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

Ryan Schiller (03:08.240)

like, and then we went to Dartmouth, and then quarantine hit. We opened to the rest of the

Ryan Schiller (03:14.240)

Ivy League, and now we have, and the Ivy League, for those who don't know, is Harvard, Yale,

Ryan Schiller (03:20.880)

Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and Penn. I got it all in one breath. What's the

Ryan Schiller (03:27.360)

younger side of the league? Penn? No. Columbia. I can't say that on camera. We'll edit it in post.

Ryan Schiller (03:34.400)

I don't know. I'll just say each of all eight of them, and then you can just like get it in.

Ryan Schiller (03:40.160)

Yeah. Penn, Harvard. There's actually a really nice software that people should check out,

Ryan Schiller (03:44.240)

like a service. It's using machine learning really nicely for podcast editing, where you can,

Ryan Schiller (03:50.160)

it learns the voice of the speaker, and it can change the words you said. It's like some deep

Ryan Schiller (03:56.560)

fake stuff. It's deep fake, but for positive applications. It's very interesting. It's like

Ryan Schiller (04:00.960)

the only deep fake positive application I've seen. I have a friend who's obsessed with deep fakes.

Ryan Schiller (04:05.120)

Yeah. What's great about, I think, deep fakes is that it's going to do the opposite of sort of

Ryan Schiller (04:10.000)

what's happening with our culture, where everyone will have plausible deniability. Yeah, exactly. I

Ryan Schiller (04:14.960)

mean, that's the hope for me is there's so many fake things out there that we're going to actually

Ryan Schiller (04:21.520)

be much more skeptical, and think, and take in multiple sources, and actually like reason,

Ryan Schiller (04:29.120)

like use common sense, and use like deep thinking to understand like what is true and what is not.

Ryan Schiller (04:34.640)

Because, you know, we used to have like traditional sources like the New York Times, and all these

Ryan Schiller (04:40.000)

kinds of publications that had a reputation. There are these institutions, and they're the source of

Ryan Schiller (04:45.200)

truth. And when you no longer can trust anything as a source of truth, you start to think on your

Ryan Schiller (04:50.400)

own. That gets part of the individual. That goes, that takes us way back to like where I came from,

Ryan Schiller (04:55.360)

the Soviet Union, where you can't really trust any one source of news. You have to think on your own.

Lex Fridman (05:00.320)

You have to talk to your friends. Tremendous amount of intellectual autonomy, don't you think?

Ryan Schiller (05:04.960)

Think about the societal consequences. Absolutely. I mean, we see so much decentralization in all

Ryan Schiller (05:10.880)

aspects of our digital lives now, but this is like the decentralization of thought. Yes. You

Ryan Schiller (05:18.720)

could say it's sadly, or I don't think it's sad, is decentralization of truth, where like truth is a

Ryan Schiller (05:25.600)

clustering thing, where you have these like this point cloud of people just swimming around, like

Ryan Schiller (05:32.160)

billions of them, and they all have certain ideas. And what's thought of as truth is almost like a

Ryan Schiller (05:39.280)

clustering algorithm. When you just get a bunch of people that believe the same thing, that's truth.

Lex Fridman (05:44.160)

But there's also another truth, and there may be like multiple truths, and it's almost will be like

Ryan Schiller (05:49.680)

a battle of truths. Maybe even the idea of truth will like lessen its power in society that there

Ryan Schiller (05:57.760)

is such a thing as a truth. Because like the downside of saying something is true is it's almost

Ryan Schiller (06:04.400)

the downside of what people like religious people call scientism, which is like once science has

Ryan Schiller (06:11.040)

declared something as true, you can't no longer question it. But the reality is science is a

Ryan Schiller (06:18.000)

moving mechanism. You constantly question, you constantly questioning, and maybe truth should be

Ryan Schiller (06:23.600)

renamed as a process, not a final destination. The whole point is to keep questioning, keep questioning,

Ryan Schiller (06:32.960)

keep discovering. Kind of like we're going backwards in time. So like back when people were

Ryan Schiller (06:40.080)

sort of finding their identities and we were less globalized, right? Like people would get together

Lex Fridman (06:46.160)

and they'd get together around common value system, common morals, and a common place. And those would

Ryan Schiller (06:50.960)

be sort of these clusters of their truth, right? And so we have all these different civilizations

Lex Fridman (06:56.080)

and societies across the world that created their own truths. We talk about the Jews and the

Ryan Schiller (07:01.520)

Talmud and Torah. We look at Buddhist texts. We can look at all sorts of different truths and how

Ryan Schiller (07:07.440)

many of them get at the same things, but many of them have different ideas or different articulations.

Ryan Schiller (07:12.240)

Yeah, Harari and sapiens, it rewinds that even farther back into like caveman times. That's the

Ryan Schiller (07:17.680)

thing that made us humans special, is who can develop these clusters of ideas, hold them in

Ryan Schiller (07:22.400)

their minds through stories, pass them on to each other, and it grows and grows. And finally, we have

Ryan Schiller (07:27.520)

Bitcoin. Which money is another belief system that has power only because we believe in it.

Lex Fridman (07:37.440)

And is that truth? I don't know, but it has power. And it's carried in the minds of millions

Lex Fridman (07:44.000)

and thereby has power. But back to Librex. So what's the founding story? What's the founding

Ryan Schiller (07:51.680)

principles of Librex? Sure. So I was on campus as a freshman, and I was talking to my friends.

Ryan Schiller (07:58.720)

Many of them felt like it was hard to raise your hand in class to ask a question. They really felt

Ryan Schiller (08:04.480)

like even outside the classroom, it was hard to be vulnerable. And the thing you have to understand

Ryan Schiller (08:08.320)

about Yale is it's not that big a place. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows you,

Ryan Schiller (08:13.680)

basically. And people come to these schools, first of all, they're home for people, and they want to

Ryan Schiller (08:19.680)

be themselves. They want to feel like they can be authentic. They want to make real friendships.

Lex Fridman (08:23.120)

And second of all, it's a place where people go for intellectual vitality to explore important

Ryan Schiller (08:28.960)

ideas and to grow as thinkers. And fortunately, due to the culture, my friends expressed that

Ryan Schiller (08:35.840)

it was very difficult to do that. And I felt it, too. And then I couldn't talk to my professors.

Lex Fridman (08:40.640)

And I remember I talked to one specific global affairs professor, and I was taking his class,

Lex Fridman (08:46.240)

and his area of expertise was in the Middle Eastern conflict. And I went to him and I said,

Ryan Schiller (08:50.640)

Professor, we're almost finished this class. And we haven't even gotten to sort of the reason I

Ryan Schiller (08:57.040)

originally wanted to take the class was to hear about your perspective on the Middle Eastern

Ryan Schiller (09:00.400)

conflict. Because something I'd learned at Yale, and this is maybe the most important thing,

Lex Fridman (09:04.720)

but I'll flush it out a bit. Something I've learned at Yale is that you can learn all sorts

Ryan Schiller (09:11.600)

of things from a textbook. And what you kind of go to Yale to do is to get the opinions of the

Ryan Schiller (09:17.120)

experts that go beyond the textbook and to have those more in depth conversations. And so that's

Ryan Schiller (09:22.080)

sort of the added value of going to a place like Yale and taking a course there as opposed to

Ryan Schiller (09:26.160)

just reading a textbook. But also interact with that opinion.

Ryan Schiller (09:29.040)

Exactly. To interact with that opinion, to hear it, to respond to it, to push back on it,

Lex Fridman (09:34.960)

and to have that with some great minds. And there really are great minds at Yale,

Lex Fridman (09:39.520)

don't get me wrong. It's still a place of tremendous brilliance.

Lex Fridman (09:44.800)

So I'm talking to this professor, right? And I'm like, I haven't heard your area of expertise.

Lex Fridman (09:48.960)

And I'm like, are we going to get to it? What's the deal? And this is during office hours,

Ryan Schiller (09:54.080)

mind you. So we're one on one. He says, Ryan, to be honest, I used to teach this area every

Ryan Schiller (09:59.680)

single year. In fact, I would do a section on it, which is like a small seminar, like breakaway

Ryan Schiller (10:04.080)

from the class where he would talk to the students in small groups and explain his perspective,

Ryan Schiller (10:10.000)

his research and have a real debate about it, like around a Harkness table. And he said,

Ryan Schiller (10:15.600)

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

Ryan Schiller (10:22.800)

my job was at risk. And I realized the best course of action was basically just not to approach the

Ryan Schiller (10:28.400)

topic. And so now I just don't even mention it. And he's like, you can say whatever you want, but

Lex Fridman (10:35.760)

I'm not going to be a part of it. And it's a real shame. It's a real loss to

Ryan Schiller (10:40.000)

all of the students who I think came to the school to learn from these brilliant professors.

Ryan Schiller (10:45.920)

In that context of these world experts, the problem seems to be that reporting mechanism

Ryan Schiller (10:54.960)

where there's a disproportionate power to a complaint of a young student, a complaint that

Ryan Schiller (11:01.120)

an idea is painful or an idea is disrespectful to, you know, or ideas creating an unsafe space.

Lex Fridman (11:10.080)

And the conclusion of that, I mean, I'm not sure what to do with that because it's a

Ryan Schiller (11:15.520)

single reporting, maybe a couple, but that has more power than the idea itself. And that's

Ryan Schiller (11:23.200)

strange. I don't know how to fix that in the administration except to fire everybody. So like

Ryan Schiller (11:29.120)

this is to push back against this storyline that academia is somehow fundamentally broken.

Ryan Schiller (11:35.520)

I think we have to separate a lot of things out. Like one is you have to look at faculty and you

Ryan Schiller (11:42.320)

have to look at the administration. And like at MIT, for example, the administration does, tries

Ryan Schiller (11:51.280)

to do well, but they're the ones that often lack courage. They're often the ones who are the source

Ryan Schiller (11:57.840)

of the problem. When people criticize academia, and I'll just speak to myself, you know, I'm

Ryan Schiller (12:05.120)

willing to take heat for this, is they really are criticizing the administration, not the faculty

Ryan Schiller (12:11.760)

because the faculty oftentimes are the most brilliant, the bolder thinkers that you think.

Ryan Schiller (12:19.600)

Whenever you talk about we need like the truth to be spoken, the faculty are often the ones

Ryan Schiller (12:25.200)

who are in the possession of the deepest truths in their mind in that sense. And they also have

Ryan Schiller (12:30.560)

the capacity to truly educate in the way that you're saying. And so it's not broken, like

Ryan Schiller (12:37.360)

fundamentally, but there's stuff that like needs, that's not working that well. It needs to be fixed.

Ryan Schiller (12:42.800)

You kind of took my words. That's what I thought you were going to ask me if I think the Ivy League

Ryan Schiller (12:46.240)

is broken. That's totally, that's exactly it. So you don't think, yeah. So on the question,

Lex Fridman (12:50.720)

do you think the Ivy League is broken? Like what, how do you think about it? The academia in general,

Ryan Schiller (12:55.680)

I suppose, but Ivy League still, I think it represents some of the best qualities of academia.

Lex Fridman (13:00.960)

What more is there to say there? I think the Ivy League is producing tremendous thinkers to this

Ryan Schiller (13:05.520)

day. I think the culture has a lot that can be improved, but I have a lot of faith in the people

Ryan Schiller (13:11.840)

who are in these institutions. I think, like you said, the administration, and I have to be a

Ryan Schiller (13:16.240)

little careful because I've been in some of these committees and I've talked to the administration

Ryan Schiller (13:22.640)

about these sorts of things. I think they have a lot of stakeholders and unfortunately it makes

Ryan Schiller (13:27.600)

it difficult for them to always serve these brilliant faculty and the students in the way

Ryan Schiller (13:33.200)

that they would probably like to. Yeah. Okay. So this is me speaking, right? The administration,

Ryan Schiller (13:38.960)

I know the people, and they're oftentimes the faculty holding positions in these committees,

Ryan Schiller (13:43.760)

right? Yes. But it's in the role of quote unquote service. They're trying to do well.

Ryan Schiller (13:52.880)

They're trying to do good. But I think you could say it's the mechanism is not working,

Lex Fridman (13:59.520)

but I could also say my personal opinion is they lack courage, and one, courage, and two,

Lex Fridman (14:12.080)

grace when they walk through the fire. So courage is stepping into the fire,

Lex Fridman (14:20.400)

and grace when you walk through the fire is like maintaining that like as opposed to being rude

Lex Fridman (14:29.040)

and insensitive to the lived quote unquote experience of others or like, you know,

Ryan Schiller (14:33.920)

just not eloquent at all. Like as you step in and take the courageous step of talking and saying

Ryan Schiller (14:39.600)

the difficult thing, doing it well, like doing it skillfully. So both of those are important,

Ryan Schiller (14:44.480)

the courage and the skill to communicate difficult ideas, and they often lack them because they

Ryan Schiller (14:49.520)

weren't trained for it, I think. So you can blame the mechanisms that don't, that allow 19, 20 year

Ryan Schiller (14:56.320)

old students to have more power than the entire faculty, or you could just say that the faculty

Ryan Schiller (15:02.160)

need to step up and grow some guts and skill of graceful communication. And really administration.

Ryan Schiller (15:08.960)

Well, yeah. And the administration. That's right. That's the administration.

Ryan Schiller (15:13.360)

Because the faculty are sometimes some of the most brave outspoken people within the bounds

Ryan Schiller (15:19.440)

of their career. Yeah. So that takes a, that's like the founding kind of spark of a fire that

Ryan Schiller (15:30.480)

led you to then say, okay, so how can I help? Yeah. And I explored a lot. I explored a lot

Ryan Schiller (15:35.760)

of options. I wrote many articles to my friends, talked to them, and I realized it sort of needed

Ryan Schiller (15:41.360)

to be a cultural change. Sort of need to be bottom up, grassroots. Something, I knew the energy was

Ryan Schiller (15:48.320)

there because you just look at the most recent institutional assessment from Yale. This was

Ryan Schiller (15:55.040)

basically the number one thing that students, faculty, and alumni all pointed to, to the

Ryan Schiller (15:59.840)

administration was cultivating more conversations on campus and more difficult conversations on

Ryan Schiller (16:05.120)

campus. So the people on campus know it. And you look at a Gallup poll, 61% of students are on

Ryan Schiller (16:16.080)

Ivy League campuses, afraid to speak their minds because of the campus culture. The campus culture

Ryan Schiller (16:23.280)

is causing a sort of freezing effect on discourse. Can you pause on that again? So what percentage

Ryan Schiller (16:28.960)

of students feel afraid to speak their mind? 61% nationally. And then you're talking about,

Ryan Schiller (16:35.040)

you know, places, nothing like the Ivy League where I'd say, I'd imagine it would be even worse

Ryan Schiller (16:40.800)

because of just the way that these communities kind of come about and the sorts of people who

Ryan Schiller (16:47.840)

are attracted or are invited to these sorts of communities. That's nationwide that college

Ryan Schiller (16:53.440)

students, and it's going up, that college students are afraid to say what they believe because of

Ryan Schiller (16:58.960)

their campus climate. So it's a majority. It's not a conservative thing. It's not a liberal thing.

Ryan Schiller (17:05.360)

It's a group thing. We're all feeling it. The majority of us are feeling it.

Lex Fridman (17:08.400)

And basically just, it doesn't even, you don't even necessarily

Ryan Schiller (17:13.120)

need to have anything to say. You just have a fear.

Lex Fridman (17:17.040)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (17:17.600)

So when you're like teaching, you know, metaphor is a really powerful thing to explain,

Ryan Schiller (17:23.520)

you know, and there's just the caution that you feel that's just horrible for humor. Now,

Ryan Schiller (17:28.240)

comedians have the freedom to just talk shit, which is why I really appreciate somebody who's

Ryan Schiller (17:34.160)

been a friend recently, Tim Dillon, who gives zero, pardon my French, fucks about anything,

Ryan Schiller (17:41.600)

which is very liberating, very important person to just tear down the powerful.

Ryan Schiller (17:46.960)

But, you know, inside the academia as an educator, as a teacher, as a professor,

Ryan Schiller (17:52.960)

you don't have the same freedom. So that fear is felt, I guess, by a majority of students.

Lex Fridman (17:57.680)

And you were getting at something there too, which is that

Ryan Schiller (18:00.880)

if you're afraid to speak metaphorically, if you're afraid to speak imprecisely,

Ryan Schiller (18:05.200)

it can be very difficult to actually think at all and to think to the extremities of what you're

Ryan Schiller (18:10.160)

capable of, because these are the mechanisms we use when we don't have quite the precise

Ryan Schiller (18:15.120)

mathematical language to quite pinpoint what we're talking about yet. This is the beginning. This is

Ryan Schiller (18:20.240)

the creative step that leads to new knowledge. And so that really scares me is that if I'm not

Ryan Schiller (18:26.160)

allowed to sort of excavate these things, these ideas with people in the sort of messy, sloppy way

Ryan Schiller (18:30.880)

that we do as humans when we're first being creative, are we going to be able to continue

Ryan Schiller (18:36.160)

to innovate? Are we going to continue to be able to learn? And that's what really starts to scare me.

Lex Fridman (18:41.280)

So you've explored a bunch of different ideas. You ordered a bunch of different stuff.

Lex Fridman (18:45.680)

How did lead bricks come about?

Ryan Schiller (18:47.920)

Basically, it came to me that it had to be kind of a grassroots movement and it had to be something

Ryan Schiller (18:53.040)

that changed culturally. And it had to be relatively personal, people meeting people,

Ryan Schiller (18:58.720)

people finding out that, no, I'm not the only one on campus who feels this way. I feel alone. And

Ryan Schiller (19:05.200)

there are a lot of other people who feel alone. I believe this thing. And it's not as unpopular as

Ryan Schiller (19:10.720)

I thought. Basically, creating heterodoxy of thought. And it's creating that moment where

Ryan Schiller (19:17.760)

you realize that your politics are personal and that your politics are shared by a lot of people

Ryan Schiller (19:23.120)

on campus. And so I just started coding it. I didn't have much coding experience, but went

Ryan Schiller (19:30.400)

headfirst in and figured how hard could it be? I mean, this is really fascinating. So I talked to a

Ryan Schiller (19:37.920)

lot of software engineers, AI people. Obviously, that's where my passion, my interests are.

Ryan Schiller (19:44.320)

My focus has been throughout my life. The fascinating thing about your story, I think it

Ryan Schiller (19:50.720)

should be truly inspiring to people that want to change the world, is that you don't have a

Ryan Schiller (19:56.880)

background in programming. You don't have even maybe a technical background. So you saw a problem,

Ryan Schiller (1:00:05.760)

I still have similar skills to my first grade self, but it's gotten a lot better. And thanks

Lex Fridman (1:00:10.640)

to a lot of my friends who have sort of chipped in here and there.

Ryan Schiller (1:00:14.240)

Oh, I love the idea of a button that just forget me. I don't know. That's really moving,

Ryan Schiller (1:00:20.720)

actually. That's actually all people want, is they want, I think... Okay, I'll speak

Ryan Schiller (1:00:28.160)

to my experience. I would give so much more if I could just disappear if I needed to.

Lex Fridman (1:00:34.800)

And I trusted the community. I trusted the founders and the principals. That's really

Ryan Schiller (1:00:42.240)

powerful, man. The trust and ease of escape. Yeah. You've also kind of mentioned moderation,

Ryan Schiller (1:00:51.360)

which is really interesting. So with this anonymity and this community, I don't know

Ryan Schiller (1:00:58.000)

if you've heard of the internet, but there's trolls on the internet.

