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

Ryan Schiller is the creator of Librex, an anonymous discussion feed for college communities. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Allform: https://allform.com/lex to get 20% off – Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get $5 off – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – Brave: https://brave.com/lex EPISODE LINKS: Librex App: https://librexapp.com/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:06) – Librex (08:59) – Deep Fakes (13:06) – Silencing of ideas (24:01) – Building Librex (33:47) – How Librex took over Dartmouth (42:13) – Anonymity (45:04) – Private vs public life (54:32) – Building a sense of community (59:14) – Refusing to sell user data (1:06:05) – Moderation (1:12:54) – Freedom of speech (1:23:45) – Scaling (1:28:02) – Yik Yak (1:35:22) – AWS and Parler (1:40:25) – Safe spaces (1:43:22) – Jeffrey Epstein (1:52:50) – Chess and poker (2:03:29) – Advice for young people (2:14:21) – Book recommendations (2:20:16) – Mortality

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Ryan Schiller, creator of Librex, an anonymous discussion feed for college communities, starting at first with Yale, then the Ivy Leagues, and now adding Stanford and MIT. Their mission is to give students a place to explore ideas and issues in a positive way, but with much more personal and intellectual freedom than has defined college campuses in recent history. I think this is a very difficult but worthy project. Quick thank you to our sponsors, Allform, Magic Spoon, BetterHelp, and Brave. Click their links to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Ryan is a young entrepreneur

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  and genuine human being who quickly won me over. He's inspiring in many ways, both in the struggle he had to overcome in his personal life, but also in the fact that he did not know how to code, but saw a problem in this world and his community that he cared about. And for that, he learned to code and built the solution in the best way he knew how. That's an important reminder for us humans. Let us not only complain about the problems in the world, let us fix them. I also have to say that there's passion in Ryan's eyes for really wanting to make a difference in the world. His story, his effort, gives me hope for the future. There is hate in this world, but I believe there's much more love.

• 1:29Lex Fridman?

  And I believe it's possible to build online platforms that connect us through our common humanity as we explore difficult, personal, even painful ideas together. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of as now. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps because I value your time and listening experience. So you can skip, but please still check out our sponsors. I'm fortunate to be able to be very selective with the sponsors we take on, so hopefully if you buy their stuff, you'll find value in it, just as I have. Click their links in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This episode is sponsored by a new sponsor, Allform.

• 2:12Lex Fridman?

  They make stylish, comfortable, customizable sofas. For an engineering mind, their modular design pleases my soul. I say they're a new sponsor, but I've had their stuff for quite a while. I have, in fact, their black leather love seat.

• 2:28Lex Fridman?

  How great is the term love seat? I think you can't help but step up the depth of human connection between any two people that sit on the love seat. I sat on the Allform love seat with Mr. Michael Malice, and now I'm in love. See, it works. Some of the best experiences in my life had to do with just sitting with friends, talking, and the weird friends, the out there friends. I think quote unquote adult life can kind of carry you down this stream of busyness where you no longer have these all night conversations with weirdos in your life. I think that's probably why I never want to grow up. Anyway, Allform is offering 20% off all orders for our listeners.

• 3:12Lex Fridman?

  That's you, my dear friend, at allform.com/lex. That's allform.com/lex to find your perfect sofa or love seat. Michael Malice is not included with your purchase. Finally, they're deciding whether to sponsor this podcast long term. So now's the time to buy their stuff if you like it. This episode is sponsored by Magic Spoon, low carb keto friendly cereal. It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs, and 140 calories in each serving. They have a couple of limited edition flavors this month, Cookies and Cream and Maple Waffle. But my favorite flavor is still cocoa, but these sound pretty good. I haven't tried them yet.

• 3:57Lex Fridman?

  I will try. You should too. Yes, I am very much excited to be living in this day and age when we have reusable rockets being launched into space and landing back on earth. But I think what really excites me is that we can have what used to be a sugar stuffed meal like cereal that's now completely keto friendly. Anyway, Magic Spoon has a 100 happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it, they refund it. Even Dusty Yevsky, Satya and Kamu would be impressed. Go to magic spoon.com/lex and use code Lex at checkout to save five bucks off your order. That's magic spoon.com/lex and use code Lex.

• 4:42Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I've always been fascinated with talk therapy. And I guess the broader way to phrase that is the power of conversations. In some sense, that's what podcasting is. When I was younger, I did see it as the ideal of psychotherapy, that through this interaction between two humans, you can arrive at something deep and profound that's personal about your particular brain, and almost from an engineering perspective, rewire things. I think there's a lot of ways in which our work with human robot interaction

• 5:27Lex Fridman?

  in the artificial intelligence space will teach us how to do this kind of reengineering better. But anyway, BetterHelp is easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This show is also sponsored by Brave, a fast, privacy-preserving browser that feels like Google Chrome, but without the ads or the various kinds of tracking that ads can do. I love using it more than any other browser, including Chrome. I also love Google Chrome, but I love Brave even more. You should check out my conversation with Brennan Icke, who's a creator of Brave, but also the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla Foundation. I mean, this guy's done basically everything.

• 6:10Lex Fridman?

  But it's his work on JavaScript, actually, that's really stuck with me. In that conversation, I was reminded that change in the world doesn't have to start with a perfect solution. It can start with something, to put it nicely, that's imperfect and grow, iterate over time. You don't have to start with something pretty. You just have to start. Anyway, get the browser at brave.com/lex, and it might become your favorite browser, too. That's brave.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now here's my conversation with Ryan Schiller.

• 7:07Lex Fridman?

  Let's start with the basics. What is Librecs? What are its founding story and founding principles? And looking into the future, what do you hope to achieve with Librecs?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Sure, let me break that down. So what is Librecs? Librecs is an anonymous discussion feed for college campuses. It's a place where people can have important and unfettered discussions and open discourse about topics they care about, ideas that matter. And they can do all of that completely anonymously with verified members of their college community. And we exist both on each Ivy League campus and we have an inter-Ivy community. And actually, this week, we just opened to MIT and Stanford.

• 7:49Lex Fridman?

  No, really? MIT?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yes. So we have MIT and Stanford communities and I expect you to sign up for your MIT account and start posting.

• 7:58Lex Fridman?

  What are, for people who are not familiar, like me, actually, which are the Ivy Leagues?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Sure. So we started at Yale, which is my, I don't know, can you call it alma mater? Because I haven't technically graduated.

• 8:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What's that called when you're actually still there? My university?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess, I guess we'll just call it home. It's my home.

• 8:18Lex Fridman?

  Educational home.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Started at my educational home of Yale. And then we moved to, and we could get into the story of this eventually if you'd like. And then we went to Dartmouth. And then quarantine hit. We opened to the rest of the Ivy League. And now we have, and the Ivy League, for those who don't know, is Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and Penn. I got it all in one breath.

• 8:45Lex Fridman?

  What's the youngest Ivy League? Penn? No. Columbia.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  I can't say I'm on camera.

• 8:51Lex Fridman?

  We'll edit it in post. I don't know.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I'll just say each of all eight of them and then you can just like cut it in.

• 8:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Pen, Harvard.

• 9:00Lex Fridman?

  There's actually a really nice software that people should check out, like a service who's using machine learning really nicely for podcast editing. Where you can, it learns the voice of the speaker and it can change the words you said.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  It's like some deep fake stuff.

• 9:17Lex Fridman?

  It's deep fake, but for positive applications. It's very interesting. It's like the only deep fake positive application I've seen.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  I have a friend who's obsessed with deep fakes.

• 9:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  What's great about I think deep fakes is that it's gonna do the opposite of sort of what's happening with our culture, where everyone will have plausible deniability.

• 9:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the hope for me is there are so many fake things out there that we're going to actually be much more skeptical and, and think and taking multiple sources and actually like reason, like use common sense and use like deep thinking to understand like what is true and what is not. Because, you know, we used to have like traditional sources like the New York Times and all these kinds of publications that had a reputation. There are these institutions and they're the source of truth. And when you no longer can trust anything as a source of truth, you start to think on your own. That gets part of the individual. That goes, that takes us way back to like where I came from, the Soviet

• 10:15Lex Fridman?

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

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Tremendous amount of intellectual autonomy, don't you think? Think about the societal consequences.

• 10:27Lex Fridman?

  Absolutely. I mean, we see so much decentralization in all aspects of our digital lives now, but this is like the decentralization of thought.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:38Lex Fridman?

  You could say it's sadly. Or I don't think it's sad is decentralization of truth. Where like, truth is a clustering thing. Where you have these like, this point cloud of people just swimming around, like billions of them, and they all have certain ideas. And what's thought of as truth is almost like a clustering algorithm. When you just get a bunch of people that believe the same thing, that's truth. But there's also another truth, and there may be like multiple truths. And it's almost, it will be like a battle of truths. Maybe even the idea of truth will like lessen its power in society, that there is such a thing as a truth.

• 11:19Lex Fridman?

  Because like, the downside of saying something is true is, uh, it's almost the downside of what people, like religious people, call scientism. Which is like, once science has declared something is true, you can't no longer question it. But the reality is, science is a moving mechanism. You're constantly questioning, you're constantly questioning. And then maybe truth should be renamed as, uh, as a process, not a, not a final destination. The whole point is to keep questioning, keep questioning, keep discovering.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Kind of like, we're going backwards in time. So like, back when, back when people were sort of finding their identities and we were less globalized, right? Like, people would, would get together and they'd get together around a common value system, common morals and a common place. And those would be sort of these clusters of their truth, right? And so we have all these different like civilizations and societies across, across the world that created their own truths. You know, we talk about the Jews and the Tom and Toro. We can look at Buddhist texts. We can look at all sorts of different truths and how many of them get at the same things, but many of them have different ideas or different articulations.

• 12:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Harari and sapiens rewinds that even farther back until like caveman times. That's the thing that made us humans special, is who can develop these clusters of ideas, hold them in their minds through stories, pass them on to each other, and it grows and grows. And finally, we have Bitcoin. So, uh, which money is another belief system that, um, that, uh, that has power only because we believe in it. And is that truth? I don't know, but it has power. And it, it's, it's carried in the minds of millions and thereby has power.

• 13:07Lex Fridman?

  But back to LibreX. So what's the founding story? What's the founding principles of LibreX?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Sure. So I was on campus as a freshman and I was talking to my friends. Many of them felt like it was hard to raise your hand in class to ask a question. They really felt like even outside the classroom, it was hard to be vulnerable. And the thing you have to understand about Yale is it's not that big a place. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows you, basically.

• 13:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  And people come to these schools, first of all, they're home for people and they want to be themselves. They want to feel like they can be authentic. They want to make real friendships. And second of all, it's a place where people go for intellectual vitality, to explore important ideas and to grow as thinkers. And fortunately, due to the culture, my friends expressed that it was very difficult to do that. And I felt it too. And then I go and talk to my professors and I remember I talked to one specific global affairs professor. And I was taking this class and his area of expertise was in the Middle Eastern conflict. And I went to him and I said, Professor, we've, we're almost finished this class and we haven't even gotten to sort of, the reason I originally wanted to take the class was to hear about your perspective on the Middle Eastern conflict.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Because something I'd learned at Yale, and this is maybe a sort of a tangent, but I'll, I'll flush it out a bit. Something I'd learned at Yale is that you can learn all sorts of things from a textbook. And what you kind of go to Yale to do is to get like the opinions of the experts that go beyond the textbook and to have those more in-depth conversations. And so that's sort of the added value of going to a place like Yale and taking a course there as opposed to just reading a textbook.

• 14:45Lex Fridman?

  But also interact with that opinion.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 14:48Lex Fridman?

  In person, yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  It's to interact with that, with that opinion, to hear it, to respond to it, to push back on it and to have that with some great minds. And there really are great minds at Yale. Don't get me wrong. It's a place, it's still a place of tremendous brilliance.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  So I'm talking to this professor, right? And I'm like, we haven't, I haven't heard your area of expertise. And I'm like, are we going to get to it? What's the deal? And he, this is during office hours, mind you, so we're one-on-one. He says, Ryan, to be honest, I used To teach this area every single year. In fact, I would do a section on it, which is like a small seminar, like breakaway from the class where he would talk to the students in small groups and explain his and explain his perspective, his research and have a real debate about it, like around a Harkness table. And he said, I used to do this. And then about two years ago, a student reported me to the school and I realized my job was at risk. And I realized the best course of action was basically just not to approach the topic.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  And so now I just don't even mention it. And he's like, you can say whatever you want, but I'm not, I'm not gonna be a part of it. And it's a real shame. It's a real loss to all of the students who I think came to the school to learn from these brilliant professors.

• 16:05Lex Fridman?

  In that context of these world experts, the problem seems to be that reporting mechanism where there's a disproportionate power to a complaint of a young student, a complaint that an idea is painful, or an idea is disrespectful to, you know, or ideas creating an unsafe space. And the the conclusion of that, I mean, I'm not sure what to do with that because it's a single reporting, maybe a couple, but that has more power than the idea itself. And that's strange. I don't know how to fix that in the administration, except to fire everybody.

• 16:47Lex Fridman?

  So like this is to push back against this storyline that academia is somehow fundamentally broken. I think we have to separate a lot of things out. Like, one is you have to look at faculty and you have to look at administration. And like at MIT, for example, the administration.

• 17:08Lex Fridman?

  Does tries to do well, but they're the ones that often lack courage. They're often the ones who are the source of the problem. When people criticize academia, and I'll just speak to myself, you know, I'm willing to take heat for this, is they really are criticizing the administration, not the faculty, because the faculty oftentimes are the most brilliant, the bolder thinkers that you think. Whenever you talk about, we need like the truth to be spoken. The faculty are often the ones who are in the possession of the deepest truths in their mind. And in that sense, and they also have the capacity to truly educate in the way that you're,

• 17:52Lex Fridman?

  you're saying, and so it's not broken, like fundamentally, but there's stuff that like needs, that's not working that well, it needs to be fixed.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  You kind of took my words. That's what I thought you were gonna ask me if I think the Ivy League is broken. And that's totally, that's exactly it.

• 18:07Lex Fridman?

