Larry Sanger Founder of Wikipedia |EP697

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienablerights.
By Liberty. If liberty means anything at
all, it means right to tell people what they do not want to
hear. Welcome back to the big League

(00:44):
show. Of course, I'm your host, Lance
Miliaccio with my Co host GeorgeBallantine and how we do it on
this show because if liberty means anything at all, it means
the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
And it's always tip of the spearon this show for you guys that
are just joining us for the first time.
First of all, thank you for the hour that you're going to give
us. But our plan is always to
educate and unify the country one episode at a time.

(01:04):
You know, we go out for both sides of the aisle.
You know how we do it with greatinterviews, lots of different
topics, very Rogan style show. So if you hear for the first
time you, I should be excited. We've got an amazing interview
weekends coming up. We like to kick off Friday
always with with something exciting.
And of course, this is how we doit.
Kill them with the truth and bury them with a smile.
George Ballantine, what's going on bro?

(01:26):
How are you, man? I'm OK, it's Friday, you know,
the weekend's here, but I still got work to do all weekend and
never stops from me. Yeah, that's right.
Bees in the trap. You're working away, man.
It's. Bees in the trap.
Rise and grind, that's how it is, but that's how we do it
every single episode. I don't forget I don't have fame
and fortune like our guest that's coming on, you know?
Yeah, that's right. That's right.

(01:47):
We're still, we're still slavingaway.
But of course I'm, I'm excited because I, I love what he did,
especially in the early years. We'll explain in a minute, but I
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Yep, George has got to get the Jingle in.
It's Friday, baby. Jingle away.
All right, You know, So tonight's guest or today's
guest, I should say, Larry Sanger founder.
I, I, I guess Co founder, but I listen to him as founder of
Wikipedia, an amazing product. He's blushing right now
backstage. You know that?
Yeah. You got him blushing.

(03:56):
But he's really an interesting guy, right?
He's a philosopher, technology innovator, advocate for unbiased
knowledge, holds a PhD in philosophy.
So you got to you got to you gotto move maneuver around him
carefully because he's probably looking at everybody from a
glass jar. Ohio State University best known
as a Co founder of Wikipedia. He launched the project in 2001

(04:17):
by working with the Jimmy Wales over at Bornus company evolved
from the slower new pedia into adynamic crowdsourced
encyclopedia. Lifelong true seeker and I guess
who lost and later rediscovered his Christian faith.
So you know, we love that about him.
God country family. Recently joining the Anglican
Church in North America, spent the last two decades critiquing

(04:39):
digital information ecosystems. Since 2020, he has served a full
time president of the Knowledge Standards Foundation.
Really interesting. We're going to get into that
details later in the show. And of course, they promote
higher standards for online knowledge through projects like
the encyclosphere and his Bold 9thesis on Wikipedia, which I've
got those we're going to discuss.

(04:59):
I'll leave him backstage. He's back there by himself.
We don't want him to get lonely.Let's get him in here.
All right. Welcome to the big, big show,
Mr. Larry Singer. How you doing, Sir?
Doing well. Thanks for having me guys, this
is going to be fun. Oh, it should be.
Man, we're excited you're here, man.
And honestly, I, you know, and Isaid it to you backstage, I
don't want to gush too much, butI man, when Wikipedia came out,

(05:22):
I just loved it. I, you know, I, I, because I
grew up. I, you know, I'm the age fan.
Girling set Larry's fangirling on your Wikipedia, just so you
know. I got to tell you, my parents
had the Britannica Encyclopedia.We had the whole set.
I used to pour through it as a child.
I loved going through it and learning about the world.
And I was always really enjoyed animals.

(05:43):
I grew up with a lot of animals in my home, so I'd look through
and see all the animals in the world.
It was a big thing. The encyclopedia was a big deal
back then. And with what you did,
everything was at your fingertips you could possibly
want. And that was the incredible part
really, for me, I think that wasa spark of genius.
But Larry, let me let me start with this.
We always like to do this. Give me the Cliff notes.
Like, you know, how did you get into that?

(06:06):
I mean, how did it happen? I mean, where, where's the track
to where you started? And then all of a sudden, here
you are and you're doing Wikipedia.
Well, I first like Gone online in 1994, and one of the very
first things I did was to join adiscussion group that was run by

(06:27):
Jimmy Wales, as it happens, before he was famous, and it was
about the philosophy of Ayn Randand I, I was a philosophy grad
student at the time. I wasn't exactly a huge fan of
Ayn Rand, but I agreed with her about a lot of important things,

(06:48):
you know, and so they, they seemlike allies to me.
I ended up meeting Jimmy, you know, in face to face in
Chicago. Me and him and another guy sort
of spent a weekend just kicking around when I was on my way
across the country to visit my my uncle.

