Ryan Schiller is the creator of Librex, an anonymous discussion feed for college communities. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Librex App: https://librexapp.com/

PODCAST INFO:
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RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:48 - Librex
3:41 - Deep Fakes
7:48 - Silencing of ideas
18:42 - Building Librex
28:29 - How Librex took over Dartmouth
36:55 - Anonymity
39:46 - Private vs public life
49:13 - Building a sense of community
53:56 - Refusing to sell user data
1:00:46 - Moderation
1:07:35 - Freedom of speech
1:18:27 - Scaling
1:22:43 - Yik Yak
1:30:03 - AWS and Parler
1:35:07 - Safe spaces
1:38:04 - Jeffrey Epstein
1:47:31 - Chess and poker
1:58:11 - Advice for young people
2:09:03 - Book recommendations
2:14:57 - Mortality

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The following is a conversation with Ryan Schiller, creator of Librex, an anonymous discussion feed for college communities, starting at first with Yale, then the Ivy Leagues, and now adding Stanford and MIT.

Their mission is to give students a place to explore ideas and issues in a positive way, but with much more personal and intellectual freedom than has defined college campuses in recent history.

I think this is a very difficult but worthy project.

Quick thank you to our sponsors, Allform, Magic Spoon, BetterHelp, and Brave.

Click their links to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that Ryan is a young entrepreneur 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 a 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 Shiller.

What are its founding story and founding principles?

And looking to the future, what do you hope to achieve with 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.

They can do all of that completely anonymously with verified members of their college community.

And we exist both on each Ivy League campus and we have an inter-Ivy community.

And actually this week we just opened to MIT and Stanford.

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

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?

Yeah, what's that called when you're actually still there?

Started at my educational home of Yale and then we moved to, and we could get into the story of this eventually if you'd like.

And then we went to Dartmouth and then quarantine hit.

We opened to the rest of the Ivy League and now we have, and the Ivy League, for those who don't know is Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and Penn.

I'll just say all 8 of them, and then you can just like, get it in.

There's actually a really nice software that people should check out, like a service, 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 deepfake, but for positive applications.

It's like the only deepfake positive applications I see.

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

I mean, 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 think and take in multiple sources and actually like reason, like use common sense and use deep thinking to understand what is true and what is not.

Because we used to have traditional sources like the New York Times and all these kinds of publications that had a reputation, there are these institutions and they're the source of truth and when you no longer can trust anything as a source of truth, you start to think on your own.

That goes, that takes us way back to like where I came from, the Soviet Union, where you can't really trust any 1 source of news.

Tremendous amount of intellectual autonomy, don't you think?

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 truth is a clustering thing, where you have this point cloud of people just swimming around, like billions of them, and they all have certain ideas.

And what's thought of as truth is almost like a clustering algorithm when you just get a bunch of people that believe the same thing, that's truth.

But there's also another truth, and there may be multiple truths, and it's almost, it would be like a battle of truths.

Maybe even the idea of truth will lessen its power in society, that there is such a thing as a truth.

Because the downside of saying something is true is almost the downside of what people, like religious people, call scientism, which is like once science has declared something as true, you can't no longer question it.

But the reality is science is a moving mechanism.

You're constantly questioning, you're constantly questioning and maybe truth should be renamed as a process, not a final destination.

The whole point is to keep questioning, keep questioning, keep discovering.

Kind of like we're going backwards in time.

So like back when people were sort of finding their identities and we were less globalized, Like people 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 civilizations and societies across the world that created their own truths.

You know, we talk about the Jews and the Talmud and Torah.

Look at Buddhist texts, we can look at all sorts of different truths and how many of them get at the same things, but many of them have different ideas or different articulations.

Yeah, Harari and sapiens, rewinds that even farther back into like caveman times.

That's the thing that made us humans special is we can develop these clusters of ideas, hold them in our minds through stories, pass them on to each other, and it grows and grows, and finally we have Bitcoin.

So, which money is another belief system that has power only because we believe in it.

And it's carried in the minds of millions and thereby has power.

So what's the founding story, what's the founding principles of Leebrechts?

Sure, so I was on campus as a freshman, and I was talking to my friends.