  So you don't think? Yeah, so on the question, do you think the Ivy League is broken? Like what, how do you think about it? The academia in general, I suppose, but Ivy League, still, I think it represents some of the best qualities of academia.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, what more is there to say there? I think the Ivy League is producing tremendous thinkers to this day. I think the culture has a lot that can be improved, but I have a lot of faith in the people who are in these institutions. I think, like you said, the administration, and I have to be a little careful because, you know, I've been in some of these committees and I have talked to the administration about these sorts of things. I think they have a lot of stakeholders and unfortunately it makes it difficult for them to always serve these brilliant faculty and the students in the way that they would probably like to.

• 18:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, okay, so this is me speaking, right? The administration, I know the people, and there oftentimes are faculty holding positions in these committees, right?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:02Lex Fridman?

  But it's in, in the role of quote unquote service, they, they're trying to do well. They're trying to do good.

• 19:14Lex Fridman?

  But I think you could say the mechanism is not working. But I could also say, my personal opinion is they lack courage. And one, courage. And two, grace when they walk through the fire. So courage is stepping into the fire. And grace, when you walk through the fire, is like maintaining that like, like, as opposed to being rude and insensitive to the lived quote unquote, experience of others, or like, you know, just not eloquent at all. Like, as you step in and take the courageous step of talking and saying the difficult thing,

• 19:59Lex Fridman?

  doing it well, like doing it skillfully. So both of those are important. The courage and the skill to communicate difficult ideas. And they often lack them because they weren't trained for it, I think. So you can blame the mechanisms that don't, that allow nineteen, twenty year old students to have more power than the entire faculty. Or you could just say that the faculty need to step up and grow some guts and skill of graceful communication.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  And really, administration.

• 20:27Lex Fridman?

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

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Because the faculty are sometimes some of the most brave, outspoken people.

• 20:35Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Within the bounds of their career.

• 20:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So, so that, that takes a, that's like the founding kind of spark of a fire that led you to then say, okay, so how can I help?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I explored a lot. I explored a lot of options. I wrote many articles to my friends, talked to them. And I realized it sort of needed to be a cultural change. Sort of need to be bottom up grassroots. Something, I knew the energy was there because you just look at the most recent institutional assessment from Yale. This was basically the number one thing that students, faculty and alumni all pointed to, to the administration was cultivating more conversations on campus and more difficult conversations on campus. So the people on campus know it.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  And you look at a Gallup poll, sixty one percent of students are on Ivy League campuses afraid to.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Speak their minds because of the campus culture. The campus culture is causing a sort of freezing effect on discourse.

• 21:45Lex Fridman?

  Can you pause on that again? So what percentage of students feel afraid to speak their mind?

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Sixty one percent nationally. And you're talking about, you know, places, nothing like the Ivy League, where I'd say, I'd imagine it would be even worse because of just the way that these communities kind of come about and the sorts of people who are attracted or are invited to these sorts of communities. That's nationwide that college students, and it's going up, that college students are afraid to say what they believe because of their campus climate. So it's a majority. It's not, it's not a conservative thing. It's not a liberal thing. It's a group thing. We're all feeling it. The majority of us are feeling it.

• 22:26Lex Fridman?

  And basically, just, it doesn't even, you don't even necessarily need to have anything to say. You just have a fear.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 22:36Lex Fridman?

  So when you're like, teaching, you know, metaphor is a really powerful thing to explain, you know, and there's just a caution that you feel that's just horrible for humor. Now comedians have the freedom to just talk shit, which is why I really appreciate, somebody who's been a friend recently, Tim Dillon, who has, who gives zero, pardon my French, fucks about anything, which is very liberating, very important person to just tear down the powerful. But, you know, inside the academia, as an educator, as a teacher, as a professor, you don't have the same freedom. So that fear is felt, I guess, by a majority of students. It's.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And you were getting at something there too, which is that if you're afraid to speak metaphorically, if you're afraid to speak imprecisely, it can be very difficult to actually think at all and to think to the extremities of what you're capable of. Because these are the, these are the mechanisms we use when we don't have quite the precise mathematical language to quite pinpoint what we're talking about yet. This is the beginning. This is the creative step that leads to new knowledge. And so that really scares me is that if I'm not allowed to sort of excavate these things, these ideas with people in the sort of messy sloppy way that we do as humans when we're first being creative, are we, are we going to be able to continue to innovate? Are we going to continue to be able to learn? And that's what really starts to scare me.

• 24:01Lex Fridman?

  So you've explored a bunch of different ideas. You wrote a bunch of different stuff. How did Lee Burks come about?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Basically, it came to me that it had to be kind of a grassroots movement, and it had to be something that changed culturally. And it had to be relatively personal. People meeting people. People finding out that, no, I'm not the only one on campus who feels this way. I feel alone, and there are a lot of other people who feel alone. I believe this thing, and it's not as unpopular as I thought. You know, the, basically, creating heterodoxy of thought. And it's creating that moment where you realize that your politics are personal and that your politics are shared by a lot of people on campus. And so I just started coding it. I didn't have much coding experience, but went headfirst in and figured,

• 24:52Speaker 01

  how hard could it be? You know?

• 24:55Lex Fridman?

  I mean, this is really fascinating. So I talked to a lot of software engineers, AI people. Obviously, that's where my passion, my, like, interests are. My focus has been throughout my life. The fascinating thing about your story, I think it should be truly inspiring to, like, people that want to change the world, is that you don't have a background in programming. You don't have even maybe a technical background. So you saw a problem. You explored different ideas. And then you just decided you're gonna learn how to build an app, like, without a technical background. Like, you didn't try to...

• 25:37Lex Fridman?

  That's so bold. That is so beautiful, man. Can you take me through the journey of deciding to do that? Of like, learning to program without a programming background? And building the app, like, detailed? Like, what do you actually, like, how do you start?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, you want to, you want to buy a Mac? I learned, you knew you had to buy a Mac. I'm just gonna go step by step, right? I'll be as dumb as possible. Because it was, it was truly... It's really, you know,

• 26:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  like leading by your feet.

• 26:06Lex Fridman?

  So you need a computer for this.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I had a PC at the time and I was Android at the time. And I realized, you know, I realized it should be like an iOS app. And so, um, you know, that was a decision. But, you know, I knew kids these days, they're always on their phone. And, you know, I wanted you to be able to say a passing thought, you know, in class, make a passing, like you're walking around and you have a thought and you can express it. Or you're in the dining hall and you have your phone out, you can express it. So it was clear to me it should be an iOS app.

• 26:33Lex Fridman?

  By the way,

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:34Lex Fridman?

  Android is great. Definitely check it out.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  We also are now available on Android, but we'll get there. For the Android users from MIT, Stanford or the Ivy League. So back to how it happened. So I realized I need a Mac, so went out and got a Mac. And I realized I need an iPhone for testing eventually. Got an iPhone. So those were the real robot blocks to start with. From there, I mean, there's, there's almost too much information out there about programming. The question is like, where do you start and what's going to be useful to you? And I, my first thought was I should look at some Yale classes, but it became very clear, very quickly that that was not the right place to start. That would probably be the right place to start if I wanted to get a job at Amazon. But my goal was slightly different.

• 27:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  And I, I definitely had it in mind that what I was trying to make was I'm trying to prove out an idea. I'm not trying to make a finished product. I'm just trying to get to the first step. Cause I figured if I keep, if I keep getting to the next step, at least I won't die now, you know? Like at least things will move forward. I'll learn new things. Maybe I'll meet new people. I'll show a degree of seriousness about what I'm doing and things will come together. And that is, as you'll see what ends up happening. So I start with Swift, right? And I find this video from the Stanford professor that had like a million views. That was like how to make basically Swift apps like perfect.

• 28:00Lex Fridman?

  And you just like, uh, so you got this Mac and you what? Like go to google.com and you type in.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  And load Xcode.

• 28:07Lex Fridman?

  Xcode.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then I typed in on YouTube, like Stanford, iOS, Swift, enter. First YouTube video has a million views. I'm like, it has to be good. It's Stanford has a million views.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  I got lucky. I mean, that turned out to be a very good video.

• 28:24Lex Fridman?

  It's basically like introductory course to Swift.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you say introductory. I think most of the people in that class probably had a much better background than I did.

• 28:34Lex Fridman?

  They're software developers, probably. They're like computer scientists.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  And it was slow for me. I don't think I realized it fully at the time, just how far behind I was from the rest of the class. Because I was like, wow, it seems like people are picking this up really quickly.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  So it took a little longer and, you know, a lot of time was Stack Overflow. But eventually I made a truly minimal viable product, the most minimal. Like, we're talking, you know, put text on screen, add text to screen, comment on top of text, you know, make a post, make a response, and anyone with a Yale email can do this. And you plug it into a cloud server and you verify people's accounts. And you're off. You have.

• 29:17Lex Fridman?

  You have to figure out how to, like, the whole idea of, like, having an account. So there's a permanence, like, you can create an account with an email.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Verify it.

• 29:27Lex Fridman?

  Verify it. Okay, so that's not, you know.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  And that's literally how I thought about it, right? Like, so what do I need to do? And I'm like, well, the first thing I need is a login page. And I'm like, how to make a login page in Swift? I mean, it's that easy. If someone, this has been done before, of course.

• 29:43Lex Fridman?

  And then the first page that pops up is probably a pretty damn good page when you.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  It wasn't that bad. It wasn't perfect, but like, maybe it got me 80% of the way there.

• 29:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  And then I came into some bugs. And then, you know, I asked Stack Overflow a few questions. And then I got a little further and then I found some more bugs. And then I'm like, maybe this isn't the right way to do. Maybe I should do it this way. And I'm sure my code isn't great, but the goal isn't to make great code. The goal wasn't to make scalable code. It was to understand, is this something my friends will use? Like, what is the reaction going to be if I put it in their hands? And am I capable of making this thing?

• 30:17Lex Fridman?

  That's awesome. And so you're focusing on the experience, like, actually just really driving towards that first step, figuring out the first step and really driving towards it. Of course, you have to also figure out, like, the concept of, like, storage, like, database.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  You know something funny?

• 30:33Lex Fridman?

  What's that?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  I just made the database structure with no knowledge of databases whatsoever. And I start showing it to my friends who have experienced in CS and they're like, you used a heap? That's so interesting. You're like, why did you decide to store it in this way? I'm like, bro, I don't even know what a heap is.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  I just did it because it works like I'm trying to make calls and stuff and they're like, uh, yeah, they're like, the hierarchy is really like, I'm like, what?

• 30:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's a deep profound lesson in there that, uh, I don't know how much you've interacted with computer science people since, but they tend to optimize and have these kinds of discussions. And what leads, what results is over optimization. It's like worrying, is this really the right way to do it? And then you go as opposed to doing the first thing on Stack Overflow, you go down this like rabbit hole of what's the actual proper way to do it. And then you're like, you wake up five years later, working on Amazon, uh, working at Amazon, because you've never finished the login page. Like, it's kind of hilarious, but that, that's a really deep lesson. Like, just get it done. And, and there's like, what, what's a heap, bro? Is, is the right, that should be a T-shirt.

• 31:43Lex Fridman?

  Uh, that, that's really the right approach to building something that ultimately creates an experience and then you iterate eventually. That's how the great, some of the greatest software products in this world have been built, is you create it quickly and then just iterate. What was, by the way, in your mind, the thing that you were chasing as a prototype? Like, what, what was the first step that it feels like something is working? Like, did you interact with another friend?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the first step was like, it's one thing to tell someone about an idea, but it's another thing to put in their hands and kind of see like, the way their, their eyes kind of look. And when I'd go, I'd, I'd walk around cross campus, which is part of Yale, and I'd literally just go up to people and run up to them and be like, try this, try this. You gotta try this. This is pre-quarantine, by the way, of course. This would never be the same post-quarantine, but like, you gotta try this, you gotta try this. Like, what is it? And I'd be like, and I'd explain, it's like an anonymous discussion feed for, for our Yale campus.

• 32:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  And you'd see their gears turning and they just, some people would be like, not interested. I'm like, fine, not your target demographic. I get it. You'll come eventually. But some people, like, you could see it, they got it. They're like, yes. And that's when I was like, okay, okay, there is, and you don't need, I mean, you don't need 50% of people to like it.

• 33:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  You need, what, 5%, 10% to love it? And then they'll tell 5%, 10%?

• 33:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, word of mouth, yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  And you're good. Of course, the first version was very, very crappy, but seeing people trying despite all the crappiness was, it was sort of enough to be the first step. And, you know, since, since then, all of my code's been stripped out. I now have friends who basically have told me, don't bother with the coding part. You do, you do the rest. You just make sure that we can code, because they want to code.

• 33:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Great. I mean, I'm not an engineer.

• 33:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I never intended to be an engineer, and there's a lot to do that's not engineering.

• 33:43Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  But the point was just to validate the idea, so to speak.

• 33:48Lex Fridman?

  When was the moment that you felt like we've created something special? Maybe a moment where you're proud of that this is a, this is, this has the potential to actually be the very implementation of the idea that I initially had?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  There's so many, there's so many little moments. It's like, and I bet there'll still be moments in the, in the future that make, that make it hard to like totally say, like.

• 34:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we should say this is, this is still very early days of LibreX.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:21Lex Fridman?

  It's literally. It's only been a year?

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Since we've had like actual, like a lot of people on the app, yeah, about a year.

• 34:27Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  I mean, there's some crazy moments. I could talk about sort of going to Dartmouth, because it's one thing to like get some traction at your school.

• 34:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  People know you and, you know, it's, it's your school, you know? It's another thing to go to another school and where no one knows you and sign up 90% of the campus overnight.

• 34:46Lex Fridman?

  Wow. So tell me that story. You're invading another territory.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  It was literally like that.

• 34:51Lex Fridman?

  Did you buy like a Dartmouth sweatshirt?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Purposely, I didn't want to defraud, fraud anyone, but I was purposely nondescript in my clothing. Yeah. No yell stuff, no Dartmouth stuff. Um, just blend in.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  I'll, yeah, I'll go back there. So what happened was, this was like March of last year. So almost, almost a year ago today. And I really wanted to see if we could go from sort of one campus to two campuses.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  So I didn't know anyone at Dartmouth's campus, but I kind of.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  I had some cold emails, some warm-ish emails. And I went to people and I was like, basically, can I sleep on your floor for two days during finals period?