(07:10):
And so we, we weren't exactly close friends or anything, but
we knew each other. We, we'd actually met each other
face to face a couple of times before.
Basically, he was looking for somebody to start a free
encyclopedia. So Jimmy Wales was the CEO of
Balmes Inc, which was it ran a an old web ring style search

(07:37):
engine. If you remember that from the
1990s. I do, yes.
And and Bahamas was probably thebiggest 1.
And so he had a lot of brands inthe fire.
One of them was this idea of a free of encyclopedia.
He had already chosen the domainname for it, Newpedia and

(07:58):
Upedia, and then it was going tobe run based on open source
software principles. Basically, it's free, but nobody
is paid necessarily to work on it, right?
So it's it's a, a public good that people contribute to.
And that's essentially how open source works.

(08:19):
And what, we're going to take that same principle and apply it
to an encyclopedia. At first, of course, we didn't
know about wikis. So it was my job basically to
start that thing from the groundup, which I did, you know, I, I
one day sat down and I mean, after he had given me the job

(08:40):
and, and started writing out the, the, the rules and, and
procedures and, and consulting with various volunteers and
collecting all the people, whichwas took a long time.
But to make a Long story short, the project moved very slowly.
Basically, we really wanted it to be a credible encyclopedia if

(09:04):
it was going to be, you know, volunteer written.
And we wanted to make sure that it was rigorously edited.
So we had a seven step process and in the end it was just too
much and people weren't really into it.
So I started looking around for ways of adding new content and

(09:26):
in the end, and that was like the fall of 2000.
In the end, right at I guess it was January 2nd, 2001, a friend
told me about wikis, which are these websites.
Anybody can, anybody who looks at the website can press an edit

(09:47):
button and edit the page that they're looking at, hit save and
the the changes are made. They immediately go live.
It was crazy idea of course, andI, my friend was very good at
explaining why it can work, why it doesn't just result in a lot

(10:13):
of graffiti and, and you know, digital vandalism and stuff like
that. So I immediately thought this is
a way to add large amounts of content to Wikipedia or sorry to
Newpedia, but the, the editors that I had collected for
Newpedia were not into that ideaat all.

(10:37):
And so we decided we need to launch it under its own domain
name and a different identity with different, I guess,
leaders, I suppose. Of course I was going to be
leading both of the projects andso I came up with the name
Wikipedia. And so between January 2nd and

(11:01):
January 15, we, we had already submitted the idea a live
website to the New Pedia people.They were not interested into
it, in it. And so, so we, we came up with
that new domain name, launched it January 15, 2001 and it just

(11:22):
took off. We had already collected like
2000 people for New Pedia to work on New Pedia, and in the
next several months it collectedmany hundreds of articles.
By the end of that year was 20,000 articles.
And yeah, yeah. I mean, that's it's crazy

(11:43):
because of course new PDA kind of had, you know, more of like I
would consider an ivory tower expert model, right.
And then, you know, Wiki was kind of the Wild West, you know,
did you have a moment? Kind of what I got to ask you,
was it pure optimism or did you secretly bet maybe on chaos
breeding clarity? Did you think that, yeah, this
can work when you got the first sample and you thought, I think

(12:05):
the way the Internet's working, this can really be something?
I was, I was excited about excited about it within the
first couple of weeks, like whenpeople started writing a lot of
articles, even though a lot of the first ones were just like
one or two or three paragraphs, you know, and they weren't
necessarily that meaty. A few people started writing
meaty stuff right away. But it was exciting because

(12:29):
there was a lot more content within a few weeks with
especially within a few months. And there was on after a year
working on Neupedia, but it wasn't as good.
And the plan was that we were going to use Neupedia to edit
the the output of Wikipedia. They were going to, they were

(12:50):
supposed to work in tandem. But in the end, basically Jimmy
Wales, he he's like just disgusted with with new pedia
had no desire to, to support it.I wanted to continue to, to like
support it, but he, he was paying the bills.

(13:10):
So, you know, he, he wouldn't even let me buy it later, like
after a couple of years, he justessentially wanted Newpedia to
die. Wikipedia took on a life of its
own, though. And I was, I was very excited.
I mean, I was amazed at how I. Was shocked at the quality of

(13:31):
the entries, knowing that it wasindependent journalists and I
guess independent editors you could call it.
I was so impressed. Sometimes you, you would pull
something up and you'd be the detail would be, you know this
long and you'd be like wow. And then and then it would be
hyperlinked and you could find other listings that would really
just clarify it, You know, You know, George, I know we were

(13:51):
talking about the original vision of Wikipedia.
Naming the beast? Is that what we're talking
about? Lance?
Listen, I said you you coined itWikipedia, right?
This is, and we all know it's a mash up of wiki and
encyclopedia. However, if you would have known
it would have one day eclipsed the brick for the Canon
Britannica Britannica and outlast your like, listen,

(14:13):
you're own involvement. You're not involved with it no
more. I don't know why, but would you
have picked something snappier? I don't know, like know it all
net or truth love. I mean, does the name still
invoke for you about I don't know the project?
So what? Tell us something, Larry.
I don't know. I'm not like a branding expert.
I didn't think that hard about it, to be honest.