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

They really felt like even outside the classroom it was hard to be vulnerable.

And the thing you have to understand about Yale is it's not that big a place.

Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows you basically.

And people come to these schools, first of all they're home for people and they wanna be themselves, they wanna feel like they can be authentic, they wanna 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 remember I talked to 1 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'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 flesh it out a bit.

Something I'd learned at Yale is that you can learn all sorts of things from a textbook, and what you kind of go to Yale to do is to get 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.

To interact 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 still a place of tremendous brilliance.

And I'm like, I haven't heard your area of expertise.

And this is during office hours, mind you.

He says, Ryan, to be honest, I used to teach this area every single year.

In fact, I would do a section on it, which is like a small seminar, like breakaway from the class where he would talk to the students in small groups and explain his perspective, his research, and have a real debate about it, like around a Harkness table.

And He said, I used to do this and then about 2 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 he's like, you can say whatever you want, but I'm not gonna be a part of it.

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 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.

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

So this is to push back against this storyline that academia is somehow fundamentally broken, I think we have to separate a lot of things out.

Like 1 is you have to look at faculty and you have to look at the administration.

And like at MIT, for example, the administration tries to do well, but they're the ones that often lack courage.

They're often the ones who are the source of the problem.

When People criticize academia, and I'll just speak to myself, I'm willing to take heat for this, is they really are criticizing the administration, not the faculty, because the faculty oftentimes are the most brilliant, the boldest thinkers that you think, whenever you talk about we need the truth to be spoken, the faculty are often the ones who are in the possession of the deepest truths in their mind.

In that sense, And they also have the capacity to truly educate in the way that you're saying.

And so it's not broken, like fundamentally, but there's stuff that needs, that's not working that well, it needs

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

So you don't think, yeah, so on the question, do you think the Ivy League is broken, like what, how do you think about it?

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

I think the Ivy League is producing tremendous thinkers to this day.

I think the culture has a lot that can be improved, but I have a lot of faith in the people who are in these institutions.

I think, like you said, the administration, and I have to be a little careful because, you know, I've been in some of these committees and I've talked to the administration about these sorts of things.

I think they have a lot of stakeholders and unfortunately it makes it difficult for them to always serve these brilliant faculty and the students in the way that they would probably like to.

Yeah, okay, so this is me speaking, right?

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

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

But I think you could say it's the mechanism is not working, but I could also say my personal opinion, is they lack courage and, 1, courage, and 2, grace when they walk through the fire.

And grace, when you walk through the fire, is like maintaining that like, as opposed to being rude and insensitive to the lived quote unquote experience of others or like, you know, just not eloquent at all.

Like as you step in and take the courageous step of talking and saying the difficult thing, doing it well, like doing it skillfully.

So both of those are important, the courage and the skill to communicate difficult ideas.

And they often lack them because they weren't trained for it, I think.

So you can blame the mechanisms that don't, that allow 19, 20 year old students to have more power than the entire faculty.

Or you could just say that the faculty need to step up and grow some guts and skill of graceful communication.

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

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

I wrote many articles to my friends, talked to them, and I realized it sort of needed to be a cultural change.

Sort of needed to be bottom-up, grassroots, something I knew the energy was there because you just look at the most recent institutional assessment from Yale.

This was basically the number 1 thing that students, faculty, and alumni all pointed to, to the administration, was cultivating more conversations on campus and more difficult conversations on campus.

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.

of students feel afraid to speak their mind?

And you're talking about places, nothing like the Ivy League where I'd say, I'd imagine it would be even worse because of just the way that these communities kind of come about and the sorts of people who are attracted or are invited to these sorts of communities, that's nationwide that college students, and it's going up, that college students are afraid to say what they believe because of their campus climate.

It's not a conservative thing, it's not a liberal thing, it's a group thing.

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

So when you're like teaching, metaphor is a really powerful thing to explain, and there's just the caution that you feel that's just horrible for humor.

Now, comedians have the freedom to just talk shit, which is why I really appreciate somebody who's been a friend recently, Tim Dillon, who gives 0, pardon my French, fucks about anything, which is very liberating, very important person to just tear down the powerful.