• 35:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  I had a lot of people who said, this is crazy. Like, no one's gonna, no one wants to download an app during finals period, a social app during finals period. But I emailed a few people and I was like, you know, can I sleep on your floor? And one of them was crazy enough to say, sure, come to my, come to my dorm. I have a nice floor. And he ended up, today, he's still really close, he's a really close friend. But anyway, I take a train, knowing nothing about this guy, besides his first and last name, and I arrive. And Dartmouth is really, really remote, way more remote than you think, to the point where I'm like, it's fine. He's like, he warned me, he's a really hospitable guy. He warned me, like, it's gonna be hard to get to campus from the train station because it's really remote.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  And I'm like, I'm sure it's fine, I'll just get an Uber. There are no Ubers in Hanovers. What do you think this is?

• 36:28Lex Fridman?

  This is New Hampshire. So Connecticut, I mean, Yale is pretty remote as well, no?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, Yale is, well, Yale's in New Haven, which is a real city. It has Ubers, it has food, it has culture, it has a nightclub even.

• 36:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Like, we're talking about a real city. Like, it's not New York, it's not Philadelphia, where I'm from, but it's a city. New Hampshire is something very different.

• 36:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, beautiful campus, I'm sure.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Beautiful, oh my gosh. I could tell, I could talk so much about, I was blown away by Dartmouth. I started wondering, like, why I didn't apply. Legitimately, between the people and the culture, it was, it was a beautiful vacation. So I arrive there, no Uber, but eventually I call this guy, who's like, the only guy who can get you to Dartmouth, and it takes a couple hours, but we get there. I sleep on this guy's floor, I wake up, I ask him if there's any printing. He's like, oh, Dartmouth happens to have free printing in the copy room. I print out like, 2,000 posters. Until the guy in the copy room literally goes to me, he's like, kid, I don't know what you're doing, but you need to get out of here. My god, I'm going, I'm going.

• 37:35Lex Fridman?

  Found the limits.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  I know, yeah, I found the limit. And I think a lot of startups about finding the limits. That's a little piece of advice socially. He's like, you gotta get out of here. And I then go to every single dorm door. I put a poster under every single dorm door advertising the app with a QR code. I walk around campus saying hi to everyone and telling them about the app. I go from table to table in the cafeteria, introduce myself, say hi, and tell them to download the app. It's an exhausting day, so many steps, so many crouching down to slip the poster into the dorm door. My legs were burning.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  But by the end of it, 24 hours later, I'm sitting on a, I'm sitting in a bus and I'm just pressing the refresh button on the account creation panels. It's like going up by hundreds. And I'm like, oh, my gosh.

• 38:27Lex Fridman?

  The word of mouth is working in a sense. I mean, certainly your like initial seed is powerful.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Just a piece.

• 38:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but then the word of mouth is what carries it forward. And what was the explanation you gave to the app? It's anonymity a fundamental part of it, like saying, this is a chance for you to speak your mind about your experiences on campus.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think people get it. You don't need to, what I've realized is you don't need to tell people why to try it. They know.

• 38:59Lex Fridman?

  There's a hunger for this.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. So all I do is I'm very factual. I said, and this is where I kind of ended up coining the kind of the line that I now used to say it because I said it so many times in those 24 hours. I just said, it's an anonymous discussion feed for Dartmouth.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  And they're like, yes.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Like they've been waiting for it. You know, some people are more skeptical, but a lot of people were like, great, I'm excited to try this. I'm excited to meet people and connect. And I mean, the way Dartmouth's taken to it is incredible. Everything from professors writing poems during finals period to be like, good luck in finals period. You're going to rise like a phoenix or whatever. Like, yeah, it's crazy to, I heard about two women meeting on Librex and starting a finance club at Dartmouth, to significant others meeting. There's an article recently written up at Yale as well about two queer women who met on Librex and started a relationship, which was pretty,

• 40:01Speaker 01

  it was pretty interesting to see people throwing parties pre-COVID. Yeah, it was just amazing to see how when you allow people to be vulnerable and social, they connect. People have this natural desire to connect.

• 40:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, when you have, when they have a natural desire to have a voice, and then when that voice is, is paired with freedom, then you could truly express yourself. And there's something liberating about that. And in that sense, you're like, you're connecting as your true self, whatever that is. What are the most powerful conversations you've seen on the app? You mentioned like people connecting.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  The hard part of that, that is the sorting, you know, figuring out which one, which one am I gonna put at the top?

• 40:43Lex Fridman?

  Mental sorting out. Just something that stands out to you. Sorry, I don't mean to do like the top 10 conversations ever of all time, ever on the app. I just mean like stuff that you remember that stands out to you.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  I remember this one really amazing comment from this, he was a Mexican international student who spoke out, and this, this, this post was super edgy, but yet it got hundreds and hundreds of upvotes within the Yale community. It was a Yale community specific post. And we should point out that there's a school specific community now, and there's an all Ivy community. So this was specifically in the Yale community. And this was a little while ago, but it stuck with me. This Mexican international student comes to Yale, and he starts talking about his experience in the La Casa, which is the Mexican Latina X, as

• 41:35Speaker 01

  they would say, cultural center at Yale, and how he doesn't feel welcome there because he's Roman Catholic, basically, and international, and how he doesn't feel like he fits with their agenda. And as a result, this place that's supposed to be home for him, he feels outcasted and feels more alone than he does anywhere else on campus.

• 41:56Lex Fridman?

  That's powerful.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  That was powerful to me. Yeah, hearing someone, someone who should be feeling supported by this culture say.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Actually, this is not doing anything for me. Like, this is not helping me.

• 42:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  This is not where I feel at home.

• 42:13Lex Fridman?

  So what do you make of anonymity? Because it seems to be a fundamental aspect of the power of the app, right? But at the same time, anonymity on the internet.

• 42:28Lex Fridman?

  So it protects us, right? It gives us freedom to have a voice. But it can also bring out the dark side of human nature. Like trolls or people who want to be malicious, want to hurt others purely for the joy of hurting others, being cruel for fun and going to the dark places. So like, what do you make of anonymity as a fundamental feature of social interaction? Like, the pros and the cons?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, just to break that down a bit. I would say a lot of those same things about a place like Twitter where people are very unanonymous.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Having said that, of course, there's a different sort of capacity people have when they're anonymous, right? In all different sorts of ways. So what do I make of anonymity? I think it can be incredibly liberating and allow people to be incredibly vulnerable and to connect in different ways, both on politics. And there was a lot to talk about this year regarding politics. And, you know, personally, being vulnerable, talking about relationships and mental health. I think it allows people to have a community that's not performative. And of course, there's this other side where, you know, people can sometimes break rules or say things that they wouldn't otherwise say, that people don't always agree with or that people might find repugnant.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  And to an extent, these can facilitate great conversations. And on the other hand, we have to have moderation in place and we have to have community guidelines to make sure that the anonymity doesn't overwhelm the purpose, which is that anonymity, first of all, anonymity is a tool in LibreX. It was not the purpose of LibreX. It is a way that we get towards these authentic conversations, given our campus climate. And second of all, I would say it's a spectrum. It's not just, it's not just Librex is anonymous, right? Because Librex isn't totally anonymous. Everyone's a verified Ivy League student. You know exactly what school everyone goes to. You only have one account per person at Yale.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Meaning if, meaning that, I mean, what that amounts to is people have more of an ownership in the community and people know that they're connected and they have a common vernacular. So the anonymity is a scale and it's a tool.

• 44:44Lex Fridman?

  But you can also trust, I mean, this is the difference between Reddit anonymity, where you can easily create multiple accounts. When you have only one account per person, or at least it's very difficult to create multiple accounts, then you can trust that the anonymous person you're talking to is a human being.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Not a bot.

• 45:04Lex Fridman?

  I try to be completely unanonymous now in my all-public interactions. I try to be as real in every way possible, like zero gap between private me and public me.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Why exactly did you, it seems like this is an intentional mission. What made you want to sort of bridge that gap between the private sphere and public sphere? Because that's, that's unique. I know a lot of intellectuals who would make a different decision.

• 45:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, interesting. I had a discussion about, with Naval about this, actually, with a few others that have a very clear distinction between public and private.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Something I'm struggling with, by the way, personally, and thinking about.

• 45:50Lex Fridman?

  So one on the very basic surface level is if you carry with yourself lies, small lies or big lies, it's extramental effort to remember what you're, like, to remember what you're supposed to say and not supposed to say. So that's on a very surface level of like, it's just easier to live life when you're have, the smaller the gap between the private you and the public you.

• 46:20Lex Fridman?

  And the second is, I think for me, from an engineering perspective, like if I'm dishonest with others, I will too quickly become dishonest with myself. And in so doing, I will not truly be able to think deeply about the world and come up and build revolutionary ideas. There's something about honesty that feels like it's that first principles thinking that's almost like overused as a term, but it feels like that requires radical honesty, not radical asshole-liciousness, but radical honesty with yourself, with yourself. And it feels like it's difficult to be radically honest with yourself when you're being dishonest with the public.

• 47:05Lex Fridman?

  And also, I have a nice feature, honestly, that in this current social context, so we can talk about race and gender and what are the other topics that are touchy? Hysteria and nationality. All those things. I mean, like. Family structure. Maybe I'm eloquent in the way I speak about them, but I honestly, when I look in the mirror, like I'm not deeply hateful of a particular race or even just hateful particular race. I'm sure I'm biased and I try to like think about those biases and so on. And also, I don't have any creepy shit in my closet about women.

• 47:47Lex Fridman?

  I haven't done, it seems like everybody, it seems like a lot of people got, did a lot of creepy stuff in their life. And I just feel like that's really nice and liberating. And especially now, you know, it's funny because I've gotten a bit of a platform. And I think it all started when I went, this is a famous comedian, female comedian, Whitney Cummings. And, you know, I've gotten a lot of amazing women writing me throughout. But when I went on Whitney. It's like the number of DMs I get on Instagram from women is just ridiculous. And I think that was a really important moment for me is like, I speak and I feel, you know,

• 48:32Lex Fridman?

  I really value love, long-term monogamy with like one person. And it's like, I could see where a lot of guys would now continue that message in public and in private just start sleeping around. And so like, that's an important statement for me mentally is like, nope.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Straight and narrow.

• 48:52Lex Fridman?

  It just goes straight and not out of fear, but out of like principle and just like, live life honestly. And I just, I feel like that's truly liberating as a human being. Forget public, all that, because then I feel like I'm on sturdy ground when I say difficult things. And at the same time, this is sorry, I'm ranting on this, I apologize.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  I'm interested personally, so keep going.

• 49:20Lex Fridman?

  I, I honestly believe in the internet and in people on the internet that when they hear me speak, they can see if I'm full of shit or not. Like, I won't be able to fake it.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:35Lex Fridman?

  Like, they'll see it through. Yeah.

• 49:39Lex Fridman?

  So I feel like if you're not lying about stuff, you have the freedom to truly be yourself and the, and the internet will figure it out. Like, will figure who you are.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  People have a natural tendency to be able to tell bullshit and it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, right?

• 49:56Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Like, why, why wouldn't, why, like, of all the things that we could evolve to be good at, being able to detect honesty seems like one that would be particularly valuable, especially in the sorts of societies we developed into.

• 50:10Lex Fridman?

  And then also from a selfish perspective, like a success perspective, I think there's a lot of folks that have inspired me, like Elon is one of them.

• 50:21Lex Fridman?

  That shows that there's a hunger for genuineness. Like, you can build a business as a CEO and be genuine and like real and do stupid shit every once in a while, as long as it's coming from the same place of who you truly are. Like Elon's inspirational that. And then there's a lot of other people I admire that are counter inspirations in the sense like they're very formal, they hold back a lot of themselves. And it's like, I know how brilliant those people are, and I think they're not being as effective of leaders, public faces of companies as they could be. I mean, to be honest, like, not to throw shade, but I will, it's like Mark Zuckerberg is an example

• 51:06Lex Fridman?

  of that. Jack Dorsey's also a bit of an example of that. I like Jack a lot. I've talked to him a lot. I will talk to him more. I think he's a much more amazing person than he conveys through his public presentation. I think a lot of that has to do with PR and marketing people having an effect. Listen, it's difficult. I think it's really difficult. It's probably many of the same difficulties you will face is the pressures. But it's, it's hard to know what to do. But I think as much as possible as an individual, you should try to be honest in the face of the world and the company that wants you to be more polished. And that

• 51:48Lex Fridman?

  being more polished turns you into a politician, and politician eventually turns into being dishonest, dishonest with the world and dishonest with yourself.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Something I noticed, which was of the people you mentioned, those things have had ramifications in terms of letting things go too far, get out of hand. And you wonder, like, it's an aspect of lying, right? You say one lie, goes to another lie, you push it down, it doesn't matter. You can talk, figure it out later, you can figure it out later. Pretty soon.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  You've dug a pretty big hole. And I think if we look at Twitter and we look at Facebook, I think it goes without saying what sorts of holes have been dug because of, perhaps because of a lack of honesty that goes all the way up to the leaders.

• 52:33Lex Fridman?

  So yeah, there's two problems. Within the company, it doesn't make you as effective of a leader, I think. That's one. And two, for social media companies, I think people need to trust, like, it doesn't have to be the CEO, but it has to be like, this is how humans work. We want to look to somebody where like, I trust you. If you're going to use a social media platform, I think you have to trust the set of individuals working at the top of that social.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Something I realized really quickly, one of the lessons throughout the startup was that people don't totally connect to products as much as they connect to people.

• 53:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  And I mean, I don't know if you've, how much you spent on Librex. You've only been here the last couple of weeks, like last week. But I mean, I love the product and one of the, one of the aspects of me loving the products is that I'm super active and I've been super active throughout the entire time. And the amount of support I've received has made that very easy to do. From the community and the fact that I could, I mean, so I came to Boston for this interview. Right?

• 53:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  I came to Boston. I got off the train.

• 53:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  It's around 5:30 PM. I checked Librex. Someone is writing, hey, I'm in Boston. Does anyone want to get dinner? 30 minutes later, I'm getting dinner with them.

• 53:58Lex Fridman?

  That's amazing.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  And I mean, it's incredible. First of all, as an entrepreneur, the amount of stuff I learn from these people and when they reiterate and I hear that they got the message through the product. I mean, that's incredibly validating, but also. I mean, I think it's just important to be able to put a face to a brand, and especially a brand that's built on trust. Because fundamentally, the users are trusting us with some really important discussions. It's really, and a movement to some degree. It's a community and a movement.

• 54:32Lex Fridman?

  I'll tell you actually why I didn't use the app very much so far is there's something really powerful about the way it's constructed, which I felt like a bit of an outsider because I don't know the communities. It felt like it's a really strong community around each of these places.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:52Lex Fridman?

