I'll be able to be integrated in hiring people who are,
who understand the way that we are sort of operating and the reasonable standards
of moderation. And there can be a sort of hierarchical structure. But I think when you have
a product whose key purpose is to allow people to have these difficult conversations on campus
that need to be had, I can never, I can never fully, I don't think I can fully ever abdicate
that responsibility. I think that would be like, I mean, that would be like Bezos abdicating e-commerce.
Right? Like that is, that's part of the job. Yeah. Of course you can run companies in different
ways. I think the, because he might have abdicated quite a bit of the details there.
It's hard for me to say. Because the Amazon does so many things. I think the probably the
better example is like Elon Woodrock as he's still at the core. Of the engineering.
He's at the core of the engineering. There's some fundamental questions of what he probably
does way too much of the engineering. Like he's like the lowest level detail. But you're saying
like the core things that are, that make the app work is, is the moderation of difficult
conversations. And by the way, I'm 21 years old. Let's, let's remind us everyone of that.
That if this thing does scale and if this thing continues to be a positive force in a lot of
people's lives, who knows what will happen in the next, what I'll learn. I'm still growing
definitely as a leader, still growing as a thinker, still growing as a person. I don't,
I can't pretend that I know how to run a business that is worth, you know, up to a billion dollars,
whatever. I can't pretend I know how to run a business that's, you know, going to have millions
and millions of users. I expect that there are going to be a lot of amazing people who will
teach me and a lot of people who have already kind of stepped into my life and helped me out and
taught me things. And I imagine that I'll learn so much more. I just know that moderation is always
going to be important to me because I don't think Librex is Librex unless we have open discourse
and moderation. Reasonable, open, light touch moderation is at the heart of creating that,
right? So as a creator of this kind of community in place with anonymity and difficult conversations,
what, what do you think about this touchy three words that people have been tossing around and
politicizing, I would say, but as at the core of the founding of this country, which is the freedom
of speech, how do you think about the freedom of speech of this particular kind of freedom of
expression? And do you think it's a fundamental human right? How do you define it to yourself
when you, when you're thinking about it? I've, I went on, especially preparing for this conversation
down a rabbit hole of like, just how unclear it is philosophically, what is meant by this kind of
freedom? It's not as easy as people think, but it's interesting pragmatically speaking to hear
how you think about it in the context of Librex. Yeah, it's a tough one, right? And there's a lot
there. So I come from the background of being a math major. Maybe it's important to start with that.
Yeah. And I found myself in the middle of this question of freedom of speech. One of the wonderful
things is that the Librex community is filled with PhDs and governance majors who have taught me
a ton about this sort of thing. And I'm still learning. I'm still growing. I'm still probably
going to modify my perspective to some degree, hopefully. Don't worry. I imagine I'll always
support free discourse. Like learning how to speak about stuff is critical here because it's like,
I'm learning that this is like a minefield of conversations. Because the moment you say like,
even saying freedom of speech is a complicated concept, people will be like, oh, we spotted a
communist. Like they'll say there's nothing complicated about freedom. Freedom is freedom,
bro. It is complicated. First of all, if you talk about there's different definitions of freedom of
speech. If you want to go constitution, if you want to talk about the United States specifically
and what's legal, it's actually not as exciting and not as beautiful as people think of.
It's complicated. It's complicated. I think there's ideals behind it that we want to see.
What does that actually materialize itself in the digital world where we're trying to communicate
in ways that allows for difficult conversations and also at the same time doesn't result in
the silencing of voices, not through like censorship, but through like just assholes being rude.
Spam. Spam. So it could be just bots. Racism. Racism. Going back to the name of the app,
Librex. Yes. Libre, free. X was support onto for free exchange and the free exchange of what?
My purpose was to create as many as much inner communication of ideas, be them repugnant or
otherwise as possible. And of course, to do that within legal bounds and to do that without
causing anyone to be harassed or doxxed. So to keep things focused on the ideas, not the people,
and then no BS crap stuff. And so to me, the easiest way to moderate around that,
because as you said, figuring out what is hateful and what is hate speech is really hard,
was to say no sweeping statements against core identity groups.
And that seems to work on the whole pretty well to be pretty light touch.
And hard to do though. It's difficult. Because we like to generalize with humans.
It's difficult. But what it comes down to is be specific. And when you think about what are
sweeping statements against core identity groups, right? Oftentimes, these are sort
of hackneyed subjects. These are things that have been broached and we've heard them before.
They don't really lead anywhere productive. So it goes under this principle of be specific
in the ideas you're discussing. So even for positive and humor stuff,
you try to avoid generalizations. Against core identity groups.
Core identity groups. Sorry, what are core identity groups?
We're talking, you know, race, religion. Okay.
Got it. Even positive stuff?
Well, against, negative.
Oh, against, sorry, against, against. Okay.
Very, very, we've learned to be very specific. Very few words. But the community gets it,
you know? Yeah, they get it. I mean, this is the thing. The, the, the, the trouble with rules
is, as the community grows, they'll figure out ways to manipulate the rules.
Absolutely. It's human nature. It's creativity.
Yeah. Something beautiful about it, of course.
Unlike an, from an evolutionary perspective, yes.
Yeah. The fact that people are so creative and so looking to, and because people are genuinely
interested in figuring out these things about social media. And so they'll 100% like see like,
where's the edge? And I mean, part of that's maintaining some level of vagueness in your
rule set. Yeah.
Which has its own set of questions and something we could think about.
And I'm not implying I have all the answers. But there is something really interesting about
people being so engaged that they're looking to figure out where are those edges and what does
that mean? What does that edge mean? You know?
Well, so one of the things I'm kind of thinking about, like from an individual user of Librex,
or an individual user of the internet, I think about like that one person that is on Reddit
saying hateful stuff or positive stuff doesn't matter or funny stuff. One of the things I think
about is the trajectory of that individual through life and how social media can help
that person become the best version of themselves. I don't mean from like an Orwellian sense,
like educate them properly or something. I just mean like, we're all, I believe,
we're all fundamentally good. And I also believe we all have the capacity to do,
to create some amazing stuff in this world, whether that's ideas or art or engineering,
all those kinds of things just to be amazing people. And I kind of think about like, you know,
a lot of social media mechanisms bring out the worst than us. And I try to think like,
in the long term, how can the social media or how can a website, how can you create,
can make the best, like you take a trajectory that makes you better, better and better and
like the best version of yourself. So I think about that because like, you know, Twitter can
really take you down some dark trajectories. I've seen people just not being the best version of
themselves. Forget the cancel culture and all that kind of stuff. It's just like, they're not
developing intellectually in the way that's going to make the best version of themselves.