Lex Fridman (1:01:01.200)

So I've heard.

Lex Fridman (1:01:01.760)

And even if they go to Yale and Dartmouth, there's still people that probably enjoy

Ryan Schiller (1:01:12.000)

sort of being the guerrilla warfare, counter revolutionary, and just like creating chaos

Lex Fridman (1:01:19.520)

in a place of love. So how do you prevent chaos and hatred breaking out in Librex?

Lex Fridman (1:01:27.040)

So the way I think about it is we have these principals. They're pretty simple and they're

Ryan Schiller (1:01:33.760)

pretty easy to enforce. And then beyond the principals, we have a set of moderators,

Ryan Schiller (1:01:38.560)

moderate from every single Ivy League school, a team of diverse moderators who enforce these

Ryan Schiller (1:01:42.560)

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

Ryan Schiller (1:01:47.200)

in their community and how the real life context of their community translates to the Librex

Ryan Schiller (1:01:52.720)

context of their community. And beyond that, we have conversation with them about the

Ryan Schiller (1:01:59.680)

standards of the community. And we're constantly talking about what needs to be further

Ryan Schiller (1:02:03.760)

elucidated and what needs to be tweaked. And we're in constant communication with the

Ryan Schiller (1:02:08.240)

community. Now, if you want me to get into the principals that underlie Librex's moderation

Ryan Schiller (1:02:13.520)

policy.

Ryan Schiller (1:02:14.000)

Yeah, please. Maybe you can explain that there's moderators. What does that mean? How

Lex Fridman (1:02:17.760)

are they chosen? And what are the principals under which they operate?

Ryan Schiller (1:02:20.880)

Sure. So how are the moderators chosen? The moderators are all volunteers. They're Librexers

Ryan Schiller (1:02:26.560)

who reach out to me and respond to the opportunity to become moderator. And the way they're

Ryan Schiller (1:02:33.840)

chosen is basically we want to make sure that they're in tune with their community. We want

Ryan Schiller (1:02:39.440)

to make sure they come from diverse backgrounds and we want to make sure that they sort of

Ryan Schiller (1:02:43.440)

understand what the community is about. And then we ask them some questions about how

Ryan Schiller (1:02:47.840)

they would deal with certain scenarios, ones that we've had in the past and we feel strongly

Ryan Schiller (1:02:52.560)

about. And then also ones that are a little more murky, where we want to see that they're

Ryan Schiller (1:02:56.000)

sort of thinking about these things in a critical way. And from there, we choose a set and they

Ryan Schiller (1:03:03.760)

have the power to take down posts. Of course, everything at the end of the day pens my

Ryan Schiller (1:03:10.000)

review, but they can take them down and we can reinstate them if it's a problem. But

Ryan Schiller (1:03:15.360)

they can take down posts and they can advocate for different moderation standards and different

Ryan Schiller (1:03:20.560)

moderation policies.

Lex Fridman (1:03:22.320)

So for now, you're the Linus Torvalds of this community. So meaning like you're able to,

Ryan Schiller (1:03:29.680)

like people are actually able to like email you or like text you, contact you and get

Ryan Schiller (1:03:37.040)

a response. Like you respond to basically everybody. And then you're like really, you

Ryan Schiller (1:03:42.080)

know, you're, you're living that live on people's floor life currently. That's not

Ryan Schiller (1:03:47.600)

necessarily, this is the early days folks. I knew Ryan before he was a billionaire and

Ryan Schiller (1:03:54.320)

he was cool. And then he was in a mansion making meats on his barbecue. No. Okay. But

Ryan Schiller (1:04:02.800)

you know, how does it scale? Like what I suppose, how does it scale is the question. I

Ryan Schiller (1:04:12.320)

mean, with Linus, I don't know if you're familiar with the Linux open source community,

Lex Fridman (1:04:17.280)

but he still stayed at the top for a while. It was really important. Like leadership there

Ryan Schiller (1:04:21.520)

was really important to drive that large scale, really productive open source community.

Lex Fridman (1:04:26.240)

What do you see your role as Librex grows and in general, what are the mechanisms of

Lex Fridman (1:04:32.960)

scaling here for moderation?

Ryan Schiller (1:04:35.360)

Where I see it, open discourse is fundamental to the purpose of the app, right? So as the,

Ryan Schiller (1:04:42.320)

I guess you could say founder, CEO, what have you, part of my purpose has to be to enforce

Ryan Schiller (1:04:49.760)

the vision, right? And part of the vision is open discourse. And that does come down

Ryan Schiller (1:04:54.080)

in part to reasonable moderation and community guided reasonable moderation. So I imagine

Ryan Schiller (1:05:00.560)

that will always be something that I'm intimately involved with to some degree. Now the

Ryan Schiller (1:05:05.600)

degree to which the way in which that manifests, I imagine will have to change, right? And

Ryan Schiller (1:05:14.080)

hopefully I'll be able to, just like you can hire a CTO, hopefully I'll be able to be

Ryan Schiller (1:05:19.680)

in integrated in hiring people who understand the way that we are sort of operating and

Ryan Schiller (1:05:27.360)

the reasonable standards of moderation. And there can be a sort of hierarchical structure.

Lex Fridman (1:05:32.960)

But I think when you have a product whose key purpose is to allow people to have these

Ryan Schiller (1:05:38.720)

difficult conversations on campus that need to be had, I can never fully, I don't think

Ryan Schiller (1:05:46.720)

I can fully ever abdicate that responsibility. I think that would be like, I mean, that would

Lex Fridman (1:05:51.920)

be like Bezos abdicating eCommerce, right? That's part of the job.

Ryan Schiller (1:05:57.280)

Yeah, of course you can run companies in different ways. I think because he might have

Lex Fridman (1:06:02.320)

abdicated quite a bit of the details there.

Ryan Schiller (1:06:05.200)

It's hard for me to say.

Ryan Schiller (1:06:06.240)

Because Amazon does so many things. I think probably the better examples like Elon with

Ryan Schiller (1:06:10.400)

rockets, he's still at the core of the engineering. He's at the core of the engineering. There's

Ryan Schiller (1:06:15.760)

some fundamental questions. He probably does way too much of the engineering. He's the

Ryan Schiller (1:06:20.640)

lowest level detail. But you're saying the core things that make the app work is the

Lex Fridman (1:06:28.000)

moderation of difficult conversations.

Lex Fridman (1:06:30.000)

And by the way, I'm 21 years old. Let's remind everyone of that. If this thing does scale

Lex Fridman (1:06:38.320)

and if this thing continues to be a positive force in a lot of people's lives, who knows

Lex Fridman (1:06:44.720)

what will happen in the next, what I'll learn. I'm still growing definitely as a leader,

Ryan Schiller (1:06:50.960)

still growing as a thinker, still growing as a person. I can't pretend that I know how

Ryan Schiller (1:06:56.880)

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

Ryan Schiller (1:07:03.520)

a business that's going to have millions and millions of users. I expect that there are

Ryan Schiller (1:07:07.680)

going to be a lot of amazing people who will teach me and that a lot of people who have

Ryan Schiller (1:07:11.840)

already kind of stepped into my life and helped me out and taught me things. And I imagine

Ryan Schiller (1:07:17.840)

that I'll learn so much more. I just know that moderation is always going to be important

Ryan Schiller (1:07:22.720)

to me because I don't think Librex is Librex unless we have open discourse and moderation,

Lex Fridman (1:07:28.960)

reasonable, open, light touch moderation is at the heart of creating that, right?

Lex Fridman (1:07:35.920)

So as a creator of this kind of community in place with anonymity and difficult conversations,

Lex Fridman (1:07:40.800)

what do you think about this touchy three words that people have been tossing around

Lex Fridman (1:07:48.160)

and politicizing, I would say, but is at the core of the founding of this country, which

Ryan Schiller (1:07:52.000)

is the freedom of speech? How do you think about the freedom of speech, this particular

Ryan Schiller (1:07:58.800)

kind of freedom of expression? And do you think it's a fundamental human right? How

Lex Fridman (1:08:04.720)

do you define it to yourself when you're thinking about it? I went down, especially

Ryan Schiller (1:08:10.560)

preparing for this conversation down a rabbit hole of like just how unclear it is philosophically

Lex Fridman (1:08:17.360)

what is meant by this kind of freedom. It's not as easy as people think, but it's interesting

Lex Fridman (1:08:25.200)

pragmatically speaking to hear how you think about it in the context of Librex.

Ryan Schiller (1:08:31.120)

Yeah, it's a tough one, right? There's a lot there. So I come from the background of being

Ryan Schiller (1:08:37.040)

a math major. Maybe it's important to start with that. And I found myself in the middle

Ryan Schiller (1:08:44.000)

of this question of freedom of speech. One of the wonderful things is that the Librex

Ryan Schiller (1:08:49.520)

community is filled with PhDs and governance majors who have taught me a ton about this

Ryan Schiller (1:08:56.160)

sort of thing. And I'm still learning. I'm still growing. I'm still probably going to

Ryan Schiller (1:09:00.560)

modify my perspective to some degree. Hopefully. Don't worry. I imagine I'll always support

Ryan Schiller (1:09:08.960)

free discourse. Like learning how to speak about stuff is critical here because it's like

Ryan Schiller (1:09:17.600)

I'm learning that this is like a minefield of conversations because the moment you say like

Ryan Schiller (1:09:23.040)

even saying freedom of speech is a complicated concept, people will be like, oh, we spotted

Ryan Schiller (1:09:29.680)

a communist. Like they'll say, there's nothing complicated about freedom. Freedom is freedom,

Ryan Schiller (1:09:34.880)

bro. It is complicated. First of all, if you talk about there's different definitions of freedom of

Ryan Schiller (1:09:41.680)

speech. If you want to go constitutionally, if you want to talk about the United States

Ryan Schiller (1:09:45.920)

specifically and what's legal, it's actually not as exciting and not as beautiful as what

Ryan Schiller (1:09:52.560)

people think of. It's complicated. I think there's ideals behind it that we want to see.

Lex Fridman (1:09:59.760)

What does that actually materialize itself in the digital world where we're trying to communicate

Ryan Schiller (1:10:06.400)

in ways that allows for difficult conversations and also at the same time doesn't result in the

Ryan Schiller (1:10:14.800)

silencing of voices, not through like censorship, but through like just assholes being rude.

Lex Fridman (1:10:23.760)

Spam.

Ryan Schiller (1:10:24.560)

Spam. So it could be just bots.

Lex Fridman (1:10:27.200)

Racism.

Ryan Schiller (1:10:28.400)

Racism.

Ryan Schiller (1:10:29.840)

Going back to the name of the app, Librex. Libre, free. X was put onto for free exchange

Lex Fridman (1:10:39.360)

and the free exchange of what my purpose was to create as much inner communication of ideas,

Ryan Schiller (1:10:46.400)

be them repugnant or otherwise as possible. And of course, to do that within legal bounds

Lex Fridman (1:10:53.200)

and to do that without causing anyone to be harassed or doxxed. So to keep things

Lex Fridman (1:10:58.240)

focused on the ideas, not the people. And then no BS crap stuff. And so to me,

Ryan Schiller (1:11:08.160)

the easiest way to moderate around that, because as you said, figuring out what is hateful and what

Ryan Schiller (1:11:13.840)

is hate speech is really hard, was to say no sweeping statements against core identity groups.

Lex Fridman (1:11:21.120)

And that seems to work on the whole pretty well to be pretty light touch.

Lex Fridman (1:11:25.680)

And it's hard to do though.

Ryan Schiller (1:11:27.120)

It's difficult.

Lex Fridman (1:11:27.920)

We like to generalize, we humans.

Ryan Schiller (1:11:30.080)

It's difficult, but what it comes down to is be specific.

Lex Fridman (1:11:33.680)

And when you think about what are sweeping statements against core identity groups,

Ryan Schiller (1:11:37.040)

oftentimes these are sort of hackneyed subjects. These are things that have been broached and

Ryan Schiller (1:11:43.600)

we've heard them before. They don't really lead anywhere productive. So it goes under

Ryan Schiller (1:11:48.480)

this principle of be specific in the ideas you're discussing.

Lex Fridman (1:11:52.240)

So even for like positive and humorous stuff, you try to avoid generalizations.

Ryan Schiller (1:11:57.360)

Against core identity groups.

Lex Fridman (1:11:58.720)

Core identity groups. Sorry, what are core identity groups?

Ryan Schiller (1:12:01.360)

We're talking, kind of like,

Lex Fridman (1:12:02.640)

You know, race, religion.

Lex Fridman (1:12:06.080)

Okay. Got it. Even positive stuff?

Lex Fridman (1:12:11.520)

Well, against, negative.

Ryan Schiller (1:12:13.280)

Oh, against. Sorry, against, against. Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:12:16.960)

Very, very, we've learned to be very specific. Very few words, but the community gets it, you know?

Ryan Schiller (1:12:23.280)

Yeah, they get it. I mean, this is the thing. The trouble with rules is as the community grows,

Lex Fridman (1:12:31.120)

they'll figure out ways to manipulate the rules.

Ryan Schiller (1:12:33.920)

Absolutely. It's human nature. It's creativity.

Lex Fridman (1:12:36.240)

Yeah.

Ryan Schiller (1:12:37.120)

Something beautiful about it, of course.

Lex Fridman (1:12:40.320)

From an evolutionary perspective, yes.

Ryan Schiller (1:12:41.840)

Yeah, the fact that people are so creative and so looking to,

Ryan Schiller (1:12:46.240)

because people are genuinely interested in figuring out these things about social media.

Lex Fridman (1:12:50.640)

And so they'll 100% see like, where's the edge? And I mean, part of that's maintaining some level

Ryan Schiller (1:12:56.640)

of vagueness in your rule set, which has its own set of questions and something we could think about.

Lex Fridman (1:13:02.400)

And I'm not implying I have all the answers, but there is something really interesting about people

Lex Fridman (1:13:06.160)

being so engaged that they're looking to figure out where are those edges and what does that mean?

Lex Fridman (1:13:11.600)

What does that edge mean, you know?

Lex Fridman (1:13:14.080)

Well, so one of the things I'm kind of thinking about,

Ryan Schiller (1:13:17.680)

like from an individual user of Librex or an individual user of the internet,

Ryan Schiller (1:13:22.000)

I think about like that one person that is on Reddit saying hateful stuff or positive stuff,

Ryan Schiller (1:13:27.600)

doesn't matter, or funny stuff. One of the things I think about is the trajectory of that individual

Ryan Schiller (1:13:33.600)

through life and how social media can help that person become the best version of themselves.

Ryan Schiller (1:13:41.440)

I don't mean from like an Orwellian sense, like educate them properly or something.

Ryan Schiller (1:13:46.560)

I just mean like, we're all, I believe, we're all fundamentally good. And I also believe

Ryan Schiller (1:13:53.760)

we all have the capacity to do, to create some amazing stuff in this world,

Ryan Schiller (1:14:01.200)

whether that's ideas or art or engineering, all those kinds of things, just to be amazing people.

Lex Fridman (1:14:07.440)

And I kind of think about like, you know, a lot of social media mechanisms bring out the worst

Ryan Schiller (1:14:13.520)

in us. And I try to think like, in the long term, how can the social media or how can a website,

Lex Fridman (1:14:22.720)

how can a tool that you create can make the best, like you take a trajectory that makes you better,

Ryan Schiller (1:14:28.640)

better and better and like the best version of yourself. So I think about that because like,

Ryan Schiller (1:14:33.760)

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

Ryan Schiller (1:14:39.360)

the best version of themselves. Forget the cancel culture and all that kind of stuff. It's just like

Ryan Schiller (1:14:43.440)

they're not developing intellectually in the way that's going to make the best version of themselves.

Ryan Schiller (1:14:49.040)

I think Reddit, I'm not sure what I think about Reddit yet, because one positive side is all the

Ryan Schiller (1:14:55.760)

shit posting I read. It could be just like a release valve for some stress in life. And you

Ryan Schiller (1:15:01.840)

almost have like a parallel life where you're in meat space. You might be actually becoming

Ryan Schiller (1:15:07.200)

successful and so on and growing and so on, but you just need some times to be angry at somebody.

Lex Fridman (1:15:11.440)

But I tend to not think that's possible. I think if you're shit posting, you're probably not

Ryan Schiller (1:15:19.120)

spending your time the best way you could. I don't know. I'm torn on that. But do you think

Ryan Schiller (1:15:25.600)

about that with Librex of creating a trajectory for the Yale, for the Dartmouth, for the students,

Lex Fridman (1:15:31.920)

to where they grow intellectually?

Ryan Schiller (1:15:33.920)

One thing that I think about a lot is how do you incentivize positive content creation? How do you

Ryan Schiller (1:15:41.760)

incentivize really intellectual content creation? It's something that, frankly, I think about every

Ryan Schiller (1:15:50.640)

single day. And I think there are ways that... I mean, one thing that's great about humans is that

Ryan Schiller (1:15:58.240)

they can be incentivized, right? And I think there are ways that you can incentivize people to make

Lex Fridman (1:16:03.120)

the right kind of content if that's your goal.

Lex Fridman (1:16:06.720)

So you think such mechanisms exist for such incentivization?

Lex Fridman (1:16:10.160)

I do. I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak.

Lex Fridman (1:16:13.680)

Do you have already concrete ideas in your mind?

Lex Fridman (1:16:16.560)

I have about three concrete ideas that I'm very, very optimistic about.

Ryan Schiller (1:16:22.160)

You don't even need to share them. I understand totally. But the fact that you have them,

Ryan Schiller (1:16:26.960)

that's really good. Because I feel like sometimes the downfall of the social media is that there's

Ryan Schiller (1:16:33.920)

literally not even a thinking or a discussion about the incentivization of positive long term

Lex Fridman (1:16:43.680)

content creation. Twitter, I really was excited about this when they said like,

Ryan Schiller (1:16:48.880)

when Jack has talked about creating healthy conversations.

Ryan Schiller (1:16:52.400)

He does seem to care. I've listened to him. I mean, he has a very particular way of saying

Ryan Schiller (1:16:57.920)

things. But you get the impression that he's someone who actually cares about these things

Lex Fridman (1:17:01.920)

within the limits of his power.

Ryan Schiller (1:17:03.520)

Yeah. And that's the question, the limits of the power. Librex is growing not just in the number

Ryan Schiller (1:17:10.160)

of communities, but also in the way you're incentivizing positive conversations, like coupled

Lex Fridman (1:17:18.480)

with a moderation and so on. So you think there's a lot of innovation to be had in that area?

Ryan Schiller (1:17:22.560)

There's a tremendous amount. I think when you think about the reasons people post,

Ryan Schiller (1:17:27.920)

fundamentally, people want to make a positive impact on their community to some degree. Now,

Ryan Schiller (1:17:34.480)

there will always be bad actors. And part of the benefit of our moderation structure is that we

Ryan Schiller (1:17:39.440)

can limit some of those bad actors, no bot accounts, no brigading. At the same time,

Ryan Schiller (1:17:45.840)

the more you incentivize a certain type of behavior, the better it's going to be. And we

Ryan Schiller (1:17:50.720)

don't see it as our role as the platform to force the community in a direction. And frankly, I don't

Ryan Schiller (1:17:58.240)

think it would be good for anyone, the community or the conversations, if we forced a specific type

Ryan Schiller (1:18:03.520)

of conversation. We just need to make the tools to allow people to be good and to incentivize good

Lex Fridman (1:18:10.320)

behavior.