  And so I felt like I was, it made me really wish there was an MIT one. And so there's both discussions about the deep, like, community issues within Columbia or Yale or so on, Dartmouth. And there's also the broader community of the Ivy Leagues that people are discussing. But I could see that actually expanding more and more and more. But, which is, it's a powerful coupling, which is the feeling of like this little village or this little community we're building together, but also the broader issues.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:25Lex Fridman?

  So you could do both discussions.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  One thing that was important to me is talking about social media as a concept, right? I think the way people socialize is very much context dependent. So we're talking about people understanding each other through language, through English.

• 55:44Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  And these languages are constructed, they're in a very nuanced way, in a very sort of temperamental way, right? And you kind of need a similar context to be able to have productive conversations. So to me, it's really important that these, these groups, they share people something in common, a really big lived experience, the Ivy League or their school community. And they have a similar vocabulary, they have a similar background, they know what's happening in their community. And so having social media that is community connected to me was fundamental, like. You talk about anonymity. To me, community is the thing that when I think about Librex,

• 56:25Speaker 01

  I think what makes it different. It's the fact that everyone, everyone knows what's going on. Everyone comes from a similar context and people can socialize in a way where they're, they understand each other because they've been through, you use the word lived experience. They've been through so many of the same lived experiences.

• 56:43Lex Fridman?

  One like clarification, is there an easy way, if you choose, to then connect in meat space, in physical space?

• 56:53Speaker 01

  So the, I guess the sort of magic of it, and I was talking to a bunch of Harvard Librexers, who I met off the app while I was in Boston. And every time they told me this is my favorite part of the app, this is what I love about the app. We have this matching system, which is an anonymous direct message that you can send to any poster. So like, I was talking to this guy who, he was really into coin collection and he met other people who were really into coin collection through a post and what he would make a post about coin collection. And then someone would come to him and they'd be like, and they could direct message him anonymously and it would just show them, it would just show him their school. And then they could just text chat, totally anonymously,

• 57:38Speaker 01

  direct message if he accepted the anonymous request.

• 57:41Lex Fridman?

  Do they see the usernames, right?

• 57:43Speaker 01

  There are no usernames on Librex. It's all just schools' names. So he made this post about coin collection and he got a direct message.

• 57:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I guess so, right?

• 57:56Speaker 01

  No username.

• 57:57Lex Fridman?

  Because I was just looking at the text.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:00Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting. That's right.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  And I can tell you, I can go into why.

• 58:04Lex Fridman?

  That's really interesting.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can go into.

• 58:06Lex Fridman?

  So truly is anonymous.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  It's, well, I mean.

• 58:09Lex Fridman?

  Depends what you mean by anonymous.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:11Lex Fridman?

  It's a very different kind of anonymous.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  And the reason, the reason that we made that decision is because we wanted people to connect to ideas. We want people to connect to things in the moment. We don't want people to go, oh, I know this guy. He said this other thing. And we didn't want people to feel like they were at risk of being doxxed. So. It's just, these are small communities, right? We talked about this. Everyone knows someone who knows you. And in 2021, it would not take much to be able to figure out who someone might be just through a couple of posts. So it's both safety and about the ideas in terms of not adding usernames. Anyway, we have this anonymous direct message system where you can direct message the original poster of any post, the OP, if you're a redditor of any post.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  And that makes it really easy to meet up because once you guys are one-on-one, you can exchange a number, you can exchange a Snapchat, you can exchange an email. Probably not very often, but you could. And then that's how people meet up, matching.

• 59:14Lex Fridman?

  And then a lot of people connect in this way. Let me just take a small step into the technical. I read somewhere, I don't know if it's true, that one of the reasons you were rejected from YC, Y Combinator, in the final rounds is because one of the principles is to refuse to sell user data. Can you speak to that? What's, why do you think it's important not to sell user data?

• 59:42Lex Fridman?

  Sort of which draws a clear contrast between other, basically any other service on the internet.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  I mean, to be honest, it's quite simple. I mean, we talk about this platform. People are talking about their most intimate secrets, their political opinions. You know, what, how are they feeling about what's going on in their city? You know, during the summer? How are they feeling about the political cycle? And also their mental health, their relationships? These are some of the like most intimate thoughts that people were having. Point blank, I don't think it was ethical to pawn them off for a profit. I didn't think it was moral. I don't think I could sleep at night if that was what I was doing is turning these people's

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  most intimate beliefs and secrets into a currency that I bought and sold. There's something very off about that.

• 1:00:41Lex Fridman?

  I tend to believe that there is some room. So like, like Facebook would just take that data and sell it, right? But there's some room in transparency and giving people the choice on which parts they can. I wouldn't even see it as sell, but like, share with advertisers.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Are you gonna give them a profit?

• 1:01:02Lex Fridman?

  So right, so you have to monetize, you have to create an entire system, you have to rethink this whole thing, right? But as long as you give people control and are transparent and make it easy. Like, I think it's really difficult to delete a Facebook account, like delete all your data.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  It's, I've tried, it's very difficult.

• 1:01:21Lex Fridman?

  So like, just make it easy and trust in that if you create a great product, people are not going to do it. And if, if they do it, then they're not actually a deep-loving member of the community, what's that?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  So, we very quickly realized that user privacy was something that was not only a core value, but was something that users really cared about. And we added, we added this functionality, it's just a button that says, "Forget me."

• 1:01:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  You press it.

• 1:01:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Like, two clicks. It's not that hard, we just remove your email from the database.

• 1:01:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  You're good.

• 1:01:58Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful. I think Facebook should have that. I, I honestly, so call me crazy, but maybe you can actually speak to this, but I don't think Facebook, well, now they would, but if they did it earlier, they would lose that much money. If they allowed, like, transparently tell people, "You could just delete everything." They also explain that, like, in ways that's going to potentially, like, lessen your experience in the short term, like, explain that. But then there shouldn't be, like, multiple clicks of a button that don't make any sense. I, I'm trying to hold back from ranting about Instagram.

• 1:02:42Lex Fridman?

  Because let me just say real quick, because I've, I've been locked out of Instagram for a month.

• 1:02:48Lex Fridman?

  And there's a whole group inside Facebook that are like supporters of like Lex, help Lex.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Free Lex?

• 1:02:54Lex Fridman?

  Free Lex. I wasn't blocked. It was just like a bug in the system. Somebody was hammering the API with my account. And so they kept thinking I'm a bot. Anyway, it's a bug. It happens to a lot of people. But like, first of all, I appreciate the love from all the amazing engineers in Instagram and Facebook. All of those folks, the entire mechanism though is somehow broken. I mean, I put that on the leadership, but it's also difficult to operate a large company once it scales. All those kinds of things, but it should not be that difficult to do some basic, basic things that you want to do, which is in the case of Facebook, that's verify your identity to the app.

• 1:03:37Lex Fridman?

  And also in the case of Facebook, in the case of LibreX, like disappear. If you, if you choose, there's downsides to disappearing, but it should not be a difficult process. And yeah, I think, I think people are waking up to that. I think there's a lot of room for an app, an app like LibreX with its, with its foundational ideas to redefine what social media should look like. You know, and like you said, I think beautifully anonymity is not the core value. It's just a tool you use. And who knows, maybe anonymity will not always be the tool we use.

• 1:04:18Lex Fridman?

  Like if you give people the choice, who knows what this involves from the login page they initially created. The key thing is the founding principles. And again, who knows? If you give people a really nice way to monetize their data, maybe there will no longer be a thing that you say do not sell user data. Yeah, all those kinds of things, but the, the, the basic principles should be there. And also a good, simple interface design is, goes, goes a really long way. Like simplicity and elegance, which LibreX currently is. Clubhouse is another app.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  A lot better, by the way. I don't, I don't mean to, I don't mean to go too deep into the history, but the.

• 1:04:57Lex Fridman?

  It was bad?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  It was.

• 1:04:58Lex Fridman?

  I didn't look at the early pictures.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Oh, thank goodness.

• 1:05:01Lex Fridman?

  I, I, I read somewhere that it was like a white screen. Like with black.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  The upvote and downvote buttons were like these big, these big frickin boxes. And like, I don't, I don't, I could go on, but um, it was my, it was my genius design skills. I almost failed art class when I was like in first grade and I think I still have similar skills to my first grade self. But it's gotten a lot better and thanks to a lot of my friends who have, you know, sort of chipped in here and there.

• 1:05:32Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I love the idea of a button that just like, forget me.

• 1:05:37Lex Fridman?

  I don't know, that's, that's really moving, actually, that, that's actually all people want. Is they, they want, I think, okay, I'll speak to my experience. Like I would give so much more if I could just like disappear if I needed to. And I trusted the, the community, I trusted like the founders and the principals. That's really, that's really powerful, man, like trust and ease of escape. Yeah.

• 1:06:07Lex Fridman?

  You've also kind of mentioned moderation, which is really interesting. So with this anonymity and this community, I don't know if you've heard of the internet, but there's trolls on the internet.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  So I've heard.

• 1:06:20Lex Fridman?

  And even if they go to Yale and Dartmouth, there's still people that probably enjoy the, the sort of being the, the guerrilla warfare, controversial and just like creating chaos in a place of love. So how do you prevent chaos from and hatred breaking out in LibreX?

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  So the way I think about it is we have these principles. They're pretty simple and they're pretty easy to enforce. And then beyond the principles, we have a set of moderators, moderator from every single Ivy League school. A seam of diverse moderators who enforce these principles, but not only enforce the principles, but kind of clue us in to what's happening in their community and how the real life context of their community translates to the LibreX context of their community. And beyond that, we have conversation with them about the standards of the community. And we're constantly talking about what needs to be further elucidated and what needs to be tweaked. And we're in constant communication with the community.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, please. Maybe you can explain that there's moderators. What does that mean? How are they chosen? And what are the principles under which they operate?

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Sure. So how are the moderators chosen? The moderators are all volunteers. They're Librexers who reach out to me and respond to the opportunity to become moderator. And the way they're chosen is basically, we want to make sure that they're in tune with their community. We want to make sure they come from diverse backgrounds. And we want to make sure that they're, they sort of understand what the community is about. And then we ask them some questions about how they would deal with certain scenarios, ones that we've had in the past and we feel strongly about. And then also ones that are a little more murky, where we want to see that they're sort of thinking about these things in a critical way.

• 1:08:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  And from there, we choose a set and they have the power to take down posts. Of course, everything at the end of the day depends my review, but they can take them down and we can reinstate them if it's a, if it's a problem. But they can take down posts and they can advocate for, you know, different moderation standards and different moderation policies.

• 1:08:42Lex Fridman?

  So for now, you're the line of trove of all to this community. And so meaning like, you're able to, like, people are actually able to like, email you or like,

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Text me.

• 1:08:54Lex Fridman?

  Text you, contact you, and get a response. Like, you respond to basically everybody. And then you're, you're like, really, you know, you're, you're living that live on people's floor life currently. That's not necessarily, this is the early days, folks. I knew Ryan before he was a billionaire and he was cool. And then he was in a mansion, making meats on his barbecue. No, okay. But, you know, how does it scale? Like, what?

• 1:09:27Lex Fridman?

  I suppose how does it scale is the question. I mean, with Linus, I don't know if you're familiar with the Linux open source community, but he still stayed at the top for a while. It was really important, like leadership there was really important to drive that large scale, really productive open source community. What do you see your role as Libra grows? And in general, what are the mechanisms of scaling here for moderation?

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Well, I see it. Open discourse is fundamental to the purpose of the app. Right? So as the, I guess you could say founder, CEO, what have you. Part of my purpose has to be to enforce the vision, right? And part of the vision is open discourse. And that does come down in part to reasonable moderation and community guided reasonable moderation. So I imagine that will always be something that I'm intimately involved with to some degree. Now, the degree to which, the way in which that manifests, I imagine will have to change. Right? And hopefully I'll be able to, just like you can hire a CTO, hopefully I'll be able

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  to be integrated in hiring people who are, who understand the, the way that we are sort of operating and the, and the reasonable standards of moderation. And there can be a sort of hierarchical structure. But I think when you have a product whose key purpose is to allow people to have these difficult conversations on campus that need to be had.

• 1:11:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that moderation is core to that. Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  I can never fully, I don't think I can fully ever abdicate that responsibility. I think that would be like, I mean, that would be like Bezos abdicating e-commerce. Right? Like that is, that's part of the job.

• 1:11:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Of course, you can run companies in different ways. I think the, because he might have abdicated quite a bit of the details there.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  It's hard for me to say.

• 1:11:25Lex Fridman?

  Because the, Amazon does so many things. I think the, probably the better example is like Elon with rockets. He's still at the core.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Of the engineering.

• 1:11:32Lex Fridman?

  He's at the core of the engineering. There's some fundamental questions. He probably does weigh too much at the engineering. Like he's like the lowest level detail. But you're saying like the core things that are, that make the app work is. Is the moderation of difficult conversations.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  And by the way, I'm 21 years old. Let's remind us everyone of that. If this thing does scale and if this thing continues to be a positive force in a lot of people's lives, who knows what will happen in the next, what I'll learn. I'm still growing, definitely as a leader, still growing as a thinker, still growing as a person. I don't, I can't pretend that I know how to run a business that is worth, you know, up to a billion dollars, whatever.

• 1:12:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  I can't pretend I know how to run a business that's, you know, going to have millions and millions of users. I expect that there are going to be a lot of amazing people who will teach me and that a lot of people who have already kind of stepped into my life and helped me out and taught me things. And I imagine that I'll learn so much more. I just know that moderation is always going to be important to me because I don't think Librex is Librex unless we have open discourse and moderation, reasonable, open, light touch moderation is at the heart of creating that, right?

• 1:12:54Lex Fridman?

  So as a creator of this kind of community in place with anonymity and difficult conversations, what, what do you think about this touchy three words that people have been tossing around and politicizing, I would say, but is at the core of the founding of this country, which is the freedom of speech? How do you think about the freedom of speech, this particular kind of freedom of expression? And do you think it's a fundamental human right? How do you define it to yourself when you, when you're thinking about it? I went down, especially preparing for this conversation, down a rabbit hole of like just how unclear it is philosophically, what is meant by this kind of freedom. It's not

• 1:13:39Lex Fridman?

  as easy as people think, but it's interesting pragmatically speaking to hear how you think about it in the context of Librex.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a tough one, right? There's a lot there. So I come from the background of being a math major. Maybe it's important to start with that.