I think Reddit, I'm not sure what I think about Reddit yet. Because one positive side is all the
shit posting. I read it could be just like a release valve for some stress in life. And you
almost have like a parallel life where you're in meat space, you might be actually becoming successful
and so on and growing and so on. But you just need some times to be angry at somebody. But I tend to
not think that's possible. I think if you're shit posting, you're probably not spending your time
the best way you could. I don't know. I'm torn on that. But do you think about that with Librex
of creating a trajectory for the Yale, for the Dartmouth, for the students to where they grow
intellectually? One thing that I think about a lot is how do you incentivize positive content
creation? How do you incentivize really intellectual content creation? It's something
that frankly, you know, I think about every single day. And I think there are ways that,
I mean, one thing that's great about humans is that they can be incentivized, right?
And I think there are ways that you can incentivize people to make the right kind of content,
if that's your goal. So you think such mechanisms exist for such incentivization?
I do. I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak.
So you have already concrete ideas in your mind? I have about three concrete ideas that I'm very,
very optimistic about. Yeah. And you don't even need to share them. The fact, I understand totally,
but like the fact that you have them, that's really good. Because I feel like sometimes
the downfall of the social media is that there's literally not even a thinking or a discussion
about the incentivization of positive long-term content creation. I mean, Twitter, I really
was excited about this when they said like, when Jack has talked about like creating healthy
conversations. Yeah, he does seem to care. I've listened to him. I mean, he's very, he has a
very particular way of saying things. But you get the impression that he's someone who actually cares
about these things within the limits of his power. Yeah. And that's the question, the limits of the
power. Librex is growing, not just in the number of communities, but also in the way you're incentivizing
positive conversations, like coupled with the moderation and so on. So you think there's
a lot of innovation to be had in that area? I think there's a tremendous amount. I think
when you think about the reasons people post, fundamentally, people want to make a positive
impact on their community to some degree. Now, there'll always be bad actors. And part of the
benefit of sort of our moderation structure is that we can limit some of those bad actors,
you know, no body counts, no purgating. At the same time, the more you incentivize a certain
type of behavior, the better it's going to be. And we don't see it as our role as the platform to
force the community in a direction. And frankly, I don't think it would be good for anyone,
the community or the conversations, if we force a specific type of conversations,
conversation, we just need to make the tools to allow people to be good. Yeah.
And to incentivize good behavior. Yeah, I believe that like if you,
you don't need, you will not need to censor if you allow people at scale to be good,
the good will overpower the assholes. That's my fundamental belief. I'm very optimistic about
that. But currently, Librex is small in the sense that it's, it's a small set of communities that
I believe, and you mentioned to me offline that by design, you're scaling slowly and carefully.
So how does Librex scale? Is it possible, you know, Facebook also started with a small set
of communities that were schools and then now grew to be basically the, if not one of the largest
social networks in the world, do you see Librex as potentially scaling to be beyond even college
campuses, but encompassing the whole world? So it's a long timeline. I'll say this, this gets
back to like, where did Facebook go wrong? Cause clearly they did a lot right. And we can only,
we can only speculate about what the objectives were of the founders of Facebook. You know,
I'm sure they've said some things, but it's always interesting to know what the, what the
mythology is versus what the truth is of the matter. So perhaps they, and they've been very
successful. I mean, they, they've taken over the world to some extent. At the same time,
the goals of Librex are to create these positive communities and these open conversations where
people can have real conversation and connection in their communities in a vulnerable and authentic
way. And so to that end, which I imagine might be different than the goals of a Facebook, for example,
one thing that we want to do is keep things intimate and community based. So each school
is its own community. And perhaps you could have a slightly broader community. Maybe you
could have a, I know the California system is an obvious one pack time might be an obvious one.
And we can think about that. But fundamentally the unit, the unit of community is your school or
your school community. So that, that, that's one difference that I think will help us. The other
thing is that we're scaling intentionally, meaning that when we expand to a school, we have moderators
in place. We have moderators who understand that school's environment in a very personal level.
And we're growing responsibly. We're growing as we're ready, both technologically, but also
socially, you know, but as we think we have the tools to preserve the community and to
encourage the community to create the sort of content that we want them to create. And, you
know, there's a lot of ways to define community. So first of all, there's geographic community as
well. But the way you're kind of defining community with Yale and Dartmouth is the email, right?
That's what gives you, there's a power to the email in the sense that
that's how you can verify, efficiently verify yourself with being a single individual in the
university. In that same way, you can verify your employment at a company, for example,
like Google, Microsoft, Facebook. Do you see your potentially taking on those communities? That'd
be fascinating. Getting like anonymous community conversations inside Google.
100% crossed my mind. To some extent, this is something where
I understand the college experience. I understand the need. And I've never worked at Google.
I don't know if they would hire me. Hopefully, maybe as a product manager.
I think if there's a community that needs this product and has that will, which I think,
especially as Librex continues to grow and expand and change and learn. Because that's what we're
doing is we're learning with each community. It's not just about growing. It's about learning
from each of these communities and iterating. I think it's quite likely there are going to be
all sorts of communities that could use this tool to improve their culture, so to speak.
So forgive me. I'm not actually that knowledgeable about the history of attempts of building social
networks to solve the problem that you're solving. But I was made aware that there was an app or at
least a social network called Yik Yak that had a similar kind of focus. I think the thing you've
spoken about that differs between Librex and Yik Yak is that Yik Yak was defined. Am I pronouncing
it right even? You're good? I'm good. I'm at the founder, so I can confirm. You can confirm. Cool.
Okay. You can confirm. Cool. That it was constrained to a geographical area versus to the actual
community and that somehow had fundamental actual differences in social dynamics that resulted.
But can you speak to the history of Yik Yak? How does Librex differ? What lessons have you learned
from that? Oh, and I should say that I guess there was controversial, I don't know. I didn't look at
the details, but I'm guessing there's a bunch of racism and hate speech and all that kind of stuff
that emerged on Yik Yak. Okay. So that's an example of like, okay, here's how it goes wrong
when you have an anonymity on college campuses. So how does Librex going to do better?
Yeah, Yik Yak had a lot of problems, content problems, but the content problems go deeper
than maybe what the press would reveal. There's a lot to say. And part of it is parsing exactly what
to talk about when it comes to Yik Yak. And when you talk about startups, I mean, you know this,
you know startups, and you look at the postmortem, it's almost never what people think it is. And
oftentimes these things are somewhat unknowable. And the degree to which people seeking confirmation
bias to somebody seeking closure look to find a singular attribute that caused the failure.
It feels like the little details often make all the difference.
Yes. And I think the details are so little that as humans, we are not capable of parsing even
what they are. But I'll tell you my perspective on it, knowing that I am also a human with biases.
In this particular case, very significant biases. So I started building Librex for
its own merits. At first, I wasn't aware of Yik Yak, but as I started to talk to people about
this platform I was building, I was made aware of Yik Yak and I built it from day one with
a lot of the issues Yik Yak had in mind. So as you said, the one difference between Yik Yak is
the geographical versus community-based aspect. Going along with that, one thing I realized
by researching social media sites is that the majority of the negative content, the content
that's terrible and breaking all the rules is created by really, and the people who are not
reformable, so to speak, the people who are not showing the best part of the human experience.
