Kind: captions
Language: en
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
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as a side note let me say that ryan is a
young entrepreneur
and genuine human being who quickly won
me over
he's inspiring in many ways both in the
struggle he had to overcome
in his personal life but also in the
fact that
he did not know how to code but saw a
problem in this world
in his community that he cared about and
for that
he learned to code and built the
solution in the best way he knew how
that's an important reminder for us
humans let us not only complain about
the problems in the world
let us fix them i also have to say that
there's passion in ryan's eyes
for really wanting to make a difference
in the world his story
his effort gives me hope for the future
there is
hate in this world but i believe there's
much more love
and i believe it's possible to build
online platforms that connect us
through our common humanity as we
explore difficult
personal even painful ideas together
this is the lex friedman podcast and
here
is my conversation with ryan schiller
let's start with the basics what is
librex
what are its founding story and finding
principles
and looking to the future what do you
hope to achieve with librex
sure let me break that down so what is
librex
librex is an anonymous discussion feed
for
college campuses it's a place where
people can have important
and unfettered discussions and open
discourse about
topics they care about ideas that matter
and they can do all of that completely
anonymously
with verified members of their college
community
and we exist both on
each ivy league campus and we have an
inter-iv community
and actually this week we just opened to
mit and stanford so now no really mit
yes stanford so we have mit and stanford
communities and i expect
you to sign up for your mit account and
start
posting what are for people who are not
familiar like me
actually which are the ivy leagues sure
so we started at yale which is my
i don't know can you call it alma mater
because i haven't technically graduated
yeah um what's that called when you're
actually still there
my university oh yeah i guess very i
guess home call it home that's my home
educational home started at my
educational home of yale and then
we moved to um 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 um for those who
don't know is
harvard yale princeton dartmouth
columbia cornell
brown and penn i got it all in one
breath what's the youngest eye league
pen no
colombia i can't say i haven't okay on
camera
we'll edit it in post i don't know okay
each of
all all eight of them and then you can
just like
get it in yeah like pen carver there's
actually a really nice
software that people should check out
like a service uh
it'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 it's like some
deep fake stuff it's deep fake but for
positive applications it's very
interesting it's like the only deep fake
positive applications i've seen i have a
friend who's obsessed with defects yeah
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 yeah exactly i
mean that that's the hope for me is
there's so many fake things out there
that we're going to actually be
much more skeptical and and think and
take in multiple sources
and actually like reason like use common
sense and use them like deep
thinking to understand like what is true
and what is not
because uh 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
another the social 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 its way back to like where i
came from the soviet union where you
can't really trust
any one source of news you have to think
on your own you have to talk to your
friends
tremendous amount of intellectual
autonomy don't you think it
think about the societal consequences
absolutely i mean
we see so much decentralization in all
aspects of our digital lives now
but this is like the decentralization of
thought you could say it's sadly
or i don't think it's sad is
decentralization of truth
where like truth is a clustering thing
where you have these like this point
cloud of people just swimming around
like billions of them and they all have
certain ideas
and what's thought of as truth is almost
like a clustering algorithm when you
just get a bunch of
people that believe the same thing
that's truth but there's also another
truth
and there might be like multiple truths
and it's almost it
be like a battle of truths maybe even
the idea of truth
will like lessen its power
in society that there is such a thing as
a truth because like the downside of
saying
something is true is uh it's always the
downside of what people like religious
people call scientism
which is like once science has declared
something is true
you can't no longer question it but
the reality is science is a moving
mechanism you're constantly questioning
you're constantly questioning and
maybe truth should be renamed
as uh as a process not a
not a final destination the whole point
is to keep questioning
keep questioning keep discovering kind
of like we're going backwards in time so
like
back when 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 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
look at buddhist texts we can look at
all sorts of different truths and
how many of them get at the same things
but many of them have different ideas or
different articulations
yeah harare and sapiens rewinds that
even farther back into 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 the girls and girls and
finally we have bitcoin
so 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 but back to
librex so what uh what's the founding
story what's the founding principles of
librex
sure so i was on campus as a freshman
and i was talking to my friends many of
them
felt like it was hard to raise your hand
in class to ask question
they really felt like even outside the
classroom it was hard to be vulnerable
and the thing you have to understand
about yells it's not that big a place
everyone knows someone who knows someone
who knows you basically
yeah um 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 couldn't talk to my professors and i
remember talked to one specific global
affairs professor
and i was taking his class and his area
of expertise was in the middle eastern
conflict
and i went to him and i said professor
we've we're almost finished this class
and we haven't even gotten to sort of
the reason i originally wanted to take
the class was to hear about your
perspective on the middle eastern
conflict because something i'd learned
at yale and this is
maybe a sort of a tangent but i'll i'll
flush it out a bit
something i've learned at yale is that
you can learn all sorts of things from a
textbook
and what you kind of go to yell to do is
to get like the opinions of the experts
that go beyond the textbook and to have
those more in-depth conversations
and so that's sort of the added value of
going to a place like yale and taking a
course there as opposed to
just reading a textbook but also
interact with that opinion exact
person yeah 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
um so i'm talking 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 any this is during
office hours mind you so we're one on
one
it 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 um he
said i used to do this and then
about two years ago a student reported
me
to the school and i realized my job was
at risk
and i realized the best course of action
was basically
just not to broach the topic
and so now i just don't even mention it
and he's like you can say whatever you
want but
i'm not i'm not 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
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 i don't know how to
fix that in the administration except to
fire everybody
so like this is to push back against
this storyline
that academia somehow fundamentally
broken i think we have to separate a lot
of things out
like one is you have to look at faculty
and you have to look at
administration and like at mit for
example
the administration does
tries to do well but they're the ones
that often lack courage
they're often the ones who are the
source of the problem
when people criticize academia and i'll
just speak to my
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
often times
are the most brilliant the the boldest
thinkers that you think whenever you
talk about we need
like the truth to be spoken the faculty
are often the ones
who are in the possession of the deepest
truths in their mind
and in that sense and they also have the
capacity to
truly educate in the way that you're
you're saying and so
it's not broken like fundamentally
but there's stuff that like needs that's
not working that well and you just kind
of
you kind of took my words that's what
that's what i thought you were going to
ask me if i think the ivy league is
broken
that's totally that's exactly it so you
don't think yeah so on the question do
you think the ivy league is broken like
what
how do you think about it academia in
general i suppose but ivy league
still i think it represents some of the
best qualities of academia yeah what
more is there to say there i think
the ivy league is producing tremendous
thinkers to this day
i think the culture has a lot that can
be improved
but i have a lot of faith in the people
who are in these institutions
i think like you said the administration
and i have to be a little careful
because
um you know i've been in some of these
committees um and i i've
talked to the administration about these
sorts of things um i think they have a
lot of stakeholders
and unfortunately it makes it difficult
for them to always
serve these brilliant faculty and the
students in the way that they would
probably
like to yeah okay so this is me speaking
right the administration
i know the people and they're oftentimes
the faculty holding positions in these
committees right
yes but it's in in the role of quote
unquote service
they they're trying to do well
they're trying to do good
but i think you could say the mechanism
is not working but i could also say
my personal opinion is
they lack courage and
want 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
doing it well like doing it skillfully
so both of those are important the
courage
and the skill to communicate difficult
ideas and they often lack them because
they weren't
trained for it i think so you can blame
the mechanisms that don't
that allow 19 20 year old students to
have more
power than the entire faculty or you
could just say that the faculty need to
step up and grow some guts and and skill
of graceful communication
really administration well yeah
and the administration that's right
that's the administration
okay so the faculty are sometimes some
of the most brave
outspoken people yes within the balance
of their career yeah so
uh so that that takes a that's like the
founding kind of spark of a fire
that uh led you to then say okay so
how can i help yeah and i explored a lot
i expert 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 um 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 um
and you look at a gallup poll 61
of students are on ivy league campuses
afraid to
speak their minds because of the campus
culture
the campus culture is causing a sort of
freezing effect on discourse
can you pause on that again so what
percentage of students feel afraid to
speak their mind
61 nationally and you're talking about
you know places
nothing like uh 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 maturity
it's not it's not a conservative thing
it's not a liberal thing
it's a group thing we're all feeling it
the majority of us are feeling it and
basically just
it doesn't even you don't even
necessarily
need to have anything to say you just
have a fear