• 1:13:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  And I found myself in the middle of this question of freedom of speech. One of the wonderful things is that the Librex community is filled with PhDs and governance majors who have taught me a ton about this sort of thing. And I'm still learning, I'm still growing, I'm still probably going to modify my perspective to some degree, hopefully. Don't worry, I imagine I'll always support free discourse.

• 1:14:28Lex Fridman?

  Like, learning.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Lex Fridman?

  How to speak about stuff is critical here because it's like, I'm learning that this is like a minefield of conversations. Because the moment you say like, even saying freedom of speech is a complicated concept, people will be like, oh, we spotted a communist.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:50Lex Fridman?

  Like, they'll say, there's nothing complicated about freedom, freedom is freedom, bro. It's, it is complicated. First of all, if you talk about, there's, there's different definitions of freedom of speech. If you, if you want to go constitution, if you want to talk about the United States specifically and what's legal, it's actually not as exciting and not as beautiful as people think of.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Complicated.

• 1:15:13Lex Fridman?

  It's complicated. I think there's ideals behind it that we want to see, what does that actually materialize itself in the digital world where we're trying to communicate in ways that allows for difficult conversations? And also, at the same time, doesn't result in the silencing of voices, not through like censorship, but through like, just assholes being rude.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Spam.

• 1:15:43Lex Fridman?

  Spam, so it could be just bots.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Racism.

• 1:15:46Lex Fridman?

  Racism.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  Going back to the name of the app, Librex.

• 1:15:50Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Libre, free.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  X was support onto for free exchange and the free exchange of what? My purpose was to create as many, as much inner communication of ideas, be them repugnant or otherwise as possible. And of course, to do that within legal bounds and to do that without causing anyone to be harassed or doxxed, so to keep things focused on the ideas, not the people. And then.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  No BS crap, you know, stuff. And so to me, the easiest way to moderate around that, because as you said, figuring out what is hateful and what is hate speech is really hard, was to say no sweeping statements against core identity groups.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:44Lex Fridman?

  It's hard to do, though.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  It's difficult.

• 1:16:46Lex Fridman?

  Because we like to generalize, we humans.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  And when you think about what are sweeping statements against core identity groups, right? Oftentimes, these are, these are sort of hackneyed subjects. These are things that have been broached and we've heard them before. They don't really lead anywhere productive. So we, so it goes under this principle of be specific in the ideas you're discussing.

• 1:17:12Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  Against core identity.

• 1:17:18Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  We're talking, you know, race, religion.

• 1:17:24Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:17:27Lex Fridman?

  Got it. Even positive stuff?

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  Well, against, negative.

• 1:17:31Lex Fridman?

  Against, sorry, against, against, okay.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they get it. I mean, this, the thing, they, they, um, the, the trouble with rules is, uh, as the community grows, they'll figure out ways to manipulate the rules.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Something beautiful about it, of course. Unlike an.

• 1:17:58Lex Fridman?

  From an evolutionary perspective, yes.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, the fact that people are so creative and so looking to, and because people are genuinely interested in figuring out these things about social media. And so they'll a hundred percent like see like, where's the edge? And I mean, part of that's maintaining some level of vagueness in your role set.

• 1:18:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Which has its own set of questions and something we could think about. And I'm not implying I have all the answers. But there is something really interesting about people being so engaged that they're looking to figure out where are those edges? And what does that mean? What does that edge mean, you know?

• 1:18:32Lex Fridman?

  Also, one of the things I'm kind of. Thinking about like from an individual user of LibreX or individual user of the internet. I think about like that one person that is on Reddit saying hateful stuff or positive stuff, doesn't matter, or funny stuff. One of the things I think about is the trajectory of that individual through life and how social media can help that person become the best version of themselves. I don't mean from like an Orwellian sense, like educate them properly or something. I just mean like, we're all, I believe, we're all fundamentally good. And I also believe we all have the capacity to do,

• 1:19:15Lex Fridman?

  to create some amazing stuff in this world. Whether that's ideas or art or engineering, all those kinds of things, just to be amazing people. And I kind of think about like, you know, a lot of social media mechanisms bring out the worst in us. And I try to think like, in the long term, how can the social media or how can a website, a whole content tool that you create can make the best? Like you take a trajectory that makes you better, better and better and like the best version of yourself. So I think about that because like, you know, Twitter can really take you down some dark trajectories. I've seen people just not being the best version of themselves.

• 1:19:59Lex Fridman?

  Forget the cancel culture and all that kind of stuff. It's just like they're not developing intellectually in the way that's going to make the best version of themselves. I think Reddit, I'm not sure what I think about Reddit yet. Because one positive side is all the shitposting on Reddit could be just like a release valve for some stress in life. And you almost have like a parallel life where in your, in meat space, you might be actually becoming successful and so on and growing and so on. But you just need some time to be angry at somebody. But I tend to not think that's possible. I think if you're shitposting, you're probably not spending your time the best way you could. I don't know. I am, I'm torn on that.

• 1:20:44Lex Fridman?

  But do you think about that with LibreX of creating a trajectory for the, for the Yale, for the Dartmouth, for the students to where they grow intellectually?

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, put, yeah.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Really intellectual content creation? It's something that frankly, you know, I think about every single day. And I think there are ways that, I mean, one thing that's great about humans is that they can be incentivized, right? And I think there are ways that you can incentivize people to make the right kind of content, if that's your goal.

• 1:21:25Lex Fridman?

  So you think such mechanisms exist for such incentivization?

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:31Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  So to speak.

• 1:21:32Lex Fridman?

  So you have already idea, like, concrete ideas in your mind?

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:21:40Lex Fridman?

  You don't even need to share them. The fact, I understand totally, but like, the fact that you have them, that's really good. Because I feel like sometimes the downfall of the social media is that there's literally not even a thinking or a discussion about the incentivization of positive, long-term content creation. And Twitter, I really was excited about this when they said like, when Jack has talked about like, creating healthy conversations.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  He does seem to care. I've listened to him. I mean, he's very, he has a very particular way of saying things. But you get the impression that he's someone who actually cares about these things within the limits of his power.

• 1:22:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And that's the question, the limits of the power. Librex is growing not just in the number of communities, but also in the way you're incentivizing positive conversations, like coupled with a moderation and so on. So you think there's a lot of innovation to be had in that area?

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  There's a tremendous amount. I think when you think about the reasons people post, fundamentally, people want to make a positive impact on their community to some degree. Now, there'll always be bad actors, and part of the benefit of sort of our moderation structure is that we can limit some of those bad actors, you know, no bot accounts, no brigating.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  At the same time, the more you incentivize a certain type of behavior, the better it's going to be. And it's, we don't see it as our role as the platform to force the community in a direction. And frankly, I don't think it would be good for anyone, the community or the conversations, if we forced a specific type of conversations, conversation. We just need to make the tools to allow people to be good.

• 1:23:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  And to incentivize good behavior.

• 1:23:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I believe that. Like, if you, you don't need, you will not need to censor if you allow people at scale to be good. The good will overpower the assholes.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

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

• 1:23:44Lex Fridman?

  But currently, LibreX is small, in the sense that it's, it's a small set of communities that I believe, and you mentioned to me offline, that by design, you're scaling slowly.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:23:57Lex Fridman?

  And carefully. So how does LibreX scale? Is it possible? You know, Facebook also started with a small set of communities that were schools, and then now grew to be basically the, if not one of the largest social networks in the world. Do you see LibreX as potentially scaling to be beyond even college campuses, but encompassing the whole world?

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a long timeline. I'll say this, this gets back to like, where did Facebook go wrong? Because clearly, they did a lot right. And we can only, we can only speculate about what the objectives were of the founders of Facebook. You know, I'm sure they've said some things, but it's always interesting to know what the, what the mythology is versus what the truth is of the matter. So perhaps they, and they've been very successful. I mean, they, they've taken over the world to some extent.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  At the same time, the goals of Librex are to create these positive communities and these open conversations where people can have real conversation and connection in their communities in a vulnerable and authentic way. And so to that end, which I imagine might be different than the goals of a Facebook, for example, one thing that we want to do is keep things intimate and community-based. So each school is its own community. And perhaps you could have a slightly broader community. Maybe you could have a, I know the California system is an obvious one, Pac-10 might be an obvious one, and we can think about that.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  But fundamentally, the unit, the unit of community is your school or your school community. So that, that, that's one difference that I think will help us. The other thing is that we're scaling intentionally, meaning that when we expand to a school, we have moderators in place. We have moderators who understand that school's environment in a very personal level. And we're growing responsibly. We're growing as we're ready, both technologically, but also socially, you know? But as we think we have the tools to preserve the community and to encourage the community to create the sort of content that we want them to create.

• 1:26:23Lex Fridman?

  And, you know, there's a lot of ways to define community. So first of all, there's geographic community as well. But the way you're kind of defining community with Yale and Dartmouth is the email, right? That's what gives you, there's a power to the email in the sense that that's how you can verify, officially verify yourself with being a single individual in the university. In that same way, you can verify your employment at a company, for example, like Google, Microsoft, Facebook. Do you see your potentially taking on those communities? That'd be fascinating, getting like anonymous community conversations inside Google.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:17Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  And I've, I've never, I've never worked at Google. I don't know if they would hire me. Hopefully, maybe as a product manager.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  I think if there's a community that needs this product and has that and has that will, which I think especially as LibreX continues to grow and expand and change and learn, because that's what we're doing is we're learning, right? With each community, it's not just about growing, it's about learning from these, from each of these communities and iterating. I think it's quite likely there are going to be all sorts of communities that could use this tool to improve their culture, so to speak.

• 1:28:02Lex Fridman?

  So forgive me, I'm not actually like that knowledgeable about the history of attempts of building social networks to solve the problem that you're solving. But I was made aware that there was an app, app or at least a social network called YikYak, that was, had a similar kind of focus. I think the thing you've spoken about that differs between LibreX and YikYak is that YikYak was defined, am I pronouncing it right even?

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  You're good?

• 1:28:37Lex Fridman?

  I'm good.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  I met the founder, so I can confirm.

• 1:28:40Lex Fridman?

  You can confirm, cool.

• 1:28:43Lex Fridman?

  The, that it was constrained to a geographical area versus like to the actual community.

• 1:28:50Lex Fridman?

  And that, and that somehow had fundamental like actual differences in social dynamics that resulted. But can you speak to the history of YikYak? Like, how does LibreX differ? What lessons have you learned from that? Oh, and I should say that I guess there was controversial, I don't know, I didn't look at the details, but I'm guessing there's a bunch of racism and hate speech and all that kind of stuff that emerged.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  There was.

• 1:29:13Lex Fridman?

  On YikYak, okay. So that's an example of like, okay, here's how it goes wrong when you have anonymity on college campuses. So how does LibreX going to do better?

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got a lot of problems, content problems. But the content problems go deeper than maybe what the press would reveal. There's a lot to say and part of it is parsing exactly what to talk about when it comes to YKK. And when you talk about startups, I mean, you know this, I, you know, startups. And you look at the postmortem, it's almost never what people think it is. And oftentimes, these things are somewhat unknowable. And the, the, the degree to which people seeking confirmation bias to somebody who's seeking closure.

• 1:29:58Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Look to find a singular attribute that caused the failure.

• 1:30:02Lex Fridman?

  It feels like the little details often make all the difference.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think, I think the details are so little that as humans, we are not capable of parsing even what they are. But I'll tell you, I'll tell you my perspective on it, knowing that I am also a human with biases. In this particular case, very significant biases.

• 1:30:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  I, so I started building LibreX for its own merits. I, I, I, at first I wasn't aware of YKK, but as I started to talk to people about this platform I was building, I, I was made aware of YKK and I built it from day one with a lot of the issues YKK had in mind. The, so as you said, the one difference between YKK is the geographical versus community based aspect. Going along with that, one thing I realized by researching social media sites is that the majority of the negative content, the content that's terrible and breaking all the rules is created by really,

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  and the people who are not reformable, so to speak, the people who are not showing the best part of the human.

• 1:31:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  Experience.

• 1:31:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  It's a really small minority, right?

• 1:31:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  I remember, I was listening to the founder of 4chan, Moot, talk about this, how like one guy was able to basically destroy like large swaths of his community.

• 1:31:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's part of what makes it exciting for that minority is how much power they can have. So if you're predisposed to think in this way, it's exciting that you can walk into, like I mentioned, the party before. You have a party of a lot of positive people and it feels, especially if you.

• 1:31:52Lex Fridman?

  Don't have much power in this world. It feels exceptionally empowering to just to to destroy like the lives of many. And if you think this way, it's a problem. But I I I'm I'm hopeful that you're right, that in most cases, it's going to be a minority of people.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  I think it is, and that's what the research has showed. And one really powerful thing is that we can really actively control who comes in and out of our community based on the dot edu verification. And we can also control who's not in our community because we have that lever where each account is associated with a dot edu. So that's the first point I would put out point out there. Second point is controlled expansion, meaning that we have community moderation. We have this panel that allows the moderators to see all of the highly downloaded content, all of the reported content, all the flagged content and look through it and decide what they like and what what's appropriate and what's not appropriate.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  And we have, we ping every moderator when there's a report, so things are taken down pretty quickly. And we have our standards and we have, I think above all of that, we have a mission and it's a community based mission. Yik Yak was more of a fun app and by its own admission, it was a place where people could enjoy themselves and could sort of yak. Yik Yak, you know, chit chat. We have a we have a bigger purpose than that, frankly. And I think I think that shows in the people who self select to be on that app, to be on Librex and to be on Yik Yak respectively. The last thing I'll say is Yik Yak was very few characters. It was a Twitter-esque platform.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  And that doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of nuance, doesn't allow for a tremendous amount of conversation. Librex is much more long form. And so the kind of posts that you'll get on Librex are can span pages. They're like, what people are starting to realize is that they can reach a lot more people at a lot more pertinent of a time, a lot more quickly by posting their thoughts on Librex than if they went to their school newspaper. And I think the school newspapers might be a little worried about that. But more importantly, we're connecting people in this way. We're long form communication with nuance that takes into account everything that's happening in the community temporally.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Is really available at LibreX and, you know, not really communicable in 240 or 480 or whatever the number of characters the apps were bound to. And then, you know, I could talk about the history of Yikyak, if you want me to go further. They started, I think they were at 12 schools. And then, spring break hit, people told their friends, look at this app. A thousand schools signed up and had active communities. They had a problem on their hands.

