YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan Schiller

lines on the record: 131
first: 2021-03-30
most recent: 2021-03-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There are so many little moments. It's like, and I bet there'll still be moments in the future that make it hard totally say, like”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're good Of course, the first version was very, very crappy, but seeing people trying, despite all the crappiness, it was sort of enough to be the first step. And, you know, since then all of my code's been stripped out, I now have friends who basically have told me don't bother with the coding part. You do the rest. You just make sure that we can code because they want to code. Great. I mean, I'm not an engineer. I never intended to be an engineer, and there's a lot to do that's not engineering But the point was just to validate the idea, so to speak.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you see there were gears turning, and they just, some people would be like not interested. I'm like, fine, not your target demographic. I get it. You'll come eventually. But some people, like, you could see it. They got it. They're like, yes. And that's when I was like, okay, okay, there is, and you don't need, I mean, you don't need 50% of people to like it. You need what 5%, 10% to love it, and then they'll tell 5%, 10%? Yeah.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the first step was like One thing to tell someone about an idea, but it's another thing to put in their hands and kind of see the way their eyes kind of look. And when I'd go, I'd walk around cross campus, which is part of Yale, and I'd literally just go up to people and run up to them and be like, try this, try this. You got to try this. This is pre-quarantine, by the way, of course. I would never do the same post-quarantine. You got to try this. You got to try this. Like, what is it? And I'd be like, and I'll explain. It's like an anonymous discussion feed for our Yale campus.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just did it because it works. Like I'm trying to make calls and stuff and they're like, yeah, they're like the hierarchy is really like, I'm like, what?”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, used a heap. That's so interesting. Why did you decide to store it in this way? I'm like, bro, I don't even know what a heap is.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't that bad. It wasn't perfect, but maybe it got me 80% of the way there. And then I came into some bugs. And then Astack Overflow a few questions. And then I got a little further and then I found some more bugs. And then I'm like, maybe this isn't the right way to do. Maybe I should do it this way. And I'm sure my code isn't great. But the goal isn't to make great code. The great 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?”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's literally how I thought about it, right? Like, so what do I need to do? And I'm like, well, the first thing I need is a login page. And I'm like, how to make a login page in Swift? I mean, it's that easy. If someone, this has been done before, of course I.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, put text on screen, add text to screen, comment on top of text, you know, make a post. Make a response, and anyone with a Yale email can do this, and you plug it into a cloud server and you verify people's accounts. You're off.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computer scientist. And it was slow for me. I don't think I realized it fully at the time, just how far behind I was from the rest of the class because I was like, wow, seems like people are picking this up really quickly.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you say introductory. I think most of the people in that class probably had a much better background than I did.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Download Xcode and then I typed in on YouTube Stanford, iOS, Swift Enter first YouTube video has a million views. I'm like, it has to be good at Stanford, has a million views. I got lucky. I mean, that turned out to be a very good video.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Like at least things will move forward. I'll learn new things. Maybe I'll meet new people. I'll show a degree of seriousness about what I'm doing. And things will come together. And that is, as you'll see, what ends up happening. So I start with Swift, right? And I find this video from the Stanford professor that had like a million views that was like, how to make basically Swift Fs. Like, perfect”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For you Android users from MIT Stanford or the Ivy League. To how it happened, so I realized I needed Mac, so went out and got a Mac and I realized I need an iPhone. For testing eventually, got an iPhone. So those were the real robot blocks to start with. From there, I mean, there's 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? 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 Michael was slightly different.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I mean, you want to buy a Mac. And you had to buy a Mac. I'm just going to go step by step, right? I'll be as dumb as possible. It was truly. It's truly, you know. Like leading by your feet. So, you need”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, it came to me that it had to be kind of a grassroots movement and it had to be something that changed culturally. And it had to be relatively personal people meeting people, people finding out that, no, I'm not the only one on campus who feels this way. I feel alone and there are a lot of other people who feel alone. I believe this thing and it's not as unpopular as I thought basically creating heterodoxy of thought and it's creating that moment where you realize that your politics are personal and that your politics are shared by a lot of people on campus. And so I just started coding it. I didn't have much coding experience, but I went headfirst in and figured how hard could it be, you know.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you were getting at something there too, which is that if you're afraid to speak metaphorically, if you're afraid to speak imprecisely, it can be very difficult to actually think at all and to think to the extremities of what you're capable of. Because these are the 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 going to be able to continue to innovate? Are we going to continue to be able to learn? That's what really starts to scare me.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“sixty one percent nationally, and that 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 in the sorts of people who are attracted or are invited to these sorts of communities. That's nationwide that college students and it's going up, that college students are afraid to say what they believe because of their campus climate So it's a majority. It's not 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.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I explored a lot. I explored a lot of options. I wrote many articles to my friends, talked to them, and I realized it sort of needed to be a cultural change. Sort of need to be bottom-up grassroots. Something I knew the energy was there because you just look at the most recent institutional assessment from Yale. This was basically the number one thing that students, faculty, and alumni all pointed to, to the administration was cultivating more conversations on campus and more difficult conversations on campus. So the people on campus know it. 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”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You kind of took my words. 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.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I realized the best course of action was basically. 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 going to 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.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exact person, yeah. 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 a place, it's still a place of tremendous brilliance. So I'm talking as a professor, right? And I'm like, I haven't heard your area of expertise. And I'm like, are we going to get to it? What's the deal? This is during office hours, mind you. So we're one-on-one. He says, Ryan, to be honest, I used to teach this area every single year. In fact, I would do a section on it, which is like a small seminar, like breakaway from the class where he would talk to the students in small groups and explain his perspective, his research and have a real debate about it, like around a Harkness table. And he said, I used to do this. And then about two years ago, a student reported me to the school, and I realized my job was at risk.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember, I 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're almost finished this class, and we haven't even gotten to sort of the reason I originally want 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 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.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 questions. 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 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 express that it was very difficult to do that and I felt it too. And then I couldn't talk to my professors and”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of like we're going backwards in time to like back when people were sort of finding their identities and we were less globalized right 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 like civilizations and societies across across the world that created their own truths you know we talk about the jews and the tom and torodists 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”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a friend who's obsessed with defak What's great about, I think, deepfakes is that it's going to do the opposite of sort of what's happening with our culture where everyone will have plausible deniability.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the rest of the Ivy League, and now we have, and the Ivy League, for those who don't know, is Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and Penn. I got it all in one.”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. What's that called”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 worry 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 we have. No, really?”
2021-03-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #172 – Ryan Schiller: Librex and the Free Exchange of Ideas on College Campuses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source