that's right so when you're like
teaching
[Music]
you know metaphors a really powerful
thing to explain
you know and there's just the caution
that you feel that's just horrible for
humor
now comedians have the freedom to just
talk shit which is why i really
appreciate uh somebody's been a friend
recently tim dillon who has
who gives zero uh pardon my french fucks
about anything which is very liberating
very important person to just
tear down the powerful but you know
inside the the academia as a 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
um you were getting at something there
too which is that
um 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 how are we going to be able to
continue to innovate are we going to
continue to be able to learn
that's what really started to scare me
so you've explored a bunch of different
ideas you wrote a bunch of different
stuff
uh how did lee brooks come about it
basically
came to me that it had to be kind of a
grassroots movement and it had to be
something that changed culturally
and it had to be relatively personal
people meeting people
people finding out that no i'm not the
only one on campus
who feels this way i i feel alone and
there are a lot of other people who feel
alone
i 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 i
didn't have much coding experience but
uh
went headfirst in and figured how hard
could it be
you know i mean this is really
fascinating
so i talked to a lot of software
engineers ai people
obviously that's where my passion my uh
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
that's so bold that is so beautiful man
um can you take me through the journey
of of
deciding to do that of like learning to
program without a programming background
and building the app like detail like
what do you actually
like how do you start sure i mean you
want to uh
you want to buy a mac i learned you knew
you had to buy them i'm just going to go
step by step right i'll be as dumb as
possible because it was it was truly
it was truly you know yeah like leading
by your feet so you need a computer for
this
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
by the way yeah android is great
definitely check out
we also are now available on android but
we'll get there
um for the you android users from mit
stanford or the ivy league
so back to how it happened so i realized
i had mac
so went out and got back um and i
realized i need an iphone
for testing eventually got an iphone um
so those are the real robot blocks to
start with
um 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
i my first thought was i should look at
some yell classes but it became very
clear very quickly that that was not the
right place to start
um that would probably be the right
place to start if i wanted to get a job
at
amazon but michael was slightly
different yeah 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
because 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
um 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 and you just like
uh so you got this mac and you what like
go to google.com
and you type in download xcode and
that's code yeah and then i type in on
youtube like
stanford ios swift
enter first youtube video has a million
views i'm like it has to be good at
stanford
as a million views i got lucky
i mean that turned out to be a very good
video it's basically like
introductory course to swift yeah i mean
you say introductory i think most of the
people in that class
um probably had a much better background
than i did software developers probably
yeah computer scientists and it was slow
for me um
i 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 um
so it took a little longer and you know
a lot of time on stack overflow
but eventually i made a truly minimal
viable product
the most minimal like we're talking you
know put text on screen
add text to screen comment on top of
text you know
make a post make a response and anyone
with a yell email can do this
and you plug it into a
certain a cloud server and you verify
people's accounts
and you you're off you have you have to
figure out how to
like the whole idea of like having an
account so
there's a permanence like you can create
an account
with an email verify it verify it
okay so that that's not you know and
that's literally how i thought about it
right like so what do i need to do
and i'm like well first thing i need is
a login page
and i'm like how to make a login page in
swift
i mean it's that easy if someone this
has been done before of course and the
first page that pops up was probably a
pretty damn good page
it wasn't that bad it wasn't perfect but
like
maybe it got me 80 of the way there yeah
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 yeah
i'm sure my code isn't great
but the goal isn't to make great code
the great wasn't the goal wasn't to make
scalable code it was to
understand is this something my friends
will use
like what is the reaction going to be if
i put it in their hands and
am i capable of making this thing and
that's awesome
and so you're focusing on the 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 concept of like storage like
database
you know something funny what's that i
just made the database structure with no
knowledge of databases whatsoever
and i start showing it to my friends who
have an experience in cs and they're
like
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 yeah
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
there's a deep profound lesson in there
that i don't know how much you've
interacted with computer science people
since but
they tend to optimize and have these
kind of discussions and what 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 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 heat
bro
is is the right that should be a t-shirt
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
as you create it quickly and then just
iterate
what was by the way in your mind the
thing that you're chasing as a
prototype like what what was the first
step that it feels like something is
working
like do you see you interacting with
another friend
yeah i think the first step was like
it's one thing to tell someone about an
idea but it's another thing to put in
their hands and kind of see like
the way their their eyes kind of look um
and when i'd go i'd walk around across
campus which is
part of yale and i'd literally just go
up to people and run up to them and be
like try this try this you got to try
this
this is pre-quarantined by the way of
course this would never
like what is it and i'd be like and i'll
explain it's like an anonymous
discussion feed
for a yale campus yeah and you see their
gears turning
and they just some people would be like
not interested yeah i'm like fine not
your target
demographic i get it you'll come
eventually um 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 fifty percent of
people to like it
yeah you need what five percent ten
percent to love it
and then they'll tell five percent ten
percent yeah word of mouth yeah
and you're good um of course the first
version was
very very crappy but seeing people
trying despite all the crappiness wasn't
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 um have friends who
basically have told me don't bother with
the coding part you do you do the rest
you just make sure that we can code
because they want to code
great i mean i'm not an engineer yeah i
never intended to be an engineer and
there's a lot to do that's not
engineering
yes but the point was just to validate
the idea
so to speak when was the moment that you
felt like
we've created something special maybe a
moment
where you're proud of that this is a
this is this has the potential to
actually be the very
uh implementation of the idea that i
initially had
there's so many there's so many little
moments it's like
and i bet there'll still be moments in
the future that make that make it hard
to like
totally say like yeah we should say this
is a
this is still very early years of libre
yeah
it's literally it's only been a year
since we've had like
actual like a lot of people on the app
yeah about a year oh wow
okay i mean there's some crazy moments i
could talk about
sort of going to dartmouth because it's
one thing to like get some traction at
your school
yeah people know you and you know it's
it's your school you know
it's another thing to go to another
school and where no one knows you and
sign up 90
of the campus overnight wow so tell me
that story
you're invading another territory it was
literally like that
did you buy it like a dartmouth
sweatshirt
purposefully i didn't want to defraud
any fraud anyone but i was purposefully
non-descript in my
clothing yeah no yell stuff no dartmouth
stuff um just blend in
um i'll get i'll go back there so what
happened was
this was like march of last year um
so almost almost a year ago today and
i really wanted to see if we could go
from sort of one campus to two campuses
so i didn't know anyone at dartmouth
campus but i
kind of i had some cold emails some
warm-ish emails um and i went to people
and i was like basically can i sleep on
your floor for two days
during finals period yeah i had a lot of
people who said this is crazy like no
one's gonna no one wants to download an
app during finals period a social
afternoon's period
but i emailed a few people 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 door
i have a nice floor um and he ended up
today he's still really close he's a
really close friend but anyway
i take a train knowing nothing about
this guy besides his first and last name
and i arrive and dartmouth is
really really remote way more remote
than you think to the point where
i'm like he's like he warned me he's a
really hospitable guy he warned me like
it's gonna be hard to get to campus from
the train station because it's really
remote and i'm like i'm sure it's fine
i'll just get an uber
there are no ubers in hanovers
what do you think this is new hampshire
so uh connecticut
i mean uh yale is pretty remote as well
no yeah yell is um
well i mean yells in new haven which is
a real city it has ubers it has
food it has a culture it has a nightclub
even yeah
like we're talking about real city like
it's not new york it's not philadelphia
where i'm from but it's a city
uh new hampshire is something very
different yeah
beautiful campus i'm sure beautiful oh
my gosh i could tell
i could talk so much about i was blown
away by
dartmouth i i started wondering like why
i didn't apply
legitimately um between the people and
the culture it was
it was a it was a beautiful vacation so
i arrived 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 got 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
um i print out like 2 000 posters
until the guy in the copy room literally
goes to he's like kid i don't know what
you're doing but you need to get out of
here
i'm like all right i'm going i'm going
um on the limits i knew yeah i found the
limit
um and i think a lot of startup is about
finding the limits
that's a little piece of advice um
socially yeah he's like you gotta get
out of here and
i um i then go to every single dorm door
i put a poster under every single dorm
door advertising the app with a with a
qr code
yeah 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
download the app
it's exhausting day so many steps so
much crouching down to slip the poster
into the dorm door my legs were burning
um but by the end of it you know 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 panel
it's like going up by hundreds yeah and
i'm like oh my gosh
this in a sense i mean certainly your
like
initial seed is powerful just a piece
yeah but then the word of mouth is what
carries it forward
and what was the explanation you gave to
the app
it's uh anonymity a fundamental part of
it like saying