• 1:34:49Lex Fridman?

  I see.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  And then the high schools come on board.

• 1:34:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I think a lot of the things you said ring true to me, but especially the vision one, which I do think having a vision in the leadership, having a mission makes all the difference in the world. That that's both for the engineers that are building, like the team that's building the app, the moderation and users, because they kind of, the mission carries itself

• 1:35:16Lex Fridman?

  through the behavior of the, of the people on the social network.

• 1:35:23Lex Fridman?

  As a small tangent, let me ask you something about Parler, but it's less about Parler, more about AWS. So AWS removed Parler from its platform, you know, for whatever reasons, doesn't really matter. But the fact that AWS would do this was really, really bothered me personally, because I saw AWS as the computing infrastructure. And I always thought that part could not put a finger on its scale. And I don't know what your thoughts are. Like, were you bothered by Parler being removed from AWS? And how does that affect how you think about the computing infrastructure on which LibreX is based?

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  I was bothered, not so much by Parler specifically being taken out of AWS, but more the fact that something that's like a highway, something that people rely on, that people build on top of, that people assume is going to be somewhat position agnostic, like a road that people drive on, is, is becoming ideologically sort of discriminatory. I just, and of course, mind you, Amazon can do what it wants. It's a private company. And I support the rights of private companies. I just, on an ethical and sort of a deep moral level, I Wonder like, at what point should a company sort of be agnostic in that in that regard?

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  And let developers build on top of their infrastructure? And where does that responsibility hold?

• 1:36:58Lex Fridman?

  Yes, it makes you hope that there's going to be, from a capitalistic sense, competitors to AWS would say like, we're not going to put our finger on the scale. I mean, on the highway is a good sort of example. It's like if a privately owned highway

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:37:15Lex Fridman?

  Said, you know, we're no longer going to allow, we're only going to allow electric vehicles. And a bunch of people in this world would be like, yes, because electric is good for the environment. And, uh, you know, yes, but then you have to consider the like the slippery slope nature of it, but also like the the negative impact on the lives of many others. And what that means for innovation and for like, uh, competition, again, in a capitalistic sense. So there's some nature, there's some level to this hierarchy of our existence that we should not allow to manipulate what's built on top of it. It should be truly infrastructure.

• 1:38:00Lex Fridman?

  And it feels like compute is, uh, storage and compute is the that layer. Like it shouldn't be messed with. I haven't seen anybody really complain about it, like in terms of government. And I'm not even sure government is the right mechanism to policy and regulation to step in. Cause again, they do a messy job of fixing things. But I do hope there's competitors to AWS to make AWS and step up. Cause I do think, you know, I'm a fan of AWS, except this.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  Good service.

• 1:38:31Lex Fridman?

  It's a good service until this.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  Until, yeah, until they rip out the rug.

• 1:38:38Lex Fridman?

  And the point is, it's not that necessarily their decision was a bad one with Parler in particular. It's that like the slippery slope nature of it, but also the, it takes the good actors that are creating amazing products and makes them more fearful. And when you're more fearful, it's the same reason that anonymity is a tool that you don't create the best thing you could possibly create. When you're fearful, you don't create.

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:39:08Lex Fridman?

  I think we kind of talked about it a little bit, but I wonder if we can kind of revisit it a little bit. I talked to a guy named Ronald Sullivan, who's a faculty at Harvard, law professor. He was on the legal defense team. He was the lawyer for Harvey Weinstein and Aaron Hernandez for the double murder case. So he takes on these really difficult cases of unpopular figures because he believes like that's the way you test that we believe in the rule of law. But he was, there's a big protest in Harvard to get him, basically censor him and to get him to no longer be faculty dean, all those kinds of things.

• 1:39:53Lex Fridman?

  And it was by a minority of students, but it was a huge blowback, obviously in the public, but also inside Harvard, like that's not okay. He stands for the very principles at the founding of Harvard and at the principles of the founding of this country and the law and so on. But the, the basic argument is that is, was about safe spaces, that it's unsafe to have somebody who is basically supporting Harvey Weinstein, right? What do you think about this whole idea of safe spaces on college campuses? Because it feels like the, the mission of LibreX is pushing back against the idea of safe spaces.

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  I think safe spaces are fine when they're within people's private lives, within their homes, you know, within their religious organizations. I think the problem becomes when the institution starts encouraging or backing safe spaces because.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  What are people being safe from? And oftentimes, it seems like there's this idea that the harm that's being attempted to be mitigated is the harm of confronting opinions you disagree with, opinions you might find repugnant.

• 1:41:12Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  And if this is conflated with a need for safety, then that's where the idea of liberal arts education sort of dies. Of course, it's complicated, and we still want to have safe intellectual environments. But the way that I hear the term "safe space" used today, I think it doesn't really have a place within, like, the intellectual context.

• 1:41:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. It's funny. I mean, this is why Librex is really exciting, is it's pushing those difficult conversations. And I'd love to see... Ultimately, there does seem to be an asymmetry of power that results in the concept of safe spaces and hate speech being redefined in a slippery slope kind of way, where it means basically anything you want it to mean. And it basically is used to silence people, to silence people that are like good, thoughtful experts.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  Also, beyond that, I would say it has not just a pragmatic purpose, which is the silencing, but also sort of an ideological purpose, and a linguistic purpose, which is to conflate words with unsafety and harm and violence, which is what you kind of see on a cultural linguistic level is happening all around us right now, is that this idea that words are harm is a very dangerous and slippery concept. I mean, you don't have to slip that far to see why that's a problem. Once we start making words into violence, and we start criminalizing words, we get into some really authoritarian territory, things that I think, I mean, myself and my

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  background, I don't know how much we have to go into it, but things that my ancestors certainly would be worried about.

• 1:43:03Lex Fridman?

  What's your background?

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  I'm a child of Holocaust survivors and pogrom survivors. So.

• 1:43:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, me as well, from different directions. I come from the Soviet Union. So there's a, well, like in most of us, hate and love runs through our blood from our history. You mentioned MIT is being added to Librex. Has it already been added?

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Yes, it was added today.

• 1:43:28Lex Fridman?

  Today. Okay. So let me ask you, this is exciting because I don't know what your thoughts are about this, but I'll tell you from my perspective, if you're and a lot of MIT folks listen to this, I would love it if you join Librex. It'd be interesting to explore conversations on several topics inside MIT, but one of the most

• 1:43:53Lex Fridman?

  moving that hasn't been discussed at all, except in little flourishes here and there, is the topic of Jeffrey Epstein.

• 1:44:06Lex Fridman?

  Now, there's been a huge amount of like, impact that the connections of various faculty to Jeffrey Epstein and the various things that have been said had on MIT. But it feels like the difficult conversation haven't had been had. It's the administration trying to clean up and give a bunch of BS to try to pretend like, let's just hide this part. Like, nothing is broken, nothing to see here. Here's a bad dude that did some bad things and some faculty that kind of misbehaved a little bit because they're a little bit clueless. Let's all look the other way. Harvard did this much better, by the way. They completely.

• 1:44:53Lex Fridman?

  It's almost like people pretend like Harvard didn't have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein. But I think I'd be curious to hear what those conversations are because there's conversations in the topic of like,

• 1:45:10Lex Fridman?

  well, obviously, sort of sexual assault and disrespecting women on any kind of level within academia, but just women in general. That's an important topic to talk about, very many sets of difficult conversations. And the other topic is, you know, funding for research. Like, how are, like, what are we okay taking money from and what are we not okay taking money from? You know, there's a lot of just interesting, difficult conversations to be had.

• 1:45:42Lex Fridman?

  I've worked with people who, you know, refuse to take money from DOD, Department of Defense, for example, because in some indirect or direct way, you're funding military industrial complex, all those kinds of things. I think with Jeffrey Epstein, it's even more stark, this contrast of like, well, what is and isn't ethical to take money from? And I just think, forget academia, I think there's just a lot of interesting, deep, human discussions to be had, and they haven't been. And there's been somebody, I don't know if you're familiar with Eric Weinstein, who has been outraged by the fact that nobody's talking about Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody's having these difficult conversations.

• 1:46:24Lex Fridman?

  And Eric himself has had sort of complicated journey through academia in the sense that he's a really kind of renegade thinker in many kinds of ways. I'm not sure if you know who Eric is by any chance?

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  Heard the name.

• 1:46:39Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  I actually checked out Zev.

• 1:46:42Lex Fridman?

  Zev?

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  It was heartening for me to see that I was not the youngest person.

• 1:46:46Lex Fridman?

  On this, on this. You're the second youngest.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  Second youngest.

• 1:46:52Lex Fridman?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:46:56Lex Fridman?

  But, but Eric has, he's kind of a renegade thinker. He's a mathematical physicist with a degree of PhD at Harvard, and he spends

• 1:47:07Lex Fridman?

  At MIT and so on, but he speaks to the fact that sort of there's a culture of conformity and so on. And if you if you're somebody who's a bit outside of the box, a bit weird and whatever dimension of weird that makes you actually kind of interesting, that the system kind of wants to make you an outcast, wants to throw you out. And so he kind of opposes that whole idea. He's the perfect person to have conversations with in this kind of LibreX kind of context of anonymity. Because I'll tell you the few conversations that came across and they were very quickly silenced. And I'm troubled by it.

• 1:47:46Lex Fridman?

  I'm not sure what to think of it is there's a few threads inside MIT, like on a mailing list, discussing Marvin Minsky. I don't know if you know who that is. He's an AI researcher. He's a seminal figure in AI before your time, but one of the most important people in art in the history of artificial intelligence. And there was a discussion on a on a on a thread that involved

• 1:48:16Lex Fridman?

  the interaction between Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein. That conversation was quickly shut down. One person was pushed out of MIT, Richard Stallman, who's one of the key figures in the because of that, because he wanted some clarity about the situation. But he also missed, he spoke like we mentioned earlier without grace, right?

• 1:48:39Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:48:48Lex Fridman?

  I guess what bothered me most is it didn't continue. It didn't it didn't expand. There was no like complexity and and it was there was a hunger that was clear behind that conversation, especially sort of for me. I'd like to understand Marvin Minsky was one of the one of the reasons I wanted to come to MIT. He's passed away, but he's one of the key figures in the field that I deeply care about our artificial intelligence. And I thought.

• 1:49:19Lex Fridman?

  That his name was dragged through the mud through that situation and without ever being like resolved. And so it's unclear to me, like, what am I supposed to think about all this? And the only way to come to a conclusion there is to keep talking. It's like the thing we started this conversation with about truth is like, is conversation. So in that sense, I'd love if people on LibreX, perhaps in other places, but it seems like LibreX is a nice platform to discuss Marvin Minsky, to discuss Jeffrey Epstein, to learn from it, to grow from it, to see how we can make MIT better. As I'm still one of the people,

• 1:50:02Lex Fridman?

  I've always dreamed of being at MIT. It was a dream come true in many ways. And I still believe that MIT is one of the most special places in this world, like many other universities, universities in general is truly special, man. I, you know, it hurts my heart when people speak poorly of academia. I understand what they mean. They're very correct, but there is much more, in my opinion, that's beautiful about academia than that's broken. I mean, I don't know if you have something to comment. It doesn't necessarily need to be about Jeffrey Epstein, but there's these difficult things that come up that test the academic community, right? That it feels like conversation is the only way to resolve it.

• 1:50:47Speaker 01

  I think people have a natural need for closure. And it's not just, I'm not as plugged into the, what academics are talking about as you would be Lex, but I even.

• 1:50:57Lex Fridman?

  Kids these days, no respect for Minsky.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, especially in the AI community. I'm not necessarily a programmer. But what I will say is that people come to LibreX and we always see a huge spike in users whenever there's like a tragedy on campus or something where people need closure. Recently, there was a suicide just the other day on Yale's campus. And people were just coming to pay respects and to say rest in peace and speak also about what might have led to an environment where people are drawn to these terrible.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  Results.

• 1:51:42Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  People need the space, especially when no one wants to go out and put their head above, you know, be the longest blade of grass on that one.

• 1:51:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  Because of the stigma.

• 1:51:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  People need to be able to speak.

• 1:52:02Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:52:10Lex Fridman?

  Well, I'm a.

• 1:52:14Lex Fridman?

  You've created an amazing place. I I'm kind of interested in your struggle and your journey of creating positive

• 1:52:24Lex Fridman?

  incentives because it's a problem in a very different domain that I'm also interested in. So I, you know, I love robotics. I love human robot interaction. And so I believe that most people are good and we can bring out the best in human nature. Social networks is a very tricky space to do that in. So I'm glad you're taking on the problem and I'm glad you have the mission that you do. I hope you succeed. But you mentioned offline that you used to be into chess. Tell me about your journey through chess.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  Sure, I was a very competitive tournament player growing up till about like 13. I got for the chess fans, I got to around 2000 USCF. So I was a competitive player, especially my age group. And that actually led me to poker. I was I was playing a tournament and what happens is when you're like a very strong 13 year old and you're playing locally, if you want a good match, you're going to end up playing a lot of adults. And I ended up playing this mid 40s guy who we played a really strong game. He actually beat me. I still I still remember the game and think, oh, I could, I should have played that move and so that one. But after after the game, we had a postmortem. It was this me, I think I was 13 at the time, and this 40 year old like hanging over this chessboard and looking over the moves.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  And even at that, even at my age, it occurred to me that this guy was absolutely brilliant.

• 1:53:46Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  And after after the postmortem, not only by the way in chess, but just like in the way he articulates his thoughts, as some people are. After the postmortem, I went and looked him up online and I found out that he was a World Series of Poker champion.

• 1:53:59Lex Fridman?

  Who is it?

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  His name is Bill Chen.

• 1:54:02Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  And I haven't really kept up with him, except one time there was another chess tournament when I was around. Fourteen and I followed him into an elevator as he was leaving the chess hall, like pretending that I was gonna go up just because I wanted to, I just wanted to talk to him. And I suggested a sequel or some changes that he could, that I thought he should make for his book. And he was like, actually, I was thinking of doing the same thing, which is incredibly validating to my fourteen year old or fifteen year old self. But I really haven't kept up with him, so it's a shout out to him. But and then that he wrote a book called The Mathematics of Poker that I started reading. And that first of all, kickstarted my interest in game theory and second of all, in poker. So it started from chess and then poker.