(14:33):
I thought, OK, well, it's a wikiand it's an encyclopedia and so
it's a Wikipedia. It was just seemed obvious.
I, we considered some other names, but I, I, I felt like it
was a kind of an unserious side project of new Pedia in the

(14:56):
first couple of months, right. But after that, it was very
clear that it was like taking ona life of its own.
It was going to be something that would succeed potentially
without Neupedia. That was clear by just six
months in. And by the end of the year, it
was very clear that that, you know, this was now the the tale

(15:16):
that was swagging the dog. Yeah.
So, you know, you, you always had that neutral point of view
policy, you know, did you, were you able to embed anything in
there to ensure that maybe it, excuse me, that it didn't
devolve in potentially a digitalTower of Babel?
I mean, 6,000,000 English articles so fast.
I mean, it blew up. Yeah.

(15:41):
Originally, I mean, the idea waswe wanted there to be kind of
an, A global Tower of Babel. Yes, we we wanted it to be weird
and diverse and extremely global, right?
In a good sense, right where where individual cultures from

(16:06):
around the world and their ideasare actually respected.
I don't really think it works that way anymore.
But nevertheless, that was the, that was the original idea and
the original vision. They, the whole idea was behind
neutrality was to bring people together who have radically
different points of view so thatthey can all record their

(16:31):
different takes on in in many cases, radically different
takes. And so it wasn't supposed to be
like some average between left and right as if all topics in an
encyclopedia are political. It doesn't work that way when
you're dealing with a general encyclopedia.
There's a lot of non political topics.
But the point is, there's a lot of different perspectives from,

(16:53):
again, all around the world, from different philosophies,
different religions and and so forth.
Making them all work together required neutrality.
That's one of the main reasons why the the policy exists.
You know, so, so I guess my question is, you know, Fast

(17:14):
forward Wikipedia, of course, has gone from kind of a very,
very unique upstart to what I think $185 million endowment
powerhouse. Did your first sense, like when
did your first sense that it wasshifting from maybe
collaborative playground, a bureaucratic fortress?
Was there a moment kind of when,I don't know, the, the, maybe
the anonymous admins or the ignore all rules inside joke

(17:36):
turned into kind of a shield forinsiders?
Was there a feeling that that was happening?
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, they lost
the ability to pay me early on because basically they lost a
big contract with, with Google. And, and so there was a time for

(17:57):
a couple of years when essentially there weren't any
administrators and it was essentially leaderless except
for Jimmy Wales who might step in from time to time.
It was a very small project, despite having a lot of articles
and like just growing like gangbusters.
It wasn't until like 2004, 2005 when it really exploded onto the

(18:20):
world scene. And, and like Jimmy Wales and I
were both getting a lot of interviews just trying to
explain what is this thing. But even after that it was still
this very fresh faced new project that was for many years

(18:41):
I would say anti establishment, right.
And the bureaucracy as such didn't really solidify until, I
would say sometime between 2005 and 2010, if we're talking about
the history, if that's, if that's what you're asking, but
that's, that's when it happened.I would say that by about 2010,

(19:06):
I would have described the bias that was evident on Wikipedia as
being similar to that of the BBCor the New York Times.
So basically establishment left or center left anyway.
And I, I would describe, I wouldhave described and did describe
the management, the anonymous management of the the editorial

(19:31):
side of Wikipedia of as being essentially like a bureaucracy.
Whereas in the earliest days I Iwas very worried that it was
turning into just an absolute free for all anarchy it it
really started to lock down I would say again by about 2010.

(19:59):
Yeah, that was an interesting period because you can start to
see the transition. George, what are we going to
say? I couldn't see you wanted to
say. I can tell George's face.
He's having a thought. So he's going in here.
Larry. I don't know what he's.
Thinking I was, I was. I get I get caught up my
thoughts sometimes, but you know, let's let's go step
further. So well, I'm going to call it

(20:19):
the the bias blind spot, right? So I mean, you've called out
Wikipedia's left-leaning tilt right as a slow poison.
They're blacklist and conservatives while while
cozying up to the globalist, academic, the second and the
progressive. You know their views.
Right, right. When the now you're a
philosopher, right? You took philosophy now with

(20:40):
your philosopher's eye. Is is this inevitable in any
crowdsourced truth machine, or did it stem from failure to
enforce your neutrality manifesto?
It's a good question, basically,yeah.
The way that I described the theperspective that they are
enforcing, sometimes brutally onWikipedia today, I describe it

(21:06):
as gasp, globalist, academic, secular and progressive.
So it's just something that cameto me.
I was, I was, I was writing the nine theses.
So if you go to larrysanger.org,you go to the top of the the
landing page, there is a link to9 theses on Wikipedia.