this is a chance for you to speak your
mind
about your experiences on campus yeah i
think
people get it you don't need to what
i've realized is you don't need to tell
people
why to try it yeah they know yeah it it
there's a hunger for this exactly yeah
so
i 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 use to say
it because i said it so many times in
those 24 hours i just said it's an
anonymous discussion feed for dartmouth
and they're like yes
[Laughter]
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 is
incredible everything from
professors writing poems during finals
period to be like
um good luck in finals period you're
gonna rise like a phoenix or whatever
so like yeah it's crazy to i heard about
uh two women meeting on librex and
starting a finance club
um at dartmouth to significant others
um meaning 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
it was pretty interesting to see people
throwing parties pre-covet
um yeah it was just amazing to see how
when you allow people to be vulnerable
and social
they connect they people have this
natural desire to connect
yeah when when you have whatever natural
desire to have a voice
and then when that voice is
is uh paired with freedom
that you could truly express yourself
and there's something liberating about
that and in that sense uh
you're like you're connecting is your
true self whatever that is
what are the most powerful conversation
you've seen on the app you mentioned
like people connecting
the hard part about that is the sorting
you know figuring out what's going on
which one am i going to put at the top
mental sorting out just something to
stand out to you sorry i don't mean to
do like the top 10 conversations
ever of all time ever on the app i just
mean like stuff that you remember that
stands out to you
i remember this one really amazing
comment
from this he was a mexican
international student who spoke out
and this 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 um la casa which is
the mexican
latinx as they would say cultural center
at yale and how
he doesn't feel welcome there because
he's
roman catholic basically and
international
and how he doesn't feel like he fits
with their agenda
and as a result this place that's
supposed to be home for him he feels
outcasted
and feels more alone than he does
anywhere else on campus
that's powerful that was powerful to me
yeah it's hearing someone
someone who should be feeling supported
by this culture
say actually this is not doing anything
for me
like this is not helping me yeah this is
this is not where i feel at home
so what do you make of anonymity
because it seems to be a fundamental
aspect
of the power of the app right but
at the same time anonymity on the
internet
so it protects us right it gives us
freedom to have a voice
but it can also bring out the dark sides
of human nature
like trolls or people who want to be
malicious
want to hurt others purely for the joy
of hurting others
being cruel for fun and
going to the dark places so like what do
you make of anonymity as a fundamental
feature of social interaction
like the pros and the cons yeah just to
break that down a bit
i would say a lot of those same things
about a place like twitter where people
are very
unanimous um having said that of course
there's a different sort of capacity
people have when they're anonymous
right well 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 vulnerable 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
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
anime 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
um because librex isn't totally
anonymous
everyone's a verified ivy league student
you know exactly what school everyone
goes to
you only have one account per person at
yale
meaning if um meaning that
i mean what that amounts to is people
have more of an ownership in the
community
and people know that they're connected
and they have a common vernacular
so the anonymity is a scale and it's a
tool but you can also trust i mean this
is the difference between
reddit anonymity where you can easily
create multiple accounts
when you have only one account per
person
or at least it's very difficult to
create multiple accounts
then you can trust that the anonymous
person you're talking to
is a human being not a bot i try to be
completely
unanimous uh 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 why exactly did you it
seems like this is an intentional
mission
what made you want to sort of bridge
that gap between the private sphere and
public sphere
because that's that's unique i know a
lot of intellectuals who would
make a different decision yeah
interesting i had a
discussion about with naval about this
actually with a few others
that have a very clear distinction
between public and private
something i'm struggling with by the way
personally i'm thinking about
so one on the very basic surface level
is
uh if you carry with yourself lies
small lies or big lies it's extra mental
effort
to remember what you uh
like to remember what you're supposed to
say 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
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-ishness
but radical honesty with yourself with
yourself
and i feels like it's difficult to be
radically honest with yourself
when you're being dishonest with the
public and also
i have a nice feature honestly that um
in this current social context so we can
talk about race and gender
and uh what what are the other topics
that are
touchy city and um nationality
all those things i mean like family
structure i
maybe i'm ineloquent 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 um
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
i haven't done it seems like everybody
uh
it seems like a lot of people got like
did a lot of creepy stuff in their life
and i i just feel like that's uh really
nice
and deliberating and especially now you
know it's funny because i've gotten a
bit of a platform
and uh i think it all started when i
went this is a
fame miss community female comedian
whitney cummings
and you know i've gotten a lot of
amazing
women writing me throughout but when
when i went on whitney
it was like the number of dm's i get on
instagram
for women is just ridiculous and
i think that was a really important
moment for me is like
i speak and i feel you know i really
value love
long-term monogamy with like one person
and it's like i could see where a lot of
guys
would now continue that message in
public
and in private just starts sleeping
around and so like that's an
important statement for me mentally he's
like nope
the straight narrow you just go straight
and not out of fear but out of like
principle and just like
live life honestly i just i feel like
that's
truly liberating uh as a human being
forget public all that because then i
feel like i'm on sturdy ground
when i say uh difficult things
and at the same time sorry i'm ranting
on this i apologize
i'm interested personally so keep going
i i honestly believe in the internet
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 you know like
they'll
see it through uh yeah i
so like 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 we'll figure who you are people
have a natural
tendency to be able to tell bullshit and
it makes sense from an evolutionary
standpoint right exactly
like why why wouldn't why like
of all the things that we could evolve
to be good at
being able to detect honesty seems like
one that would be particularly valuable
especially in the sorts of societies we
developed into and then also from a
selfish perspective like a success
perspective
i think there's a lot of folks that have
inspired me uh
like the elon is one of them that shows
that
there's a hunger for genuineness like
you can build a business as a ceo
and be genuine and like real and do
stupid shit every once in a while
as long as it's coming from the same
place of who you truly are
like elon's inspiration with that and
then there's a lot of other people i
admire
that are counter inspirations in the
sense like they're very
formal they hold back
a lot of themselves and it's like i know
how brilliant those people are
and i think they're not being as
effective of leaders
public faces of companies as they could
be i mean
to be honest like not to throw shade
but i will it's like mark zuckerberg is
an example of that
uh jack dorsey's also a bit of an
example 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 then 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 being more polished turns into
a politician
and politician eventually turns into
being dishonest
dishonest with the world and dishonest
with yourself something i noticed which
was
the people 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
does it doesn't matter you can talk
it figure it out later you can figure
out later pretty soon
you've stuck a pretty big hole and i
think if we look at twitter
and we look at facebook i think it goes
without saying what sorts of holes have
been
dug because of perhaps because of a lack
of honesty that goes all the way up to
the leaders
so yeah there's two problems within the
company
it it doesn't make you as effective of
an 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 one
like this is how humans work we want to
look to somebody
where like i trust you
if you're going to use this social media
platform
i think you have to trust the set of
individuals working at the top of that
social
uh social person something i realized
really quickly one of the lessons
throughout the startup was that people
don't totally connect to
products as much as they connect to
people yeah and
beautifully but i mean i i don't know if
you've
how much you've spent on librex you've
only been here the last couple weeks
like
last week but i mean i love the product
and one of the
one of the aspects of me loving the
product is that i was super active and
i've been super active
throughout the entire time and the
amount of support i've received has made
that very easy to do
yeah um from the community and the fact
that i could
i mean so i came to boston for this
interview right yeah i came to boston
i got off the train yeah it's around 5
30 p.m
i checked librex someone is writing hey
i'm in boston does anyone want to get
dinner
yeah 30 minutes later i'm getting dinner
with them that's amazing and
i mean it's incredible first of all
as an entrepreneur the amount of stuff i
learned from these people
and when they reiterate and i hear that
they got the message
through the product i mean that's
incredibly validating but also
i mean i think it's just important to be
able to put a face to
a brand and especially a brand that's
built on trust
because fundamentally the users are
trusting us with some
really important discussions and some
really um and a movement to some degree
it's a community and a movement i'll
tell you actually why i didn't use the
app very much
uh so far is uh
there's something really powerful about
the way it's constructed which
i felt like a bit of an outside because
i don't know
the communities it felt like it's like
it's a really strong community around
each of these places yeah 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 colombia or yale
or so on
dartmouth and there's also the broader
community of the ivy leagues that people
are discussing but i could see that
actually
expanding more and more and more but
which is it's a powerful coupling
which is the feeling of like this little
village this little community we're
building together
but also the broader issues yeah so you
could do both
discussions 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 yes and
these languages are constructed
very 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 is the thing that
when i think about librex 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're