But inside the academia, as an educator, as a teacher, as a professor, you don't have the same freedom.

So that fear is felt, I guess, by a majority of students.

getting at something there too, which is that if you're afraid to speak metaphorically, if you're afraid to speak imprecisely, it can be very difficult to actually think at all and to think to the extremities of what you're capable of.

Because these are the 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 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 going to be able to continue to innovate?

Are we gonna continue to be able to learn?

So you've explored a bunch of different ideas, you

Basically came to me that it had to be kind of a grassroots movement and it had to be something that changed culturally.

People meeting people, people finding out that, no, I'm not the only 1 on campus who feels this way.

I feel alone and there are a lot of other people who feel alone.

I believe this thing and it's not as unpopular as I thought.

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.

I didn't have much coding experience, but went head first in, and figured how hard could it be, you know?

So I talked to a lot of software engineers, AI people, obviously that's where my passion, my interests are, my focus has been throughout my life.

The fascinating thing about your story, I think it should be truly inspiring to 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.

Can you take me through the journey of deciding to do that, of like learning to program without a programming background and building the app, like detail.

Like what do you actually, like how do you start?

Sure, I mean, you wanna buy a Mac, I learned, you had to buy a Mac, I'm just gonna go step by step, right?

I'll be as dumb as possible, because it was truly, it was truly, you know, like leading by your feet.

Oh yeah, I had a PC at the time, and I was Android at the time, and I realized it should be like an iOS app.

And so, yeah, that was a decision, but I knew kids these days, they're always on their phone, And I wanted you to be able to say a passing thought 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.

We also are now available on Android, but we'll get there for the Android users from MIT, Stanford, or the Ivy League.

So I realized I needed a Mac, so went out and got a Mac.

And I realized I needed an iPhone for testing eventually.

So those were the real robot blocks to start with.

From there, I mean, there's almost too much information out there about programming.

The question is like, where do you start and what's gonna be useful to you?

And my first thought was I should look at some Yale classes, but it became very clear very quickly that that was not the right place to start.

That would probably be the right place to start if I wanted to get a job at Amazon, but my goal was slightly different.

And I definitely had it in mind that what I was trying to make was I'm trying to prove out an idea.

I'm not trying to make a finished product.

I'm just trying to get to the first step.

Because I figured if I keep getting to the next step, at least I won't die now, 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.

And I find this video from the Stanford professor that had like a million views that was like, how to make basically Swift apps perfect.

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

Yeah, and then I type in on YouTube, like Stanford iOS Swift, enter.

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

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

It's basically like introductory course to Swift.

I think most of the people in that class probably had a much better background than I did.

Software developers probably, they're computer scientists.

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

So it took a little longer, and a lot of time on Stack Overflow, but eventually I made a truly minimal viable product.

The most minimal, like we're talking, put text on screen, add text to screen, comment on top of text, make a post, make a response, and anyone with a Yale email can do this, and you plug it into a cloud server, and you verify people's accounts,

You have to figure out how to, like the whole idea of having an account.

So there's a permanence, like you can create an account with an email.

And that's literally how I thought about it, right?

And I'm like, well, the first thing I need is a login page.

And I'm like, how to make a login page in Swift?

If someone, this has been done before, of course I-

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

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

And then I asked Stack Overflow a few questions.

And then I got a little further, and then I found some more bugs.

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

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

It was to understand, is this something my friends will use?

What is the reaction going to be if I put it in their hands?

So you're just focusing on the experience, like actually just really driving towards that first step, figuring out the first step and really driving towards it.

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

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

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.

And they're like, yeah, they're like, the hierarchy is really like, I'm like, what?

Well, 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 kinds of discussions.

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 5 years later working on Amazon because you've never finished the login page.

Like it's kind of hilarious but that's a really deep lesson like just get it done and there's like, what's a heat bro?

That's really the right approach to building something that ultimately creates an experience and then you iterate eventually.

That's how some of the greatest software products in this world have been built, is you create it quickly and then just iterate.

What was, by the way, in your mind, the thing that you were chasing as a prototype?

What was the first step that it feels like something is working?

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Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses | Lex Fridman Podcast #172