(21:26):
And I developed that in essay 2 and essay 4.
This idea that Wikipedia has a gasp perspective now it's no
longer a, a neutral point of view.
They, they like to think that itis, but it's not.
Yeah. But your question is, were were

(21:47):
they stuck with that? Was it inevitable?
I think it's inevitable only in the sense that the left is
really motivated and practiced at what they do.
And you know, in analysis of of the new left, what they say is.

(22:15):
Well listen, if if bias is humanthen why pretend encyclopedias
aren't? What's that?
If if bias is human, why pretendencyclopedias aren't?
Well, look, I think that it's possible for really skilled
journalists to write unbiased stuff.

(22:36):
We can all I agree when there's a really good news article or a
really good textbook that just gives an even handed fair
presentation of the issues and allows you to make up your own
mind. It's difficult though, when you
have a completely open project. And what I was about to say is

(22:59):
that the left is making a a, a, a a, what do they call it?
A March through the institutions, right?
And Wikipedia is one of the institutions that they
deliberately have marched through.
It would have required foresight.
We should have thought a lot harder about the fact that they

(23:20):
would do that and taken special care to to just set up processes
and whatever to to keep that from being the case yes yes, I
mean basically, if you didn't have some special way to ensure
that it remain neutral I I I think they'll just keep pushing

(23:43):
and pushing until it reflects the bias that that they want it
to reflect. I'll.
Tell you, I agree with that statement so much.
It rings so true on this show because when we do political
shows, as an example, we're talking about politics.
We always go to after both sidesof the aisle.
But it's very clear that the bias machine that's in
mainstream media and the narrative control, even if you

(24:05):
look at some of the funding thatgot funneled out through USAID
and what they paid for, there was no neutral payments coming
out of USAID when Doge started to discover them.
Everything was left-leaning. Lots of money, millions and
millions of dollars in use. Once the narrative was
determined, whether it's negative about Larry Sanger or
negative about Lance Miniatio George Valentin, that's the
narrative, right? So they propel it.

(24:26):
They created it at the higher levels.
Call it whatever you want, deep state cabal.
I don't care what name you give it because at the end of the
day, I'm not sure that isn't tooa nefarious a title, but the
intent is to control the power. So when it comes to narrative or
bias control, they decide that they're going to write a story
about Larry or write a story about Lance and it goes through
everything. So Wikipedia being the go to

(24:47):
source for this entire time period, it makes sense to me
that they they said, OK, hey, while we're doing this, we're
going to write an article particle in the New York Times
and Washington Post and let's make sure we go and have our
approved editor over at Wiki. Go ahead and go in there.
And you know, Hammer Lance Miliotra, let's make sure that
his we put in there a bunch of negative stuff towards the end
of his report. And it's interesting.

(25:09):
You almost wish you could have had somebody.
And again, with the volume that was coming in, you really needed
AI quantum computing. You're almost seem like where it
could have said it could have read it and it could have sent
back just a single rejected update bias and if they wanted
to resubmit, they could. But it's but it's interesting.
You didn't have quantum computing, you didn't have AI.

(25:29):
And you know, you would hope that you always hope for the
best, but expect the worst sometimes when it comes to
media, because we see it, you know, we get we're we're pretty
fortunate. We have a lot of great sources
in Washington, DC and a lot of great sources around the globe.
And we hear about what the actual story is.
And then you kind of see it rollout into the media and you're
like, this isn't even close to what happened.

(25:49):
Kind of like what you saw the BBC do recently with the Trump
video where they edited kind of what you saw with 60 minutes.
And Kamala Harris is an example,you know, or what they did with
Joe Biden, you know, not lettinghim really go out in public
because he was having a problem,problem with dementia and
Alzheimer's. You know, it's, it's
complicated. The neutrality of reporting has
disappeared. I I feel sometimes you end up

(26:11):
doing like our show, we're very,we're very neutral.
We'll go after everybody. We don't care.
What I want is a great country. I want the greatest country in
the world. So whoever's not doing that
doesn't matter whether it's thisadministration or a different
one or people that are saying the wrong thing, we'll go after
him and we'll say this isn't right.
I don't agree with it. Do you find yourself knowing?
That you created. Probably 1 of the biggest

(26:31):
cultural icons, especially that period.
And even now you ever find yourself thinking, God, I wish
maybe we could have had AI because you're a technology guy.
Maybe then it could have looked,it could have read the article
when it got submitted and boom, it could have got rejected by
us. And then they would have had to
neutralize all the, you know, they would have just reported
from a neutral position. Do you think AI might have been

(26:51):
an amazing thing had you had that during this period, I mean.
If we had launched when AI was available, then clearly it would
have been, it would have made use of AI from the beginning.
That's clear to me, as long as it were as as AI were advanced

(27:12):
enough at the time. But anyway, that's a that's an
alt history kind of question. It's interesting, I suppose, And
and how now, you know, 25 years on, Grokopedia is going to.
Yeah, yeah. What do you think?
I mean, do you listen? Eli's always got his hand, you

(27:33):
know, I I understand he's even doing something with, you know,
new drugs for diabetes he's doing some research on that now.
This guy always seems to be involved in really interesting
projects, but I think that of course, you know if you read
his. When I first heard about
Gracopedia, I went and read his Wikipedia and I can see why he's
not thrilled about it 'cause it's not very neutral reporting
about him, you know, and you want neutrality.