been through use the word lift
experience i've been through so many of
the sim
same lived experiences uh one like
clarification
is there an easy way if you choose
to then connect and meet space in
physical space
so the i guess the sort of magic of it
and i was talking to a bunch of harvard
leapfrogsters who i met off the app
while i was in boston
and um every time they told me this is
the 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 um he was really into coin
collection
and he met other people who were really
into coin collection through a post and
what they he would make a post about
coin collection um and then someone
would come to him and they'd be like and
they they could direct message him
anonymously
and it would just show them that his he
would just show him their school
and then they could just text chat
totally anonymously direct message if he
accepted the
anonymous request do they see the
usernames right um 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 yeah i guess
so right
i didn't know he's because i was just
looking at the text
yeah that's interesting that's right and
i can tell you i can go into why
um that's really interesting yeah i can
go into it truly is anonymous
it's well i mean but you're not by
anonymous exactly
very different kind of anonymous and the
reason
the reason that we made that decision
yeah it's because we want 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 doxed so
it's these are small communities right
yeah we talked about this everyone knows
someone who knows you
yeah and um in 2021 it
would not take much to be able to figure
out who someone might be
just through a couple of posts um 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 redditer of any post and
you that 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 a email probably not
very often but you could
and then that's how people meet up
matching
and then a lot of people connect in this
way uh let me let me just
take a small step into the technical i
read somewhere enough it's true
that uh one of the reasons you were
rejected from ycy combinator
in the final rounds is because one of
the principles
is to refuse to sell user data
uh can you speak to that what's uh what
why
do you think it's important not to sell
user data
and sort of which draws a clear
contrast between other basically any
other service on the internet
i mean to be honest it's quite simple i
mean
we talk about this platform people are
talking about their most
intimate secrets their political
opinions you know what how
how are they feeling about what's going
on in their city
you know during the summer um how how
are they feeling about
um the 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
most intimate beliefs and secrets into
a currency that i bought and sold
there's something very off about that
i tend to believe that there is uh some
room
so like like facebook would just take
that data and sell it right
but there's some room in transparency
giving people the choice
on which parts they can i wouldn't even
see it as sell
but like share with advertisers are you
going to give them a profit
um so right you have to monetize you
have to create an entire system you have
to rethink this whole
thing right but if 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 or like delete
all your data
or deduct it's very difficult
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 something
a deep loving member of the community
what's that
so we very quickly realized that user
privacy was something that
um 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
yeah um you press it yeah like two
clicks
um it's not that hard we just remove
your email from the database
um yeah you're good 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 allow like transparently tell
people you could just delete everything
they also explained that like in ways
that's going to
potentially like lessen your experience
in the short term like i'll explain that
but then there shouldn't be like
multiple clicks of a button that don't
make any sense
uh i i'm uh trying to hold back from
ranting about
instagram because let me just say real
quick because i've been locked out of
instagram for a month
uh and there's a whole group inside
facebook they're like supporters
of like lex helplex relax
freelance uh 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 on instagram
or facebook
love those folks the entire mechanism
though is somehow broken
i mean that i i put that on the
leadership but it's also difficult to
operate a large company wants the 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
and also in the case of facebook in the
case of librex
like beco like disappear
it if you if you choose there's
downsides to disappearing
but it should not be a difficult process
and
yeah i think i think people are waking
up to that i think there's a lot of room
for
an app like librex with its
the with with its foundational ideas to
redefine what social media should look
like
you know and like you said i think
beautifully anonymity is not the core
value
it's just the tool you use and
who knows maybe anonymity will not
always be the tool you use
like if you give people the choice who
knows what this evolves
from the login page you initially
created the key thing is the founding
principles
and again who knows if you give people a
really nice way to monetize their data
maybe they'll no longer be a thing that
you say do not sell user data yeah all
those kinds of things but
the the basic principles should be there
and
also a good simple interface design
um is goes it goes a really long way
like simplicity and elegance which
librex currently is
clubhouse i'm a lot better by the way i
don't i don't mean to uh
i don't mean to go too deep into the
history but the um it was bad
it was i didn't look at the early
pictures oh thank goodness
i i read somewhere that it was like a
white screen
like with black like those html bases
and download buttons were like these
big these big freaking boxes and like
i don't i i could go on but um it was my
it was my genius design skills um
i almost failed art class when i was
like in first grade and i think uh 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
oh i love the idea of a button that just
like forget me
um yeah i don't know that's that's
really moving actually
that uh 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 uh if i could just like disappear
if i needed to
and i trusted the the community i
trusted like
the the founders and the principals
that's really that's really powerful man
like trust and ease of escape
yeah uh you've also
kind of mentioned moderation which is
really interesting
so with this anonymity and this
community
i don't know if you've heard of the
internet but there's trolls on the
internet
so i've heard and uh even if they go to
yale and dartmouth there's still people
that
probably enjoy uh the
sort of being the the guerrilla warfare
contra revolutionary and just like
creating chaos
in a place of uh love so how do you
prevent
chaos from and hatred uh breaking out in
librex
so the way i think about it is we have
these
principles um they're pretty simple and
they're pretty easy to enforce and then
beyond the principles we have
a set of moderators moderate from every
single ivy league school
scheme of diverse moderators to enforce
these principles but not only enforce
the principles
but kind of clue us in to what's
happening in their community
and how the real-life context of their
community translates to the
librex context of their community and
beyond that we have conversation with
them
about the standards of the community and
we're constantly
talking about what needs to be further
elucidated and what needs to be
tweaked and we're in constant
communication with the community
now if you want me to get into the
principles that underlie librex's
moderation policy
yeah please maybe you can explain that
there's moderators what does that mean
how are they chosen and what are the
principles under which they operate
sure so how are the moderators chosen
the moderators are all volunteers
they're lead brexiters who reach out to
me
and respond to the opportunity to
become moderator and the way they're
chosen um
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
yeah um and from there we
choose a set and uh they have the power
to
um take down posts of course everything
at the end of the day
pens my review but they can take them
down and we can reinstate them if it's
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
so for now you're the lioness torvald of
this community and
so meaning like you're able to like
people are actually able to like
email you or like 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 right now he was a billionaire
and he was cool
and then he was in a mansion uh making
uh meets
on his barbecue no okay
but you know how does it scale um like
what
i suppose how does the scale is the
question i mean
with linus uh 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 your role as
libraries grows
and in general what are the mechanisms
of scaling here for moderation
so 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
um and hopefully i'll be able to
just like you can hire a cto hopefully
i'll be able to be
in integrated and 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
yeah i can never record to that yeah i
can never
fully i don't think i can fully ever
abdicate that responsibility i think it
that would be like
i mean that would be like bezos
abdicating e-commerce
right right like that is that's part of
the job
yeah of course you can run companies in
different ways i think that
because he might have abdicated quite a
bit of the details there hard for me to
say
because the amazon does so many things i
think the probably the better examples
like elon with rock is he's still
at the core of the engineering he's at
the core of the engineering there's
some fundamental questions he probably
does way too much of the engineering
like he's like the lowest level detail
but you're saying like the core
things that are that make the app work
is
is the moderation of difficult
conversations and by the way
i'm 21 years old let's remind us
everyone of that
um 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
what will happen in the next what i'll
learn
um 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 ten billion dollars whatever
yeah i can't pretend i know how to run a
business that's you know going to have
millions and millions of users
i expect that there are going to be a
lot of amazing people who will teach me
and a lot of people who have already
kind of stepped into my life
and helped me out and taught me things
and i imagine that i'll learn so much
more i just know that
moderation is always going to be
important to me because i don't think
librex is librex unless we have open
discourse and moderation
reasonable open light touch moderation
is at the heart of creating that right
so as a creator of this kind of
community in place with anonymity and
difficult conversations what
what do you think about this touchy
three words that people have been
tossing around and politicizing i would
say but as at the core of the founding
of this country which is the freedom of
speech
how do you think about the freedom of
speech
this particular kind of freedom of
expression
and uh do you think it's a fundamental
human right
how do you define it to yourself when
you when you're thinking about it
i've i went down especially preparing
for this conversation down the rabbit
hole
of like just how unclear it is
philosophically what is meant by this
kind of freedom
uh it's not as easy as people think but
it's interesting pragmatically speaking
to hear what how you
think about it in the context of librex