Yeah. It's a really small minority, right? Yeah.
I remember I was listening to the founder of 4Cham Moot talk about this, how one guy was able to
basically destroy large swaths of his community. Yeah. That's part of what makes it exciting for
that minority is how much power they can have. So if you're predisposed to think in this way,
it's exciting that you can walk into, like I mentioned the party before. You have a party of
a lot of positive people, and it feels especially if you don't have much power in this world,
it feels exceptionally empowering to destroy the lives of many. And if you think this way,
it's a problem. But I'm hopeful that you're right that in most cases, it's going to be a minority
of people. I think it is, and that's what the research has showed. And one really powerful
thing is that we can really actively control who comes in and out of our community based on the
.edu verification. And we can also control who's not in our community because we have that lever
where each account is associated with a.edu. So that's the first point I would put out,
point out there. Second point is controlled expansion, meaning that we have community moderation.
We have this panel that allows the moderators to see all of the highly downloaded content,
all of the reported content, all the flagged content and look through it and decide what they
like and what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. And we ping every moderator when
there's a report. So things are taken down pretty quickly. And we have our standards. And we have,
I think above all of that, we have a mission. And it's a community based mission. Yikyak was
more of a fun app. And by its own admission, it was a place where people could enjoy themselves
and could sort of yak. Yikyak, chit chat. We have a bigger purpose than that, frankly. And
I think that shows in the people who self select to be on that app, to be on Librex and to be on
Yikyak, respectively. The last thing I'll say is Yikyak was very few characters. It was a Twitter
esk platform. And that doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of nuance. It doesn't allow for a
tremendous amount of conversation. Librex is much more long form. And so the kind of posts that you'll
get on Librex can span pages. They're like, what people are starting to realize is that they can
reach a lot more people at a lot more pertinent of a time, a lot more quickly by posting their
thoughts on Librex than if they went to their school newspaper. And I think the school newspapers
might be a little worried about that. But more importantly, we're connecting people in this
way where long form communication with nuance that takes into account everything that's happening
in the community temporally is really available at Librex and not really communicable in 240 or
480 or whatever the number of characters the acts were bound to. And then I could talk about the
history of Yikyak if you want me to go further. They started, I think they were at 12 schools
and then Spring Break it. People told their friends, look at this app,
a thousand schools signed up and we're had active communities. They had a problem on their hands.
I see. And then the high schools come on board. Yeah. I think a lot of the things you said ring
true to me, but especially the vision one, which I do think having a vision in the leadership,
having a mission makes all the difference in the world. That's both for the engineers that are
building, like the team that's building the app, the moderation and users because they kind of,
you know, the mission carries itself through the behavior of the people on the social network.
As a small tangent, let me ask you something about Parler, but it's less about Parler and
more about AWS. So AWS removed Parler from his platform, you know, for whatever reasons,
doesn't really matter. But the fact that AWS would do this was really, really bothered me personally
because I saw AWS as the computing infrastructure. And I always thought that part could not put a
finger on its scale. And I don't know what your thoughts are, like, were you bothered by Parler
being removed from AWS? And how does that affect how you think about the computing infrastructure
on which Librex is based? I was bothered not so much by Parler specifically being taken out of AWS,
but more the fact that something that's like a highway, something that people rely on, that people
build on top of, that people assume is going to be somewhat position agnostic, like a road that
people drive on is becoming ideologically sort of discriminatory. And of course, mind you,
Amazon can do what it wants. It's a private company. And I support the rights of private
companies. I just on an ethical and sort of a deep moral level, I wonder like, at what point
should a company sort of be agnostic in that regard and let developers build on top of their
infrastructure? And where does that responsibility hold? Yes, it makes you hope that there's going
to be, from a capitalistic sense, competitors to AWS will say like, we're not going to put our
finger on the scale. I mean, on the highway is a good sort of example. It's like if a privately
owned highway said, you know, we're no longer going to allow, we're only going to allow electric
vehicles. And a bunch of people in this world would be like, yes, because electric is good for
the environment. And, you know, yes, but then you have to consider the like the slippery slope
nature of it, but also like the negative impact on the lives of many others. And what that means
for innovation and for like, competition, again, in a capitalistic sense. So there's some nature,
there's some level to this hierarchy of our existence that we should not allow to manipulate
what's built on top of it, it should be truly infrastructure. And it feels like compute is
storage and compute is the that layer, like it shouldn't be messed with. I haven't seen anybody
really complained about it, like in terms of government, and I'm not even sure government is
the right mechanism to policy and regulation to step in. Because again, they do a messy job of
fixing things. But I do hope there's competitors to AWS to make AWS and step up. Because I do
think, you know, I'm a fan of AWS, except this service, it's a good service until this until
yeah, until they rip out the rug. And the point is, it's not that necessarily their decision
was a bad one with parlor, in particular, it's that like, the slippery slope nature of it,
but also the it takes the good actors, they're creating amazing products and makes them more
fearful. And when you're more fearful, it's the same reason that anonymity is a tool that you
don't create the best thing you could possibly create when you're fearful, you don't create.
That's right. I think we kind of talked about it a little bit. But I wonder if we can kind of revisit
it a little bit. I talked to a guy named Ronald Sullivan, who's a faculty at Harvard Law Professor.
He was on the legal defense team, he was the lawyer for Harvey Weinstein, and Aaron Hernandez
for the double murder case. So he takes on these really difficult cases of unpopular figures,
because he believes like that's the way you test that we believe in the rule of law. But he was,
there's a big protest in Harvard to get him, basically censor him and to get him to no longer
be faculty dean, all those kinds of things. And it was by minority of students, but it was a huge
blowback, obviously in the public, but also inside Harvard, like that's not okay. He stands for the
very principles at the founding of Harvard and at the principles of the founding of this country
and the law and so on. But the basic argument is that it was about safe spaces, that it's unsafe to
have somebody who is basically supporting Harvey Weinstein. What do you think about this whole
idea of safe spaces on college campuses? Because it feels like the mission of Librex is pushing back
against the idea of safe spaces. I think safe spaces are fine when they're within people's
private lives, within their homes, within their religious organizations. I think the problem
becomes when the institution starts encouraging or backing safe spaces, because what are people
being safe from? And oftentimes it seems like there's this idea that the harm that's being
attempted to be mitigated is the harm of confronting opinions you disagree with,
opinions you might find repugnant. And if this is conflated with a need for safety,
then that's where the idea of liberal arts education sort of dies. Of course, it's complicated and we
still want to have safe intellectual environments. But the way that I hear the term safe space used
today, I think it doesn't really have a place within the intellectual context.
Yeah, it's funny. I mean, this is why Librex is really exciting is it's pushing those difficult
conversations. And I'd love to see, ultimately, there does seem to be an asymmetry of power
that results in the concept of safe spaces and hate speech being redefined in the slippery
slope kind of way where it means basically anything you want it to mean. And it basically is used to
silence people. To silence people, they're like good, thoughtful experts.