(27:55):
I want neutrality in the news. I just want to hear it like it
is. I don't want to hear all the
opinions and the rest of it. If I turn on the news, I'm like,
that would be the demise of the.Democratic Party, Lance, you
know that? Well, it'd.
Be the IT would be the demise, Ibelieve, of the rhinos, the
Democratic Party and maybe the people that want things to be a
certain way, which I've never really been good with.
I've never really, I've never liked bullies.

(28:16):
And I often feel like the media is a bully, that they want us,
they try. They want to force fetus.
It's like, you know, I'm a baby strapped in a chair.
And here comes that spoon. Here comes the Choo, Choo.
No, you got to eat those mashed peas.
No, I don't want the mashed peas.
I want the mashed bananas. No, you're going to eat the
mashed peas. All right, listen, you know what
that music means. We're going to take a short
break here on the Big Ming show,and we come back.
We'll be here with Larry Sanger,founder of Wikipedia.

(28:38):
Don't miss a minute. George Valentin, myself, Lance
Bellaccio. You know how we do it on this
show. We're going all in, so stay
tuned. We'll be right back.
Don't go nowhere. Are you ready to stand?

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(32:25):
I'm not saying Co founder because it made him blush.
I want to make him blush too. Larry Sanger.
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(34:12):
I got the QR code. Take a screenshot, save your
photo files. Now you all look at Larry Sanger
right there. You would never think he would
be throttled or banned on X. But the man, what is he?
Probably still is we all are. I haven't got my account back.
All our other accounts are are throttled and now he's listen.

(34:34):
I like Elon Musk, he saved helped.
Save free speech. Somewhat, but let's face it,
he's coming out with Grokopedia.But you know, his platform X
still has a ton of problems. Is it truly free speech?
They're still banning accounts or not letting everybody get
their accounts back? And what's your take on

(34:54):
Grokopedia? On Grokopedia.
Well, I can tell you that it's measurably at least as far as
ten articles go. The ten that I looked at
considerably more neutral than than Wikipedia.

(35:16):
It's not a very big sample size,need to look at a lot more
articles. But, and that isn't my opinion,
that's the opinion of ChatGPT. So I basically fed articles on
the same topics from Wikipedia and from Grokopedia, and on
average the Grokopedia articles were slightly biased and on

(35:41):
average the Wikipedia articles were.
More severely. Biased, and I think that's a.
Great way to do it, of course. You know, even AI.
You have to assume that. The person doing the programming
is intelligent as it is. There is the potential for bias.
I'm always concerned. I'm cautiously optimistic.

(36:01):
My problem is I still think there's foxes in the hen house
over at X. I've tried to deal with support
on on what I would consider shadow banning or ghost banning
on the accounts that I have withGeorge.
I think we, like I said, we haveabout 400 and some followers,
400 and some 1000 followers in the two accounts.
And I don't see the impressions based on what it is.
And of course, we have a naturally syndicated radio show.

(36:23):
We have this show, we have the number one crypto show on
Rumble. So a lot of optics, a lot more
than the average person. So you would think the
combination of promoting our accounts, which we do constantly
on all our media would propel those counts to a really higher
level. I don't see that the suppression
is real and it concerns me with gracopedia.
I'd love to see it completely neutral.
I'd, I'd love to see Wikipedia draw the line and sand and go,

(36:46):
hey, we're going to go through, we're going to have AI analyze
everything in our platform and anything biased is going to be
removed. The editing, the editing will be
removed and it'll become neutral.
It would be great to do that because, you know, Wikipedia is
kind of a standby for me. It always was for years and
years and years. I don't use it a lot now, but
years ago I used it all the time.
I'd like to see us kind of boomerang back to that.

(37:09):
But you you, you kind of have a recommendation that that the 9
thesis is I, I read that about your 9 thesis on Wikipedia and I
want you to take us walk us through this because this seems
to me to be the fix. It seems like it is a solution
if they would, if they would adopt these ideas.
This seems like a really you could turn Wikipedia around

(37:29):
pretty quickly quickly and with AII would have to think the
editing and the and taking the bias out could be, you know,
like that because ChatGPT and other platforms deep sea can
grok. You could use them to really
just edit very quickly if you automated it.
Good point. Right, so the. 9 theses are
basically my big reform proposalfor Wikipedia.