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
yeah and i found myself um
in the middle of this question of
freedom of speech
one of the wonderful things is that the
library's 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 um
support free discourse
like learning yeah how to speak about
stuff
is is critical here because it's like
i'm 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
yeah like they'll say there's nothing
complicated about freedom freedom is
freedom bro
it's it it is complicated first of all
if you talk about
there's there's different definitions of
freedom of speech uh if
you if you want to go constitutional 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 complicated
it's complicated
i think there's ideals behind it that we
want to see
what does that actually materialize
itself in the digital world
where we're trying to communicate in
ways that
allows for difficult conversations and
also
at the same time doesn't result in the
silencing
of voices not through
like censorship but through like just
assholes being rude spam spam
so it could be just bots racism uh
racism
going back to the name of the app librex
yes
libre free um x
was support montu for free exchange
and the free exchange of what my purpose
was to create as many
as much inner communication of ideas
be them repugnant or otherwise as
possible
and of course to do that within legal
bounds and to do that without
causing anyone to be harassed or doxxed
so to keep things focused on
the ideas not the people and then
no bs crap 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
and that seems to work on the whole
pretty well to be pretty light
touch and hard to do though it's
difficult we like to generalize
with humans it's difficult but what it
comes down to is
be specific yeah um and when you think
about
what are sweeping statements against
coordinating 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
so even for like positive and humorous
stuff
you try to avoid generalizations against
core identity core identity groups
sorry what are core identity groups
we're talking about you know
race religion okay
got it even positive stuff well against
negative against sorry against against
okay very very we've learned to be very
specific
very few words but the community gets it
you know
yeah they get it i mean this 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
absolutely it's human nature it's
creativity yeah
something beautiful about it of course
unlike and from an evolutionary
perspective yes yeah the fact that
people are
so creative and so looking to and
because people are genuinely interested
in figuring out these things about
social media and so they'll
100 percent like see like where's the
edge and i mean part of that's
maintaining some level of vagueness in
your role set yeah which has its own
set of questions and something we could
think about and i'm not implying i have
all the answers
but there is something really
interesting about people being so
engaged
that they're looking to figure out where
those edges and what does that mean
what does that edge mean you know so one
of the things i'm
kind of thinking about like from an
individual user of librex
or an individual user of the internet i
think about like that one person
that is on reddit saying hateful stuff
or positive stuff doesn't matter
or funny stuff one of the things i think
about is the trajectory of that
individual through life
and how uh social media can help that
person become the best version of
themselves
i don't mean from like an orwellian
sense like educate them
properly or something i just mean like
we're all i believe
we're all fundamentally good and i also
believe
we all have the capacity to do
to create some amazing stuff in this
world
whether that's ideas or art or
engineering all those kinds of things
just to be
amazing people and i kind of think about
like
you know a lot of social media
mechanisms bring out the worse than us
and i try to think like in the long term
how can as the social media or how can a
website
how cut to you that you create can make
the best
like you take a trajectory that makes
you a better better and better and like
the best version of yourself
so i think about that because like you
know twitter can
really take you down some dark
trajectories i've seen people just not
being the best version of themselves
forget the cancer 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 ready
yet because one
positive side is all the shit posting i
read it could be just like a
release valve for for some stress in
life
and you almost have like a parallel life
where you're in meat space
you might be actually becoming
successful and so on and growing and so
on but you just need sometimes to be
angry at somebody
but i tend to not think that's possible
i think
if you're shit posting you're probably
not spending your time
the best way you could i don't know i am
i'm torn on that
but do you think about that with librex
of creating a trajectory for the
for the yale for the dartmouth the
students to where they grow
intellectually one thing that i think
about a lot
is how do you incentivize positive
content creation
how do you incentivize well but yeah
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 do you think such
mechanisms exist
for such incentivization i do i don't
want to let the cat out of the bag
sure so to speak so you have already
idea like concrete ideas in your mind
and i have about three concrete ideas
that i'm very very
optimistic about yeah and you don't even
need to share
them the the fact i understand totally
but like the fact that you have them
that's really good
because i feel like sometimes the
downfall of the
social media is that there's literally
not even a thinking or a discussion
about the
incentivization of positive long-term
content creation i mean twitter i really
was excited about this when they said
like when jack has talked about like
creating healthy conversations
he does seem to care i've listened to
him i mean
he's very he has a very particular way
of saying things
but you get the impression that he's
someone who actually cares about these
things within the limits of his power
yeah and that's the question the limits
of the power
librex is growing not just in the number
of communities
but also in the way you're incentivizing
positive conversations like coupled with
the moderation and so on so you think
there's a lot of innovation to be had in
that area 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 are 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 brigading
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 communion
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 uh conversation we just
need to make the tools to allow
people to be good yeah and to
incentivize good behavior yeah i believe
that like if you
you don't nee you will not need to
censor if you allow people
at scale to be good the good will
overpower the assholes
that's that's my fundamental belief i
i'm very optimistic about that
but currently librex is small in the
sense that it's just
it's a small set of communities that i
believe and you mentioned to me offline
that by design you're scaling slowly
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 uh but
encompassing the whole world it's a it's
a long timeline
i'll say this let's get step 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
um you know i'm sure they've said some
things but
it's always interesting to know what the
what the uh
mythology is versus what the truth is of
the matter
so perhaps they and they've been very
successful i mean
they they've taken over the world to
some extent
at the same time the goals of librex are
to create
these positive communities and these
open
conversations where people can have real
conversation and connection in their
communities in a vulnerable and
authentic way
and so to that end which
i imagine might be different than the
goals of a facebook
for example one thing that we want to do
is keep things intimate and
community-based
so each school is its own community
and perhaps you could have a slightly
broader community
maybe you could have a i know uh the
california system is an obvious one
pac-10 might be an obvious one
and we can think about that um 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 um
preserve the community and to encourage
the community to create this sort of
content that we want them to create
and you know there's a lot of ways to
define communities so
first of all there's geographic
community as well uh
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
or efficiently verify yourself with
being an 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
uh potentially taking on those
communities that'd be fascinating
getting like anonymous community
conversations
inside google 100 crossed my mind
to some extent this is this is something
where
i understand the college experience i
understand the need got it and
i've i've never i've never worked at
google
i don't know if they would hire me um
hopefully maybe as a product manager
uh i i think if there's a community that
needs this product
and has that and and has that will which
i think
especially as librex continues to grow
and expand and change
and learn and 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 um i think it's quite likely
they're going to be
all sorts of communities that could use
this tool to improve their
culture so to speak so forgive me i'm
not actually
like that knowledgeable about the
history of attempts of
building social networks to solve the
problem the year solving
but i was made aware that there was an
app
app or at least a social network called
yik yak
that was had a similar kind of
um focus um i think the thing you've
spoken about
that differs between librex and yikayak
is that
yike was defined am i pronouncing it
right even
uh you're good yeah i'm good i met the
founder so i can confirm
you can confirm cool uh
the that it was constrained to a
geographical area versus like
to the actual community um and that
and that somehow had fundamental like
actual
differences in social dynamics that
resulted but
can you speak to the history of yik yak
like how does lee breaks 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 emerges there was
on you 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 zebrax
going to do better
yeah you guys 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 you get
and when you talk about startups i mean
you know this i i
you know startups um and you look at the
postmortem it's almost
never what people think it is and and
oftentimes these things are
somewhat unknowable and the the degree
to which people
seeking confirmation bias to something
seeking closure yes
look to find a singular attribute that
caused the failure
it feels like the little details often
make all the difference
yes and i think 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
um knowing that i'm also a human with
biases um
in this particular case very significant
biases yeah
um i um so i started building librex
for its own merits i i i i at first i
wasn't aware of
yik but as i started to talk to people
about this platform i was building
i i was made aware of the cac and i
built it from day one
with a lot of the issues you get had in
mind the
so as you said the one difference
between yak is the geographical versus
community based aspect going along with
that
one thing i realized by researching
social media sites is that
the majority of the negative content the
content that's
terrible and breaking all the rules is
created by
really and the people who are not
reformable
so to speak the people who are not
showing the best part of
the human yeah experience yeah um
it's a really small minority right yeah
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