Also, on that, I would say it has not just a pragmatic purpose, which is the silencing,
but also sort of an ideological purpose, which is an linguistic purpose, which is to conflate words
with unsafety and harm and violence, which is what you kind of see on a cultural linguistic
level is happening all around us right now is that this idea that words are harm is very dangerous
and slippery concept. I mean, you don't have to slip that far to see why that's a problem.
Once we start making words into violence and we start criminalizing words, we get into
some really authoritarian territory. Things that I think, I mean, myself and my background,
I don't know how much we have to go into it, but things that my ancestors certainly would be worried
about. What's your background? I'm a child of Holocaust survivors and program survivors. So
yeah, I mean, me as well from different directions, I come from the Soviet Union. So
there's, well, like in most of us, hate and love runs through our blood from our history.
You mentioned MIT is being added to Librax. Has it already been added? Yes, it was added today.
Today. Okay. So let me ask you, this is exciting because I don't know what your thoughts are about
this, but I'll tell you from my perspective, if you're in a lot of MIT folks listen to this,
I would love it if you join Librax. It'd be interesting to explore conversations
on several topics inside MIT, but one of the most moving that hasn't been discussed at all,
except in little flourishes here and there, is the topic of Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, there's been a huge amount of like impact that the connections of various faculty to Jeffrey
Epstein and the various things that been said had on MIT, but it feels like the difficult
conversation haven't had been had. It's the administration trying to clean up and give a
bunch of BS to try to pretend like, let's just hide this part. Like nothing is broken, nothing to
see here. Here's a bad dude that did some bad things and some faculty that kind of misbehaved
a little bit because they're a little bit clueless. Let's all look the other way. Harvard did this
much better by the way. They completely, it's almost like people pretend like Harvard didn't
have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, but I think I'd be curious to hear what those conversations
are because there's conversations on the topic of like, well, obviously sort of sexual assault and
disrespecting women on any kind of level within academia, but just women in general.
That's an important topic to talk about various, many sets of difficult conversations.
And the other topic is funding for research. Like, what are we okay taking money from and
what are we not okay taking money from? There's a lot of just interesting,
difficult conversations to be had. I've worked with people who refuse to take money from DOD,
Department of Defense, for example, because in some indirect or direct way, you're funding
military industrial complex, all those kinds of things. I think with Jeffrey Epstein, it's even
more stark this contrast of like, well, what is and isn't ethical to take money from? And I just
think, forget academia, I think there's just a lot of interesting deep human discussions to be had,
and they haven't been. And there's been somebody, I don't know if you're familiar with Eric Weinstein,
who has been outraged by the fact that nobody's talking about Jeffrey Epstein.
Nobody's having these difficult conversations. And Eric himself has had a sort of complicated
journey through academia, in the sense that he's a really kind of renegade thinker in many kinds
of ways. I'm not sure if you know who Eric is by any chance. I heard the name. I actually checked
out Zev. Zev. It was heartening for me to see that I was not the youngest person on this podcast.
You're the second youngest. Second youngest. That's hilarious.
But Eric has, he's kind of a renegade thinker. He's a mathematical physicist with, I believe,
a PhD at Harvard. And he spends some time at MIT and so on. But he speaks to the fact that sort of
there's a culture of conformity and so on. And if you're somebody who's a bit outside of the box,
a bit weird and whatever dimension of weird, that makes you actually kind of interesting
that the system kind of wants to make you an outcast, wants to throw you out. And so he kind
of opposes that whole idea. He's the perfect person to have conversations with in this kind
of librex kind of context of anonymity. Because I'll tell you the few conversations that came
across and they were very quickly silenced. And I'm troubled by it. I'm not sure what to think
of it. Is there's a few threads inside MIT, like on a mailing list, discussing Marvin Minsky. I
don't know if you know who that is. He's an AI researcher. He's a seminal figure in AI before
your time. But one of the most important people in the history of artificial intelligence.
And there was a discussion on a thread that involved
the interaction between Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein. That conversation was quickly shut down.
One person was pushed out of MIT, Richard Stallman, who was one of the key figures in the
because of that, because he wanted some clarity about the situation. But he's also
he spoke like we mentioned earlier without grace, right? But he was quickly punished by the
administration because of a few people protesting. And just that conversation,
I guess what bothered me most is it didn't continue. It didn't expand. There was no
like complexity. And it was there was a hunger that was clear behind that conversation,
especially for me. I'd like to understand Marvin Minsky was one of the reasons I wanted
to come to MIT. He's passed away. But he's one of the key figures in the field that I deeply
care about artificial intelligence. And I thought that his name was dragged through the mud through
that situation. And without ever being like resolved. And so it's unclear to me, like,
what am I supposed to think about all this? And the only way to come to a conclusion there is to
keep talking. It's like the thing we started this conversation with about truth is like
is conversation. So in that sense, I'd love if people on Librex, perhaps in other places,
but it seems like Librex is a nice platform to discuss Marvin Minsky, to discuss
Jeffrey Epstein, to learn from it, to grow from it, to see how we can make MIT better.
As I'm still one of the people I've always dreamed of being at MIT. And it was a dream come true
in many ways. And I still believe that MIT is one of the most special places in this world,
like many other universities. Universities in general is a truly special man. It hurts my
heart when people speak poorly of academia. I understand what they mean. They're very correct.
But there is much more, in my opinion, that's beautiful about academia. And that's broken.
I mean, I don't know if you have something to comment. It doesn't necessarily need to be about
Jeffrey Epstein, but there's these difficult things that come up that test the academic community,
right? That it feels like conversation is the only way to resolve it.
I think people have a natural need for closure. And it's not just, I'm not as plugged into the
what academics are talking about as you would be lax, but I even-
Kiss these days, no respect for Minsky.
Exactly. I mean, especially in the AI community, I'm not necessarily a programmer.
But what I will say is that people come to Librex and we always see a huge spike in users
whenever there's like a tragedy on campus or something where people need closure.
Recently, there was a suicide just the other day on Yale's campus. And people were just coming
to pay respects and to sit rest in peace and speak also about what might have led to an
environment where people are drawn to these terrible results.
So just having a conversation is important there? Because it brings closure.
People need the space, especially when no one wants to go out and put their head above,
be the longest blade of grass on that one because of the stigma, people need to be able to speak.
Yeah, that fear really bothers me, the fear that silences people, like were they self-censor,
were they self-silence? Well, you've created an amazing place. I'm kind of interested in your
struggle and your journey of creating positive incentives because it's a problem in a very
different domain that I'm also interested in. So I love robotics. I love human-robot interaction.
And so I believe that most people are good and we can bring out the best in human nature.
Social networks is a very tricky space to do that in. So I'm glad you're taking on the problem
and I'm glad you have the mission that you do. I hope you succeed. But you mentioned offline
that you used to be into chess. Tell me about your journey through chess.