(37:53):
Nobody to my knowledge has ever made a a really general
ambitious proposal for improvingWikipedia and I I don't know if
we have time to go through all nine.
We've got time, Larry, for you we got.
Time, my friend. Yeah, enjoy the.
Media. I've got the list there of the 9
if you want to put that up. I'll just give you the

(38:15):
highlights and if you want to like, you know, poke at any of
them, let me know. The first one and this.
By the way, if you want to like follow along, you can go to
larrysanger.org, click on the first big link there and says
special feature of the 9 theses and for each of the 9 theses

(38:37):
there is a separate essay. So the whole thing, if you were
to print it out, would be a short book.
So #1 is end decision making by consensus.
The idea is Wikipedia has this policy that says that the way
that we on Wikipedia decide difficult editorial issues if

(38:59):
people can't resolve something is is through consensus.
But well, what? What if people can't actually
come to a real agreement? And then then it's not really,
you shouldn't call it a consensus, should you?
But they nevertheless do. And and over the years, as
Wikipedia has become more and more gasp in its perspective,

(39:24):
right, it has more and more justleft out a lot of of other
people. And and it's just, it just adds
insult to injury to say that it is somehow the community
consensus that only one view holds sway on Wikipedia.

(39:44):
A very good example actually is and this is a good example for
the for the next three points aswell is something that, as it
happens, to my surprise, Jimmy Wales pointed out.
So Wikipedia has an article called.
The Gaza genocide, all right, Soit Wikipedia in its own voice,

(40:08):
in what is called Wiki voice. In other words, this is what the
article itself claims is that Israel committed.
Committed, perhaps, you know, itisn't now because they're
they've got a ceasefire going, but it committed genocide in
Gaza and and it lists a lot of claims and a lot of sources that

(40:33):
that make this assertion. But the very title itself is
something that is in dispute. And if you're going to talk
about something that is truly neutral, then you have to give
it a word a a a description thatthe competing sides can actually

(40:55):
agree on. It has to be something given
that that you have to choose some title.
It can't favor one side is the point.
So they say though, that that's the consensus.
It's consensus of all the peoplethat think like them.
All right, all right. That that was that was an
especially tricky. Topic.
Because touchy. Yeah, tricky.
Touchy. Well, it's not really that it's

(41:16):
touchy. I think that, you know, and
Gaza, from what I know, isn't doing it, but the Palestinians
aren't doing it. But, you know, Israel's got a a
very sophisticated advertising, marketing and narrative machine
that they put a lot of money outinto the market.
There are a lot of influencers and podcasts, a lot of people
that are posting that are being paid for that because it's a

(41:38):
paid narrative. And, and, and, and I'm not, you
know, I'm actually a Italian Jew.
So my point is, I'm not being anti-Semitic.
My thing is, is that it's reallycomplicated because you deal
with one side that's got this incredible amount of capital
they put into advertising, I'd call it.
And that controls a lot of the narrative.
And then you've got Washington, DC with its own belief system.
So it's complicated. And I'm sure that for them, Wiki

(42:00):
is ripe fruit, right? If you can control the story and
if you can organize, Yeah, you would think so.
So but they're they're not. It's in.
Fact. It's it's extremely biased in
the opposite direction. Yeah, it really is it.
That's. Interesting, didn't realize
that. In other words, the Israeli
view. Is simply not represented in
that article at all. Now that's interesting.
Right, isn't it? Because that's like a first

(42:21):
really. I didn't realize that.
I thought you were saying the opposite.
So my correction. So that's interesting that that
somehow that that Gaza article is so one side leaning when we
really know what the real story is about what happened if you
really have the research. And that's interesting to me
because I would think that Israel would be really motivated
about Wiki because it's an open source and they can do a lot of

(42:42):
editing because in normal so cases, that's really what they
do. Because I as an example, as an
influencer as of late that has received quite a bit of money
that's come out kind of behind the scenes.
We've heard about got a lot of money for posting for Israel I I
think Wikipedia. Is to a certain extent kind of a
it's APR and intelligence and journalistic battleground,

(43:07):
right? Yeah, I agree.
So that that. Means that probably there are
players in the background throwing money.
Some of them win and some of them lose, right?
And in this case, you know, whatever money is actually being
spent by Israel, if it very muchis being spent on Wikipedia,

(43:29):
seems to well be on the losing side.
But. And now we're actually getting
skipping ahead to another of the9 theses.
Let's see, the second one is enable competing articles.
So if Wikipedia takes a gasp point of view or gasp
perspective, then shouldn't we allow other perspectives to

(43:53):
present what they regard as neutral position on on the facts
from from their perspective? It almost sounds like a
contradiction. I I agree, but that's simply
applying the same sort of principles Wikipedia itself now
applies to the rest of the world.