yeah that's part of what makes it
exciting for that minority
is how much power they can have so if
you're predisposed to think in this way
it's exciting that you can walk into
like i mentioned the party before you
have a party of a lot of positive people
and it feels especially if you
don't have much power in this world it
feels exceptionally empowering
to to uh to destroy
like the lives of many yeah and if you
think this way
it's a problem but i i i i'm hopeful
that you're right that in most cases
it's going to be a minority of people
i think it is and that's what the
research has showed
and one really powerful thing is that
we can really actively control who comes
in and out of our community based on the
edu verification and we can also control
who's not in our community because we
have that lever where each account is
associated with it.edu
um 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 downvoted content all of the
reported content all the flagged content
and look through it
and decide what they like and what's
appropriate and what's not appropriate
and we have um 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 yuk 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 yeah yeah
yeah you know chit chat um we have a we
have a bigger purpose than that
frankly and i think i think that shows
and the people who self-select to be on
that app
to be on librex and to be on yak
respectively the last thing i'll say is
yuk yak was very few characters it was a
twitter-esque platform
and that doesn't allow for a tremendous
amount of nuance it doesn't allow for a
tremendous amount of conversation
um librex is much more long form and so
the kind of
um posts that you'll get on librex are
can spam 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 is really
available at librex and you know not
really
communicable in 240 or 480 or whatever
the number of characters
the acts were um bound to and then you
know i could talk about the history of
the act if you want me to go further um
they
started i think they were at 12 schools
and then
spring break it people told their
friends
look at this app a thousand schools
signed up and
were had active communities they had a
problem on their hands i see and then
the high schools come on board
yeah i think a lot of the things you
said uh ring true to me
but especially the vision one which i do
think uh having a vision
in the leadership having a mission makes
all the difference in the world
now 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
uh through the behavior of the
of the people on the social network
as a small tangent let me ask you
something about um
parlor but it's less about parlor more
about aws
so aws removed parlor from his platform
you know for whatever reasons doesn't
really matter but the fact that
aws would do this was really
really bothered me personally because
i saw aws as the computing
infrastructure
and i always thought that part could not
put a finger on its scale
and i don't know what your thoughts are
like were you bothered by
parlor being removed from aws and how
does that
affect how you think about the computing
infrastructure on which
librex is based i was bothered not so
much by
parlor 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
and let developers build on top of their
infrastructure
and where to where where does that
responsibility hold
yes it makes you uh 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
exactly
said uh 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
and it feels like compute is uh
storage and compute is the that layer
like it shouldn't be messed with um 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 through policy and
regulation to step
in because again they do a messy job of
fixing things
but i do hope there's competitors to aws
to make
aws and step up because i do think you
know i'm a fan of aws
except this service it's a good service
until this
until yeah until they rip out the the
rug
and the point is it's not that
necessarily their decision
was a bad one with parlor in particular
it's that like the 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 that's right i think we kind of
talked about it a little bit
but i wonder if we can kind of revisit
it a little bit um
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 uh hernandez for the double
murder case
so he takes on these really difficult
cases of on unpopular figures
because he believes like that's the way
you test
that we believe in the rule of law but
he was uh there's a big protest in
harvard
to get him uh to basically censor him
and
to get him to no longer be faculty dean
all those kinds of things
and uh it was by a minority of students
but
it was a huge blow back 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
uh on college campuses because it feels
like
the the mission of librex is pushing
back against the idea of safe spaces
i think safe spaces are fine when
they're within people's private lives
within their homes you know within their
religious organizations
i think the problem becomes when the
institution starts encouraging
or um backing safe spaces
because what are people being safe from
and oftentimes it seems like there's
this idea that
the harm that's being attempted to to be
mitigated is the harm of confronting
opinions you disagree with opinions you
might find repugnant
and if this is conflated with a need for
safety
then that's where the idea of liberal
arts education sort of dies
um 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 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 uh it basically is used to silence
people
to silence people they're like good
thoughtful
experts also beyond that i would say it
has
not just a pragmatic purpose which is
the silencing
but also sort of an ideological purpose
which is 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
it's a very dangerous and slippery
concept i mean
it's not you don't have to slip that far
to see why that's a problem
once we start cr making words into
violence and we start criminalizing
words we get into
some really authoritarian territory
things that i think
i mean myself and my background i don't
know how much we have to go into it but
uh
things in my that my ancestors certainly
would be worried about
what's your background i'm a child of
holocaust survivors and program
survivors
so yeah i mean me as well from different
directions that come from the soviet
union so
there's uh 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 yes it
was added um
today today okay so let me ask this is
exciting because um
i don't know what your thoughts are
about this but
i'll tell you from my perspective if
you're 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
moving that hasn't been discussed at all
except in little flourishes here and
there is the topic
of jeffrey epstein now
there's been a huge amount of like
impact that the connections of various
faculty to jeffrey epstein
and the various things that been said
had on mit
but it feels like the difficult
conversation haven't had been
had it's the administration trying to
clean up and give a bunch of bs
to try to pretend like let's just hide
this
part like nothing is broken nothing to
see here
there's a bad dude that did some bad
things and
uh some faculty that kind of uh
misbehaved a little bit
because they're a little bit clueless
let's let's all look the other way
harvard did this much better by the way
they they completely
it's almost like people pretend like
harvard didn't have anything to do with
jeffrey epstein
but i think i'd be curious
to to hear what those conversations are
because uh
the there's conversations on the topic
of like
uh 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 um you know funding
uh for research like how are
like what are we okay taking money from
and whether we're not okay taking money
from
you know a lot there's a lot of just
interesting difficult conversations to
be had
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 and eric himself
has had a sort of complicated journey
through academia in the sense that
he's a really kind of renegade thinker
in many kinds of ways i'm not sure if
you didn't know who eric is
by any chance heard the name okay i
actually uh checked out zev
it was heartening for me to see that i
was not the youngest person
on the yeah
that's hilarious uh
but uh but but eric has he's kind of a
renegade thinker he's a
mathematical physicist uh with a
believer phd at harvard
and he spent some time at mit and so on
but he
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
the box a bit weird in 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
so he's the perfect person to have
conversations with in this kind of
librex kind of context
of anonymity because
i'll tell you the few conversations that
came across and they were
very quickly silenced and i'm troubled
by it
i'm not sure what to think of it is
there's a few um
threads inside mit like on a mailing
list
discussing uh marvin minsky i don't know
if you know how that is he's an ai
researcher he's a summonable figure and
before your time but one of the most
important people in art
in the history of artificial
intelligence and
uh there was a discussion on a on a on a
thread
that involved uh
the interaction between marvel minsky
and jeffrey epstein
that conversation was quickly shut down
uh 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 mis
he spoke like we mentioned earlier
without grace
right but he was quickly punished for
the administration
uh because of a few people protesting
and just that conversation
uh 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 one of the reasons i wanted to come
to mit uh
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 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 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
it's like it is conversation so in that
sense and
i'd love uh if people on librex
perhaps in other places but seems like
librex is a nice platform to discuss
marvel minsky to discuss
jeffrey epstein to learn from it to grow
from it to see how we can make mit
better
because i'm still one of the people 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 this 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
and that's broken i mean i don't know if
uh
you have something to comment it doesn't
necessarily need to be about
jeffrey epstein but there's these
difficult things that come up
that test the academic community right
that it feels like conversation is the
only way
to resolve it i think people have a
natural need for closure
and it's not just i'm not as plugged
into the what academics are talking
about as
you would be lex but even kids these
days no respect for minsky
exactly i mean especially in the ai
community i'm
i'm not not necessarily a programmer um
but what i will say is that
um 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
stay rest in peace and speak also about
what might have led to an environment
where people
are drawn to these terrible
results um so just having a conversation
is important there because it like it
brings you
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 yeah because of the stigma
yeah people need to be able to speak
yeah that fear really bothers me the
fear that silences people like
were they self-censored were they
self-silence
well i'm um
you've created an amazing place i i'm
kind of interested
in your struggle and your journey of
creating positive
incentives because uh it's a problem
in a very different domain that i'm also
interested in
um so i you know i love about 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 uh
you mentioned offline that you used to
be into chess
tell me about your journey through chess
sure i was a very competitive tournament
player growing up till about like 13.