Sure. I was a very competitive tournament player growing up until about like 13. I got,
for the chess fans, I got through around 2000, USCF. So I was a competitive player,
especially my age group, and that actually led me to poker. I was playing a tournament
and what happens is when you're like a very strong 13-year-old and you're playing locally,
if you want to match, you're going to end up playing a lot of adults. And I ended up playing
this mid-40s guy who, we played a really strong game. He actually beat me. I still remember the
game and think, oh, I should have played that move instead of that one. But after the game,
we had a post-mortem. It was this me, I think I was 13 at the time in this 40-year-old,
like hanging over this chessboard and looking over the moves. And even at that, even at my age,
it occurred to me that this guy was absolutely brilliant. And after the post-mortem, not only
by the way in chess, but just like in the way he articulates his thoughts as some people are,
after the post-mortem, I went and looked him up online and I found out that he was a World
Series of Poker Champion. And his name is Bill Chen. And I haven't really kept up with him except
one time there was another chess tournament when I was around 14. And I followed him into an elevator
as he was leaving the chess hall, pretending that I was going to go up just because I wanted to,
I just wanted to talk to him. And I suggested a sequel or some changes that I thought he'd
should make for his book. And he was like, actually, I was thinking of doing the same thing,
which is incredibly validating to my 14-year-old or 15-year-old self. But I really haven't
kept up with him. So, it's a shout out to him. And then he wrote a book called The Mathematics
of Poker that I started reading. And that, first of all, kickstarted my interest in game theory
and second of all, in poker. So, it started from chess and then poker. And I started with Bitcoin
poker and had a lot of success with that, met a lot of amazing friends, learned a ton about,
I mean, I think about entrepreneurship as well as taking risks, reasonable risks,
positive expected value risks, and also just growing as a person and mathematician.
And what's, did you say Bitcoin poker? Yeah, what's Bitcoin poker? So, you have to understand,
I was 14 years old, right? Yes. So, how is a 14-year-old with wonderful parents who care about
him and probably don't want him playing poker, going to start playing poker? Because I wanted,
I wanted the challenge. I love the challenge. I love the competition. And I realized the answer
was probably Bitcoin because the implications of that. And they had these free roll tournaments,
which for those of you who don't know what free rolls are, there's these promotional tournaments
that sites put on where they'll put like a few dollars in. And then thousands of people sign up
and the winners get like a dollar. And I started there and I worked my way up. And that's amazing.
What's your sense about from that time to today of the growth of the cryptocurrency community?
I'm actually having like four or five conversations with Bitcoin proponents,
Bitcoin Maximus, and like all these, I'm just having all these cryptocurrency conversations
currently because there's so many brilliant, like technically brilliant, but also financially
and philosophically brilliant people in those communities. It's fascinating with the explosion
of impact. And also, if you look into the future, the possible revolutionary impact
on society in general, but what's your sense about this whole growth of Bitcoin?
I'm definitely less knowledgeable on the currency. Again, like programming,
it was a means to an end. What I will say is that there was this amazing community that grew out
of it. And you'd have people who were willing to stake me or have me be their horse and they're
my backer for having never met me for literally full Bitcoin tournaments, like full Bitcoin
entry fee tournaments. And I get a percentage of the profits and they get a percentage.
And to have that level of community for that degree of money, I mean, it gives you hope about
the potential for humans to act in mutual best interests with a degree of trust.
Yeah, there's a really fascinating, strong community there. But speaking of like bringing
out the best of human nature, it's a community that's currently struggling a little bit
in terms of their ability to communicate in a positive, inspiring way. Like the Bitcoin folks,
and we talk about this a lot, they, I honestly think they have a lot, a lot of love in their
hearts and minds, but they just kind of naturally, because the world has been
institutions and the centralized powers have been sort of mocking and fighting them for many years
that they've become sort of worn down and cynical. And so they tend to be a little bit more aggressive
and negative on the internet in the way they communicate, especially on Twitter. And it's
just created this whole community of basically being derisive and mocking and trolling and all
this kind of stuff. But people are trying to, as the Bitcoin community grows, as the cryptocurrency
community grows, they're trying to revolutionize that aspect too. So they're trying to find the
positive core and grow and grow in that way. So it's fascinating because I think all of us
are trying to find the positive aspects of ourselves and trying to learn how to communicate
in a positive way online. It's like the internet has been around, social networks haven't been around
that long. We're trying to, we're trying to figure this thing out. Let me ask you the ridiculous
question. I don't know if you have an answer, but who is the greatest chess player of all time in
your view? So since you like chess, you talk about- That's on how you define it. But if you're
talking about raw skill, like if you put everyone across time into a tournament together, Carlson
would win. I don't think that's particularly controversial. Oh, you mean like with the same
exact skill level? Exactly. Magnus Carlson, okay. Now, if you talk about political importance,
I think Bobby Fisher is, you know, he's the only one that people still, when you go to someone
on the street, they know Bobby Fisher because of what he represented, right? Who do you think is
more famous on the street, Garry Kasparov or Bobby Fisher? Bobby in America, Bobby Fisher.
You think so? Yes. That's interesting. I think we're going to have to put that to the test.
Yeah, maybe it's, maybe it's more reflective of the community that I was a part of, but yeah.
Also in the community, you're a part of like young minds playing chess. Bobby Fisher was a
superstar in terms of like the roots. Yeah, I think so because he's American and you know,
he stood up against the big bad Russians at the time and you know, unfortunately, he had a very
bad downfall, but you know, for our geopolitical situation, he meant a lot. And then if you talk
about compared to contemporaries, actually, I would say Paul Murphy was a bit of a throwback was,
he's one of those geniuses that was just head and shoulders above everyone else.
Is there somebody that inspired your own play like as a young mind? Yeah, I really like McHale
tall. So like you see you were, I think he was very aggressive, right? Yeah, very tactical.
Yeah. Which is funny because I found that I was better at like sort of slow methodical play
than quick tactics. But I just, I mean, there's something beautiful about the creativity. And
that's something I always latched onto as being a creative player, being a creative person. I mean,
chess doesn't really reward creativity as much as a lot of other things, especially entrepreneurial
pursuits, which I think is part of the reason why I sort of grew out of it. But I always was
attracted to the creativity that I did see in chess. So let me ask the flips the the other
because you said poker, is there somebody that stands out to use could be the greatest poker
player of all time? Like who do you admire? That's a more controversial one, because
these chess players are such like, first of all, there's more an objective standard. And second
of all, there's like, they're like almost like cultural figures to me. Whereas poker players
are more like live living, they feel more like, yeah, they feel more accessible. But they also
have like personalities. Yeah, poker have like Phil Ivey's personality, they're vices, they have
quirks, they have humor. Like, I guess we've seen videos of them. Yeah, because it's such a recent
development. Let's say one person who I admire so much. And like, if I could like have a dinner
list of people that I want to have dinner with, like, maybe it'll happen now, actually. I would
love to have dinner with them. Phil Galfont, who I don't most people probably won't know. Yeah.