(44:14):
Wikipedia now says that the GASPframework, as I call it, is the
neutral point of view. That's what they say, right?
All I'm saying is, well, maybe we should allow to change the
example Hindus to write articlesabout God and and you know, I

(44:38):
don't know the the, the French and feminists and, you know,
Protestants and and let 1000 flowers bloom.
Now, I'm not saying necessarily that we should have a lot of
biased articles. In fact, this isn't what I
prefer. So let me move on and I'll

(44:59):
explain why I think so. The third of the feces is
abolish source blacklist. So right now if you go to
Wikipedia and you go to the perennial sources page, just
type that in into a search engine, Wikipedia, perennial
sources, you will come to a listof media sources and you'll see

(45:23):
various colours on the page, green and yellow and red, grey
and anything that is not green essentially is being to some
degree or other blacklisted. It is frowned upon as a source
on Wikipedia. Anything that is red or Gray is

(45:44):
basically not allowed on Wikipedia.
Now if you look through the list, you will see that the vast
majority of conservative sourcesnow are blacklisted.
Like you can't use them on Wikipedia.
And that's interesting in itselfbecause of course, yeah.
You know, not so shocking is yeah.

(46:05):
And I agree with you. It's it's like, but it's not
surprising. It's strange because we see that
kind of banning so much. You know which is.
Awful, right? Because that, you know, those
sources not being neutral reallylimits the the viability of
Wikipedia. It really hurts the product
because you just want to go there just like you would
Britannica. If you read Britannica, it

(46:27):
wasn't biased, it just gave you information.
So you're like, oh, OK, great, now I understand how blood works
or how the the body works or howthe bowel system works or what
this animal is. It was very simple and right to
the point you can find the source of the information.
So when you think of Wikipedia, that's what you're really want,
right? 100% So the the proposal is

(46:49):
simply that they rethink and renegotiate their policies on
sourcing and they should get ridof that perennial sources page
entirely and they should allow articles from conservative
sources. Now who's responsible for that?
Larry, how do you think that came about?

(47:10):
Was it the community or their specific individuals that have
decided this is how we're going to do it?
And that's all there is to it. It's the community.
That's certainly what they will tell you and from the outside,
just looking at what's going on on the website, it certainly
looks like it's just a communitydecision.
So they've got a, what they calla reliable sources notice board

(47:33):
and somebody will, you know, say, just to take a, a random
example, the the Federalist and there will be a discussion of
the Federalist on the reliable sources notice board.
And they will open different people will say, OK, this, this
is the level of approval that I think that the Federalist should

(47:56):
have on this type of topic. And it turns out that one is is
basically banned. So yeah, it's The thing is, most
of the people who are contributing to Wikipedia do so
using anonymous accounts. You can't tell how many are

(48:21):
being controlled by the same people or by the same group.
You can't tell who is paid, who's working for for some well
paid operation. There are some accounts that are
clearly doing their work full time.
Some of them I'm sure are are simply, you know, public
spirited retirees and things like that.

(48:43):
People who just have a lot of time on their hand.
Are you able to if you were to all right?
Let's let me go like this. I'm going to call it the Larry
Singer come back. If you were able to go back in
there, you able to root out these people like who may be
contributing or is it or is it truly totally anonymous?
Like is there anybody from the old guard there?

(49:03):
Anybody can go in there, I mean.Basically, you don't even have
to make an account, right? If your IP address has been
blocked by Wikipedia, then you won't won't be able to to.
There's ways around that, yeah. Of course there are, yeah.
Although it's, it's sometimes it's kind of hard to get around

(49:24):
them like that, that they have VPN blockers as well.
So anyway, so the point is then that basically we need to.
Open up. The the number and type of

(49:44):
sources that are permitted. I'm not saying that, you know,
we need to start counting the National Enquirer as a reliable
source or anything like that. That's not the point.
It's just, you know, I think FoxNews and the New York Post, if
they can serve as source, sources of factual claims,

(50:07):
perhaps the claims, especially if they are disputed or they're
the only source, then they should be, you know, that the
claims should be attributed to Fox or to the Post, Right.
All right, So that enough on that number 5, revive the

(50:27):
original neutrality policy. So I don't really know if I need
to go into this in a lot of detail because this summarizes
the first 3 to a great extent. But there's yeah.
And and it really does get into a lot of inside baseball.
I will say this. There's a lot of really good

(50:48):
examples of extreme bias on Wikipedia, and maybe the best
way to to understand what's going on with #4 is to just give
an example. Like, OK, one of my favorite
examples is an article called Yahweh.