i got for the chess fans i got to around
2000 um
uscf so i was a competitive player
especially my age group
and um that actually led me to poker
i was um 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 gonna
end up playing a lot of adults and i
ended up playing this um mid-40s guy
who we played a really strong game he
actually beat me i i still i still
remember the game and
and think i could i should have played
that move instead of that one but
after after the game we had a
post-mortem 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 and
even at that even at my age it occurred
to me that this guy was absolutely
brilliant
yes and after after the post-mortem not
only by the way in chess but just like
in the way he articulates his thoughts
as
some people are um after postmortem i
went and looked him up online and i
found out that he was a world series
poker champion
and what is it his name is bill chan oh
wow and i haven't really kept up with
him
except one time there was another chess
tournament when i was around
14 and i followed him into an elevator
as he was leaving the chess hall
like pretending that i was going to go
up just because i wanted to i just
wanted to talk to him and i
suggested a sequel or some changes that
he could that i thought he
could make for his book and he was like
actually i was thinking of doing the
same thing
which was incredibly validating to my 14
year old or 15 year old self
um 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 kick started my
interest in game theory and second of
all in poker um so it started from chess
and then poker
and i started with bitcoin poker and
had a lot of success with that met a lot
of amazing friends
um learned a ton about i mean i think
about entrepreneurship as well as taking
risks reasonable risks
positive expected value risks and um
also just growing as a person and
mathematician and
what's did you say bitcoin poker yeah
what's bitcoin poker so you have to
understand i was 14 years old right yes
so how is a 14 year old with wonderful
parents who care about him
yeah and probably don't want him playing
poker
yeah um going to start playing poker
because i wanted i wanted the challenge
i loved the challenge i loved the
competition
and i realized the answer was probably
bitcoin
because the implications of that and uh
they had
they had these uh free world tournaments
which for those who don't know
what free rules are there's these
promotional tournaments that
sites put on where they'll put like a
few dollars in and then thousands of
people sign up
and the winners get like a dollar and i
started there and i
worked my way up and that's amazing
what's your
sense about from that time to today
of the growth of the cryptocurrency
community i'm actually having
like four or five conversation with
bitcoin
proponents bitcoin maximus and like all
these
i'm just having all these cryptocurrency
conversations currently
because there's so many brilliant like
technically brilliant
but also financially and philosophically
brilliant people in those communities
it's fascinating with the explosion of
impact
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
i'm definitely less knowledgeable on the
currency
again like programming it was a means to
an end yes
right um 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
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
uh in terms of their ability to
communicate in a positive inspiring way
like the bitcoin folks and we talk about
this a lot they um
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 uh the centralized powers have been
sort of mocking and uh fighting them for
many years
that they've become sort of worn down
and cynical
and so they tend to be a little bit more
aggressive and negative on the
internet that's interesting in the way
they communicate especially on twitter
and it's just created this whole
community of
basically being derisive and mocking and
trolling and all this kind of stuff
yeah but people are trying to you know
as the 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
uh and and grow in that way so it's it's
a it's fascinating because i think all
of us
are trying to find the positive aspects
of ourselves and trying to learn
how to communicate in a positive way
online it's like the internet has been
around
social networks haven't been around that
long we're trying to we're trying to
figure this thing out
let me ask you the ridiculous question
uh 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
talks on how you define it but if you're
talking about raw skill
like if you put everyone across time
into a torment together
yeah um carlson would win i don't think
that's particularly controversial oh you
mean like with the same exact skill
level
exactly magnus cossack because 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
would use to go to someone on the street
they know bobby fischer because he was
because of what he represented right who
do you think is more famous
on the street uh gary kasparov or bobby
fischer
probably fit in america but efficiently
do you think so yes
that's interesting i think we're gonna
have to put that to the test yeah maybe
it's maybe it's more reflective of the
community that i was a part of but yeah
also in the community you're a part of
like young minds playing chess bobby
fischer was a superstar
in terms of like yeah i think so because
he's american
and you know he stood up against the
big bad russians yes at the time and uh
you know unfortunately he had a very bad
downfall but um
what 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 uh
was just head and shoulders above
everyone else
is there somebody that inspired your own
play like as a young mind
yeah i really like mikhail tall so like
you see you were
i think he was very aggressive right
yeah very tactical yeah um
which is funny because i am 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
so let me ask the flip the uh the other
because he said poker
is there somebody that stands out to you
as uh could be the greatest poker player
of all time
like who do you uh admire
that's in that and that's a more
controversial one because
these chess players are such like first
of all there's more than objectives
objective standard and second of all
there's like they're like almost like
cultural figures to me whereas poker
players are more like
live living they feel more like yeah but
they feel more accessible
but they also have like personalities
yeah poker have like phil either
their vices they have quirks they have
humor like i guess we've seen videos of
them
yeah because it's such a recent
development let's say one person who i
admire so much and like if i 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
um phil galphond
who i don't most people probably won't
know yeah but uh 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
um through his website and um
i learned a ton from him and not only
that but you just listen to him think
and it's almost like a philosophical
meditation the way that he
breaks things down and thinks about
these different elements and
has such a holistic thought process it's
like watching a genius work
and you know he's also just a nice fun
sociable guy that like you can you can
imagine being at your dinner table yeah
all that combined which is not true for
a lot of poker players right
a lot of them are dark so say the least
yes i
i like i really like the what is he
canadian daniel negrano
he's also a nice guy he's also a nice
guy but he's also somebody who's able to
express his uh
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 uh you watch the challenge
which challenge
he uh he lost like a million dollars
recently to uh
doug polk he lost a million dollars to
doug polk heads up online
it's really interesting yeah it's it's
awesome to watch these
these guys work so i know
you're 20 21 21 21
uh so asking you for advice is uh
is a little bit funny but uh 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 uh and given the fact that
20 years from now you probably laugh at
the advice you're going to give now
absolutely i hope so if i don't laugh at
the advice i give now
something went desperately wrong right
yeah
uh so do you have advice for people that
want to follow in your
footsteps and create a startup whether
it's in
the software app domain or whether it's
anything else so i'll speak specifically
about social media apps yes um
try to keep it as narrow as possible so
i can laugh as little as possible when
i'm 41.
um 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 um 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
um and you're gonna 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
um so you'd be amazed at the advice i've
gotten
advice i've gotten so there's like a
minefield of bad advice
that's the hardest part i think for
young people and it's the thing
when people like i help i help yelli's
all the time
who asks like i never turn down when a
founder asked me to have a conversation
i never turn it down
i'm always there for them um and the
number one thing i worry about is that
at yale we're taught implicitly and
explicitly that you listen to the adult
in the room you listen to the person
with the highest
you know pay grade and
it's devastating because that's how
innovation dies and
you know yeah it's intimidating to like
you talk to vc who probably
makes it worth a billion dollars yeah
billion dollars and they're
going to tell you you know all the all
the successful startups they helped fund
or even just a successful business owner
is going to tell you some advice and
it's hard psychologically to think that
they might be wrong
yeah but you're saying that's the only
way 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
yeah and then i'll and i'll do my own
thing and that sounds great and abstract
but sometimes
you can't always even put your finger on
why they're wrong yeah and i think
to have the conviction to say
you're wrong and i can't tell you why
but i still think i'm right
it's a rare thing especially at like
it's very counterintuitive and
you might even say it's hubris or yeah
arrogant
but i think it's necessary because a lot
of these things are
they're not things that you can really
put into words until
you see them in action like a lot of
them are kind of happy accidents
yeah it's been it's been tough for me
like as a as a person who
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 yeah
and uh like my parents too that's been a
hard one
it's 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 that's the worst kind
yeah
yeah uh if it if it sounds really good
that just means it's an ear worm like
that's like a song that you hear on the
radio and then you're like
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
yeah reason is a is a bad drug like
should be very careful
because like you know the things that
seem impossible
you ever 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
the point uh the point is to just
pat the person in the back and say go
get him kid like what is it the goodwill
hunting and went to see about
a girl oh yeah
[Laughter]
that's a good movie i love that movie
but
yeah that that's uh 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 uh
nothing in life is uh worth
accomplishing is easy so
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
yeah 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 yeah and at a
certain point
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
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 but no one
tells you that nobody tells you that
because they're
they want you to keep following the same
path as they they're leading you towards
like they're not going to say
your whole job is to eventually rebel
yeah
that's how revolut that's how rebellion
works you're not supposed to be told
but that is the task they can take you
just like you said
and depending who you are they can take
you really far
but at a certain point you have to rebel
that could be getting you know phd
that could be in your undergrad that
could be high schools yeah it could be
any point
one thing that i think played a pretty
pivotal role and i've never really
mentioned this
um he might not even know the person
about to tell you about
um in sort of me actually going out and
making librex was that
i was taking this graduate level math
class um
my sophomore year um and i met this uh i
met this uh
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 um i've sort of lost touch with
him but we're still facebook friends
as it is in the 21st century right um