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  And I started with Bitcoin poker and had a lot of success with that. Met a lot of amazing friends, learned a ton about, I mean, I think about entrepreneurship as well as taking risks, reasonable risks, positive expected value risks, and also just growing as a person and mathematician and.

• 1:55:05Lex Fridman?

  What's, did you say Bitcoin poker?

• 1:55:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:08Lex Fridman?

  What's Bitcoin poker?

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  So you have to understand, I was fourteen years old, right?

• 1:55:11Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  So how is a fourteen year old with wonderful parents who care about him?

• 1:55:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  And probably don't want him playing poker.

• 1:55:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  Going to start playing poker because I wanted, I wanted the challenge. I love the challenge. I love the competition. And I realized the answer is probably Bitcoin because the implications of that. And they had, they had these free roll tournaments, which for those of you who don't know what free rolls are, there's these promotional tournaments that sites put on where they'll put like a few dollars in and then thousands of people sign up and the winners get like a dollar. And I started there and I worked my way up and.

• 1:55:48Lex Fridman?

  That's amazing. What's your sense about from that time to today of the growth of the cryptocurrency community? I'm actually having. Like four or five conversation with Bitcoin proponents, Bitcoin maximists and like all these, I'm just having all these cryptocurrency conversations currently because there's so many brilliant, like technically brilliant, but also financially and philosophically brilliant people in those communities. It's fascinating with the explosion of impact like, and also if you look into the future, the possible revolutionary impact on society in general. But what's your sense about this whole growth of Bitcoin?

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  I'm definitely less knowledgeable on the currency. Again, like programming, it was a means to an end.

• 1:56:35Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  Right? What I will say is that there was this amazing community that grew out of it. And you'd have people who were willing to stake me or have me be their horse and they're my backer for having never met me for literally full Bitcoin tournaments, like full Bitcoin entry fee tournaments. And I get a percentage of the profits and they get a percentage. And to have that level of community for that degree of money, I mean, it gives you hope about the potential for, you know, humans to act in mutual best interest with a degree of trust.

• 1:57:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a really fascinating, strong community there. But speaking of like bringing out the best of human nature, it's a community that's currently struggling a little bit in terms of their ability to communicate in a positive and inspiring way. Like the Bitcoin folks, and we talk about this a lot. They, I honestly think they have a lot, a lot of love in their hearts and minds. But they just kind of naturally, because the world has been like institutions and the centralized powers have been sort of mocking and fighting them for many years that they've become sort of worn down and cynical.

• 1:57:57Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 1:58:02Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:58:09Lex Fridman?

  Basically being derisive and mocking and trolling and all this kind of stuff. But people are trying to, you know, as the Bitcoin community grows, as the cryptocurrency community grows, they're trying to revolutionize that aspect too. So they're trying to find the positive core and grow and grow in that way. So it's fascinating because I think all of us are trying to find the positive aspects of ourselves and trying to learn how to communicate in a positive way online. It's like the internet hasn't been around, social networks haven't been around that long. We're trying to, we're trying to figure this thing out. Let me ask you the ridiculous question. I don't know if you have an answer, but who is the greatest chess player of all time in your view? So since you like chess.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  Depends on how you define it. But if you're talking about raw skill, like if you put everyone across time into a tournament together.

• 1:58:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  Carlson would win. I don't think that's particularly controversial.

• 1:59:03Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you mean like with the same exact skill level?

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:59:06Lex Fridman?

  Magnus Carlsen, okay.

• 1:59:07Speaker 01

  And is the object now, if you talk about political importance, I think Bobby Fischer is, you know, he's a, he's the only one that people still, when you go to someone on the street, they know Bobby Fischer because he was, because of what he represented, right?

• 1:59:21Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  Bobby in America, Bobby Fischer.

• 1:59:28Lex Fridman?

  You think so?

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59:30Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting. I think we're gonna have to put that to the test.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe it's, maybe it's more reflective of the community that I was a part of, but yeah.

• 1:59:37Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so in the community you're a part of, like, young minds playing chess, Bobby Fischer was a superstar in terms of like the roots.

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  I think so, because he's American and, you know, he stood up against the big bad Russians at the time. And, you know, unfortunately, he had a very bad downfall. But, you know, for our geopolitical situation, he meant a lot. And then if you talk about compared to contemporaries, actually, I would say Paul Murphy was a bit of a throwback, was, he's one of those geniuses that was just head and shoulders above everyone else.

• 2:00:14Lex Fridman?

  Is there somebody that inspired your own play, like as a young mind?

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really liked Mikhail Tal.

• 2:00:21Lex Fridman?

  So like you see you were, I think he was very aggressive, right?

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, very tactical.

• 2:00:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  Which is funny because I, I found that I was better at like sort of slow, methodical play than quick tactics, but I just, I mean, there's something beautiful about the creativity. And that's something I always latched on to was being a creative player, being a creative person. I mean, chess doesn't really reward creativity as much as a lot of other things, especially entrepreneurial pursuits. Which I think is part of the reason why I sort of grew out of it. But I always was attracted to the creativity that I did see in chess.

• 2:00:56Lex Fridman?

  So let me ask the flip, the, the other, because you said poker. Is there somebody that stands out to you as could be the greatest poker player of all time? Like, who do you admire?

• 2:01:08Speaker 01

  That's, that's a more controversial one because these chess players are such like, first of all, there's more an objective, objective standard. And second of all, there's like, they're like, almost like cultural figures to me. Whereas poker players are more like live, living, they feel more like.

• 2:01:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  They feel more accessible.

• 2:01:27Lex Fridman?

  But they also have like personalities.

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:29Lex Fridman?

  Poker have like Phil Ives.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  They have vices.

• 2:01:32Lex Fridman?

  They have vices, they have quirks, they have humor. Like, I guess we've seen videos of them.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:39Lex Fridman?

  Because it's such a recent development.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  I'll say one person who I admire so much and like, if I, if I could like have a dinner list of people that I want to have dinner with, like, maybe it'll happen now, actually. But I would love to have dinner with him. Phil Galvant. Who I don't, most people probably won't know.

• 2:01:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  But on this podcast, but the way, first of all, he democratized poker learning in like the mathematical, nitty gritty, how do you get good at poker type sense? To the entire world in like an unprecedented way. He was, he gave, he had this gift that he had learned and distilled by working with some of the greatest poker minds and he just democratized it through his website. And I learned a ton from him. And not only that, but you just listen to him think and it's almost like a philosophical meditation, the way that he breaks things down and thinks about these different elements and has such a holistic thought process. It's like watching a genius work.

• 2:02:40Speaker 01

  And, you know, he's also just a nice, fun, sociable guy that like you can, you can imagine being at your dinner table.

• 2:02:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  All that combined.

• 2:02:49Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:02:53Speaker 01

  To say the least, yes.

• 2:02:55Lex Fridman?

  I like, I really like the, what is he, Canadian, Daniel Negrono?

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  He's also a nice guy.

• 2:03:01Lex Fridman?

  He's also a nice guy, but he's also somebody who is able to express his thoughts about poker really well, but also in an entertaining way. He seems to be able to predict cards better than anybody I've ever seen, like what.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  Did you watch The Challenge?

• 2:03:15Lex Fridman?

  Which challenge?

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  He, he lost like a million dollars recently to Doug Polk. He lost a million dollars to Doug Polk, heads up online. It's really interesting.

• 2:03:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's, it's awesome to watch these guys' work. So I know you're 20, 21?

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  21.

• 2:03:32Lex Fridman?

  21. So asking you for advice is, is a little bit funny, but, but at the same time, not because you've created a social network, you've created a startup from nothing, as we talked about earlier, like without knowing how to program, you've programmed. I mean, you've taken this whole journey that a lot of people I think would be really inspired by. So given that, and given the fact that 20 years from now, you probably laugh at the advice you're gonna give now.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I hope so. If I don't laugh at the advice I give now, something went desperately wrong, right?

• 2:04:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So do you have advice for people that wanna follow in your footsteps and create a startup, whether it's in the software app domain or whether it's anything else?

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  So I'll speak specifically about social media apps.

• 2:04:24Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  Try to keep it as narrow as possible so I can laugh as little as possible when I'm 41. And what I would say is that if you're like a 21, 22 year old who's looking at me and being like, I want to do something like this. What I would say is you probably know better than just about anyone. And if you have a feeling in yourself that this is something that I have to do, and this is something I could imagine myself doing for the next 10 years. Because if you're successful, you are going to have to do it for the next 10 years. And through the ups and the downs, through the amazing interviews with Lex, and through the not so amazing articles you might have with other people, right?

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  And you're going to have to ride those highs and lows and you have to believe in what you're doing. But if you have that feeling, what I would say is listen to as few people as possible. Because people are experts in domains. But when it comes to like, what's hot and what's, what, what makes sense in a social context, you are the authority as a young person who's going through these things and living in, in your sort of milieu. And I mean, I've talked to, at this point, you know, so many experts, experts. So many investors, VCs.

• 2:05:46Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying-

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  You'd be amazed at the advice I've gotten, advice I've gotten.

• 2:05:49Lex Fridman?

  So there's like a minefield of bad advice?

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  That's the hardest part, I think, for young people. And it's the thing, when people, like, I help, I help Yellees all the time who ask. Like, I never turn down, when a founder asks me to have a conversation, I never turn it down. I'm always there for them. And the number one thing I worry about is that at Yale, we're taught implicitly and explicitly that you listen to the adult in the room, you listen to the person with the highest, you know, pay grade. And it's devastating because that's how innovation dies and, you know.

• 2:06:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's intimidating to like, you talk to VC who probably made-

• 2:06:31Speaker 01

  Is worth a billion dollars.

• 2:06:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, billion dollars. And they're going to tell you, you know, all the, all the successful startups they helped fund, or even just a successful business owner is going to tell you some advice. And it's hard psychologically to think that they might be wrong.

• 2:06:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but you're saying that's the only way you succeed.

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  The only way you succeed, because if they knew what they were doing, they would have built it themselves. Um, and what's especially hard is people go, oh, of course, you know, I'll listen to people's, I'll listen to their advice, but I'll know why it's wrong. And then I'll, and I'll do my own thing. And that sounds greatly abstract, but sometimes you can't always even put your finger on why they're wrong.

• 2:07:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  And I think to have the conviction to say, you're wrong and I can't tell you why, but I still think I'm right.

• 2:07:21Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  It's a rare thing, especially at like, it's very counterintuitive and you might even say it's hubris or arrogant. But I think it's necessary because a lot of these things are, they're not things that you can really put into words until you see them in action. Like, a lot of them are kind of happy accidents.

• 2:07:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's been, it's been tough for me. Like as a, as a person who, um, like I'm very empathetic, so I, when people tell me stuff, I kind of want to understand them. And it's been a painful process, especially people close to me. Basically, everything I've done, especially in the recent few years, a lot of people close to me said not to do.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:06Lex Fridman?

  And, uh, like my parents too, that's been a hard one.

• 2:08:11Lex Fridman?

  Is, is to basically acknowledge to myself that you don't know, like, you, you don't, that everything you're going to say by way of advice for me is not going to be helpful. Like, I love my parents very much, but like, they're just like, they don't get it. And, and as you put it beautifully, it's very difficult to put your finger on exactly why. Because, uh, a lot of advice sounds reasonable.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  That's the worst kind.

• 2:08:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it if it sounds really good, that just means it's an earworm. Like, that's like a song that you hear on the radio and then you're like, mm hmm, you're humming it in the car and it's like, it's the same thing. The more, the better it sounds, the more skeptical.

• 2:09:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, reason is a is a bad drug. Like, should be very careful because like, you know, the things that seem impossible, every every major innovation, every major business seems impossible at birth. But even not just the impossible things. I think, you know, you look at like love, for example. It's very easy to give advice, to sort of point out all the ways it can go wrong. Or marriage, all the divorces that people go through, all the pain of years that you go through the divorce, like the system of marriage, the marriage industrial complex, all the money that's wasted, all those kinds of things. But that advice is useless when you're in love.

• 2:09:47Lex Fridman?

  The point, the point is to just pat the person on the back and say, go get him, kid. Like, what is it, the Good Will Hunting? I went to see about a girl.

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:59Lex Fridman?

  That's a good movie.

• 2:10:00Speaker 01

  I love that movie.

• 2:10:02Lex Fridman?

  But, yeah, that that's, that took me a long time to figure out. I'm still trying to fight through it, but especially when you're young, that's hard. But nothing in life is worth accomplishing is easy, so.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  But I think it's really interesting. You make that connection between like startup advice and like your parents, because it's the exact same sort of mechanism, where when you're young, your parents are usually like, right.

• 2:10:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Speaker 01

  Right? And the experts are usually right. And, you know, if you listen to them and you you you follow their orders, you're gonna go to a school like Yale.

• 2:10:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  And at a certain point, it stops making sense. And I've I've seen my friends at Yale go down paths because they just continued listening to their parents that I know in their heart of hearts is not the right path for them.

• 2:10:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you know what? That's how I see like the education system. The whole point is to guide you to a certain point in your life, and everybody's point is different. And Your task is to, at that point, to have a personal revolution and create your own path.

• 2:11:14Speaker 01

  But no one tells you that.

• 2:11:15Lex Fridman?

  Nobody tells you that because they're, they want you to keep following the same path as they, they're leading you towards. Like, they're not going to say your whole job is to eventually rebel.

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:25Lex Fridman?

  That's how revol- that's how rebellion works. You're not supposed to be told, but that is the task. They can take you, just like you said, and depending who you are, they can take you really far. But at a certain point, you have to rebel. That could be getting your PhD, that could be in your undergrad, that could be high school.

• 2:11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be at any point. One thing that I think played a pretty pivotal role, and I've never really mentioned this. He might not even know the person about to tell you about, in sort of me actually going out and making LibreX, was that I was taking this graduate level math class.

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  My sophomore year, and I met this, I met this PhD student who was also in it and had considerable citations and also startup experience. And I think he actually ended up being the CTO of a unicorn later on. I've sort of lost touch with him, but we're still Facebook friends. As it, as it is in the 21st century, right? So, and I was in a class and I was telling him, I really want to, I really want to make this thing, but I have no technical background. And he, this guy's a computer genius. He worked under Dan Spielman at Yale, so. He's a good guy, right? And we were doing some math together. We were doing something on discrepancy, for those of you who really care about math. So combinatorics.