Ryan Schiller (1:18:10.880)

Yeah, I believe that. You will not need to censor if you allow people at scale to be good. The good

Lex Fridman (1:18:19.600)

will overpower the assholes.

Ryan Schiller (1:18:21.440)

That's my fundamental belief. I'm very optimistic about that.

Lex Fridman (1:18:26.080)

But currently, Librex is small in the sense that it's a small set of communities that I believe.

Lex Fridman (1:18:32.400)

And you mentioned to me offline that by design, you're scaling slowly and carefully.

Lex Fridman (1:18:38.400)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (1:18:38.960)

So how does Librex scale? Is it possible? Facebook also started with a small set of communities

Ryan Schiller (1:18:48.480)

that were schools, and then now grew to be basically the, if not one of the largest social

Ryan Schiller (1:18:55.280)

networks in the world. Do you see Librex as potentially scaling to be beyond even college

Lex Fridman (1:19:03.120)

campuses, but encompassing the whole world?

Lex Fridman (1:19:06.560)

It's a long timeline. I'll say this. This gets back to where did Facebook go wrong?

Ryan Schiller (1:19:17.440)

Because clearly, they did a lot right. And we can only speculate about what the objectives

Ryan Schiller (1:19:24.400)

were of the founders of Facebook. I'm sure they've said some things, but it's always

Ryan Schiller (1:19:30.160)

interesting to know what the mythology is versus what the truth is of the matter. So

Ryan Schiller (1:19:36.880)

perhaps they've been very successful. I mean, they've taken over the world to some extent.

Ryan Schiller (1:19:43.920)

At the same time, the goals of Librex are to create these positive communities and

Ryan Schiller (1:19:49.440)

these open conversations where people can have real conversation and connection in

Ryan Schiller (1:19:54.000)

their communities in a vulnerable and authentic way. And so to that end, which I imagine might

Ryan Schiller (1:20:00.720)

be different than the goals of a Facebook, for example, one thing that we want to do

Ryan Schiller (1:20:06.320)

is keep things intimate and community based. So each school is its own community. And perhaps

Ryan Schiller (1:20:13.760)

you could have a slightly broader community. Maybe you could have a, I know the California

Ryan Schiller (1:20:19.040)

system is an obvious one. Packed time might be an obvious one. And we can think about that. But

Ryan Schiller (1:20:24.880)

fundamentally, the unit of community is your school or your school community. So that's one

Ryan Schiller (1:20:33.200)

difference that I think will help us. The other thing is that we're scaling intentionally, meaning

Ryan Schiller (1:20:38.560)

that when we expand to a school, we have moderators in place. We have moderators who understand that

Ryan Schiller (1:20:44.320)

school's environment in a very personal level. And we're growing responsibly. We're growing as we're

Ryan Schiller (1:20:50.720)

ready, both technologically, but also socially. But as we think we have the tools to preserve

Ryan Schiller (1:20:58.960)

the community and to encourage the community to create the sort of content that we want them to

Ryan Schiller (1:21:02.640)

create. And there's a lot of ways to define community. So first of all, there's geographic

Ryan Schiller (1:21:09.120)

community as well. But the way you're kind of defining community with Yale and Dartmouth is the

Ryan Schiller (1:21:16.240)

email, right? That's what gives you, there's a power to the email in the sense that that's how

Ryan Schiller (1:21:24.640)

you can verify, efficiently verify yourself with being a single individual in the university. In

Ryan Schiller (1:21:32.560)

that same way, you can verify your employment at a company, for example, like Google, Microsoft,

Ryan Schiller (1:21:39.360)

Facebook. Do you see potentially taking on those communities? That'd be fascinating,

Ryan Schiller (1:21:45.920)

getting like anonymous community conversations inside Google.

Ryan Schiller (1:21:50.960)

100% crossed my mind. To some extent, this is something where I understand the college

Ryan Schiller (1:21:57.280)

experience. I understand the need. And I've never worked at Google. I don't know if they would hire

Ryan Schiller (1:22:04.400)

me. Hopefully, maybe as a product manager. I think if there's a community that needs this product,

Lex Fridman (1:22:14.080)

and has that will, which I think, especially as Librex continues to grow and expand and change

Lex Fridman (1:22:22.800)

and learn. Because that's what we're doing is we're learning, right? With each community, it's not just

Ryan Schiller (1:22:27.840)

about growing. It's about learning from each of these communities and iterating. I think it's

Ryan Schiller (1:22:35.440)

quite likely there are going to be all sorts of communities that could use this tool to improve

Ryan Schiller (1:22:40.160)

their culture, so to speak. So forgive me, I'm not actually that knowledgeable about the history of

Ryan Schiller (1:22:48.400)

attempts of building social networks to solve the problem that you're solving. But I was made aware

Ryan Schiller (1:22:55.280)

that there was an app or at least a social network called Yik Yak that had a similar kind of

Ryan Schiller (1:23:07.440)

focus. I think the thing you've spoken about that differs between Librex and Yik Yak is that Yik Yak

Ryan Schiller (1:23:14.720)

was defined, am I pronouncing it right even? You good? I'm good. I met the founder so I can confirm.

Ryan Schiller (1:23:21.520)

Okay, you can confirm, cool. That it was constrained to a geographical area versus like to the actual

Ryan Schiller (1:23:29.840)

community and that somehow had fundamental like actual differences in social dynamics that resulted.

Lex Fridman (1:23:38.720)

But can you speak to the history of Yik Yak? Like how does Librex differ? What lessons have you learned

Ryan Schiller (1:23:45.040)

from that? Oh, and I should say that I guess there was controversial, I don't know, I didn't look at

Ryan Schiller (1:23:50.160)

the details, but I'm guessing there's a bunch of racism and hate speech and all that kind of stuff

Ryan Schiller (1:23:53.840)

that emerged on Yik Yak. Okay, so that's an example of like, okay, here's how it goes wrong when you

Ryan Schiller (1:24:01.840)

have anonymity on college campuses. So how does Librex going to do better? Yeah, Yik Yak had a

Ryan Schiller (1:24:09.760)

lot of problems, content problems, but the content problems go deeper than maybe what the press would

Ryan Schiller (1:24:14.720)

reveal. There's a lot to say and part of it is parsing exactly what to talk about when it comes

Ryan Schiller (1:24:21.680)

to Yik Yak and when you talk about startups, I mean you know this, you know startups, and you

Ryan Schiller (1:24:27.440)

look at the postmortem, it's almost never what people think it is. And oftentimes these things

Ryan Schiller (1:24:32.880)

are somewhat unknowable and the degree to which people seeking confirmation bias to somebody,

Ryan Schiller (1:24:39.040)

seeking closure, look to find a singular attribute that caused the failure. It feels like the little

Ryan Schiller (1:24:44.720)

details often make all the difference. Yes, and I think the details are so little that as humans

Ryan Schiller (1:24:51.600)

we are not capable of parsing even what they are. But I'll tell you my perspective on it,

Ryan Schiller (1:24:58.560)

knowing that I am also a human with biases. In this particular case, very significant biases.

Lex Fridman (1:25:08.720)

So I started building Librex for its own merits. At first I wasn't aware of Yik Yak, but as I started

Ryan Schiller (1:25:14.960)

to talk to people about this platform I was building, I was made aware of Yik Yak and I

Ryan Schiller (1:25:20.080)

built it from day one with a lot of the issues Yik Yak had in mind. So as you said, the one

Ryan Schiller (1:25:28.000)

difference between Yik Yak is the geographical versus community based aspect. Going along with

Ryan Schiller (1:25:33.680)

that, one thing I realized by researching social media sites is that the majority of

Ryan Schiller (1:25:39.920)

the negative content, the content that's terrible and breaking all the rules is created by really,

Lex Fridman (1:25:48.240)

and the people who are not reformable, so to speak, the people who are not showing the best

Ryan Schiller (1:25:54.800)

part of the human experience. It's a really small minority, right? I remember, I was listening to

Ryan Schiller (1:26:02.960)

the founder of 4ChamMoot talk about this, how like one guy was able to basically destroy

Ryan Schiller (1:26:10.080)

like large swaths of his community. Yeah, that's part of what makes it exciting for that

Ryan Schiller (1:26:16.160)

minority is how much power they can have. So if you're predisposed to think in this way,

Ryan Schiller (1:26:22.080)

it's exciting that you can walk into, like I mentioned the party before, you have a party

Ryan Schiller (1:26:27.120)

of a lot of positive people and it feels, especially if you don't have much power in this

Ryan Schiller (1:26:35.120)

world, it feels exceptionally empowering to just, to destroy like the lives of many.

Ryan Schiller (1:26:44.800)

Yeah. And if you think this way, it's a problem. But I'm hopeful that you're right, that in most

Ryan Schiller (1:26:51.680)

cases it's going to be a minority of people. I think it is. And that's what the research has

Ryan Schiller (1:26:56.480)

showed. And one really powerful thing is that we can really actively control who comes in and out

Ryan Schiller (1:27:04.320)

of our community based on the.edu verification. And we can also control who's not in our community

Ryan Schiller (1:27:10.080)

because we have that lever where each account is associated with a.edu. So that's the first point

Ryan Schiller (1:27:16.400)

I would point out there. Second point is controlled expansion, meaning that we have community

Ryan Schiller (1:27:22.560)

moderation. We have this panel that allows the moderators to see all of the highly downloaded

Ryan Schiller (1:27:29.040)

content, all of the reported content, all the flagged content and look through it and decide

Lex Fridman (1:27:34.240)

what they like and what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. And we have, we ping every

Ryan Schiller (1:27:40.720)

moderator when there's a report. So things are taken down pretty quickly. And we have our

Ryan Schiller (1:27:45.920)

standards and we have, I think above all of that, we have a mission and it's a community based

Ryan Schiller (1:27:51.600)

mission. Yik Yak was more of a fun app and by its own admission, it was a place where people could

Ryan Schiller (1:27:57.040)

enjoy themselves and could sort of yak. Yik Yak, chit chat. We have a bigger purpose than that,

Ryan Schiller (1:28:05.920)

frankly. And I think that shows in the people who self select to be on that app, to be on Librex

Lex Fridman (1:28:11.920)

and to be on Yik Yak, respectively. The last thing I'll say is Yik Yak was very few characters. It

Ryan Schiller (1:28:18.320)

was a Twitter esque platform. And that doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of nuance. It

Ryan Schiller (1:28:22.880)

doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of conversation. Librex is much more long form.

Lex Fridman (1:28:28.240)

And so the kind of posts that you'll get on Librex can span pages. What people are starting

Ryan Schiller (1:28:36.160)

to realize is that they can reach a lot more people at a lot more pertinent of a time a lot

Ryan Schiller (1:28:41.520)

more quickly by posting their thoughts on Librex than if they went to their school newspaper.

Lex Fridman (1:28:47.440)

And I think the school newspapers might be a little worried about that. But more importantly,

Ryan Schiller (1:28:52.800)

we're connecting people in this way where long form communication with nuance that takes into

Ryan Schiller (1:28:57.520)

account everything that's happening in the community temporally is really available at

Ryan Schiller (1:29:03.840)

Librex and not really communicable in 240 or 480 or whatever the number of characters the yaks were

Ryan Schiller (1:29:11.920)

bound to. And I could talk about the history of Yik Yak if you want me to go further. They started,

Ryan Schiller (1:29:19.280)

I think they were at 12 schools. And then spring break hit. People told their friends,

Ryan Schiller (1:29:25.440)

look at this app. A thousand schools signed up and had active communities. They had a problem

Ryan Schiller (1:29:30.560)

on their hands. And then the high schools come on board. I think a lot of the things you said

Ryan Schiller (1:29:36.000)

ring true to me, but especially the vision one, which I do think having a vision in the leadership,

Ryan Schiller (1:29:42.880)

having a mission makes all the difference in the world. That's both for the engineers that

Ryan Schiller (1:29:48.320)

are building, like the team that's building the app, the moderation and users because they kind of,

Ryan Schiller (1:29:54.880)

the mission carries itself through the behavior of the people on the social network.

Ryan Schiller (1:30:02.480)

As a small tangent, let me ask you something about Parler, but it's less about Parler,

Ryan Schiller (1:30:08.080)

more about AWS. So AWS removed Parler from his platform, you know, for whatever reasons,

Ryan Schiller (1:30:14.720)

it doesn't really matter. But the fact that AWS would do this was really, really bothered me

Ryan Schiller (1:30:21.600)

personally, because I saw AWS as the computing infrastructure and I always thought that part

Ryan Schiller (1:30:29.440)

could not put a finger on its scale. And I don't know what your thoughts are. Like,

Ryan Schiller (1:30:34.080)

were you bothered by Parler being removed from AWS? And how does that affect how you think about

Lex Fridman (1:30:40.640)

the computing infrastructure on which Librex is based?

Ryan Schiller (1:30:45.680)

I was bothered not so much by Parler specifically being taken out of AWS, but more the fact that

Ryan Schiller (1:30:52.160)

something that's like a highway, something that people rely on, that people build on top of, that

Ryan Schiller (1:30:59.040)

people assume is going to be somewhat position agnostic, like a road that people drive on, is

Ryan Schiller (1:31:06.720)

becoming ideologically sort of discriminatory. And of course, mind you, Amazon can do what it

Ryan Schiller (1:31:13.520)

wants. It's a private company and I support the rights of private companies. I just, on an ethical

Lex Fridman (1:31:18.720)

and sort of a deep moral level, I wonder, like, at what point should a company sort of be agnostic

Ryan Schiller (1:31:27.520)

in that regard and let developers build on top of their infrastructure? And where does that

Lex Fridman (1:31:34.880)

responsibility hold?

Ryan Schiller (1:31:36.400)

Yes, it makes you hope that there's going to be, from a capitalistic sense, competitors to AWS

Ryan Schiller (1:31:43.920)

would say, like, we're not going to put our finger on the scale. I mean, on the highway is a good

Ryan Schiller (1:31:49.040)

sort of example. It's like if a privately owned highway said, you know, we're no longer going to

Ryan Schiller (1:31:56.400)

allow, we're only going to allow electric vehicles. And a bunch of people in this world would be like,

Ryan Schiller (1:32:03.600)

yes, because electric is good for the environment. And, you know, I think that's a good example.

Ryan Schiller (1:32:12.480)

You know, yes, but then you have to consider the, like, the slippery slope nature of it, but also

Ryan Schiller (1:32:20.560)

like the negative impact on the lives of many others and what that means for innovation and for,

Ryan Schiller (1:32:25.920)

like, competition, again, in a capitalistic sense. So, there's some nature, there's some level to

Ryan Schiller (1:32:32.640)

this hierarchy of our existence that we should not allow to manipulate what's built on top of it. It

Ryan Schiller (1:32:40.320)

should be truly infrastructure. And it feels like compute is storage and compute is that layer. Like,

Ryan Schiller (1:32:48.640)

it shouldn't be messed with. I haven't seen anybody really complain about it, like, in terms

Ryan Schiller (1:32:53.840)

of government. And I'm not even sure government is the right mechanism through policy and regulation

Ryan Schiller (1:32:59.040)

to step in. Because again, they do a messy job of fixing things. But I do hope there's competitors

Ryan Schiller (1:33:06.160)

to AWS to make AWS then step up. Because I do think, you know, I'm a fan of AWS, except this.

Ryan Schiller (1:33:12.560)

Good service.

Lex Fridman (1:33:13.360)

It's a good service until this.

Ryan Schiller (1:33:15.760)

Until, yeah, until they rip out the rug.

Lex Fridman (1:33:20.320)

And the point is, it's not that necessarily their decision was a bad one with Parler,

Ryan Schiller (1:33:26.080)

in particular. It's that, like, the slippery slope nature of it, but also

Ryan Schiller (1:33:32.640)

the, it takes the good actors that are creating amazing products and makes them more fearful.

Lex Fridman (1:33:38.400)

And when you're more fearful, it's the same reason that anonymity is a tool that you don't create

Ryan Schiller (1:33:43.200)

the best thing you could possibly create. When you're fearful, you don't create.

Ryan Schiller (1:33:47.040)

That's right.

Ryan Schiller (1:33:48.560)

I think we've kind of talked about it a little bit. But I wonder if we can kind of revisit it

Ryan Schiller (1:33:54.000)

a little bit. I talked to a guy named Ronald Sullivan, who's a faculty at Harvard, a law

Ryan Schiller (1:34:00.400)

professor. He was on the legal defense team. He was the lawyer for Harvey Weinstein and Aaron

Ryan Schiller (1:34:07.680)

Hernandez for the double murder case. So he takes on these really difficult cases of unpopular

Ryan Schiller (1:34:13.440)

figures because he believes like that's the way you test that we believe in the rule of law.

Lex Fridman (1:34:20.400)

But he was, there's a big protest in Harvard to get him, basically censor him and to get him to

Ryan Schiller (1:34:30.160)

no longer be faculty dean, all those kinds of things. And it was by a minority of students, but

Ryan Schiller (1:34:38.160)

there's a huge blowback, obviously in the public, but also inside Harvard, like that's not okay.

Ryan Schiller (1:34:44.000)

He stands for the very principles at the founding of Harvard and at the principles of the founding

Ryan Schiller (1:34:48.640)

of this country and the law and so on. But the basic argument is that it was about safe spaces,

Lex Fridman (1:34:57.360)

that it's unsafe to have somebody who is basically supporting Harvey Weinstein, right?

Lex Fridman (1:35:05.760)

What do you think about this whole idea of safe spaces on college campuses? Because it feels like

Lex Fridman (1:35:12.800)

the mission of Librex is pushing back against the idea of safe spaces.

Ryan Schiller (1:35:19.040)

I think safe spaces are fine when they're within people's private lives, within their homes,

Ryan Schiller (1:35:23.920)

within their religious organizations. I think the problem becomes when the institution starts

Ryan Schiller (1:35:28.880)

encouraging or backing safe spaces because what are people being safe from? And oftentimes,

Ryan Schiller (1:35:40.560)

it seems like there's this idea that the harm that's being attempted to be mitigated is the

Ryan Schiller (1:35:47.680)

harm of confronting opinions you disagree with, opinions you might find repugnant.

Lex Fridman (1:35:52.560)

And if this is conflated with a need for safety, then that's where the idea of liberal arts

Ryan Schiller (1:35:58.960)

education sort of dies. Of course, it's complicated and we still want to have safe

Ryan Schiller (1:36:05.440)

intellectual environments. But the way that I hear the term safe space used today,

Ryan Schiller (1:36:11.840)

I think it doesn't really have a place within the intellectual context.

Ryan Schiller (1:36:17.280)

Yeah, it's funny. I mean, this is why Librex is really exciting, is it's pushing those

Ryan Schiller (1:36:23.040)

difficult conversations. And I'd love to see, ultimately, there does seem to be an asymmetry

Ryan Schiller (1:36:29.680)

of power that results in the concept of safe spaces and hate speech being redefined in the

Ryan Schiller (1:36:39.120)

slippery slope kind of way where it means basically anything you want it to mean. And

Ryan Schiller (1:36:44.880)

it basically is used to silence people, to silence people. They're like good, thoughtful experts.

