Meet New People

Hi Strangers,

This is Liban (pronounced lee-ben). I organized this thing called Strangers Meeting Strangers (SMS for short). I need to tell you something.

A few years ago, I moved back home here to Minneapolis. I was gone for about 10 years. I didn't know if I was going to come back home. And something changed.

I came home and I realized many things have changed and some not. Of those changes, I realize I was the one that changed the most. And as such, I didn't know where to start. I had a sense of desperation, loneliness, and a yearning ambition to figure something out.

The First Life

I served active duty for 10 years in the Air Force (2011-2021) as a program manager, managing base logistics deployments with 24+ direct reports across 6 different duty locations: Utah, United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Ohio.

I wasn't planning to leave. The original plan was to stay 20 years and retire around 40.

But Covid gave me a year to pause and reconsider everything. I started to imagine: at 40, I'd come home and ask my younger brother—two years younger than me—how his life had been.

That image didn't sit right with me.

So I left. It was a difficult decision. But I felt I could find my own way. I had the fortitude, the discipline, and the capacity to venture on my own. I consider this now my second life. The first was in the military.

The Yearning

In this yearning, I contemplated and bet my life—specifically my life savings. I took massive risks, leveraging all my assets for margins so I could buy as many stocks as I could, so that I could have more capital to try to build an inkling of an idea.

That idea was not SMS.

I wanted and needed anything to figure out or to find an anchor. Something to replace what the military gave me. I very much enjoyed "Humans of New York." Reading Brandon's blog, the strangers he would encounter, the exquisite stories he would document behind a singular photo—it was so poetic and tantalizing in nature it would pull at my string.

And then I noticed a small opening within Humans of New York. I noticed the stories ended.

Life of Humans

It inspired me to write my own story—especially as the transition from military to civilian life was difficult on me. I thought a blog would be nice, but when I started I thought how boring would it be to just be Liban's blog. And so I thought: what about if I created a blog similar to HONY but it allowed people to register and write their own blogs with me?

I built a clone of Medium.com and called it lifeofhumans.com.

Within Life of Humans, instead of categories defined by typical genres, writers and readers would define their categories by human emotions.

I placed everything into that idea. I started like Brandon, going person-to-person interviewing people and transcribing their stories, and the idea was to help jumpstart their blog—and this time with no ending, because they can continue their story.

I leveraged all my assets to bet on high leverage stocks in hopes of using that funding to build Life of Humans.

The Fork in the Road

In November of 2021, the stock market collapsed.

I lost 90% of my life savings and I fell into madness.

And in that moment of delirium, I met God. Who gave me a choice between anger and peace.

This moment of choice felt like I was driving a hundred miles an hour towards a fork in the road. Choose anger, and allow it to consume you, and experience the full rage. Or peace, and start from nothing. Begin by accepting what is, as it is.

I chose peace.

The Birth

I thought to myself: what do I do now? How do I bring people to Life of Humans?

And just then I had this idea: what if I bring strangers together first? Maybe I'll have to bring strangers to meet other strangers.

Strangers meeting strangers.

I could almost immediately feel SMS generating a life of its own, separate from Life of Humans—and I listened.

But it wasn't actually immediate, because only the words "Strangers Meeting Strangers" came to me. Looking back, I think things come to me first as a name, and only then does it carry an idea.

In this instance I had a name but I didn't know the idea until I was in San Francisco. I was with a friend and we were walking on a beach near the Golden Gate Bridge when we saw people in the distance dancing during the sunset. I remember how groovy and fun it looked. As we got closer, I noticed they were all wearing the same headphones and all in step, just letting it loose.

As I stared, someone approached us and invited us to step in and grab a headphone. We picked it up, put it on, and immediately felt "connected-in" and realized it was a silent disco party. Just when I thought I understood what it was—someone's voice came over the headset and I noticed everyone could hear the same thing.

And just like that, Eureka. I could feel the birth of SMS.

The First One

I ran the first one in June of 2022.

My friend was an event producer. I went and bought the headphones. I was going around inviting my friends to a social experiment where I would bring two strangers together to meet in front of a live audience.

It was the headphones that solved the paradox of how do you gather people together to allow them to listen to each other in front of a live audience. That's why I invited them to a park on Saturday. He told me he couldn't make it because he was hosting a party on a rooftop on Sunday starting at 5 PM.

As I was understanding that he couldn't make it, something dawned on me the next morning when I asked him: if it's Sunday 5 PM on that rooftop, do you think I could take a slice of your hour from 5 PM to 6 PM before everybody shows up?

He was so cordial and kind that he allowed me to bring it to an elevated state—we brought the venue to the VIP section where there was refreshments and drinks and it looked so elaborate.

About 25 people showed up. Of them, only three were strangers.

And it was beautiful, because it was quite funny that 22 of my friends and three random people happened to be there. That was enough for me to see that this concept, as crazy as it sounds, had merit. For everyone enjoyed listening to two people meeting for the first time.

What It Became

The thing I built to save myself started saving other people too.

Since June 2022:

• 2,800+ strangers have come through our gatherings
• 35+ events across Minneapolis
• 700 people showed up to Talk to Me Day in Loring Park
• Town Halls filled theaters with entrepreneurs and artists
• Salons created space for men to talk about weakness and vulnerability
• Tiny SMS gatherings happened on lakes, in coffee shops, on sailing boats

I've watched strangers become collaborators. I've seen people find business partners, friends, lovers—just because they said yes to being in a room with people they didn't know.

The formats worked. The philosophy held. "What happens when two strangers meet" turned out to be a question worth asking over and over again.

The Weight

But here's what I didn't say out loud for a long time:

I was exhausted.

Every event ran through me. Every detail. Every decision. Every relationship. SMS wasn't a platform. It was me. I was the bottleneck, the brand, the logistics, the vision, the execution—all of it funneled through one person who was already tired when this started.

People would ask: "Can I host an SMS?"

And I'd say yes, but then I'd have to be involved. I'd have to manage it. I'd have to make sure it felt right. Because the brand was fragile—it was just me and whatever trust I'd built.

I was fighting entropy. And I don't believe in fighting entropy.

The Logo

My friend Janine—a nuclear reactor of energy who had supported SMS from the beginning—wanted to host her own event. And in her own way, she made it simple:

"Liban, just give me the logo."

That's all she needed. The logo. The permission. The ability to say "this is SMS" without going through me.

And I realized: the thing I built to escape loneliness had become its own kind of trap. I couldn't step away. I couldn't rest. I couldn't even attend an SMS in Tokyo without first building a franchise system.

What if, instead, we opened SMS to the public?

P.S. Thank you, Weldon, the man behind the evolution of SMS (story for another time).

The Evolution

SMS becomes the infrastructure for strangers to meet strangers—everywhere, hosted by anyone.

For hosts: You have an impulse to gather people. You open your door. SMS handles the rest—the invitations, the RSVPs, the trust layer that took three years to build.

For attendees: You tell us what you're into. You wait—not for a feed to scroll, but for an invitation. When the right gathering happens near you, we reach out. You say yes. You show up.

We handle everything except what happens in the room. That part is human. That part is yours.

The brand stays the same. The mission stays the same. What changes is who gets to use it.

I built it. Now it works for everyone—including me.

The Invitation

Do the hard thing — join us : )

The Close

I bought SMS for $95,000.

That's what it cost. Everything I had. That was the price of admission to this life.

Most people would call losing 90% of their life savings a tragedy. I call it a purchase. A transaction. I gave up one future and got this one instead.