But on this podcast, but the way, first of all, he democratized poker learning in like the
mathematical nitty gritty, how do you get good at poker type sense to the entire world. And
like an unprecedented way he was, he gave he had this gift that he had learned and distilled by
working with some of the greatest poker minds. And he just democratized it through his website.
And I learned a ton from him. And not only that, but you just listen to him think. And it's almost
like a philosophical meditation, the way that he breaks things down and thinks about these different
elements and has such a holistic thought process. It's like watching a genius work. And, you know,
he's also just a nice, fun, sociable guy that like you can, you can imagine being at your
dinner table. Yeah. All that combined. Which is not true for a lot of poker players, right?
A lot of them are dark. To say the least. Yes. I like, I really like the, what is it, Canadian,
Daniel Negrano. He's also a nice guy. He's also a nice guy, but he's also somebody who is able
to express his thoughts about poker really well, but also in an entertaining way. He seems to be
able to predict cards better than anybody I've ever seen. Like what, did you watch the challenge?
What's the challenge? He lost like a million dollars recently to Doug Polk. He lost a million
dollars to Doug Polk heads up online. It's really interesting. Yeah. It's awesome to watch these
guys work. So I know you're 21. 21. 21. So asking you for advice is a little bit funny, but
at the same time, not because you've created a social network. You've created a startup from
nothing as we talked about earlier, like without knowing how to program, you've programmed. I mean,
you've taken this whole journey that a lot of people I think would be really inspired by. So
given that and given the fact that 20 years from now, you probably laugh at the advice you're going
to give now. Absolutely. I hope so. If I don't laugh at the advice I give now, something went
desperately wrong, right? Yeah. So do you have advice for people that want to follow in your
footsteps and create a startup, whether it's in the software app domain or whether it's anything
else? So I'll speak specifically about social media apps. Yes. Try to keep it as narrow as possible
so I can laugh as little as possible when I'm 41. And what I would say is that if you're like a 21,
22-year-old who's looking at me and being like, I want to do something like this,
what I would say is you probably know better than just about anyone. And if you have a feeling in
yourself that this is something that I have to do, and this is something I could imagine myself
doing for the next 10 years, because if you're successful, you are going to have to do it for
the next 10 years. And through the ups and the downs, through the amazing interviews with Lex,
and through the not so amazing articles you might have with other people, right? And you're
going to have to ride those highs and lows, and you're going to have to believe in what you're
doing. But if you have that feeling, what I would say is listen to as few people as possible,
because people are experts in domains, but when it comes to what's hot and what makes sense in a
social context, you are the authority as a young person who's going through these things and living
in your sort of milieu. And I mean, I've talked to, at this point, so many experts, experts,
so many investors, VCs, you'd be amazed at the advice I've gotten, advice I've gotten.
So there's like a minefield of bad advice. That's the hardest part, I think, for young
people. And it's the thing, when people, like, I help, I help Yellies all the time who ask, like,
I never turned down when a founder asked me to have a conversation, I never turned it down.
I'm always there for them. And the number one thing I worry about is that at Yale, we're taught
implicitly and explicitly that you listen to the adult in the room, you listen to the person with
the highest, you know, pay grade. And it's devastating, because that's how innovation
dies. And you know, yeah, it's intimidating to like, you talk to VC, who probably made worth a
billion dollars. Yeah, billion dollars. And they're going to tell you, you know, all the,
all the successful startups, they helped fund or even just a successful business owner.
It's going to tell you some advice. And it's hard psychologically to think that they might be wrong.
Yeah, what you're saying, that's the only way you succeed.
The only way you succeed, because if they knew what they were doing, they would have built it
themselves. And what's especially hard is people go, Oh, of course, you know,
I'll listen to the people's, I'll listen to their advice, but I'll know why it's wrong.
And then I'll, and I'll do my own thing. And that sounds great, the abstract,
but sometimes you can't always even put your finger on why they're wrong.
Yeah. And I think to have the conviction to say, you're wrong, and I can't tell you why,
but I still think I'm right. It's a rare thing, especially at like, it's very counterintuitive.
And you might even say it's hubris or arrogant. But I think it's necessary because a lot of
these things are, they're not things that you can really put into words until you see them in
action. Like a lot of them are kind of happy accidents. Yeah, it's been, it's been tough for me,
like as a, as a person who, like I'm very empathetic. So when people tell me stuff,
I kind of want to understand them. And it's been a painful process, especially people close to me.
Basically, everything I've done, especially in the recent few years,
there's a lot of people close to me who said not to do. And like my parents too, that's been a hard
one, is to basically acknowledge to myself that you don't know, like you don't, that everything
you're going to say by way of advice for me is not going to be helpful. Like I love my parents
very much. But like, they're just like, they don't get it. And as you put it beautifully,
it's very difficult to put your finger on exactly why. Because a lot of advice sounds reasonable.
That's the worst kind. Yeah. If it, if it sounds really good, that just means it's an earworm.
Like that's like a song that you hear on the radio. And then you're like,
you're having it in the car. And it's like, it's the same thing. The more, the better it sounds,
the more skeptical. Yeah. Reason is a bad drug. It should be very careful. Because like,
you know, the things that seem impossible, every major innovation, every major business
seems impossible at birth. But even not just the impossible things, I think, you know, you look
at like love, for example, it's very easy to give advice, to sort of point out all the ways you
can go wrong, or marriage, all the divorces that people go through, all the pain of years
that you go through the divorce, like the system of marriage, the marriage industrial complex,
all the money that's wasted, all those kinds of things. But that advice is useless when you're
in love. The point is to just pat the person in the back and say, go get him, kid. Like,
what is it? Goodwill hunting and went to see a bottle girl. Oh, yeah. That's a good movie.
I love that movie. But yeah, that that's, that took me a long time to figure out. I'm still
trying to fight through it, but especially when you're young, that's hard. But nothing in life is
worth accomplishing is easy. So. But I think it's really interesting to make that connection between
like startup advice and like your parents, because it's the exact same sort of mechanism
where when you're young, your parents are usually like right, right? And the experts are usually
right. And you know, if you listen to them and you follow their orders, you're going to go to
a school like Yale. And at a certain point, stops making sense. And I've seen my friends at Yale
go down paths because they just continued listening to their parents that I know in their heart of
hearts is not the right path for them. Yeah, you know what? That's how I see the education system.
The whole point is to guide you to a certain point in your life and everybody's point is different.
And your task is to at that point, to have a personal revolution and create your own path.
But no one tells you that nobody tells you that because they're they want you to keep following
the same path as they they're leading you towards like they're not going to say your whole job is
to eventually rebel. Yeah, that's how that's how rebellion works. You're not supposed to be told.
But that is the task they can take you just like you said, and depending who you are, they can
take you really far. But at a certain point, you have to rebel that could be getting you know,
that could be in your undergrad, that could be high school. Yeah, to be at any point,
one thing that I think played a pretty pivotal role. And I've never really mentioned this.