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 um
and he this guy's a computer genius he
worked under dan spielman
a ael so yeah he's a good guy right and
we were doing some math together um we
were doing something on discrepancy
for those who really care about math uh
so combinatorics
um and uh he just turns to me he's like
i think you could do it like what do you
mean you think i could do is like
i think you could do it yeah and i was
like really
but i respected this guy so much um his
name was young duck
um 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
doug is a legit genius
and he knows and he knows me because we
were in two classes together and we
spent a lot of time together
if he thinks i can do it then who am i
to say i can't do it
yeah you know that's a lesson for
mentorship
is like by the way he has no idea
probably
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
uh you know every once in a while you
should just pet him in the back and say
i believe in you
like you can do it if they look up to
you that means your words have power
and if you say no no come on be like
reasonable
like you know finish your school work
kind of thing
like that's that's unreasonable to take
that leap now just finish your education
blah blah blah whatever
whatever the reasonable advice is every
once in a while
maybe often as a mentor you should say
you know
go see about a girl in in california or
whatever the equivalent is
that was my moment that was my goodwill
hunting this is your goodwill hunting
moment
oh man i miss robin williams i was a
special guy
people love it uh 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 uh video
games
that you recommend to others minecraft
manual
manga i mean yeah video you could
mention video games too that if there's
something that jumps out to you that
just had like an impact um
i guess i'll say i really like the book
the the war of art
um which is a book about creative
resistance and the creative struggle and
what it means to be creative yeah
um and part of what i see in this
conversation and what you're doing lex
is so much of the war of arts idea is
that you just keep writing
and writing and writing until you get to
the new crap yeah yeah
and yeah 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 yeah
you can only have so much scripted or
societally constructed
stuff until you get to the real you
and you have to show up i mean he's that
book that book is kind of painful
it's really painful and it's not
something i would recommend for every
part of it
but for what it did in my life at the
time it also kind of normalized
i don't know um i part of my coming of
age story
is the 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 perfect
but for what it did for my life it was
really impactful
yeah i think exactly the words may not
be uh
exactly right by way of advice but i
think the journey that a lot of
creatives take
by reading that book is uh kind of
profound
he also has another one called turning
pro i think i mean he in general
espouses like taking it seriously
like if you have a creative mind and you
want to create something special in this
world
go do it it's not don't you know show up
and so many blank pages 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 um
it's a good signal because my really
close friends the ones who have always
supported me
yeah they never said that because they
got it they understood that was
that that was my path and they might be
skeptical they might be like
i mean one of my friends i remember told
me like i was always like taken aback
about why you were so
certain this would work out and he's
like i finally got it like once i saw it
like popping off but like
before that i just didn't get it but
like he still supported me
and i think i think it's a really good
signal and actually
just the fact of going through this
process has made me
socially feel so much more connected and
i've somewhat consolidated my social
life to some degree but it's so much
more
vulnerable connected and that's part of
the creative process
i have to thank for that i think this
there's something that's like
unstoppable about the creative mind it's
like it's right there that fire
and i guess part of the part of the
thing that you're supposed to do is let
that fire burn in whichever direction
and it's gonna hurt it's gonna hurt fire
will hurt
uh but on top of the video game she's
mentioned stanley parable
offline is there uh you said you played
some video games is there a video game
that you
especially love do you recommend i play
for example
yeah i'll uh 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
rendon who made the stanley parable
which i
i briefly saw you i i just clicked the
video and yeah
then i went to sleep it was at 2am um
and then
um but i briefly saw you that you were
looking at um and
it's the it's a game that is better
treated as art and i think
um i won't claim to understand the
creator because that would be a cardinal
sin
to me of uh as a creative person but uh
it gets to the heart of a lot of the
things that we've been uh that we've
been talking about which is the creative
mind
um the game can be interpreted a lot of
ways in a feminist way
it could be interpreted as story of
friends it could be interpreted
as the story of critics versus a
creative
the way i like to interpret it and i
don't want to give out 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 um versus the part that's
you could call it the editor 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 have this fascinating intention
which
reminds me about the ridiculous question
every once in a while ask about meaning
and death so this this
whole this whole ride ends you're at the
beginning of the ride
but it could end any day actually that's
that's kind of
the way human life works you could die
today you can die tomorrow
uh do you think about your immortality
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 uh what do you
think is the meaning of this whole thing
yeah so on mortality right um
about about three years ago four years
ago now
i was uh 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 yell team
and uh i woke up one day
i felt really really sick i
went and i decided not to go squash that
day
and i know um i wanted to i almost did
and you'll see how this story turns out
so 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
uh where i had to get my driver's
license because i want 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 um and i'm going
back and i successfully got my driver's
license
for him and i go back to uh
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 the 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 and
she'll get better yeah
i like your mom yeah um and then you
know
and then at one point i look at my arms
and they're like covered in this like
red splotchy stuff yeah and i'm like
well i think and she's like yeah we have
to go
um and so i go there and they're like
you have scarlet fever
and uh 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 um 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
source of pain right and that was sort
of pain
never felt before i suppose an athlete
you're used to like
feeling pain um so i tell my parents and
immediately we hop back in the car we go
up to the same hospital as that six
hours ago
and they initially didn't want to let me
in and i was like i have chest pain
they're like oh come in
because they're like you're a healthy
guy wait your turn i'm like no you don't
understand i have like a pain in my
chest
and then they let me in they start doing
tests on me they like put something like
in my back which is really scary it's a
huge needle and
i'm smiling because it's like one of the
ways i reduce stress i guess or deal
with this sort of thing
and make light of it but like know that
you know it 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
and so
i'm sitting in my i they met me into the
hospital i'm in the bed in my bed for
about three weeks
um and i'm just i'm just standing there
and i had this moment also that i
remember
very specifically where
i was in so much pain
that like i was crying not out of like
emotional standpoint but actually just
purely out of the pain itself
like i could feel my heart in my chest
and when i leaned back i felt it
touch my rib cage and feel horrible so i
couldn't go to sleep and lean back i had
to lean forward
all throughout the night right and i'm
feeling my and i'm feeling my chest i'm
feeling this terrible pain in my chest
and i'm crying
unstoppably 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 i tried to be
unmedicated
um eventually i i didn't allow them to
add a little medication to my body
but there's just so much uncertainty and
pain and the first time i had to come to
terms with mortality
uh first of all i think you still should
have gone play squash i mean come on
i mean yeah i thought you were i thought
you're serious about this
you still carry that with you sort of
there is power to realizing the ride can
end
right in very suddenly very suddenly
yeah
and painfully and you know
it has pragmatic application to like
what you trajectories you take through
life right
something else that is worth noting is
that
i for the next year couldn't walk to my
classes
so i get to yell 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 um i can't move my book i
can't
lift my book bags i can't i can't walk
upstairs
um i spent like 12 hours a day
in my dorm room just like staring at the
walls
and more so and more than that all this
like
you i got to watch my body like
deteriorate and like the muscle like
fall off of it because i was i was
taking these pills and
they're kind of catabolic um and for an
18 year old
i mean i think every 18 year old has
feelings about their body
um 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 um i took a meditation practice
like started with like five minutes a
day um at my peak i was at like 40
minutes a day
kept it up consistently for about two
years
um and i started thinking about like
what do i want to do
and like what do i care about
and to get to your point i think you're
asking like how does this
carry forward right i think
i realized that you know there's an end
and i realized that there are things i
believe
and things that i believe that might not
be so overtly popular
but that i truly think make the world a
better place
and in spite of and 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 yeah i mean
that's an amazing journey to take that
time and to come out on the other end
um no man 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
because struggle is ultimately like
humbling
but also empowering so
i'm glad to see that but from the
perspective of the creator of the other
ridiculous question about meaning
do you think about this kind of stuff
is that uh the you know the meaning of
life
for you the meaning of life for
us descendants of apes in general the
first thing i'd like to say
is that i think part of like when we
talk about the meaning of life 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 i'm look i'm very young um
again i hope that anything i say now is
going to be
very different in the future because i
think i mean
life has so many meanings that
it'll be crazy to see what i think in 20
years about the meaning of life and yeah
right from the future cut him some slack
please do
um 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
yeah this conversation is is just
another
like echo of the thing you're trying to
create uh in a digital space
right yes 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 listened to long-form
podcasts is there something deeply
human and genuine about the the
interchange
through their 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
that's powerful you can really
communicate
not just the actual semantic meaning
of of uh 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 uh ryan i think this is an
incredible conversation i'm glad that
people like you
are fighting the good fight for uh
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 thank
you for having me
bam how many finger guns have you gotten
at the end of vodka
zero now
thanks for listening to this
conversation with ryan schiller and
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and now let me leave you with some words
from george washington
on march 15th 1783
if freedom of speech is taken away then
dumb
and silent we may be led like sheep to
the slaughter
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time