KIND Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzsky JD ’93 launched the Stanford Builders Forum, a new speaker series intended to promote respectful civil dialogue across lines of disagreement, with a talk at Stanford Law School (SLS) on Oct. 8. 

The Forum comes as a gift from Lubetzsky in an effort to increase sociopolitical dialogue on campus. As a program of ePluribus Stanford, an initiative by Provost Jenny Martinez aimed at enhancing student citizenship, Lubetzsky’s donation will also support a new faculty fellow in Civic, Liberal and Global Education (COLLEGE), the first-year course requirement for students to navigate self-definition as citizens.

Martinez and psychology professor Jamil Zaki joined Lubetzky on the panel, moderated by School of Humanities and Sciences Dean Debra Satz, sharing how their personal experiences navigating conflict reshaped their perspectives on communicating with others. 

“My father was a Holocaust survivor,” Lubetzsky said. “When I was nine years old, he started talking to me about what he went through. He terrified me … I wanted to build bridges between people so that what happened to him would not happen to people.” 

As a student at SLS, he said, his “advocate’s identity” on issues like Jewish nationalism changed through conversations with classmates from Palestine and Saudi Arabia. In fact, his interest in entrepreneurship as a social force began at SLS when a legislative law course led him to found Peaceworks Foundation, a food company in the Middle East aimed at bringing Israelis and Palestinians together under a common goal, he said. 

“During my time [at Stanford] I started to realize that talking past people wasn’t going to solve issues,” Lubetzsky said. “That impacted how I saw the world.”

After launching this October, Builders Forum will host a speaker event each quarter in collaboration with the Builders Movement, an organization Lubetzsky co-founded to counteract rising polarization in America through social media partnerships with celebrity ambassadors. 

Lubetzsky’s national network of leaders, said Dan Edelstein, professor of French and the faculty director of COLLEGE, will help bring “natural partners” to the Builders Forum, moving beyond ePluribus’s existing Stanford-based programming to a more outward-facing dialogue. 

During the panel, Martinez discussed her personal experience facing backlash for defending conservative judge Kyle Duncan’s visit to speak at Stanford despite protests from law school students in 2023. 

“To me, it seemed like a moment for teaching,” Martinez said of the incident. “I’m a constitutional law professor. [I was teaching] introductory constitutional law. We hadn’t gotten to the First Amendment yet. Maybe we need[ed] to accelerate that process.” 

Martinez founded ePluribus Stanford as a “connective tissue” for civic dialogue programs across campus, she said at the panel. Her vision for the Forum is that it will expand ePluribus’s focus beyond the opinions of the undergraduate community, bringing in outside voices from people who “have navigated conflict in different contexts.” Her collaboration with Lubetzsky, she said, stretches back many years, and his gift will deepen and prolong ePluribus’s programming along multiple axes beyond the forum. 

Zaki, who researches the neuroscience of empathy as the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, reflected upon how his experiences observing quarreling parents as a child led him to value listening to understand instead of listening to persuade. 

“Much of my childhood was spent bridging, trying to understand the distance between [my parents],” Zaki said. “I try to encourage people to treat conversations less like debates, and more like mutual interviews.” 

In an interview with The Daily, Lubetzsky expressed concern about what he called the “hate-industrial complex”: social media algorithms, political lobbies and foreign governments that foster division for their own purposes. Another factor contributing to polarization, he added, was a rigid oppressor-victim dialectic that he said removed agency from young people. 

He emphasized the Builders Movement’s key values — curiosity, compassion, courage and creativity — as necessary takeaways to “wake up and choose to be a builder.” He added that this was the only way to “be a protagonist” in one’s own life. 

“I think it’s really, really important for all of us to give each other grace,” Lubetzsky said. “To look into each other’s eyes with humanity, with love, with compassion, with warmth.”