Ryan Schiller (1:36:52.160)

Also, beyond that, I would say it has not just a pragmatic purpose, which is the silencing,

Lex Fridman (1:37:00.640)

but also sort of an ideological purpose, which is, and a linguistic purpose, which is to

Ryan Schiller (1:37:05.360)

conflate words with unsafety and harm and violence, which is what you kind of see on a

Ryan Schiller (1:37:14.400)

cultural linguistic level is happening all around us right now is that this idea that words are harm

Ryan Schiller (1:37:20.320)

is a very dangerous and slippery concept. I mean, you don't have to slip that far to see

Lex Fridman (1:37:25.200)

why that's a problem. Once we start making words into violence and we start criminalizing words,

Ryan Schiller (1:37:30.480)

we get into some really authoritarian territory, things that I think, I mean, myself and my

Ryan Schiller (1:37:37.680)

background, I don't know how much we have to go into it, but things that my ancestors

Lex Fridman (1:37:42.080)

certainly would be worried about. What's your background?

Lex Fridman (1:37:46.640)

I'm a child of Holocaust survivors and pro grom survivors, so.

Ryan Schiller (1:37:52.160)

Yeah, I mean, me as well from different directions. I come from the Soviet Union, so

Ryan Schiller (1:37:56.560)

there's, well, like in most of us, hate and love runs through our blood from our history.

Lex Fridman (1:38:04.080)

You mentioned MIT is being added to Librex. Has it already been added?

Lex Fridman (1:38:07.840)

Yes, it was added today.

Ryan Schiller (1:38:09.840)

Today, okay. So let me ask you, this is exciting because I don't know what your thoughts are about

Ryan Schiller (1:38:16.400)

this, but I'll tell you from my perspective, if you're, and a lot of MIT folks listen to this,

Ryan Schiller (1:38:22.480)

I would love it if you joined Librex. It'd be interesting to explore conversations

Ryan Schiller (1:38:29.040)

on several topics inside MIT, but one of the most moving that hasn't been discussed at all

Ryan Schiller (1:38:38.000)

at all, except in little flourishes here and there, is the topic of Jeffrey Epstein.

Ryan Schiller (1:38:47.840)

Now, there's been a huge amount of, like, impact that the connections of various faculty to Jeffrey

Ryan Schiller (1:38:57.360)

Epstein and the various things that have been said had on MIT, but it feels like the difficult

Ryan Schiller (1:39:04.880)

conversation haven't had been had. It's the administration trying to clean up and give a bunch

Ryan Schiller (1:39:11.680)

of BS to try to pretend, like, let's just hide this part. Like nothing is broken, nothing to see

Ryan Schiller (1:39:18.080)

here. Here's a bad dude that did some bad things and some faculty that kind of misbehaved a little

Ryan Schiller (1:39:25.760)

bit because they're a little bit clueless. Let's all look the other way. Harvard did this much

Ryan Schiller (1:39:31.040)

better, by the way. They completely, it's almost like people pretend like Harvard didn't have

Ryan Schiller (1:39:37.520)

anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein. But I think I'd be curious to hear what those conversations

Ryan Schiller (1:39:45.280)

are because there's conversations on the topic of like, well, obviously sort of sexual assault and

Ryan Schiller (1:39:55.040)

disrespecting women on any kind of level within academia, but just women in general.

Ryan Schiller (1:40:00.160)

That's an important topic to talk about, various, many sets of difficult conversations. And the

Ryan Schiller (1:40:05.840)

other topic is, you know, funding for research. Like how are, like, what are we okay taking money

Ryan Schiller (1:40:15.360)

from and what are we not okay taking money from? You know, there's a lot of just interesting

Ryan Schiller (1:40:20.160)

difficult conversations to be had. I've worked with people who, you know, refuse to take money

Ryan Schiller (1:40:27.280)

from DOD, Department of Defense, for example, because in some indirect or direct way, you're

Ryan Schiller (1:40:32.800)

funding military industrial complex, all those kinds of things. I think with Jeffrey Epstein,

Lex Fridman (1:40:37.520)

it's even more stark, this contrast of like, well, what is and isn't ethical to take money from?

Lex Fridman (1:40:44.960)

And I just think, forget academia, I think there's just a lot of interesting, deep human

Ryan Schiller (1:40:51.280)

discussions to be had. And they haven't been. And there's been somebody, I don't know if you're

Ryan Schiller (1:40:55.760)

familiar with Eric Weinstein, who has been outraged by the fact that nobody's talking about Jeffrey

Ryan Schiller (1:41:02.160)

Epstein. Nobody's having these difficult conversations. And Eric himself has had a sort of

Ryan Schiller (1:41:10.080)

complicated journey through academia, in the sense that he's a really kind of renegade thinker in

Ryan Schiller (1:41:16.960)

many kinds of ways. I'm not sure if you know who Eric is, by any chance. Heard the name. Okay. I

Ryan Schiller (1:41:21.280)

actually checked out ZEV. ZEV. It was heartening for me to see that I was not the youngest person

Lex Fridman (1:41:28.560)

on this podcast. You're the second youngest. Second youngest.

Ryan Schiller (1:41:34.080)

That's hilarious. But Eric, he's kind of a renegade thinker. He's a mathematical physicist

Ryan Schiller (1:41:45.440)

with, I believe, a PhD at Harvard, and he spent some time at MIT and so on. But he speaks to the

Ryan Schiller (1:41:52.560)

fact that there's a culture of conformity and so on. And if you're somebody who's a bit outside of

Ryan Schiller (1:41:58.240)

the box, a bit weird, in whatever dimension of weird, that makes you actually kind of interesting

Ryan Schiller (1:42:03.440)

that the system kind of wants to make you an outcast, wants to throw you out. And so he kind

Ryan Schiller (1:42:09.360)

of opposes that whole idea. He's the perfect person to have conversations with in this kind

Ryan Schiller (1:42:14.400)

of Librex kind of context of anonymity. Because I'll tell you the few conversations that came across

Lex Fridman (1:42:22.800)

and they were very quickly silenced. And I'm troubled by it. I'm not sure what to think of it.

Ryan Schiller (1:42:30.160)

Is there's a few threads inside MIT, like on a mailing list, discussing Marvin Minsky. I don't

Ryan Schiller (1:42:39.200)

know if you know who that is. He's an AI researcher. He's a seminal figure in AI before your time, but

Ryan Schiller (1:42:44.560)

one of the most important people in the history of artificial intelligence. And there was a

Ryan Schiller (1:42:50.720)

discussion on a thread that involved the interaction between Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein.

Ryan Schiller (1:43:01.600)

That conversation was quickly shut down. One person was pushed out of MIT, Richard Stallman,

Ryan Schiller (1:43:07.360)

who's one of the key figures in the, because of that, because he wanted some clarity about the

Lex Fridman (1:43:13.120)

situation. But he also miss, he spoke, like we mentioned earlier, without grace, right?

Lex Fridman (1:43:20.800)

But he was quickly punished by the administration because of a few people protesting. And just that

Ryan Schiller (1:43:27.280)

conversation, I guess what bothered me most is it didn't continue. It didn't expand. There was no

Ryan Schiller (1:43:36.880)

like complexity. And it was, there was a hunger that was clear behind that conversation, especially

Ryan Schiller (1:43:44.560)

sort of for me, I'd like to understand Marvin Minsky was one of the reasons I wanted to come

Ryan Schiller (1:43:49.840)

to MIT. He's passed away, but he's one of the key figures in the field that I deeply care about,

Ryan Schiller (1:43:56.400)

artificial intelligence. And I thought that his name was dragged through the mud,

Ryan Schiller (1:44:03.840)

through that situation, and without ever being like resolved. And so it's unclear to me, like,

Lex Fridman (1:44:11.280)

what am I supposed to think about all this? And the only way to come to a conclusion there is to

Ryan Schiller (1:44:18.400)

keep talking. It's like the thing we started this conversation with about truth is like,

Ryan Schiller (1:44:24.000)

is conversation. So in that sense, I'd love if people on Librex, perhaps in other places,

Lex Fridman (1:44:30.480)

but it seems like Librex is a nice platform to discuss Marvin Minsky, to discuss Jeffrey Epstein,

Ryan Schiller (1:44:36.800)

to learn from it, to grow from it, to see how we can make MIT better. As I'm still one of the

Ryan Schiller (1:44:42.880)

people, I've always dreamed of being at MIT and it was a dream come true in many ways. And I still

Ryan Schiller (1:44:49.040)

believe that MIT is one of the most special places in this world. Like many other universities,

Ryan Schiller (1:44:54.400)

universities in general is truly special, man. It hurts my heart when people speak poorly of

Ryan Schiller (1:45:01.360)

academia. I understand what they mean. They're very correct, but there is much more, in my opinion,

Ryan Schiller (1:45:06.880)

that's beautiful about academia than that's broken. I mean, I don't know if you have something to

Ryan Schiller (1:45:12.800)

comment. It doesn't necessarily need to be about Jeffrey Epstein, but there's these difficult things

Ryan Schiller (1:45:18.560)

that come up that test the academic community, right? That it feels like conversation is the

Ryan Schiller (1:45:26.080)

only way to resolve it. I think people have a natural need for closure. And it's not just,

Ryan Schiller (1:45:33.040)

I'm not as plugged into the, what academics are talking about as you would be Lux, but I even...

Ryan Schiller (1:45:38.880)

In case these days, no respect for Minsky. Exactly. I mean, especially in the AI community,

Ryan Schiller (1:45:45.440)

I'm not necessarily a programmer. But what I will say is that people come to Librex and

Ryan Schiller (1:45:53.280)

we always see a huge spike in users whenever there's a tragedy on campus or something where

Ryan Schiller (1:45:58.400)

people need closure. Recently, there was a suicide just the other day on Yale's campus,

Lex Fridman (1:46:05.840)

and people were just coming to pay respects and to say, rest in peace, and speak also about

Lex Fridman (1:46:13.200)

what might've led to an environment where people are drawn to these terrible results.

Lex Fridman (1:46:23.440)

So just having a conversation is important there, because it brings closure.

Ryan Schiller (1:46:28.800)

People need the space, especially when no one wants to go out and put their head above,

Ryan Schiller (1:46:34.480)

be the longest blade of grass on that one because of the stigma. People need to be able to speak.

Ryan Schiller (1:46:41.520)

Yeah, that fear really bothers me, the fear that silences people. Like, were they self censor? Were

Ryan Schiller (1:46:46.320)

they self silence? Well, you've created an amazing place. I'm kind of interested in your struggle and

Ryan Schiller (1:46:58.160)

your journey of creating positive incentives, because it's a problem in a very different domain

Ryan Schiller (1:47:07.680)

that I'm also interested in. So I love robotics. I love human robot interaction. And so I believe

Ryan Schiller (1:47:16.960)

that most people are good and we can bring out the best in human nature. Social networks is a very

Ryan Schiller (1:47:21.760)

tricky space to do that in. So I'm glad you're taking on the problem and I'm glad you have the

Ryan Schiller (1:47:25.840)

mission that you do. I hope you succeed. But you mentioned offline that you used to be into chess.

Lex Fridman (1:47:33.600)

Tell me about your journey through chess. Sure. I was a very competitive tournament player growing

Ryan Schiller (1:47:37.920)

up till about like 13. I got for the chess fans, I got to around 2000. USCF. So I was a competitive

Ryan Schiller (1:47:45.280)

player, especially my age group. And that actually led me to poker. I was I was playing a tournament.

Lex Fridman (1:47:53.360)

And what happens is when you're like a very strong 13 year old and you're playing locally,

Ryan Schiller (1:47:57.040)

if you want a good match, you're gonna end up playing a lot of adults and you're gonna end up

Ryan Schiller (1:48:01.120)

playing if you want a good match, you're gonna end up playing a lot of adults. And I ended up

Ryan Schiller (1:48:04.960)

playing this mid 40s guy who we played a really strong game. He actually beat me. I still I still

Ryan Schiller (1:48:12.000)

remember the game and think I could I should have played that move instead of that one. But after

Ryan Schiller (1:48:16.720)

after the game, we had a postmortem. It was this me I think I was 13 at the time and this 40 year

Ryan Schiller (1:48:20.880)

old like hanging over this chessboard and looking over the moves. And even at that even at my age,

Ryan Schiller (1:48:26.240)

that this guy was absolutely brilliant. Yes. And after after the postmortem, not only by the way,

Ryan Schiller (1:48:31.600)

in chess, but just like in the way he articulates his thoughts, as some people are. After postmortem,

Ryan Schiller (1:48:36.960)

I went and looked him up online, I found out that he was a World Series of Poker Champion.

Lex Fridman (1:48:41.520)

And his name is Bill Chen. Oh, wow. And I haven't really kept up with him, except one time there

Ryan Schiller (1:48:47.120)

was another chess tournament when I was around 14. And I followed him into an elevator as he was

Ryan Schiller (1:48:53.520)

leaving the chess hall, like pretending that I was going to go up just because I wanted to,

Ryan Schiller (1:48:57.680)

I just wanted to talk to him. And I suggested a sequel or some changes that he could that I

Ryan Schiller (1:49:01.920)

thought he could make for his book. And he was like, actually, I was thinking of doing the same

Ryan Schiller (1:49:05.120)

thing, which is incredibly validating to my 14 year old or 15 year old self. But I really haven't

Ryan Schiller (1:49:10.640)

kept up with him. So shout out to him. But and then that he wrote a book called the mathematics

Ryan Schiller (1:49:15.920)

of poker that I started reading. And that, first of all, kickstarted my interest in game theory.

Lex Fridman (1:49:21.680)

And second of all, in poker. So it started from chess and then poker. And I started with Bitcoin

Ryan Schiller (1:49:28.320)

poker and had a lot of success with that met a lot of amazing friends. Learned a ton about I mean,

Ryan Schiller (1:49:35.920)

I think about entrepreneurship as well as taking risks, reasonable risks, positive expected value

Ryan Schiller (1:49:41.120)

risks. And also just growing as a person and mathematician. And what did you say Bitcoin

Ryan Schiller (1:49:48.960)

poker? Yeah, what's Bitcoin poker? So you have to understand I was 14 years old, right? Yes. So how

Ryan Schiller (1:49:54.080)

is a 14 year old with wonderful parents who care about him? Yeah. And probably don't want him

Ryan Schiller (1:49:59.760)

playing poker. Yeah. Going to start playing poker, because I wanted I wanted to challenge I love the

Ryan Schiller (1:50:05.600)

challenge of the competition. And I realized the answer is probably Bitcoin. Because the implications

Ryan Schiller (1:50:12.720)

of that. And they had they had these free roll tournaments, which for those who don't know what

Ryan Schiller (1:50:17.840)

free rolls are, there's these promotional tournaments that sites put on where they'll

Ryan Schiller (1:50:22.080)

put like a few dollars in and then 1000s of people sign up and the winners get like a dollar.

Lex Fridman (1:50:27.280)

And I started there and I worked my way up. And that's amazing. What's your sense about from that

Ryan Schiller (1:50:33.040)

time to today of the growth of the cryptocurrency community? I'm actually having like four or five

Ryan Schiller (1:50:40.880)

conversations with Bitcoin proponents, Bitcoin maximalists, and like all these I'm just having

Ryan Schiller (1:50:47.840)

all these cryptocurrency conversations currently, because there's so many brilliant, like technically

Ryan Schiller (1:50:53.920)

brilliant, but also financially and philosophically brilliant people in those communities. It's

Ryan Schiller (1:50:58.960)

fascinating with the explosion of impact, like and also, if you look into the future, the possible

Ryan Schiller (1:51:04.640)

revolutionary impact on society in general, but what's your sense about this whole growth of

Ryan Schiller (1:51:09.840)

Bitcoin? I'm definitely less knowledgeable on the currency. Again, like programming, it was a means

Ryan Schiller (1:51:16.560)

to an end. Yes. Right. What I will say is that there was this amazing community that grew out of

Ryan Schiller (1:51:22.080)

it. And you'd have people who were willing to stake me or have me be their horse and they're my

Ryan Schiller (1:51:28.720)

backer. For having never met me for literally full Bitcoin tournaments, like full Bitcoin entry fee

Ryan Schiller (1:51:37.280)

tournaments, and I get a percentage of the profits and they get a percentage. And to have that level

Ryan Schiller (1:51:42.000)

of community for that degree of money, I mean, it gives you hope about the potential for, you know,

Ryan Schiller (1:51:48.640)

humans to act in mutual best interest with a degree of trust. Yeah, there's a really fascinating,

Ryan Schiller (1:51:56.160)

strong community there. But speaking of like bringing out the best of human nature,

Ryan Schiller (1:52:00.640)

it's a community that's currently struggling a little bit in terms of their ability to communicate

Ryan Schiller (1:52:07.840)

in a positive, inspiring way. Like the Bitcoin folks, and we talk about this a lot. I honestly

Ryan Schiller (1:52:15.520)

think they have a lot of love in their hearts and minds, but they just kind of naturally,

Ryan Schiller (1:52:22.480)

naturally, because the world has been like institutions and the centralized powers have been

Ryan Schiller (1:52:32.160)

sort of mocking and fighting them for many years that they've become sort of worn down and cynical.

Lex Fridman (1:52:39.360)

And so they tend to be a little bit more aggressive and negative on the internet in the

Ryan Schiller (1:52:44.560)

way they communicate, especially on Twitter. And it's just created this whole community of

Ryan Schiller (1:52:49.280)

of basically being derisive and mocking and trolling and all this kind of stuff.

Lex Fridman (1:52:55.360)

But people are trying to, you know, as the Bitcoin community grows, as the cryptocurrency community

Ryan Schiller (1:53:00.160)

grows, they're trying to revolutionize that aspect too. So they're trying to find the positive core

Lex Fridman (1:53:05.840)

and grow and grow in that way. So it's fascinating because I think all of us are trying to find the

Ryan Schiller (1:53:12.800)

positive aspects of ourselves and trying to learn how to communicate in a positive way online.

Ryan Schiller (1:53:18.800)

It's like the internet hasn't been around. Social networks haven't been around that long. We're

Ryan Schiller (1:53:22.480)

trying to figure this thing out. Let me ask you the ridiculous question. I don't know if you

Ryan Schiller (1:53:28.080)

have an answer, but who is the greatest chess player of all time in your view? So since you

Ryan Schiller (1:53:33.520)

like chess. That's how you define it. But if you're talking about raw skill, like if you put everyone

Ryan Schiller (1:53:39.920)

across time into a torment together, Carlson would win. I don't think that's particularly

Ryan Schiller (1:53:44.560)

controversial. Oh, you mean like with the same exact skill level? Exactly. Now if you talk about

Ryan Schiller (1:53:51.280)

political importance, I think Bobby Fischer is, you know, he's the only one that people still,

Ryan Schiller (1:53:58.640)

when you go to someone on the street, they know Bobby Fischer because of what he represented,

Lex Fridman (1:54:02.720)

right? Who do you think is more famous on the street? Garry Kasparov or Bobby Fischer?

Ryan Schiller (1:54:08.160)

Bobby Fischer. In America, Bobby Fischer. You think so? Yes. That's interesting. I think we're

Ryan Schiller (1:54:12.880)

gonna have to put that to the test. Yeah, maybe it's more reflective of the community that I was

Ryan Schiller (1:54:17.360)

a part of, but yeah. Oh, so in the community you're a part of like Young Minds playing chess,

Ryan Schiller (1:54:22.720)

Bobby Fischer was a superstar in terms of the roots. Yeah, I think so because he's American

Ryan Schiller (1:54:28.000)

and, you know, he stood up against the big bad Russians at the time and, you know, unfortunately

Ryan Schiller (1:54:35.520)

he had a very bad downfall. But, you know, for our geopolitical situation, he meant a lot. And then

Ryan Schiller (1:54:43.520)

if you talk about compared to contemporaries, actually, I would say Paul Morphy was a bit of

Ryan Schiller (1:54:49.280)

a throwback. He's one of those geniuses that was just head and shoulders above everyone else.

