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 thi