He might not even know the person about to tell you about in sort of me actually going out and
making Librex was that I was taking this graduate level math class, my sophomore year. And I met
this, I met this PhD student who was also in it and had considerable citations and also
startup experience. And I think he actually ended up being the CTO of a unicorn later on.
I've sort of lost touch with him, but we're still Facebook friends,
as it is in the 21st century. So and I was in a class and I was telling him,
I really want to I really want to make this thing, but I have no technical background.
And he disguised as computer genius, he worked under Dan Spielman at Yale. So he's a good guy,
right? And we were doing some math together. We were doing something on discrepancy for those of
you who really care about math, so combinatorics. And he just turns to me, he's like, I think you
could do it. Like what do you mean? You think I could do it? I think you could do it. And I was
like, really? But I respected this guy so much. His name was Young Duck. Shout out to Young Duck.
I respected this guy so much that I was like, if Young Duck says I can do it, and Young Duck is
legit genius, and he knows, and he knows me, because we were in two classes together and we
spent a lot of time together. If he thinks I can do it, then who am I to say I can't do it?
Yeah, you know, that's a lesson for mentorship is like,
Oh, he has no idea, probably.
Well, he might not even remember that interaction, which is funny. But the point is,
that when a crazy young kid comes up to you with a crazy dream, you know, every once in a while,
you should just pet him in the back and say, I believe in you. Like you can do it. If they look
up to you, that means your words have power. And if you say, no, no, come on, be like reasonable,
like, you know, finish your schoolwork kind of thing, like that's that's unreasonable to take
that leap. Now just finish your education, blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever the reasonable
advice is. Every once in a while, maybe often as a mentor, you should say, you know, go see about
a girl in California, or whatever the equivalent is. That was my moment. That was my good little
hunting moment. It's your good little hunting moment. Man, I miss Robin Williams as a special guy.
People love it. When I ask about book recommendations in general, of course,
your journey is just beginning. But is there something that jumps out to you,
technical fiction, philosophical, sci-fi, coloring books, blog posts you read somewhere
that had an impact on your life? Video games. Video games that you recommend to others. Minecraft,
manual. Manga. I mean, yeah, video, you can mention video games too. If there's something
that jumps out to you that just had like an impact. I guess I'll say, I really like the book, The
War of Art, which is a book about creative resistance and the creative struggle and what it means to
be creative. And part of what I see in this conversation and what you're doing, Lex, is
so much of the War of Art's idea is that you just keep writing and writing and writing until you
get to the new crap. And you just roll with it, right? And that's sort of what happens when you
have like three hour conversations with people is you can only have so much scripted or societally
constructed stuff until you get to the real you. And you have to show up. I mean, he's,
that book, that book is kind of painful. It's really painful. And it's not something I would
recommend for every part of it. But for what it did in my life at the time, it also kind of normalized,
I don't know, part of my coming of age story is part of it's about realizing that
I'm a creative person and person who needs to create. That's sort of a God given thing, I think,
for a lot of people. But it's something that I don't really feel like I can live without. And
part of it was realizing that even within some of these more rigid structures, it's okay that I
don't sort of fit in with them. And to hear about the struggles of other creatives was something
for my own self esteem and my own growing up that was really important to me. So I don't think the
I don't think the book itself might be perfect. But for what it did for my life, it was really
impactful. Yeah, I think exactly the words may not be exactly right by way of advice. But I think
the journey that a lot of creatives take by reading that book is kind of profound. He also
has another one called Turning Pro, I think, I mean, he in general espouses like, taking it
seriously. Like, if you have a creative mind and you want to create something special in this world,
go do it. It's not don't, you know, show up. And so many people at the blank page, so many people
would like tell me like, would encourage me either blatantly or through like implicit means to like
basically take the app less seriously. It's a good signal, by the way. It's a good signal because
my really close friends, the ones who have always supported me, they never said that because they
got it. They understood that was that that was my path. And they might be skeptical. They might be
like, I mean, one of my friends I remember told me like, I was always like taken aback about why
you were so certain this would work out. And he's like, I finally got it like once I saw it like
popping off. But like, before that, I just didn't get it. But like, he still supported me. And I
think, I think it's a really good signal. And actually, just the fact of going through this
process has made me socially feel so much more connected. And I've somewhat consolidated my
social life to some degree, but it's so much more vulnerable connected. And that's part of the creative
process. I have to thank for that, I think there's something that's like, unstoppable about the
creative mind. It's like, it's right there that fire. And I guess part of the part of the thing
that you're supposed to do is let that fire burn in whichever direction. And it's gonna hurt.
It's gonna hurt. Fire will hurt. But on the topic of video games, you mentioned Stanley Parable
offline. Is there, you said you play some video games. Is there a video game that you especially
love that you recommend I play, for example? Yeah, I'll mention it's actually freely in keeping
with what we've been talking about. It's the beginner's guide, which is what it was made by
the same guy, Davey Rendon, who made the Stanley Parable, which I briefly saw you. I just clicked
the video and then I went to sleep at 2am. And then, but I briefly saw you that you were looking at.
And it's a game that is better treated as art. And I think
I won't claim to understand the creator because that would be a cardinal sin to me as a creative
person. But it gets to the heart of a lot of the things that we've been talking about,
which is the creative mind. The game can be interpreted in a lot of ways in a feminist way.
It could be interpreted as story of friends. It could be interpreted as the story of critics
versus a creative. The way I like to interpret it, and I don't want to give out a way too much,
is the story of the creative part of your mind that creates just for the sake of creating,
meaning the part that creates for no rhyme or reason or clear meaning. It's almost ethereal
versus the part that you could call it the editor. You could call it the pragmatist. You could call
it the necessary force of ego in our lives. We can't totally be egoless, right? But we need
to be egoless to be creative. And how that sort of internal censure, what role does it play?
And how do we allow our creative minds to be creative? And yet, how do we still become useful?
Because, and it's funny that a video game, right, could have this in.
It's a fascinating attention, which reminds me about the ridiculous question every once in a while asked
about meaning and death. So this whole ride ends. You're at the beginning of the ride,
but it could end any day, actually. That's kind of the way human life works. You could die today.
You could die tomorrow. Do you think about your mortality? Do you think about death?
Do you meditate on it? And in that context, as the creative, but a pragmatist too,
as running a startup, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
Yeah, so on mortality, right? About three years ago, four years ago now, I was excited to go to
Yale. I was playing six hours of squash a day, which squash is a sport I love so much. And I was
really getting a lot better. And I was even thinking I could maybe walk on to the Yale team.
And I woke up one day. I felt really, really sick. I went and I decided not to go to squash that day.
And I know, I wanted to. I almost did. And you'll see how this story turns out.