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  And he just turns to me, he's like, I think you could do it. Like, what do you mean, you think I could do it? He's like, I think you could do it. And I was like, really? But I respected this guy so much. His name was Young Duck. Shout out to Young Duck. I respected this guy so much that I was like, if Young Duck says I can do it, and Young Duck is a legit genius, and he knows, and he knows me. Because we were in two classes together and we'd spent a lot of time together. If he thinks I can do it, then who am I to say I can't do it?

• 2:13:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you know, that's a lesson for mentorship is like.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  By the way, he has no idea, probably.

• 2:13:25Lex Fridman?

  Well, he might not even remember that interaction, which is funny, but the, the point is that when a crazy young kid comes up to you with a crazy dream. You know, every once in a while, you should just pat them on the back and say, I believe in you. Like, you can do it. If they look up to you, that means your words have power. And if you say, no, no, come on, be like reasonable, like, you know, finish your school work kind of thing, like, that's unreasonable to take that leap now. Just finish your education, blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever the reasonable advice is. Every once in a while, maybe often, as a mentor, you should say, you know,

• 2:14:07Lex Fridman?

  go see about a girl in California, or whatever the equivalent is.

• 2:14:12Speaker 01

  That was my moment. That was my goodwill hunting moment.

• 2:14:15Lex Fridman?

  It's your goodwill hunting moment. Man, I miss Robin Williams. That was a special guy. People love it when I ask about book recommendations in general. Of course, your journey is just beginning, but is there something that jumps out to you? Technical fiction, philosophical, sci fi, coloring books, blog posts you read somewhere? That had an impact on your life?

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  Video games.

• 2:14:42Lex Fridman?

  That you recommend to others? Minecraft, a manual?

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  Manga.

• 2:14:47Lex Fridman?

  I mean, yeah, video, you could mention video games, too, if there's something that jumps out to you that just had like an impact.

• 2:14:53Speaker 01

  I guess I'll say, I really like the book, The War of Art, which is a book about creative resistance and the creative struggle and what it means to be creative.

• 2:15:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  And part of what I see in this conversation and what you're doing, Lex, is so much of the War of Art's idea is that you just keep writing and writing and writing until you get to the new crap.

• 2:15:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  And you just, you just, you just roll with it, right? And that's sort of what happens when you have like three hour conversations with people is you can only have so much scripted or societally constructed stuff until you get to the real you.

• 2:15:33Lex Fridman?

  And you have to show up. I mean, he's, that book, that book is kind of painful.

• 2:15:37Speaker 01

  It's really painful, and it's not something I would recommend for every part of it, but for what it did in my life at the time, it also kind of normalized. I don't know. Um, I, part of my coming of age story is, part of it's about realizing that I'm a creative person and person who needs to create. Um, that's sort of a God given thing, I think, for a lot of people, but it's something that I don't really feel like I can live without. And part of it was realizing that even within some of these more rigid structures, it's okay that I don't sort of fit in with them. And to hear about the struggles of other creatives was something for my own self-esteem and my own growing up that was really important to me. So I don't think the book itself might be

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  perfect, but for what it did for my life, it was really impactful.

• 2:16:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think exactly. The words may not be exactly right by way of advice, but I think the journey that a lot of creatives take by reading that book is kind of profound. He also has another one called Turning Pro, I think. I mean, he in general espouses like taking it seriously. Like, if you have a creative mind and you want to create something special in this world, go do it. It's not, don't, you know, show up.

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  And so many people.

• 2:16:56Lex Fridman?

  Look at the blank page.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  So many people would like tell me like, would encourage me either blatantly or through like implicit means to like basically take the app less seriously. It's a good signal, by the way. It's a good signal because my really close friends, the ones who have always supported me, they never said that because they got it. They understood that that was that that was my path. And they might be skeptical. They might be like, I mean, one of my friends I remember told me like, I was always like taken aback about why you were so certain this would work out. And he's like, I finally got it like once I saw it like popping off, but like before that I just didn't get it. But like, he still supported

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  me. And I think, I think it's a really good signal. And actually, just the fact of going through this process has made me socially feel so much more connected. And I've somewhat consolidated my social life to some degree, but it's so much more vulnerable, connected. And that's part of the creative process. I have to thank for that, I think.

• 2:17:56Lex Fridman?

  There's something that's like unstoppable about the creative mind. It's like, it's right there, that fire. And I guess part of the- Part of the thing that you're supposed to do is let that fire burn in whichever direction.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  And it's gonna hurt.

• 2:18:10Lex Fridman?

  It's gonna hurt. Fire will hurt. But on topic of video games, you mentioned Stanley Parable offline. Is there, you said you play some video games. Is there a video game that you especially love that you recommend I play, for example?

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll, I'll mention, it's actually really in keeping with what we've been talking about. It's the beginner's guide, which is what I, it was made by the same guy, Davey Rundin, who made the Stanley Parable, which I, I briefly saw you. I just clicked the video and then I went to sleep. It was like 2 a.m. And then, but I briefly saw that you were looking at. And it's, it's a game that is better treated as art. And I think, I won't claim to understand the creator, because that would be a cardinal sin to me of, as a creative person. But it gets to the heart of a lot of the things that we've been, that we've been talking

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  about, which is the creative mind. The game can be interpreted in a lot of ways, in a feminist way. It could be interpreted as a story of friends. It could be interpreted as the story of critics versus a creative. The way I like to interpret it, and I don't want to give out away too much, is the story of the creative part of your mind that creates just for the sake of creating, meaning the part that creates for no rhyme or reason or clear meaning. It's almost, it's almost ethereal versus the part that's, you could call it the editor,

• 2:19:48Speaker 01

  you could call it the pragmatist, you could call it the necessary force of ego in our, in our lives. We can't totally be egoless, right? But we need to be egoless to be creative. And how that sort of internal censure, what role does it play? And how do we allow our creative minds to be creative? And yet, how do we still become useful? Because, and it's funny that a video game, right, could, could have this in.

• 2:20:14Lex Fridman?

  Fascinating tension, which reminds me about the ridiculous question that every once in a while I ask. About meaning and death. So this whole ride ends. You're at the beginning of the ride, but it could end any day, actually. That's kind of the way human life works. You could die today, you could die tomorrow. Do you think about your mortality? Do you think about death? Do you meditate on it? And in that context, as the creative, but a pragmatist too, as running a startup, what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?

• 2:20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so on mortality, right? About about three years ago, four years ago now, I was excited to go to Yale. I was playing six hours of squash a day, which squash is a sport I love so much. And I was really getting a lot better. And I was even thinking I could maybe walk onto the Yale team.

• 2:21:20Speaker 01

  And I woke up one day, I felt really, really sick. I went and I decided not to go to squash that day. And I know I wanted to, I almost did.

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  And you'll see how this story turns out. You'll decide if I made the right choice. I decided not to go squash today and I decided to get my driver's license. Or I had to get my driver's license because I wanted to get driver's license before I, you know, it's just how young I am before I went off to college because otherwise I might never get it. And I'm going back and I successfully got my driver's license for Hashem. And I go back to, I go back to my house and I decided I don't want to drive back because I just feel so sick. Like things are spinning. I have the worst headache. I come home, I run back right into my bed and feeling really sick to the point where I even like asked my mom, who is a doctor, I'm like, should I, should I go to the hospital? And she's like, You can just wait it out. I'm sure it'll get better.

• 2:22:20Lex Fridman?

  I like your mouth.

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, you know, and then at one point I look at my arms and they're like covered in this like red splotchy stuff.

• 2:22:29Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm like, well, I think, and she's like, yeah, we have to go. And so I go there and they're like, you have scarlet fever and they're like, there's nothing we can do. You should probably just go back home. So I go back home. Six hours later, I wake up in the morning. They'd let me out at like 3 a.m. They let me, I come home in the morning and I feel this, like a spear through my chest. And I never felt anything like it. And I was, it was very disconcerting when you have a, because we're all used to different sorts of pain, right? And that was the sort of pain I never felt before. I suppose as an athlete, you're used to like, you know, pain. So I tell my parents and immediately we hop back in the car. We go up to the same hospital. I was at six hours ago.

• 2:23:11Speaker 01

  And they initially didn't want to let me in. And I was like, I have chest pain. They're like, oh, come in. Because they're like, you're a healthy guy. Wait your turn. And I'm like, no, you don't understand. I have like a pain in my chest. And then they let me in. They start doing tests on me. They like put something like in my back, which is really scary. It's a huge needle. And I'm smiling because it's like one of the ways I reduce stress, I guess, or deal with this sort of thing and make light of it. But like, know that, you know, it's, it was definitely very scary in the moment. Shocking and scary. And they go and they, they do a bunch of tests and they determined that a virus like attacked my heart. And I had myocarditis and pericarditis. And they said I had maybe 25 to 35% chance at one point of dying.

• 2:23:56Speaker 01

  And so I'm sitting in my, they, they admit me into the hospital. I'm in the bed, in my bed for about three weeks. And I'm just, I'm just standing there and I had this moment also that I remember very specifically where.

• 2:24:16Speaker 01

  I was in so much pain that like I was crying, not out of like emotional standpoint, but actually just purely out of the pain itself. Like, I could feel my heart in my chest. And when I leaned back, I felt it touch my rib cage and feel horrible. So I couldn't go to sleep and lean back. I had to lean forward all throughout the night. Right? And I'm feeling my and I'm feeling my chest. I'm feeling this terrible pain in my chest and I'm crying unstoppable. And I mean, also, maybe I should mention that at the time, I was someone who like refused to take in anything into my body that wasn't natural. And so a lot of the time, I tried to be unmedicated. Eventually, I didn't allow them to add a little medication

• 2:24:58Speaker 01

  to my body. But there's just so much uncertainty and pain. And the first time I had to come to terms with mortality.

• 2:25:08Lex Fridman?

  First of all, I think you still should have gone play squash. I mean, come on.

• 2:25:11Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah.

• 2:25:12Lex Fridman?

  I thought you're I thought you're serious about this. You used to carry that with you. Sort of.

• 2:25:20Lex Fridman?

  There is power to realizing the ride can end. Right?

• 2:25:26Speaker 01

  Very suddenly.

• 2:25:27Lex Fridman?

  Very suddenly. Yeah. And painfully. And, you know, it has pragmatic application to like what you trajectories you take through life. Right?

• 2:25:39Speaker 01

  Something else that is worth noting is that I, for the next year, couldn't walk to my classes. So I get to Yale. They put me in a medical single, alone. And I have to get shuttled to all my classes. I have to ask I had to ask a few professors to even move classes so I could actually get there. I can't move my book. I can't lift my book bags. I can't I can't walk upstairs. I spent like 12 hours a day in my dorm room, just like staring at the walls. And more so and more than that, all this like.

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  You, I got to watch my body like deteriorate and like the muscle like fall off of it. Cause I was, I was taking these pills and they're kind of catabolic. And for an 18 year old, I mean, I think every 18 year old has feelings about their body.

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  Man or woman and you know, just seeing this, it's like you're watching sort of death transpire. And you're also very fatigued because your heart's not at peak condition. And you're thinking about the future and a lot of the things you enjoy have kind of been stripped away from you. And I, I took up meditation practice, like started with like five minutes a day. At my peak, I was at like 40 minutes a day, kept it up consistently for about two years. And I started thinking about like, what do I want to do? And like, what do I care about?

• 2:27:14Speaker 01

  And to get to your point, I think you were asking like, how does this carry forward? Right? I think. I realized that, you know, there's an end and I realized that there are things I believe. And things that I believe that might not be so overtly popular, but that I truly think make the world a better place. And in spite of, and then basically if my conditions provided, I wanted to make something that. I wanted to do something that would make me feel sort of whole in that way.

• 2:27:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, that's an amazing journey to take that time and to come out on the other end. Now, I mean, that's amazing. I did not realize like that there was a long-term struggle. I think that's in the end, if you do succeed, will have a profound positive impact. Cause struggles ultimately like humbling, but also empowering. So I'm glad to see that. But from the perspective of the creative, the other ridiculous question about meaning. Do you think about this kind of stuff?

• 2:28:22Lex Fridman?

  Is that the, you know, the, the meaning of life for you? The meaning of life for us, descendants of apes in general?

• 2:28:32Speaker 01

  The first thing I'd like to say is that I think part of like, when we talk about the meaning of life, the part of it is the fact that we get to struggle with this question and we get to do it together for a long time and we, sometimes I think it's accepting that there's no meaning at all. And sometimes I think it's accepting that, or even just parsing the phrase and thinking about the meaning of life. I sometimes, and look, I'm very young. Again, I hope that anything I say now is going to be very different in the future because I think meaning, life has so many meanings that it'll be crazy to see what I think in 20 years about the meaning of life.

• 2:29:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Ryan from the future, cut him some slack.

• 2:29:14Speaker 01

  Please do. Perspective, perspective, perspective. Having said that, you know, I think part of what brings meaning to my life is things like this, where we think about these things with people who are really, really, really on the ball and we get to connect with these people. That certainly brings meaning to my life, human connection.

• 2:29:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this conversation is, is just another like echo of the thing you're trying to create in the digital space, right?

• 2:29:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:29:45Lex Fridman?

  That, that's the same kind of magic. From, from what I understand about what you're trying to create is the same reason I fell in love with the long form podcasting, like as a fan. That's why I listen to long form podcasts. Is there something deeply human and genuine about the, the interchange through, through voice? But I do think that connection through text can be even more powerful. Like I think about letters, I still write letters to Russia, you know? There's something powerful in letters. When you- When you put a lot of yourself in the words you say, in the words you write,

• 2:30:24Lex Fridman?

  that's powerful. You can really communicate not just the actual semantic meaning of the words, but like a lot of who you are through those words and create real connections. So I hope you succeed there. And listen, Ryan, I think this is an incredible conversation. I'm glad that people like you are fighting the good fight for bringing out the best in human nature in the digital space. I think that's a battleground where the good will win, like love will win. And I'm glad you're creating technology that does just that. So thank you so much for wasting all your time for coming down. I can't wait to see what you do in the future. Thanks for talking today.

• 2:31:09Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:31:10Lex Fridman?

  Bam.

• 2:31:11Speaker 01

  How many finger guns have you gotten at the end of the podcast?

• 2:31:15Lex Fridman?

  Zero.

• 2:31:16Speaker 01

  Two now.

• 2:31:19Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ryan Schiller, and thank you to our sponsors, Allform, Magic Spoon, BetterHelp, and Brave. Click their links to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from George Washington on March 15, 1783. "If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.