Ryan Schiller (1:54:56.320)

Is there somebody that inspired your own play, like as a Young Mind? Yeah, I really liked

Ryan Schiller (1:55:00.720)

Mikhail Tal. I think he was very aggressive, right? Yeah, very tactical. Which is funny because I

Ryan Schiller (1:55:10.080)

found that I was better at like sort of slow methodical play than quick tactics, but I just,

Ryan Schiller (1:55:14.960)

I mean, there's something beautiful about the creativity and that's something I always latched

Ryan Schiller (1:55:18.480)

onto as being a creative player, being a creative person. I mean, chess doesn't really reward

Ryan Schiller (1:55:23.600)

creativity as much as a lot of other things, especially entrepreneurial pursuits, which I

Ryan Schiller (1:55:28.640)

think is part of the reason why I sort of grew out of it. But I always was attracted to the

Ryan Schiller (1:55:35.040)

creativity that I did see in chess. So let me ask the flip, the other, because you said poker,

Ryan Schiller (1:55:41.440)

is there somebody that stands out to you as could be the greatest poker player of all time? Like

Ryan Schiller (1:55:46.640)

who do you admire? That's a more controversial one because these chess players are such like,

Ryan Schiller (1:55:55.360)

first of all, there's more an objective standard. And second of all, there's like,

Ryan Schiller (1:55:59.440)

they're like almost like cultural figures to me. Whereas poker players are more like live,

Ryan Schiller (1:56:05.280)

living. They feel more like, yeah, they feel more accessible. But they also have like

Ryan Schiller (1:56:09.680)

personalities in poker. They have vices, they have quirks, they have humor. Like,

Ryan Schiller (1:56:18.160)

I guess we've seen videos of them because it's such a recent development. I'll say one person

Ryan Schiller (1:56:23.360)

who I admire so much. And like, if I could like have a dinner list of people that I want to have

Ryan Schiller (1:56:29.360)

dinner with, like maybe it'll happen now, actually. I would love to have dinner with him. Phil

Ryan Schiller (1:56:35.360)

Galfond, who most people probably won't know. But on this podcast, but the way, first of all,

Ryan Schiller (1:56:44.160)

he democratized poker learning in like the mathematical nitty gritty, how do you get good

Ryan Schiller (1:56:49.600)

at poker type sense to the entire world in like an unprecedented way. He gave, he had this gift

Ryan Schiller (1:56:57.120)

that he had learned and distilled by working with some of the greatest poker minds. And he

Ryan Schiller (1:57:01.040)

just democratized it through his website. And I learned a ton from him. And not only that,

Lex Fridman (1:57:09.440)

but you just listen to him think. And it's almost like a philosophical meditation,

Ryan Schiller (1:57:13.840)

the way that he breaks things down and thinks about these different elements and has such a

Ryan Schiller (1:57:18.240)

holistic thought process. It's like watching a genius work. And, you know, he's also just a nice,

Ryan Schiller (1:57:24.560)

fun, sociable guy that like, you can, you can imagine being at your dinner table. So all that

Ryan Schiller (1:57:30.560)

combined. Which is not true for a lot of poker players, right? A lot of them are dark souls.

Ryan Schiller (1:57:34.720)

To say the least, yes. I like, I really like the, what is he, Canadian Daniel Negrano.

Ryan Schiller (1:57:41.360)

He's also a nice guy. He's also a nice guy, but he's also somebody who's able to express his

Ryan Schiller (1:57:45.760)

thoughts about poker really well, but also in an entertaining way. He seems to be able to predict

Lex Fridman (1:57:51.040)

cards better than anybody I've ever seen. Like what. Did you watch the challenge? Which challenge?

Ryan Schiller (1:57:57.040)

He, he lost like a million dollars recently to Doug Polk. He lost a million dollars to Doug Polk,

Ryan Schiller (1:58:03.440)

heads up online. It's really interesting. Yeah. It's, it's awesome to watch these guys work.

Lex Fridman (1:58:09.120)

So I know you're 20, 21. 21. 21. So, so asking you for advice is, is a little bit funny, but,

Lex Fridman (1:58:19.120)

but at the same time, not because you've created a social network. You've created a startup from

Ryan Schiller (1:58:25.280)

nothing as we talked about earlier, like without knowing how to program you've programmed. I mean,

Ryan Schiller (1:58:30.800)

you've taken this whole journey that a lot of people I think would be really inspired by.

Lex Fridman (1:58:34.720)

So given that, and given the fact that 20 years from now, you probably laugh at the

Ryan Schiller (1:58:40.000)

advice you're going to give now. Absolutely. I hope so. If I don't laugh at the advice I give now,

Ryan Schiller (1:58:44.720)

something went desperately wrong, right? Yeah. So do you have advice for people that want to

Ryan Schiller (1:58:51.840)

follow in your footsteps and create a startup, whether it's in a software app domain or whether

Ryan Schiller (1:58:58.400)

it's anything else. So I'll speak specifically about social media apps. Yes. Try to keep it as

Ryan Schiller (1:59:05.280)

narrow as possible so I can laugh as little as possible when I'm 41. And what I would say is that

Ryan Schiller (1:59:13.120)

if you're like a 21, 22 year old, who's looking at me and being like, I want to do something like

Ryan Schiller (1:59:18.240)

this. What I would say is you probably know better than just about anyone. And if you have a feeling

Ryan Schiller (1:59:25.920)

in yourself that this is something that I have to do, and this is something I could imagine myself

Ryan Schiller (1:59:31.120)

doing for the next 10 years, because if you're successful, you are going to have to do it for

Ryan Schiller (1:59:35.680)

the next 10 years. And through the ups and the downs, through the amazing interviews with Lex,

Lex Fridman (1:59:40.800)

and through the not so amazing articles you might have with other people, right? And you're going to

Ryan Schiller (1:59:47.520)

have to ride those highs and lows and you have to believe in what you're doing. But if you have that

Ryan Schiller (1:59:51.520)

feeling, what I would say is listen to as few people as possible, because people are experts

Ryan Schiller (1:59:58.160)

in domains. But when it comes to what's hot and what makes sense in a social context,

Ryan Schiller (20:06.160)

you explored different ideas, and then you just decided you're going to learn how to build an app

Ryan Schiller (20:12.320)

without a technical background. That's so bold. That is so beautiful, man. Can you take me through

Ryan Schiller (20:22.480)

the journey of deciding to do that, of learning to program without a programming background,

Lex Fridman (20:29.120)

and building the app? Detail, how do you start?

Ryan Schiller (20:33.680)

Sure. You want to buy a Mac? I'm just going to go step by step. I'll be as dumb as possible.

Lex Fridman (20:42.960)

Because it was truly leading by your feet.

Lex Fridman (20:48.240)

So you need a computer for this?

Ryan Schiller (20:49.680)

Oh, yeah. I had a PC at the time, and I was Android at the time. And I realized it should

Ryan Schiller (20:54.800)

be an iOS app. And so that was a decision. But I knew kids these days, they're always on their

Ryan Schiller (21:01.280)

phone. And I wanted you to be able to say a passing thought in class. You're walking around,

Lex Fridman (21:08.000)

and you have a thought, and you can express it. Or you're in the dining hall, and you have your

Lex Fridman (21:11.520)

phone out, you can express it. So it was clear to me it should be an iOS app.

Ryan Schiller (21:14.880)

By the way, Android is great. Definitely check it out.

Lex Fridman (21:18.400)

We also are now available on Android, but we'll get there,

Ryan Schiller (21:21.760)

for the new Android users from MIT, Stanford, or the Ivy League. So back to how it happened. So I

Ryan Schiller (21:27.920)

realized I need a Mac. So I went out and got a Mac. And I realized I need an iPhone for testing

Ryan Schiller (21:34.400)

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

Ryan Schiller (21:41.600)

there's almost too much information out there about programming. And the question is, where

Lex Fridman (21:45.440)

do you start, and what's going to be useful to you? And my first thought was I should look at some

Ryan Schiller (21:52.640)

Yale classes. But it became very clear, very quickly, that that was not the right place to start.

Ryan Schiller (21:58.080)

That would probably be the right place to start if I wanted to get a job at Amazon,

Lex Fridman (22:01.440)

but my goal was slightly different. And I definitely had it in mind that what I was

Ryan Schiller (22:07.760)

trying to make was I'm trying to prove out an idea. I'm not trying to make a finished product.

Ryan Schiller (22:11.520)

I'm just trying to get to the first step. Because I figured if I keep getting to the next step,

Ryan Schiller (22:18.560)

at least I won't die now. At least things will move forward. I'll learn new things. Maybe I'll

Ryan Schiller (22:23.440)

meet new people. I'll show a degree of seriousness about what I'm doing. And things will come

Ryan Schiller (22:27.920)

together. And that is, as you'll see, what ends up happening. So I start with Swift. And I find

Ryan Schiller (22:35.040)

this video from the Stanford professor that had a million views that was how to make, basically,

Ryan Schiller (22:39.360)

Swift apps perfect. And you just like, so you got this Mac, and you go to google.com,

Lex Fridman (22:46.800)

and you type in Xcode. And then I type in on YouTube like Stanford, iOS, Swift, enter.

Ryan Schiller (22:57.040)

First YouTube video has a million views. I'm like, it has to be good at Stanford has a million

Ryan Schiller (23:01.200)

views. I got lucky. I mean, that turned out to be a very good video. It's basically like

Ryan Schiller (23:07.520)

introductory course to Swift. Yeah. I mean, you say introductory. I think most of the people in

Ryan Schiller (23:12.160)

that class probably had a much better background than I did software developers probably computer

Ryan Schiller (23:18.000)

scientists. And it was slow for me. I don't think I realized it fully at the time just how far

Ryan Schiller (23:23.520)

behind I was from the rest of the class because I was like, wow, it seems like people are picking

Ryan Schiller (23:27.120)

this up really quickly. So it took a little longer and you know, a lot of time on Stack Overflow.

Lex Fridman (23:32.800)

But eventually I made a truly minimal viable product. The most minimal like we're talking,

Ryan Schiller (23:38.880)

you know, put text on screen, add text to screen, comment on top of text, you know,

Ryan Schiller (23:44.560)

make a post, make a response. And anyone with a Yale email can do this. And you plug it into

Ryan Schiller (23:52.720)

a certain cloud server and you verify people's accounts. And you you're off you have to figure

Ryan Schiller (23:59.600)

out how to like the whole idea of like having an account. So there's a permanence like you can

Ryan Schiller (24:05.760)

create an account with an email, verify it, verify it. OK, so that that's not, you know,

Lex Fridman (24:12.240)

and that's literally how I thought about it. Right. Like, so what do I need to do? And I'm

Ryan Schiller (24:15.520)

like, well, first thing I need is a login page. And I'm like, how to make a login page in Swift.

Ryan Schiller (24:21.920)

I mean, it's that easy. If someone this has been done before, of course. And then the first page

Ryan Schiller (24:25.520)

that pops up is probably a pretty damn good page when it wasn't that bad. It wasn't perfect. But

Ryan Schiller (24:30.400)

like maybe it got me 80 percent of the way there. And then I came into some bugs and then, you know,

Ryan Schiller (24:35.920)

I asked Stack Overflow a few questions and then I got a little further and then I found some more

Ryan Schiller (24:40.480)

bugs. And then I'm like, maybe this isn't the right way to do. Maybe I should do it this way.

Lex Fridman (24:43.680)

And I'm sure my code isn't great, but the goal isn't to make great code. The goal wasn't to

Ryan Schiller (24:48.640)

make scalable code. It was to understand, is this something my friends will use? Like,

Lex Fridman (24:53.760)

what is the reaction going to be if I put it in their hands and am I capable of making this thing?

Lex Fridman (24:58.720)

And that's awesome. And so you're focusing on the experience, like actually just really driving

Ryan Schiller (25:04.160)

towards that first step, figuring out the first step and really driving towards it. Of course,

Lex Fridman (25:08.560)

you have to also figure out like this concept of like storage, like database.

Lex Fridman (25:13.680)

You know something funny?

Lex Fridman (25:14.640)

What's that?

Ryan Schiller (25:15.280)

I just made the database structure with no knowledge of databases whatsoever.

Lex Fridman (25:19.840)

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

Lex Fridman (25:23.360)

you used to heap. That's so interesting. You're like, why did you decide to store it in this way?

Ryan Schiller (25:28.320)

I'm like, bro, I don't even know what a heap is. I just did it because it works. Like I'm trying

Ryan Schiller (25:35.200)

to make calls and stuff. And they're like, yeah, they're like, the hierarchy is really like,

Lex Fridman (25:39.360)

I'm like, what?

Ryan Schiller (25:40.400)

Well, there's a deep profound lesson in there that I don't know how much you've interacted

Ryan Schiller (25:44.800)

with computer science people since, but they tend to optimize and have these kinds of discussions.

Lex Fridman (25:49.760)

And what leads, what results is over optimization. It's like worrying, is this really the right way

Ryan Schiller (25:55.040)

to do it? And then you go as opposed to doing the first thing on Stack Overflow, you go down this

Ryan Schiller (26:00.080)

like rabbit hole of what's the actual proper way to do it. And then you're like, you wake up five

Ryan Schiller (26:06.640)

years later working on Amazon because you've never finished the login page. Like it's kind of

Ryan Schiller (26:13.120)

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

Ryan Schiller (26:20.880)

bro? Is the right, that should be a t shirt. That's really the right approach to building something

Ryan Schiller (26:27.920)

that ultimately creates an experience. And then you iterate eventually. That's how the great,

Ryan Schiller (26:34.720)

some of the greatest software products in this world have been built is you create it quickly

Lex Fridman (26:39.760)

and then just iterate. What was, by the way, in your mind, the thing that you were chasing as a

Ryan Schiller (26:45.360)

prototype? Like what, what was the first step that it feels like something is working? Like did you

Ryan Schiller (26:52.960)

see you interacting with another friend? Yeah. I think the first step was like, it's one thing to

Ryan Schiller (27:00.240)

tell someone about an idea, but it's another thing to put in their hands and kind of see like the way

Ryan Schiller (27:04.720)

their, their eyes kind of look. And when I'd go, I'd walk around cross campus, which is part of

Ryan Schiller (27:11.760)

Yale, and I'd literally just go up to people and run up to them and be like, try this, try this,

Ryan Schiller (27:15.520)

you got to try this. This is pre quarantine, by the way, of course, this would never be the same

Ryan Schiller (27:19.360)

post quarantine, but like, you got to try this, you got to try this. Like, what is it? And I'd be

Ryan Schiller (27:22.560)

like, and I explain it's like an anonymous discussion feed for our Yale campus. And you see

Ryan Schiller (27:27.520)

their gears turning and they just, some people would be like, not interested. I'm like, fine,

Ryan Schiller (27:32.560)

not your target demographic. I get it. You'll come eventually. But some people like you could see it,

Ryan Schiller (27:38.160)

they got it. They're like, yes. And that's when I was like, okay, okay, there is, and you don't need,

Ryan Schiller (27:46.080)

I mean, you don't need 50% of people to like it. You need what, 5%, 10% to love it. And then

Ryan Schiller (27:53.280)

they'll tell 5%, 10%. Yeah, word of mouth. And you're good. Of course, the first version was

Ryan Schiller (28:00.240)

very, very crappy, but seeing people trying despite all the crappiness wasn't, it was sort of enough

Ryan Schiller (28:05.520)

to be the first step. And since then, all of my code has been stripped out. I now have friends

Ryan Schiller (28:12.560)

who basically have told me, don't bother with the coding part. You do the rest. You just make sure

Ryan Schiller (28:17.280)

that we can code because they want to code. Great. I mean, I'm not an engineer. I never intended to

Ryan Schiller (28:22.000)

be an engineer. And there's a lot to do that's not engineering. But the point was just to validate

Lex Fridman (28:27.280)

the idea, so to speak. When was the moment that you felt like we've created something special?

Ryan Schiller (28:33.760)

Maybe a moment where you're proud of that this is, this has the potential to actually be the very

Ryan Schiller (28:44.320)

implementation of the idea that I initially had. There's so many little moments. It's like,

Lex Fridman (28:51.120)

and I bet there'll still be moments in the future that make it hard to like totally say, like. Yeah,

Ryan Schiller (28:58.080)

we should say this is, this is still very early days of Librex. It's only been a year since we've

Ryan Schiller (29:04.800)

had like actual, like a lot of people on the app. Yeah. About a year. Oh wow. Okay. I mean,

Ryan Schiller (29:09.520)

there's some crazy moments I could talk about sort of going to Dartmouth because it's one thing to

Ryan Schiller (29:14.000)

like get some traction at your school. People know you and you know, it's your school, you know,

Ryan Schiller (29:20.320)

it's another thing to go to another school and where no one knows you and sign up 90% of the

Ryan Schiller (29:25.360)

campus overnight. Wow. So tell me that story. You're invading another territory. It was literally

Ryan Schiller (29:31.440)

like that. Did you buy it like a Dartmouth sweatshirt? Purposefully, I didn't want to fraud

Ryan Schiller (29:37.840)

anyone, but I was purposefully nondescript in my clothing. Yeah. No Yale stuff, no Dartmouth stuff.

Ryan Schiller (29:43.520)

Just blended. I'll go back there. So what happened was this was like March of last year. So almost,

Ryan Schiller (29:54.080)

almost a year ago today. And I really wanted to see if we could go from sort of one campus to two

Ryan Schiller (2:00:05.920)

you are the authority as a young person who's going through these things and living in your

Ryan Schiller (2:00:12.000)

sort of milieu. And I mean, I've talked to, at this point, you know, so many experts, so many

Lex Fridman (2:00:21.760)

investors, VCs. You'd be amazed at the advice I've gotten. Advice I've gotten.

Lex Fridman (2:00:29.280)

So there's like a minefield of bad advice.

Ryan Schiller (2:00:32.240)

That's the hardest part, I think, for young people. And it's the thing, when people, like,

Ryan Schiller (2:00:37.680)

I help Yellies all the time who ask, like, I never turn down, when a founder asks me to have a

Ryan Schiller (2:00:43.200)

conversation, I never turn it down. I'm always there for them. And the number one thing I worry

Ryan Schiller (2:00:48.960)

about is that at Yale, we're taught implicitly and explicitly that you listen to the adult in the

Ryan Schiller (2:00:55.840)

room, you listen to the person with the highest, you know, pay grade. And it's devastating, because

Ryan Schiller (2:01:02.720)

that's how innovation dies. And, you know, yeah, it's intimidating to, like, you talk to VC who

Ryan Schiller (2:01:10.640)

probably means worth a billion dollars, a billion dollars, and they're going to tell you, you know,

Ryan Schiller (2:01:16.720)

all the, all the successful startups they have funders or even just a successful business owner,

Ryan Schiller (2:01:22.800)

uh, is going to tell you some advice and it's hard psychologically to think that they might be wrong.

Ryan Schiller (2:01:28.480)

Yeah, but you're saying that's the only way you succeed.

Ryan Schiller (2:01:31.680)

The only way you succeed, because if they knew what they were doing, they would have built it

Ryan Schiller (2:01:35.280)

themselves. Um, and what's especially hard is people go, oh, of course, you know,

Ryan Schiller (2:01:42.080)

I'll listen to people's, I'll listen to their advice, but I'll know why it's wrong.

