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

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 all form 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. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of as now I try to make these interesting but I give you timestamps because I value your time and listening experience. So you can skip, but please still check out our sponsors. I'm fortunate to be able to be very selective with the sponsors we take on, so hopefully if you buy their stuff you'll find value in it. Just as I have click their links in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This episode is sponsored by a new sponsor, all form. They make stylish, comfortable, customizable sofas for an engineering mind. Their modular design pleases my soul. I say they're a new sponsor, but I've had their stuff for quite a while. I have in fact their black leather love seat. How great is the term love seat? I think you can't help but step up the depth of human connection between any two people that sit on the love seat. I sat on the all form love seat with Mr. Michael Malice and now I'm in love. See, it works. Some of the best experiences in my life had to do with just sitting with friends, talking and the weird friends, the out there friends. I think, quote unquote adult life can kind of carry you down this stream of busyness where you no longer have these all night conversations with weirdos in your life. I think that's probably why I never want to grow up. Anyway, all form is offering 20% off all orders for our listeners. That's you, my dear friend@allform.com. Lex. That's allform.com lex. To find your perfect sofa or love seat. Michael Malice is not included with your purchase. Finally, they're deciding whether to sponsor this podcast long term. So now's the time to buy their stuff if you like it. This episode is sponsored by magic Spoon low carb keto friendly cereal. It has 0 gram of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only 49 grams of carbs, and 140 calories in each serving. They have a couple limited edition flavors this month, cookies and cream and maple waffle. But my favorite flavor is still cocoa. But these sound pretty good. I haven't tried them yet. I will try. You should, too. Yes, I am very much excited to be living in this day and age when we have reusable rockets being launched into space and landing back on earth. But I think what really excites me is that we can have what used to be a sugar stuffed meal like cereal that's now completely keto friendly. Anyway, magic Spoon has a 100 happiness guarantee, so if you don't like it, they refund it. Even Dostoevsky, Sartre, and Camus would be impressed. Go to magicspoon.com lex and use code Lex at checkout to save $5 off your order. That's magicspoon.com lex and use code lex. This episode is also sponsored by Betterhelp, spelled H-E-L-P. Help they figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I've always been fascinated with talk therapy, and I guess the broader way to phrase that is the power of conversations. In some sense, that's what podcasting is. When I was younger, I did see it as the ideal of psychotherapy, that through this interaction between two humans, you can arrive at something deep and profound that's personal about your particular brain and almost from an engineering perspective, rewire things. I think there's a lot of ways in which our work with human robot interaction in the artificial intelligence space will teach us how to do this kind of re engineering better. But anyway, betterhelp is easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. Check them out@betterhelp.com. Slash Lex that's betterhelp.com slash lex. This show is also sponsored by Brave, a fast, privacy preserving browser that feels like Google Chrome, but without the ads or the various kinds of tracking that ads can do. I love using it more than any other browser, including Chrome. I also love Google Chrome, but I love Brave even more. You should check out my conversation with Brennan Icke, who's a creator of Brave, but also the creator of Javascript and Mozilla Foundation. I mean, this guy's done basically everything, but it's his work on JavaScript actually, that's really stuck with me. In that conversation I was reminded that change in the world doesn't have to start with a perfect solution. It can start with something, to put it nicely, that's imperfect and grow iterate over time. You don't have to start with something pretty, you just have to start anyway. Get the browser@brave.com Slash Lex and it might become your favorite browser too. That's brave Slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. And now here's my conversation with Ryan Schiller. Let's start with the basics. What is Librex? What are its founding story and founding principles, and looking into the future? What do you hope to achieve with Librex?