You'll decide if I made the right choice. I decided not to go squash today. And I decided to get my
driver's license, or I had to get my driver's license, because I wanted to get a driver's
license before I, you know, it's just how young I am, before I went off to college,
because otherwise I might never get it. And I'm going back and I successfully got my driver's
license, brush him. And I go back to, I go back to my house and I decided I don't want to drive back
because I just feel so sick. Like things are spinning. I have the worst headache. I go home,
I run back right into my bed and feeling really sick to the point where I even like asked my mom
who is a doctor. I'm like, should I go to the hospital? And she's like, you can just wait it
out. I'm sure you'll get better. I like your mom. And then, you know, and then at one point I look
at my arms and they're like covered in this like red splotchy stuff. Yeah. And I'm like, mom,
I think she's like, yeah, we have to go. And so I go there and they're like, you've scarlet fever.
And they're like, there's nothing we can do. You should probably just go back home. So I go back
home. Six hours later, I wake up in the morning. They'd let me out at like 3am. They let me, I
come home in the morning and I feel this like a spear through my chest. And I never felt anything
like it. And I was, it was very disconcerting when you have a, because we're all used to different
sorts of pain, right? And that was sort of pain I never felt before. I suppose as an athlete,
you're used to like, you know, pain. So I tell my parents and immediately we hop back in the car,
we go up to the same hospital I was at six hours ago. And they initially didn't want to let me in.
And I was like, I have chest pain. They're like, oh, come on. Cause they're like, you're a healthy
guy. Wait your turn. I'm like, no, you don't understand. I have like a pain in my chest.
And then they let me in. They start doing tests on me. They like put something like in my back,
which is really scary. It's a huge needle. And I'm smiling because it's like one of the ways I
reduce stress, I guess, or deal with this sort of thing and make light of it. But like, know that,
you know, it's definitely very scary in the moment, shocking and scary. And they go and they,
they do a bunch of tests and they determined that a virus like attacked my heart. And I had myocarditis
and pericarditis. And they said I had maybe 25 to 35% chance at one point of dying. And so
I'm sitting in my, they admit me into the hospital. I'm in the bed in my bed for about three weeks.
And I'm just, I'm just standing there. And I had this moment also that I remember very specifically
where I was in so much pain that like I was crying not out of like emotional standpoint,
but actually just purely out of the pain itself. Like I could feel my heart in my chest. And when
I leaned back, I felt it touch my rib cage and feel horrible. So I couldn't go to sleep and lean
back. I had to lean forward all throughout the night, right? And I'm feeling my, and I'm feeling
my chest. I'm feeling this terrible pain in my chest. And I'm crying unstoppable. And I mean,
also maybe I should mention that at the time, I was someone who'd like refuse to take in anything
into my body that wasn't natural. And so a lot of the time I tried to be unmedicated. Eventually,
I didn't allow them to add a little medication to my body. But there's just so much uncertainty and
pain. And the first time I had to come to terms with mortality.
First of all, I think you still should have gone play squash. I mean, come on.
I mean, yeah, I thought you're, I thought you're serious about this.
You still carry that with you. Sort of
there is power to realizing the ride can end, right?
In very suddenly. Very suddenly. Yeah. And painfully. And, you know, it has
pragmatic application to like what you, to trajectories you take through life, right?
Something else that is worth noting is that I, for the next year, couldn't walk to my classes.
So I get to Yale. They put me in a medical single alone. And I have to get shuttled to all my classes.
I have to ask, I had to ask a few professors to even move classes so I could actually get there.
I can't move my book. I can't lift my book bags. I can't, I can't walk upstairs.
I spent like 12 hours a day in my dorm room, just like staring at the walls.
And more so, and more than that, all this like, you, I got to watch my body
like deteriorate and like the muscle like fall off of it because I was, I was taking these pills and
they're kind of catabolic. And for an 18 year old, I mean, I think every 18 year old has feelings about their body.
Man or woman. And you know, just seeing this, it's like you're watching sort of death transpire.
And you're also very fatigued because your heart's not at peak condition and you're thinking about the future.
And a lot of the things you enjoy have kind of been stripped away from you.
And I took a meditation practice, like started with like five minutes a day.
At my peak, I was at like 40 minutes a day, kept it up consistently for about two years.
And I started thinking about like, what do I want to do? And like, what do I care about?
And to get to your point, I think you're asking like, how does this carry forward, right?
I think I realized that, you know, there's an end and I realized that there are things I believe
and things that I believe that might not be so overtly popular, but that I truly think make the world a better place.
And in spite of, and basically, if my conditions provided, I wanted to make something that,
I wanted to do something that would make me feel sort of whole in that way.
Yeah. I mean, that's an amazing journey to take that time and to come out on the other end.
That's amazing. I did not realize like there was a long term struggle.
I think that's in the end, if you do succeed, will have a profound positive impact because
struggles ultimately like humbling, but also empowering. So I'm glad to see that.
But from the perspective of the creator of the other ridiculous question about meaning,
do you think about this kind of stuff?
Is that the meaning of life for you, the meaning of life for us descendants of Apes in general?
The first thing I'd like to say is that I think part of like, when we talk about the meaning of life,
part of it is the fact that we get to struggle with this question and we get to do it together for a long time.
And we sometimes, I think it's accepting that there's no meaning at all.
And sometimes I think it's accepting that we're even just parsing the phrase and thinking about the meaning of life.
I sometimes look, I'm very young. Again, I hope that anything I say now is going to be very different in the future
because I think life has so many meanings that it'll be crazy to see what I think in 20 years about the meaning of life.
Yeah, rise from the future, cut him some slack.
Please do. Perspective, perspective, perspective.
Having said that, I think part of what brings meaning to my life is things like this,
where we think about these things with people who are really, really, really on the ball
and we get to connect with these people. That certainly brings meaning to my life, human connection.
Yeah, this conversation is just another echo of the thing you're trying to create in the digital space, right?
Yes.
That's the same kind of magic from what I understand about what you're trying to create
is the same reason I fell in love with the long-form podcast thing like as a fan.
That's why I listened to long-form podcasts.
Is there something deeply human and genuine about the interchange through the voice?
But I do think that connection through text can be even more powerful.
I think about letters. I still write letters to Russia.
There's something powerful in letters.
When you put a lot of yourself in the words you say, in the words you write, that's powerful.
You can really communicate not just the actual semantic meaning of the words,
but a lot of who you are through those words and create real connections.
I hope you succeed there.
Listen, Ryan, I think this was an incredible conversation.
I'm glad that people like you are fighting the good fight for bringing out the best in human nature in the digital space.
I think that's a battleground where the good will win, like love will win.
I'm glad you're creating technology that does just that.
Thank you so much for wasting all your time for coming down.
I can't wait to see what you do in the future.
Thanks for talking today.
Thank you for having me.
Bam.
How many finger guns have you gotten at the end of the podcast?
Zero.
Two now.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ryan Schiller and thank you to all our sponsors.
All form, Magic Spoon, Better Help and Brave.
Click their links to support this podcast.
And now, let me leave you with some words from George Washington on March 15th, 1783.
If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.