Lex Fridman (2:01:46.000)

And then I'll, and I'll do my own thing. And that sounds great in the abstract, but sometimes you

Ryan Schiller (2:01:50.240)

can't always even put your finger on why they're wrong. And I think to have the conviction,

Ryan Schiller (2:01:54.720)

to say, you're wrong and I can't tell you why, but I still think I'm right. It's a rare thing,

Ryan Schiller (2:02:01.680)

especially at like, it's very counterintuitive. And you might even say it's hubris or arrogant,

Lex Fridman (2:02:07.680)

but I think it's necessary because a lot of these things are, they're not things that you can really

Ryan Schiller (2:02:13.760)

put into words until you see them in action. Like a lot of them are kind of happy accidents.

Ryan Schiller (2:02:19.120)

Yeah. It's been, it's been tough for me, like as a, as a person who, um, like I'm very empathetic.

Lex Fridman (2:02:25.040)

So I, when people tell me stuff, I kind of want to understand them. And it's been a painful process,

Ryan Schiller (2:02:33.200)

especially people close to me, basically everything I've done, and especially in the

Ryan Schiller (2:02:38.400)

recent few years, a lot of people close to me said not to do, you know, and, uh, like,

Ryan Schiller (2:02:45.040)

my parents too, that's been a hard one is, is to basically acknowledge to myself that you don't know,

Ryan Schiller (2:02:55.440)

like, you, you don't, that everything you're going to say by way of advice for me is not going to be

Ryan Schiller (2:03:03.040)

helpful. Like, I love my parents very much, but like, they're just like, they don't get it.

Ryan Schiller (2:03:10.160)

And, and as you put it beautifully, it's very difficult to put your finger on exactly why,

Ryan Schiller (2:03:17.440)

because, uh, a lot of advice sounds reasonable. That's the worst kind. Yeah.

Ryan Schiller (2:03:25.440)

Uh, if it, if it sounds really good, that just means it's an earworm. Like, that's like a song

Ryan Schiller (2:03:31.280)

that you hear on the radio and then you're like, you're humming it in the car and it's like,

Ryan Schiller (2:03:35.040)

it's the same thing. The more, the better it sounds, the more skeptical. Yeah. Reason is a,

Ryan Schiller (2:03:41.920)

is a bad drug. Like, should be very careful because, like, you know, the things that seem

Ryan Schiller (2:03:47.920)

impossible, every, every major innovation, every major business seems impossible at birth. But

Ryan Schiller (2:03:55.440)

even not just the impossible things, I think, you know, you look at like love, for example,

Ryan Schiller (2:03:59.760)

it's very easy to give advice, to sort of point out all the ways you can go wrong or marriage,

Ryan Schiller (2:04:07.760)

all the divorces that people go through, all the pain of years that you go through the divorce,

Ryan Schiller (2:04:13.840)

like the system of marriage, the marriage industrial complex, all the money that's wasted,

Ryan Schiller (2:04:19.280)

all those kinds of things. But that advice is useless when you're in love. I guess the best

Ryan Schiller (2:04:24.640)

the point is to just pat the person on the back and say, go get him, kid. Like, what is it? Good

Ryan Schiller (2:04:30.320)

Will Hunting. I went to see about a girl. Yeah. That's a good movie. I love that movie. But yeah,

Ryan Schiller (2:04:39.200)

that, that's, that took me a long time to figure out. I'm still trying to fight through it,

Lex Fridman (2:04:44.560)

but especially when you're young, that's hard. But, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

Lex Fridman (2:04:53.120)

but, uh, nothing in life is, uh, worth accomplishing is easy. So,

Lex Fridman (2:05:00.000)

but I think it's really interesting. You make that connection between like startup advice

Lex Fridman (2:05:03.440)

and like your parents, because it's the exact same sort of mechanism where when you're young,

Ryan Schiller (2:05:09.040)

your parents are usually like, right. Right. And the experts are usually right. And, you know,

Ryan Schiller (2:05:14.560)

if you listen to them and you, you, you follow their orders, you're going to go to a school

Ryan Schiller (2:05:18.320)

like Yale and at a certain point stops making sense. And I've, I've seen my friends at Yale

Lex Fridman (2:05:25.360)

go down paths because they just continued listening to their parents that

Ryan Schiller (2:05:29.840)

I know in their heart of hearts is not the right path for them.

Ryan Schiller (2:05:33.840)

Yeah. You know what? That's how I see like the education system. The whole point is to guide you

Ryan Schiller (2:05:42.320)

to a certain point in your life. And everybody's point is different. And your task is to,

Ryan Schiller (2:05:51.600)

at that point, to have a personal revolution and create your own path. But no one tells you that.

Ryan Schiller (2:05:57.040)

Nobody tells you that because they're, they want you to keep following the same path as they,

Ryan Schiller (2:06:00.800)

they're leading you towards. Like they're not going to say your whole job is to eventually

Ryan Schiller (2:06:05.520)

rebel. Yeah. That's how revolution, that's how rebellion works. You're not supposed to be told,

Lex Fridman (2:06:11.520)

but that is the task. They can take you just like you said, and depending who you are,

Ryan Schiller (2:06:16.720)

they can take you really far. But at a certain point you have to rebel. That could be getting

Ryan Schiller (2:06:21.520)

your PhD, that could be in your undergrad, that could be high school. Yeah. It could be any point.

Ryan Schiller (2:06:25.760)

One thing that I think played a pretty pivotal role, and I've never really mentioned this,

Ryan Schiller (2:06:32.000)

he might not even know the person about to tell you about, in sort of me actually going out and

Ryan Schiller (2:06:37.120)

making Librex was that I was taking this graduate level math class, my sophomore year. And I met

Ryan Schiller (2:06:45.200)

this, I met this PhD student who was also in it and had considerable citations and also startup

Ryan Schiller (2:06:53.200)

experience. And I think he actually ended up being the CTO of a unicorn later on. I've sort of lost

Ryan Schiller (2:06:59.040)

touch with him, but we're still Facebook friends as it is in the 21st century. So, and I was in a

Ryan Schiller (2:07:06.640)

class and I was telling him, I really want to, I really want to make this thing, but I have no

Ryan Schiller (2:07:10.240)

technical background. And he, this guy's a computer genius. He worked under Dan Spielman at Yale. So

Ryan Schiller (2:07:19.280)

he's a good guy. Right. And we were doing some math together. We were doing something on

Ryan Schiller (2:07:23.360)

discrepancy for those of you who really care about math. So combinatorics. And he just turns to me,

Ryan Schiller (2:07:31.280)

he's like, I think you could do it. Like, what do you mean you think I could do? He's like,

Ryan Schiller (2:07:35.360)

I think you could do it. And I was like, really? But I respected this guy so much.

Ryan Schiller (2:07:41.120)

His name was Young Duck. Shout out to Young Duck. I respected this guy so much that I was like,

Ryan Schiller (2:07:46.480)

if Young Duck says I can do it and Young Duck is a legit genius and he knows, and he knows me,

Ryan Schiller (2:07:52.160)

because we were in two classes together and we'd spent a lot of time together.

Lex Fridman (2:07:55.280)

If he thinks I can do it, then who am I to say I can't do it?

Ryan Schiller (2:07:59.120)

Yeah. You know, that's a lesson for mentorship is like, by the way, he has no idea probably.

Ryan Schiller (2:08:06.560)

Well, he might not even remember that interaction, which is funny. But the point is

Ryan Schiller (2:08:11.760)

that when a crazy young kid comes up to you with a crazy dream, you know, every once in a while,

Ryan Schiller (2:08:19.760)

you should just pat him on the back and say, I believe in you. Like you can do it. If they look

Ryan Schiller (2:08:25.440)

up to you, that means your words have power. And if you say, no, no, come on, be like reasonable,

Ryan Schiller (2:08:32.560)

like, you know, finish your schoolwork kind of thing. Like that's, that's unreasonable to take

Ryan Schiller (2:08:39.040)

that leap now. Just finish your education, blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever the reasonable

Ryan Schiller (2:08:43.440)

advice is every once in a while, maybe often as a mentor, you should say, you know, go see about a

Ryan Schiller (2:08:50.080)

girl in California or whatever the equivalent is. That was my moment. That was my good will hunting

Ryan Schiller (2:08:56.400)

moment. That's your good will hunting moment. Man, I miss Robin Williams. I was a special guy.

Ryan Schiller (2:09:03.520)

People love it when I ask about book recommendations in general. Of course,

Ryan Schiller (2:09:08.640)

your journey is just beginning. But is there something that jumps out to you? Technical,

Ryan Schiller (2:09:12.640)

fiction, philosophical, sci fi, coloring books, blog posts you read somewhere

Ryan Schiller (2:09:18.240)

that had an impact on your life? Video games. Video games that you recommend to others. Minecraft,

Ryan Schiller (2:09:26.720)

manual. Manga. I mean, yeah, video, you could mention video games too,

Lex Fridman (2:09:31.760)

if there's something that jumps out to you that just had like an impact.

Ryan Schiller (2:09:36.800)

I guess I'll say I really liked the book, The War of Art, which is a book about creative resistance

Lex Fridman (2:09:43.440)

and the creative struggle and what it means to be creative. And part of what I see in this

Ryan Schiller (2:09:49.280)

conversation and what you're doing, Lex, is so much of The War of Art's idea is that you just

Ryan Schiller (2:09:55.040)

keep writing and writing and writing until you get to the new crap. And you just roll with it,

Ryan Schiller (2:10:03.040)

right? And that's sort of what happens when you have like three hour conversations with people is

Ryan Schiller (2:10:07.840)

you can only have so much scripted or societally constructed stuff until you get to the real you.

Lex Fridman (2:10:15.120)

And you have to show up. I mean, that book is kind of painful.

Ryan Schiller (2:10:18.960)

It's really painful. And it's not something I would recommend for every part of it,

Lex Fridman (2:10:22.480)

but for what it did in my life at the time. It also kind of normalized, I don't know,

Ryan Schiller (2:10:28.960)

part of my coming of age story is part of it's about realizing that I'm a creative person and

Ryan Schiller (2:10:35.520)

person who needs to create. That's sort of a God given thing, I think, for a lot of people.

Lex Fridman (2:10:41.760)

But it's something that I don't really feel like I can live without. And part of it was realizing

Ryan Schiller (2:10:46.240)

that even within some of these more rigid structures, it's okay that I don't sort of

Ryan Schiller (2:10:50.880)

fit in with them. And to hear about the struggles of other creatives was something for my own

Ryan Schiller (2:10:55.840)

self esteem and my own growing up that was really important to me. So I don't think the book itself

Lex Fridman (2:11:01.360)

might be perfect, but for what it did for my life, it was really impactful.

Ryan Schiller (2:11:06.960)

Yeah, I think exactly. The words may not be exactly right by way of advice, but I think

Ryan Schiller (2:11:13.440)

the journey that a lot of creatives take by reading that book is kind of profound. He also

Ryan Schiller (2:11:20.880)

has another one called Turning Pro, I think. I mean, he in general espouses like taking it

Ryan Schiller (2:11:26.800)

seriously. If you have a creative mind and you want to create something special in this world,

Ryan Schiller (2:11:32.800)

go do it. Don't show up. Look at that blank page.

Lex Fridman (2:11:38.320)

So many people would tell me, would encourage me either blatantly or through implicit means

Ryan Schiller (2:11:45.600)

to basically take the Apple S seriously. It's a good signal, by the way. It's a good signal

Ryan Schiller (2:11:53.680)

because my really close friends, the ones who have always supported me, they never said that

Ryan Schiller (2:11:58.160)

because they got it. They understood that that was my path. And they might be skeptical. They might

Ryan Schiller (2:12:03.280)

be like, I mean, one of my friends I remember told me, I was always taken aback about why you

Ryan Schiller (2:12:09.120)

were so certain this would work out. And he's like, I finally got it once I saw it popping off,

Lex Fridman (2:12:14.640)

but before that, I just didn't get it. But he still supported me. And I think it's a really

Ryan Schiller (2:12:20.720)

good signal. And actually just the fact of going through this process has made me socially feel so

Ryan Schiller (2:12:27.120)

much more connected. And I've somewhat consolidated my social life to some degree, but it's so much

Ryan Schiller (2:12:31.840)

more vulnerable, connected. And that's part of the creative process. I have to thank for that,

Ryan Schiller (2:12:36.800)

I think. There's something that's unstoppable about the creative mind. It's right there,

Ryan Schiller (2:12:42.720)

that fire. And I guess part of the thing that you're supposed to do is let that fire burn.

Ryan Schiller (2:12:49.360)

In whichever direction. And it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt. Fire will hurt.

Lex Fridman (2:12:55.360)

But on the topic of video games, you mentioned the Stanley Parable offline.

Ryan Schiller (2:13:00.640)

You said you played some video games. Is there a video game that you especially love that you

Ryan Schiller (2:13:04.720)

recommend I play, for example? Yeah, I'll mention. It's actually really in keeping with what we've

Ryan Schiller (2:13:10.880)

been talking about. It's the Beginner's Guide, which was made by the same guy, Davey Rendon,

Ryan Schiller (2:13:16.560)

who made the Stanley Parable, which I briefly saw you. I just clicked the video and then I went to

Ryan Schiller (2:13:22.480)

sleep. It was like 2 a.m. But I briefly saw that you were looking at. And it's a game that is

Ryan Schiller (2:13:32.480)

better treated as art. And I think I won't claim to understand the creator, because that would be

Ryan Schiller (2:13:40.000)

a cardinal sin to me as a creative person. But it gets to the heart of a lot of the things that

Ryan Schiller (2:13:49.840)

we've been talking about, which is the creative mind. The game can be interpreted in a lot of

Ryan Schiller (2:13:54.960)

ways in a feminist way. It could be interpreted as a story of friends. It could be interpreted

Ryan Schiller (2:14:01.520)

as the story of critics versus a creative. The way I like to interpret it, and I don't want to

Ryan Schiller (2:14:07.520)

give away too much, is the story of the creative part of your mind that creates just for the sake

Ryan Schiller (2:14:16.240)

of creating. Meaning the part that creates for no rhyme or reason or clear meaning. It's almost

Ryan Schiller (2:14:24.560)

ethereal. Versus the part that's, you could call it the editor. You could call it the pragmatist.

Lex Fridman (2:14:32.080)

You could call it the necessary force of ego in our lives. We can't totally be egoless, right?

Lex Fridman (2:14:38.640)

But we need to be egoless to be creative. And how that sort of internal censure, what role does it

Lex Fridman (2:14:45.360)

play? And how do we allow our creative minds to be creative? And yet, how do we still become useful?

Lex Fridman (2:14:52.960)

And it's funny that a video game could have this in.

Ryan Schiller (2:14:55.760)

It's a fascinating tension, which reminds me about the ridiculous question that every once in a while

Ryan Schiller (2:15:02.480)

asks about meaning and death. So, this whole ride ends. You're at the beginning of the ride,

Lex Fridman (2:15:11.280)

but it could end any day, actually. That's kind of the way human life works. You could die today,

Lex Fridman (2:15:17.360)

you could die tomorrow. Do you think about your mortality? Do you think about death?

Lex Fridman (2:15:22.000)

Do you meditate on it? And in that context, as the creative, but a pragmatist, too,

Lex Fridman (2:15:29.600)

as running a startup, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?

Ryan Schiller (2:15:35.840)

Yeah, so, on mortality, right? About three years ago, four years ago now, I was excited to go to

Ryan Schiller (2:15:46.880)

Yale. I was playing six hours of squash a day, which squash is a sport I love so much. And I was

Ryan Schiller (2:15:53.360)

really getting a lot better. And I was even thinking I could maybe walk onto the Yale team.

Lex Fridman (2:16:00.960)

And I woke up one day, I felt really, really sick. I went and I decided not to go squash that day.

Ryan Schiller (2:16:11.280)

I wanted to, I almost did. And you'll see how this story turns out. You'll decide if I made the right

Ryan Schiller (2:16:20.640)

choice. I decided not to go squash today. And I decided to get my driver's license, or I had to

Ryan Schiller (2:16:25.840)

get my driver's license because I wanted to get a driver's license before I went off to college,

Ryan Schiller (2:16:31.440)

because otherwise I might never get it. And I'm going back and I successfully got my driver's

Ryan Schiller (2:16:35.840)

license for Hashem. And I go back to my house and I decided I don't want to drive back because I

Ryan Schiller (2:16:44.160)

just feel so sick. Like things are spinning. I have the worst headache. I come home, I run back

Ryan Schiller (2:16:50.160)

right into my bed and feeling really sick to the point where I even like asked my mom who is a

Ryan Schiller (2:16:55.840)

doctor, I'm like, should I go to the hospital? And she's like, you can just wait it out and

Ryan Schiller (2:17:00.160)

she'll get better. And then, you know, and then at one point I look at my arms and they're like

Ryan Schiller (2:17:08.320)

covered in this like red splotchy stuff. Yeah. And I'm like, mom, I think. And she's like, yeah,

Ryan Schiller (2:17:14.240)

we have to go. And so I go there and they're like, you have scarlet fever. And they're like,

Ryan Schiller (2:17:20.160)

there's nothing we can do. You should probably just go back home. So I go back home. Six hours

Ryan Schiller (2:17:24.320)

later I wake up in the morning. They'd let me out at like 3 a.m. They let me, I come home in

Ryan Schiller (2:17:30.880)

the morning and I feel this, like a spear through my chest. And I never felt anything like it. And

Ryan Schiller (2:17:37.440)

I was, it was very disconcerting when you have a, cause we're all used to different sorts of pain,

Ryan Schiller (2:17:41.280)

right? And that was the sort of pain I never felt before. As far as an athlete, you're used to like,

Ryan Schiller (2:17:46.240)

you know, pain. So I told my parents and immediately we hop back in the car. We go up

Ryan Schiller (2:17:51.280)

to the same hospital I was at six hours ago. And they initially didn't want to let me in. And I

Ryan Schiller (2:17:55.600)

was like, I have chest pain. They're like, oh, come in. Cause they're like, you're a healthy guy,

Ryan Schiller (2:17:58.880)

wait your turn. And I'm like, no, you don't understand. I have like a pain in my chest.

Lex Fridman (2:18:02.800)

And then they let me in. They start doing tests on me. They like put something like in my back,

Ryan Schiller (2:18:07.840)

which is really scary. It's a huge needle. And I'm smiling because it's like one of the ways

Ryan Schiller (2:18:12.720)

I reduce stress, I guess, or deal with this sort of thing and make light of it. But like,

Ryan Schiller (2:18:17.280)

you know, that, you know, it's definitely very scary in the moment, shocking and scary.

Lex Fridman (2:18:22.480)

And they go and they, they do a bunch of tests and they determined that a virus like attacked

Ryan Schiller (2:18:28.160)

my heart and I had myocarditis and pericarditis. And they said I had maybe 25 to 35% chance at

Ryan Schiller (2:18:35.520)

one point of dying. And so I'm sitting in my, they admit me into the hospital. I'm in the bed,

Ryan Schiller (2:18:43.600)

in my bed for about three weeks. And I'm just, I'm just standing there. And I had this moment

Ryan Schiller (2:18:51.680)

also that I remember very specifically where I was in so much pain that like I was crying,

Ryan Schiller (2:19:01.440)

not out of like emotional standpoint, but actually just purely out of the pain itself. Like I could

Ryan Schiller (2:19:07.920)

feel my heart in my chest. And when I leaned back, I felt it touch my rib cage and feel horrible.

Lex Fridman (2:19:12.880)

So I couldn't go to sleep and lean back. I had to lean forward all throughout the night. Right.

Lex Fridman (2:19:17.200)

And I'm feeling my, and I'm feeling my chest. I'm feeling this terrible pain in my chest.

Ryan Schiller (2:19:21.520)

I'm crying unstoppably. And I mean, also maybe I should mention that at the time I was someone

Ryan Schiller (2:19:28.080)

who like refused to take in anything into my body that wasn't natural. And so a lot of the time I,

Ryan Schiller (2:19:33.600)

I tried to be unmedicated. Eventually I didn't allow them to add a little medication to my body,

Lex Fridman (2:19:40.160)

but there's just so much uncertainty and pain. And the first time I had to come to terms with

Ryan Schiller (2:19:46.560)

mortality. First of all, I think you still should have gone and played squash. I mean, come on.

Ryan Schiller (2:19:52.080)

I mean, yeah. I thought you're serious about this. You still carry that with you sort of.

Ryan Schiller (2:20:01.440)

There is power to realizing the ride can end. Right. Very suddenly. Very suddenly. Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:20:08.960)

And painfully. And, you know, it, it has pragmatic application to like what you,

Lex Fridman (2:20:16.720)

to trajectories you take through life. Right.

Ryan Schiller (2:20:19.280)

Something else that is worth noting is that I, for the next year, couldn't walk to my classes.

Lex Fridman (2:20:27.840)

So I get to Yale, they put me in a medical single alone, and I have to get shuttled to all my

Ryan Schiller (2:20:35.280)

classes. I have to ask, I had to ask a few professors to even move classes so I could

Ryan Schiller (2:20:39.120)

actually get there. I can't move my book. I can't lift my book bags. I can't, I can't walk upstairs.

Ryan Schiller (2:20:48.080)

I spent like 12 hours a day in my dorm room, just like staring at the walls and more so. And more

Ryan Schiller (2:20:55.440)

than that, all this, like, you, I got to watch my body, like, deteriorate and like the muscle,

Ryan Schiller (2:21:05.520)

like fall off of it. Cause I was, I was taking these pills and they're kind of catabolic. And

Ryan Schiller (2:21:11.680)

for an 18 year old, I mean, I think every 18 year old has feelings about their body, man or woman.

Ryan Schiller (2:21:18.960)

And, you know, just seeing this, it's like, you're watching sort of death transpire. And it's like,

Lex Fridman (2:21:24.720)

and you're also very fatigued because your heart's not at peak condition. And you're thinking about

Ryan Schiller (2:21:30.640)

the future and a lot of the things you enjoy have kind of been stripped away from you.

Lex Fridman (2:21:35.520)

And I took up a meditation practice, like started with like five minutes a day. At my peak, I was at

Ryan Schiller (2:21:43.360)

like 40 minutes a day, kept it up consistently for about two years. And I started thinking about,

Ryan Schiller (2:21:50.240)

like, what do I want to do? And like, what do I care about? And to get to your point,

Ryan Schiller (2:21:57.600)

I think you were asking, like, how does this carry forward? Right? I think I realized that,

Ryan Schiller (2:22:05.440)

you know, there's an end and I realized that there are things I believe and things that I believe

Ryan Schiller (2:22:10.480)

that might not be so overtly popular, but that I truly think make the world a better place.

Lex Fridman (2:22:15.520)

And in spite of, and then basically, if my conditions provided, I wanted to make something

Ryan Schiller (2:22:21.920)

that I wanted to do something that would make me feel sort of whole in that way.

Ryan Schiller (2:22:28.080)

Yeah. I mean, that's an amazing journey to take that time and to come out on the other end.

Ryan Schiller (2:22:33.280)

Now, man, that's amazing. I did not realize like that there was a long term struggle.

Ryan Schiller (2:22:37.920)

I think that's in the end, if you do succeed, will have a profound positive impact because

Ryan Schiller (2:22:45.280)

struggle is ultimately like humbling, but also empowering. So I'm glad to see that. But from the

Ryan Schiller (2:22:53.600)

perspective of the creator of the other ridiculous question about meaning, do you think about this

Ryan Schiller (2:22:58.240)

kind of stuff? Is that the, you know, the meaning of life for you, the meaning of life for us,

Ryan Schiller (2:23:08.800)

descendants of apes in general? The first thing I'd like to say is that I think part of like,

Ryan Schiller (2:23:13.760)

when we talk about the meaning of life, the part of it is the fact that we get to struggle with

Ryan Schiller (2:23:17.680)

this question and we get to do it together for a long time. And we sometimes, I think,

Ryan Schiller (2:23:25.200)

it's accepting that there's no meaning at all. And sometimes I think it's accepting that,

Ryan Schiller (2:23:29.840)

or even just parsing the phrase and thinking about the meaning of life. I sometimes I'm,

Ryan Schiller (2:23:34.080)

look, I'm very young. Again, I hope that anything I say now is going to be very different in the

Ryan Schiller (2:23:41.120)

future because I think life has so many meanings that it'll be crazy to see what I think in 20

Ryan Schiller (2:23:49.040)

years about the meaning of life.

Lex Fridman (2:23:50.400)

Yeah, rise from the future, cut them some slack.

Ryan Schiller (2:23:57.040)

Please do. Perspective, perspective, perspective. Having said that, you know, I think part of what

Ryan Schiller (2:24:05.120)

brings meaning to my life is things like this, where we think about these things with people

Ryan Schiller (2:24:09.040)

who are really, really, really on the ball, and we get to connect with these people.

Lex Fridman (2:24:14.800)

That certainly brings meaning to my life, human connection.

Ryan Schiller (2:24:17.200)

Yeah, this conversation is just another, like, echo of the thing you're trying to create

Ryan Schiller (2:24:24.240)

in a digital space, right? That's the same kind of magic. From what I understand about what you're

Ryan Schiller (2:24:30.720)

trying to create is the same reason I fell in love with the long form podcasting, like as a fan.

Ryan Schiller (2:24:36.240)

That's why I listen to long form podcasts. Is there something deeply human and genuine

Ryan Schiller (2:24:42.400)

about the interchange through their voice? But I do think that connection through text can be

Ryan Schiller (2:24:49.680)

even more powerful. Like I think about letters. I still write letters to Russia. You know,

Ryan Schiller (2:24:55.280)

there's something powerful in letters. When you put a lot of yourself in the words you say,

Ryan Schiller (2:25:03.360)

in the words you write, that's powerful. You can really communicate, not just the actual semantic

Ryan Schiller (2:25:10.480)

meaning of the words, but like a lot of who you are through those words and create real connection.

Lex Fridman (2:25:18.160)

So I hope you succeed there. And listen, Ryan, I think this is an incredible conversation. I'm

Ryan Schiller (2:25:26.960)

glad that people like you are fighting the good fight for bringing out the best in human nature

Ryan Schiller (2:25:33.760)

in the digital space. I think that's a battleground where the good will win, like love will win. And

Ryan Schiller (2:25:40.800)

I'm glad you're creating technology that does just that. So thank you so much for wasting all

Ryan Schiller (2:25:45.680)

your time for coming down. I can't wait to see what you do in the future. Thanks for talking today.

Lex Fridman (2:25:50.400)

Thank you for having me. Bam. How many finger guns have you gotten at the end of the podcast?

Ryan Schiller (2:25:56.560)

Zero. Two now. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ryan Shiller. And thank you

Ryan Schiller (2:26:04.720)

to our sponsors, Allform, Magic Spoon, BetterHelp, and Brave. Click their links to support this

Ryan Schiller (2:26:12.080)

podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from George Washington on March 15, 1783.

Ryan Schiller (2:26:20.960)

If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.

Lex Fridman (2:26:28.640)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Ryan Schiller (30:00.880)

campuses. So I didn't know anyone at Dartmouth's campus, but I kind of, I had some cold emails,

Ryan Schiller (30:10.160)

some warmish emails. And I went to people and I was like, basically, can I sleep on your floor for

Ryan Schiller (30:16.320)

two days during finals period? I had a lot of people who said, this is crazy. Like no one's

Ryan Schiller (30:21.120)

going to, no one wants to download an app during finals period, a social app during finals period.

Lex Fridman (30:26.160)

But I emailed a few people. I was like, you know, can I sleep on your floor? And one of them

Ryan Schiller (30:31.040)

was crazy enough to say, sure, come to my, come to my dorm. I have a nice floor. And he ended up,

Ryan Schiller (30:37.760)

today, he's still really close. He's a really close friend. But anyway, I take a train,

Ryan Schiller (30:42.800)

knowing nothing about this guy besides his first and last name. And I arrive and Dartmouth is

Ryan Schiller (30:50.160)

really, really remote, way more remote than you think to the point where I'm like, he's like,

Ryan Schiller (30:56.560)

he warned me. He's a really hospitable guy. He warned me like, it's going to be hard to get to

Ryan Schiller (31:00.480)

campus from the train station because it's really remote. And I'm like, I'm sure it's fine. I'll

Lex Fridman (31:04.400)

just get an Uber. There are no Ubers in Hanover. What do you think this is?

Lex Fridman (31:09.680)

This is New Hampshire. So, Connecticut, I mean, Yale is pretty remote as well, no?

Ryan Schiller (31:14.800)

Yeah. Yale is, well, I mean, Yale is in New Haven, which is a real city. It has Ubers. It has food.

Ryan Schiller (31:21.920)

It has culture. It has a nightclub even. Like, we're talking about a real city. Like, it's not

Ryan Schiller (31:26.800)

New York. It's not Philadelphia, where I'm from, but it's a city. New Hampshire is something very

Ryan Schiller (31:32.880)

different. Yeah. Beautiful campus, I'm sure. Beautiful. Oh, my gosh. I could talk so much

Ryan Schiller (31:37.840)

about, I was blown away by Dartmouth. I started wondering like why I didn't apply.

Ryan Schiller (31:42.880)

Legitimately, between the people and the culture, it was a beautiful vacation. So,

Ryan Schiller (31:49.680)

I arrived there, no Uber, but eventually I call this guy who's like the only guy who can get you

Ryan Schiller (31:54.960)

to Dartmouth and it takes a couple hours, but we get there. I sleep on this guy's floor. I wake up.

Ryan Schiller (32:00.160)

I ask him if there's any printing. He's like, oh, Dartmouth happens to have free printing in

Ryan Schiller (32:03.760)

the copy room. I print out like 2000 posters until the guy in the copy room literally goes to me,

Ryan Schiller (32:10.640)

he's like, kid, I don't know what you're doing, but you need to get out of here. I'm like,

Ryan Schiller (32:15.200)

I'm going, I'm going. I found the limits. Yeah, I found the limit. I think a lot of startups

Ryan Schiller (32:20.480)

about finding the limits. That's a little piece of advice. Socially, he's like, you got to get

Ryan Schiller (32:26.400)

out of here. I then go to every single dorm door. I put a poster under every single dorm door,

Lex Fridman (32:34.000)

advertising the app with a QR code. I walk around campus saying hi to everyone

Lex Fridman (32:40.080)

and telling them about the app. I go from table to table in the cafeteria, introduce myself,

Ryan Schiller (32:44.320)

say hi and tell them to download the app. It's an exhausting day. So many steps,

Lex Fridman (32:48.960)

so many crotching down to slip the poster under the dorm door. My legs were burning.

Lex Fridman (32:54.640)

But by the end of it, 24 hours later, I'm sitting in a bus and I'm just pressing the refresh button

Ryan Schiller (33:02.320)

on the account creation panels. It's like going up by hundreds. And I'm like, oh my gosh.

Ryan Schiller (33:07.600)

The word of mouth is working in a sense. I mean, certainly your initial seed is powerful.

Ryan Schiller (33:14.400)

Just a piece.

Ryan Schiller (33:15.360)

Yeah, but then the word of mouth is what carries it forward. And what was the explanation you gave

Ryan Schiller (33:20.320)

to the app? Is anonymity a fundamental part of it? Like saying, this is a chance

Lex Fridman (33:27.280)

for you to speak your mind about your experiences on campus.

Ryan Schiller (33:32.160)

Yeah, I think people get it. What I've realized is you don't need to tell people

Lex Fridman (33:37.360)

why to try it. They know.

Ryan Schiller (33:40.880)

There's a hunger for this.

Ryan Schiller (33:42.080)

Exactly. So all I do is I'm very factual. I said, and this is where I kind of ended up coining the

Ryan Schiller (33:50.480)

line that I now used to say it because I said it so many times in those 24 hours.

Ryan Schiller (33:55.040)

I just said, it's an anonymous discussion feed for Dartmouth. And they're like, yes.

Ryan Schiller (34:02.480)

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

Ryan Schiller (34:06.320)

great, I'm excited to try this. I'm excited to meet people and connect. And I mean,

Ryan Schiller (34:11.520)

the way Dartmouth is taken to is incredible. Everything from professors writing poems during

Ryan Schiller (34:17.040)

finals period to be like, good luck in finals period. You're going to rise like a Phoenix

Ryan Schiller (34:22.160)

or whatever to like, yeah, it's crazy. To I heard about two women meeting on Librex and

Ryan Schiller (34:29.040)

starting a finance club at Dartmouth to significant others meeting. There was an article recently

Ryan Schiller (34:37.280)

written up at Yale as well about two queer women who met on Librex and started a relationship,

Ryan Schiller (34:41.840)

which was pretty, it was pretty interesting to see people throwing parties pre COVID. Yeah.

Ryan Schiller (34:47.600)

It was just amazing to see how, when you allow people to be vulnerable and social,

Lex Fridman (34:51.440)

they connect. People have this natural desire to connect.

Ryan Schiller (34:54.960)

Yeah. When, when you have, would have a natural desire to have a voice. And then when that voice

Ryan Schiller (35:01.520)

is, is paired with freedom, that you could truly express yourself and there's something

Ryan Schiller (35:08.560)

liberating about that. And in that sense, you're like, you're connecting as your true self,

Ryan Schiller (35:14.240)

whatever that is. What are the most powerful conversation you've seen on the app? You mentioned

Ryan Schiller (35:19.040)

like people connecting. The hard part of that, that is the sorting, you know, figuring out which

Ryan Schiller (35:23.680)

one, which one am I going to put at the top? Mental sorting out. Just something that stands

Ryan Schiller (35:27.360)

out to you. Sorry. I don't mean to do like the top 10 conversations ever of all time,

Ryan Schiller (35:31.600)

ever on the app. I just mean like stuff that you remember that stands out to you.

Ryan Schiller (35:35.280)

I remember this one really amazing comment from this. He was a Mexican international student

Ryan Schiller (35:43.760)

who spoke out and this, this, this post was super edgy, but yet it got hundreds and hundreds of

Ryan Schiller (35:51.440)

upvotes within the Yale community. It was a Yale community specific post. And we should point out

Ryan Schiller (35:55.040)

that there's a school specific community now and there's an all Ivy community. So this was

Ryan Schiller (36:00.800)

specifically in the Yale community. And this was a little while ago, but it stuck with me. This

Ryan Schiller (36:06.560)

Mexican international student comes to Yale and he starts talking about his experience

Ryan Schiller (36:13.040)

in the La Casa, which is the Mexican Latina X as they would say, cultural center at Yale,

Lex Fridman (36:19.120)

and how he doesn't feel welcome there because he's Roman Catholic basically and international

Lex Fridman (36:26.720)

and how he doesn't feel like he fits with their agenda. And as a result, this place that's

Ryan Schiller (36:31.680)

supposed to be home for him, he feels outcasted and feels more alone than he does anywhere else

Ryan Schiller (36:36.240)

on campus. That's powerful. That was powerful to me. Yeah. It's hearing someone, someone who should

Ryan Schiller (36:42.400)

be feeling supported by this culture say, actually, this is not doing anything for me. Like this is

Lex Fridman (36:50.240)

not helping me. This is not where I feel at home. So what do you make of anonymity?

Ryan Schiller (36:59.520)

Because it seems to be a fundamental aspect of the power of the app, right? But at the same time,

Ryan Schiller (37:06.640)

anonymity on the internet, so it protects us, right? It gives us freedom to have a voice,

Lex Fridman (37:14.000)

but it can also bring out the dark sides of human nature, like trolls or people who want

Ryan Schiller (37:20.080)

to be malicious, want to hurt others purely for the joy of hurting others, being cruel for fun

Lex Fridman (37:28.320)

and going to the dark places. So like, what do you make of anonymity as a fundamental feature

Ryan Schiller (37:33.600)

of social interaction, like the pros and the cons? Yeah. Just to break that down a bit,

Ryan Schiller (37:38.960)

I would say a lot of those same things about a place like Twitter where people are very

Ryan Schiller (37:42.480)

unanonymous. Having said that, of course, there's a different sort of capacity people have when

Ryan Schiller (37:49.280)

they're anonymous, right? In all different sorts of ways. So what do I make of anonymity? I think

Ryan Schiller (37:55.440)

it can be incredibly liberating and allow people to be incredibly vulnerable and to connect in

Ryan Schiller (37:59.440)

different ways, both on politics, and there was a lot to talk about this year regarding politics,

Lex Fridman (38:04.880)

and personally being vulnerable, talking about relationships and mental health.

Lex Fridman (38:10.960)

I think it allows people to have a community that's not performative.

Lex Fridman (38:14.800)

And of course, there's this other side where people can sometimes break rules or say things

Ryan Schiller (38:21.440)

that they wouldn't otherwise say that people don't always agree with or that people might

Ryan Schiller (38:25.200)

find repugnant. And to an extent, these can facilitate great conversations. And on the other

Ryan Schiller (38:31.600)

hand, we have to have moderation in place, and we have to have community guidelines to make sure

Ryan Schiller (38:36.000)

that the anonymity doesn't overwhelm the purpose, which is that anonymity, first of all, anonymity

Ryan Schiller (38:42.480)

is a tool in Librex. It was not the purpose of Librex. It is a way that we get towards these

Ryan Schiller (38:48.560)

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

Ryan Schiller (38:57.840)

It's not just Librex is anonymous because Librex isn't totally anonymous. Everyone's a verified

Ryan Schiller (39:05.680)

Ivy League student. You know exactly what school everyone goes to. You only have one account per

Ryan Schiller (39:11.200)

person at Yale. I mean, what that amounts to is people have more of an ownership in the community

Lex Fridman (39:19.680)

and people know that they're connected and they have a common vernacular.

Lex Fridman (39:23.040)

So the anonymity is a scale and it's a tool. But you can also trust, I mean, this is the

Ryan Schiller (39:27.840)

difference between Reddit anonymity, where you can easily create multiple accounts.

Ryan Schiller (39:33.920)

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

Ryan Schiller (39:39.840)

accounts, then you can trust that the anonymous person you're talking to is a human being.

Lex Fridman (39:45.600)

Not a bot.

Ryan Schiller (39:46.640)

I try to be completely unanonymous now in my all public interactions. I try to be as real in every

Lex Fridman (39:53.840)

way possible, like zero gap between private me and public me.

Lex Fridman (39:59.200)

Why exactly did you, it seems like this is an intentional mission. What made you want to sort

Ryan Schiller (40:04.400)

of bridge that gap between the private sphere and public sphere? Because that's unique. I know a

Ryan Schiller (40:09.760)

lot of intellectuals who would make a different decision.

Ryan Schiller (40:13.040)

Yeah, interesting. I had a discussion with Naval about this, actually, with a few others that

Ryan Schiller (40:20.080)

have a very clear distinction between public and private.

Lex Fridman (40:24.160)

Something I'm struggling with, by the way, personally, and thinking about.

Lex Fridman (40:27.840)

So one on the very basic surface level is if you carry with yourself lies, small lies or big lies,

Ryan Schiller (40:41.840)

it's extra mental effort to remember what you're supposed to say and not supposed to say.

Lex Fridman (40:51.920)

So that's on a very surface level of like, it's just easier to live life when you have

Lex Fridman (40:57.680)

the smaller the gap between the private you and the public you.

Lex Fridman (41:01.760)

And the second is, I think for me, from an engineering perspective,

Ryan Schiller (41:09.200)

like if I'm dishonest with others, I will too quickly become dishonest with myself.

Lex Fridman (41:16.880)

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

Lex Fridman (41:22.080)

and build revolutionary ideas. There's something about honesty that feels like

Ryan Schiller (41:26.560)

it's that first principles thinking that's almost like overused as a term, but it feels like that

Ryan Schiller (41:31.760)

requires radical honesty, not radical asshole and lishness, but radical honesty with yourself,

Ryan Schiller (41:38.160)

with yourself. And it feels like it's difficult to be radically honest with yourself when you're

Ryan Schiller (41:44.960)

being dishonest with the public. And also I have a nice feature, honestly, that in this current

Ryan Schiller (41:52.240)

social context, so we can talk about race and gender and what are the other topics that are

Lex Fridman (41:52.240)

Ethnicity and nationality.

Lex Fridman (41:59.440)

touchy?

Lex Fridman (42:03.040)

All those things. I mean, like.

Ryan Schiller (42:04.640)

Family structure.

Ryan Schiller (42:05.840)

Maybe I'm ineloquent in the way I speak about them, but I honestly, when I look in the mirror,

Ryan Schiller (42:12.480)

like I'm not deeply hateful of a particular race or even just hateful particular race.

Ryan Schiller (42:19.440)

I'm sure I'm biased and I've tried to like think about those biases and so on. And also, I don't have any

Ryan Schiller (42:36.720)

creepy shit in my closet. It seems like a lot of people did a lot of creepy stuff in their life.

Ryan Schiller (42:43.680)

I've gotten a bit of a platform. And I think it all started when I went to this female comedian, Whitney

Ryan Schiller (43:12.800)

Brown, and I was like, you know, I really value love, long term monogamy with like one person. And it's like, I

Ryan Schiller (43:42.720)

really value liberating as a human being. Forget public, all that. Because then I feel like I'm on sturdy ground when I say

Ryan Schiller (44:06.240)

difficult things. And at the same time, sorry, I'm ranting on this. I apologize.

Ryan Schiller (44:12.240)

Like I won't be able to fake it. Like they'll see it through. Yeah. So I feel like if you're not

Ryan Schiller (44:23.920)

lying about stuff, you have the freedom to truly be yourself. And the internet will figure it out.

Ryan Schiller (44:30.800)

Like we'll figure who you are. People have a natural tendency to be able to tell bullshit.

Ryan Schiller (44:35.680)

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,

Ryan Schiller (44:45.600)

being able to detect honesty seems like one that would be particularly valuable,

Ryan Schiller (44:49.520)

especially in the sorts of societies we developed into. And then also from a selfish perspective,

Ryan Schiller (44:54.160)

like a success perspective, I think there's a lot of folks that have inspired me, like Elon is one of them,

Ryan Schiller (45:01.360)

that shows that there's a hunger for genuineness. Like you can build a business as a CEO and be

Ryan Schiller (45:09.920)

genuine and like real and do stupid shit every once in a while, as long as it's coming from the

Ryan Schiller (45:15.040)

same place of who you truly are. Like Elon is inspirational with that. And then there's a lot of

Ryan Schiller (45:19.680)

other people I admire that are counter inspirations in the sense like they're very formal. They hold

Ryan Schiller (45:28.080)

back a lot of themselves. And it's like, I know how brilliant those people are. And I think they're

Ryan Schiller (45:33.920)

not being as effective of leaders, public faces of companies as they could be. I mean, to be honest,

Ryan Schiller (45:41.120)

like not to throw shade, but I will, it's like Mark Zuckerberg is an example of that. Jack Dorsey is

Ryan Schiller (45:49.520)

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

Ryan Schiller (45:54.000)

more. I think he's a much more amazing person than he conveys through his public presentation. I think

Ryan Schiller (46:03.360)

a lot of that has to do with PR and marketing people having an effect. This is difficult. I think

Ryan Schiller (46:08.400)

it's really difficult. It's probably many of the same difficulties you will face as the pressures.

Lex Fridman (46:14.800)

But it's hard to know what to do. But I think as much as possible as an individual, you should try

Ryan Schiller (46:20.320)

to be honest in the face of the world and the company that wants you to be more polished. And

Ryan Schiller (46:28.800)

that being more polished turns you into a politician and politician eventually turns into

Ryan Schiller (46:33.760)

being dishonest. Dishonest with the world and dishonest with yourself.

Ryan Schiller (46:37.760)

Something I noticed, which was of the people you mentioned, those things have had ramifications

Ryan Schiller (46:43.360)

in terms of letting things go too far or get out of hand. And you wonder, it's an aspect of lying,

Ryan Schiller (46:51.760)

right? You say one lie goes to another lie. You push it down. It doesn't matter. You can figure

Ryan Schiller (46:57.920)

it out later. You can figure it out later. Pretty soon, you've dug a pretty big hole. And I think

Ryan Schiller (47:04.000)

if we look at Twitter and we look at Facebook, I think it goes without saying what sorts of holes

Ryan Schiller (47:09.440)

have been dug because of, perhaps because of a lack of honesty that goes all the way up to the

Ryan Schiller (47:14.400)

leaders. So yeah, there's two problems within the company. It doesn't make you as effective of a

Ryan Schiller (47:20.640)

leader, I think. That's one. And two, for social media companies, I think people need to trust,

Ryan Schiller (47:28.480)

like it doesn't have to be the CEO, but it has to be like, this is how humans work. We want to look

Ryan Schiller (47:34.000)

to somebody we're like, I trust you. If you're going to use a social media platform, I think you

Ryan Schiller (47:43.040)

have to trust the set of individuals working at the top of that social. Something I realized

Ryan Schiller (47:49.760)

really quickly, one of the lessons throughout the startup was that people don't totally connect to

Ryan Schiller (47:55.920)

products as much as they connect to people. And I mean, I don't know how much you've spent on

Ryan Schiller (48:03.600)

Librex. You've only been here the last week, but I mean, I love the product. And one of the aspects

Ryan Schiller (48:11.520)

of me loving the product is that I was super active and I've been super active throughout the

Ryan Schiller (48:15.840)

entire time. And the amount of support I've received has made that very easy to do from

Lex Fridman (48:22.000)

the community and the fact that I could, I mean, so I came to Boston for this interview, right?

Ryan Schiller (48:26.480)

Yeah. I came to Boston. I got off the train. It was around 5.30 PM. I checked Librex. Someone

Ryan Schiller (48:34.560)

is writing, hey, I'm in Boston. Does anyone want to get dinner? 30 minutes later, I'm getting

Ryan Schiller (48:38.800)

dinner with them. That's amazing. And I mean, it's incredible. First of all, as an entrepreneur,

Ryan Schiller (48:46.160)

the amount of stuff I learn from these people and when they reiterate and I hear that they got the

Ryan Schiller (48:52.080)

message through the product. I mean, that's incredibly validating, but also, I mean, I think

Ryan Schiller (48:57.120)

it's just important to be able to put a face to a brand and especially a brand that's built on trust

Ryan Schiller (49:02.960)

because fundamentally the users are trusting us with some really important discussions and some

Lex Fridman (49:09.440)

really, and a movement to some degree. It's a community and a movement.

Ryan Schiller (49:13.840)

I'll tell you actually why I didn't use the app very much so far is there's something really

Ryan Schiller (49:20.960)

powerful about the way it's constructed, which I felt like a bit of an outsider, because I don't

Ryan Schiller (49:26.080)

know the communities. It felt like it's a really strong community around each of these places.

Lex Fridman (49:34.000)

And so I felt like I was, it made me really wish there was an MIT one. And so there's

Ryan Schiller (49:39.920)

both discussions about the deep community issues within Columbia or Yale or so on,

Lex Fridman (49:45.680)

and Dartmouth, and there's also the broader community of the Ivy Leagues that people are

Ryan Schiller (49:52.240)

discussing. But I could see that actually expanding more and more and more, but which is,

Ryan Schiller (49:57.200)

it's a powerful coupling, which is the feeling of like this little village, this little community

Ryan Schiller (50:02.640)

we're building together, but also the broader issues. So you could do both discussions.

Ryan Schiller (50:08.480)

One thing that was important to me is talking about social media as a concept. I think the way

Ryan Schiller (50:16.560)

people socialize is very much context dependent. So we're talking about people understanding each

Ryan Schiller (50:23.360)

other through language, through English. And these languages are constructed in a very nuanced way,

Ryan Schiller (50:31.440)

in a very sort of temperamental way, right? And you kind of need a similar context to be able to

Ryan Schiller (50:38.960)

have productive conversations. So to me, it's really important that these groups, they share

Ryan Schiller (50:45.520)

something in common, a really big lived experience, the Ivy League, or their school community. And

Ryan Schiller (50:51.840)

they have a similar vocabulary, they have a similar background, they know what's happening

Ryan Schiller (50:55.200)

in their community. And so having social media that is community connected to me was fundamental.

Ryan Schiller (51:00.480)

Like, you talk about anonymity. To me, community is the thing that when I think about Librex,

Ryan Schiller (51:06.240)

I think what makes it different. It's the fact that everyone knows what's going on. Everyone

Ryan Schiller (51:12.880)

comes from a similar context and people can socialize in a way where they understand each

Ryan Schiller (51:18.000)

other because they've been through, you used the word lived experience, they've been through so

Lex Fridman (51:22.080)

many of the same lived experiences.

Ryan Schiller (51:23.920)

One clarification, is there an easy way, if you choose, to then connect in meat space,

Lex Fridman (51:32.640)

in physical space?

Lex Fridman (51:34.480)

So the, I guess the sort of magic of it, and I was talking to a bunch of Harvard Librexers who I

Ryan Schiller (51:41.280)

met off the app while I was in Boston. And every time they told me this is my favorite part of the

Ryan Schiller (51:46.320)

app, this is what I love about the app. We have this matching system, which is an anonymous direct

Ryan Schiller (51:50.640)

message that you can send to any poster. So, like, I was talking to this guy who, he was really

Ryan Schiller (51:59.120)

into coin collection. And he met other people who are really into coin collection through a post

Lex Fridman (52:04.480)

and what they he would make a post about coin collection. And then someone would come to him

Lex Fridman (52:09.200)

and they'd be like, and they could direct message him anonymously. And it would just show them that

Ryan Schiller (52:13.760)

his it would just show him their school. And then they could just text chat, totally anonymously,

Ryan Schiller (52:18.960)

direct message if he accepted the anonymous request.

Lex Fridman (52:22.000)

Do they see the usernames, right?

Ryan Schiller (52:23.760)

There are no usernames on Librex. It's all just school's names. So he made this post about coin

Lex Fridman (52:30.400)

collection. And he got a direct message.

Lex Fridman (52:34.000)

Yeah, I guess so, right?

Lex Fridman (52:35.360)

No usernames.

Ryan Schiller (52:38.240)

I was just looking at the text.

Lex Fridman (52:39.760)

Yeah.

Ryan Schiller (52:40.560)

That's interesting. That's right.

Lex Fridman (52:42.400)

And I can tell you, I can go into why.

Ryan Schiller (52:44.320)

That's really interesting.

Lex Fridman (52:46.320)

Yeah, I can go into it.

Lex Fridman (52:47.360)

So it truly is anonymous.

Lex Fridman (52:49.360)

Well, I mean, it depends on what you mean by anonymous.

Ryan Schiller (52:52.400)

Exactly. It's a very different kind of anonymous.

Lex Fridman (52:56.160)

And the reason that we made that decision is because we wanted people to connect to ideas.

Ryan Schiller (53:02.320)

We want people to connect to things in the moment. We don't want people to go,

Ryan Schiller (53:06.160)

oh, I know this guy. He said this other thing. And we didn't want people to feel like they were at

Ryan Schiller (53:10.880)

risk of being doxxed. So it's just these are small communities, right? We talked about this. Everyone

Ryan Schiller (53:15.680)

knows someone who knows you. And in 2021, it would not take much to be able to figure out who someone

Ryan Schiller (53:23.200)

might be just through a couple of posts. So it's both safety and about the ideas in terms of not

Ryan Schiller (53:29.440)

adding usernames. Anyway, we have this anonymous direct message system where you can direct

Ryan Schiller (53:34.480)

message the original poster of any post, the OP, if you're a Redditor, of any post. And that makes

Ryan Schiller (53:41.920)

it really easy to meet up because once you guys are one on one, you can exchange a number. You

Ryan Schiller (53:46.720)

can exchange a Snapchat. You can exchange an email. Probably not very often, but you could.

Lex Fridman (53:53.440)

And then that's how people meet up. Matching.

Lex Fridman (53:56.560)

And then a lot of people connect in this way. Let me just take a small step into the technical.

Ryan Schiller (54:01.920)

I read somewhere, I don't know if it's true, that one of the reasons you were rejected from YC,

Ryan Schiller (54:06.720)

Y Combinator, in the final rounds is because one of the principles is to refuse to sell user data.

Lex Fridman (54:15.200)

Can you speak to that? Why do you think it's important not to sell user data?

Ryan Schiller (54:24.560)

Which draws a clear contrast between other, basically any other service on the internet.

Ryan Schiller (54:30.400)

I mean, to be honest, it's quite simple. I mean, we talk about this platform. People are talking

Ryan Schiller (54:37.360)

about their most intimate secrets, their political opinions. How are they feeling about what's going

Ryan Schiller (54:44.800)

on in their city during the summer? How are they feeling about the political cycle and also their

Ryan Schiller (54:54.080)

mental health, their relationships? These are some of the most intimate thoughts that people

Ryan Schiller (55:00.000)

were having. Point blank, I don't think it was ethical to pawn them off for a profit.

Ryan Schiller (55:07.440)

I didn't think it was moral. I don't think I could sleep at night if that was what I was doing,

Ryan Schiller (55:11.840)

is turning these people's most intimate beliefs and secrets into a currency that I bought and sold.

Ryan Schiller (55:20.320)

There's something very off about that.

Ryan Schiller (55:22.480)

Yeah, I tend to believe that there is some room, so like Facebook would just take that data and

Ryan Schiller (55:30.000)

sell it, right? But there's some room in transparency and giving people the choice

Ryan Schiller (55:35.440)

on which parts they can, I wouldn't even see it as sell, but like share with advertisers.

Lex Fridman (55:42.080)

Are you going to give them a profit?

Lex Fridman (55:44.080)

So right, you have to monetize, you have to create an entire system, you have to rethink

Ryan Schiller (55:47.920)

this whole thing, right? But as long as you give people control and are transparent and make it

Ryan Schiller (55:54.960)

easy, like I think it's really difficult to delete a Facebook account or like delete all your data.

Ryan Schiller (55:59.520)

I've tried, it's very difficult.

Lex Fridman (56:03.280)

So like just make it easy and trust in that if you create a great product,

Ryan Schiller (56:07.760)

people are not going to do it. And if they do it, then they're not actually

Lex Fridman (56:12.560)

a deep loving member of the community. What's that?

Lex Fridman (56:14.800)

So we very quickly realized that user privacy was something that was not only a core value,

Lex Fridman (56:23.440)

but was something that users really cared about. And we added this functionality. It's just a

Ryan Schiller (56:28.720)

button that says, forget me. You press it, like two clicks. It's not that hard. We just

Lex Fridman (56:35.440)

remove your email from the database. You're good.

Ryan Schiller (56:40.480)

Beautiful. I think Facebook should have that. I honestly, so call me crazy, but maybe you can

Ryan Schiller (56:47.920)

actually speak to this, but I don't think Facebook, well now they would, but if they

Ryan Schiller (56:53.200)

did it earlier, they would lose that much money. If they allow like transparently tell people,

Ryan Schiller (56:59.680)

you could just delete everything. They also explained that like in ways that's going to

Ryan Schiller (57:05.760)

potentially like lessen your experience in the short term, like explain that. But then there

Ryan Schiller (57:12.400)

shouldn't be like multiple clicks of a button that don't make any sense. I'm trying to hold

Ryan Schiller (57:20.640)

back from ranting about Instagram because let me just say real quick, because I've been locked

Ryan Schiller (57:25.200)

out of Instagram for a month. And there's a whole group inside Facebook that are like supporters of

Ryan Schiller (57:31.760)

like Lex, help Lex. Free Lex? Free Lex. I wasn't blocked. It was just like a bug in the system.

Ryan Schiller (57:39.600)

Somebody was hammering the API with my account. And so they kept thinking I'm a bot. Anyway,

Ryan Schiller (57:44.960)

it's a bug. It happens to a lot of people, but like, first of all, I appreciate the love from

Ryan Schiller (57:49.280)

all the amazing engineers in Instagram and Facebook. All of those folks, the entire mechanism

Ryan Schiller (57:54.720)

though is somehow broken. I mean, I put that on the leadership, but it's also difficult to operate

Ryan Schiller (58:00.560)

a large company once it scales, all those kinds of things, but it should not be that difficult

Ryan Schiller (58:06.080)

to do some basic, basic things that you want to do, which is in the case of Facebook,

Ryan Schiller (58:15.520)

that's verify your identity to the app. And also in the case of Facebook, in the case of Librex,

Ryan Schiller (58:22.320)

like disappear if you choose. There's downsides to disappearing, but it should not be a difficult

Ryan Schiller (58:31.360)

process. And yeah, I think people are waking up to that. I think there's a lot of room for an app

Ryan Schiller (58:40.320)

like Librex with its foundational ideas to redefine what social media should look like.

Ryan Schiller (58:47.520)

You know, and like you said, I think beautifully, anonymity is not the core value. It's just a tool

Ryan Schiller (58:53.920)

you use. And who knows, maybe anonymity will not always be the tool you use. Like if you give

Ryan Schiller (59:00.800)

people the choice, who knows what this evolves from the login page you initially created.

Ryan Schiller (59:06.080)

The key thing is the founding principles. And again, who knows if you give people a really

Ryan Schiller (59:10.640)

nice way to monetize their data, maybe there'll no longer be a thing that you say, do not sell

Ryan Schiller (59:15.920)

user data. Yeah, all those kinds of things. But the basic principles should be there. And also

Ryan Schiller (59:22.240)

a good, simple interface design goes a really long way. Like simplicity and elegance, which

Ryan Schiller (59:30.640)

Librex currently is. Clubhouse is another app.

Ryan Schiller (59:32.560)

It's gotten a lot better, by the way. I don't mean to go too deep into the history, but the...

Ryan Schiller (59:39.040)

It was bad? I didn't look at the early pictures.

Lex Fridman (59:41.680)

Oh, thank goodness.

Ryan Schiller (59:43.280)

I read somewhere that it was like a white screen, like with black.

Ryan Schiller (59:47.840)

The up and down buttons were like these big freaking boxes. And I could go on, but it was

Ryan Schiller (59:57.760)

my genius design skills. I almost failed art class when I was in first grade. And I think