(51:09):
So that's the name of my God. That's the name of the Christian
God used to be called Jehovah. A lot of people still call him
Jehovah. What's the name now again?
What is it? Yahweh.
Yahweh. It's.
It's no, no Yahweh, yes, Jesus, I mean.
They say in the Bible Yahweh is Jesus Christ's name, but OK,

(51:30):
well, well, basically. Yahweh is the name of the
Trinity. It's what I would say and so
anyway. But if you go and look at the
article about Yahweh on Wikipedia and then this is a
page that is titled that the that the entire title is simply

(51:51):
Yahweh. That's what it's called.
Then you will see an article that says Yahweh was the God of
the ancient kingdoms of Judea and and Samaria, the head of a
polytheistic pantheon, a God of War and weather.

(52:13):
It's like, what the hell? Yeah, that's what I that's.
What I was thinking, I was like,well, that's an interesting
start. Maybe it improves as you get
through the rest of it. But The thing is.
What it's trying to do is explain a secular theory of the
origin of the built of Yahweh, as they call it, right?

(52:37):
And of course they're not going to say, well, God revealed
himself. He said I am that I am or you
can refer to me as Yahweh right?And they're not going to say
that they'll they what they ought to do and I don't know if
they do any. I pulled it up on the page you
want. Any particular?

(52:58):
You want me to pull to on here? I'm sorry, I'll have Yahweh on
Wikipedia. I pulled it up.
For. Everybody to see what we were
talking about. Yeah, so.
You know, they, they are not going to present the, the
Bible's account as as fact stating now that I understand,

(53:19):
right, because it's supposed to be a neutral article and not
everybody believes that. Of course, a lot of people do
think that they, the belief in Yahweh had a naturalistic
origin. In other words, you know, it,
it's just sort of psychological historical processes and it

(53:40):
didn't come from God himself. Fine, but at least they should
share the view of the actual Christians and Jews whose God
Yahweh is. But they don't.
They don't do that. Yeah, you would think.
And you would think the historical.
Premise they'd kind of maybe even historically go through

(54:02):
where the first time Yahweh appears in any kind of writings
or words the first time. And you would think historically
they'd come down and kind of say, well here's where the
judeo-christian beliefs came in here's where the Jewish beliefs
came in. Yeah, you you would think that,
but the way that was described, it almost sounded like the Hindu
God of War in a way. It kind of it kind of made me
you. Know I was thinking wow that's.

(54:22):
Pretty brutal right out of the cage.
It's it's all speculative too you.
Know this is just this is just some theory.
They have no great evidence for this.
The the biggest source of their evidence for this is actually
from the Bible itself. And of course, they have to
simply ignore a lot of the evidence that is in the Bible in

(54:44):
order to come up with this theory.
But we're the point point is notreally about what what these
secular scholars think about Yahweh.
The point is, is that Wikipedia restricts its discussion of
Yahweh to that gasp point of view, globalist, academic,

(55:04):
secular and progressive. So in this on this page, it's
the academic and secular perspective that holds sway.
And and so they're not even going to report about the, I
don't know, the sorts of views that are taught at seminaries or

(55:28):
that are taught in religions andnot just, you know, obviously
it's not just Christianity, it'salso Judaism.
So anyway, so I just want to point to them out.
So when you. Just do whatever Google search
right and you put the name Yahweh.
Wikipedia has competition now because your first things coming
up is AI and and it gives you actually what?

(55:51):
You're talking about. That, you know, the meaning,
where it came from and stuff. And then if you go down a little
bit, there's Wikipedia. Oops.
But you can even do a deeper dive into AI mode.
So I mean, Wikipedia's got some competition now with AI.
They're going to have to clean up their act over there.
Maybe that's right. Can I ask you this, Larry?
Do you know? Because I don't.
I didn't look this. Up I don't know is the traffic

(56:13):
down on Wikipedia since the advent of AI being used by the
public, there was a news report.About a month ago, as I recall,
where they said that that was observed for the first time.
It wasn't down by much, but it, it, it had dropped a bit.

(56:35):
That is certainly what I would expect too.
They're, they're going to be people who who just find,
they'll just continue doing whatthey have always done and
they'll continue to use Wikipedia.
Sure. But but yeah, I mean, a lot of
people are as soon as as soon asI turn people on to AI, you

(56:59):
know, they they're like using itfrom then from that point
forward because it's just so easy.
Except for my wife. My wife just just got into it.
She isn't, you know something. There is a stubbornness when it
comes. To the use of it because I've
recommended some people I just don't want to bother with it,
but it is incredible that you can ask it, you know, what
should my caloric intake be? You know, hey, I've got diabetes

(57:21):
and I want a solution or hey, you know, I just got sued and I,
I want I here's the document. Can you tell me, you know, is
this a legitimate concern I should have do it?
Can I handle this on my own? I mean, you know, people are
doing it for medical, they're doing it for legal, they're
doing it for their personal life.
And of course, if I was going tosource some information
nowadays, I would just dump it into AI because it would give me
more of what I wanted. Let's go to number six here.

(57:45):
I want to talk about this, reveal who the Wikipedia leaders
are, right? So.
I I collected what I thought were the most powerful people by
role on Wikipedia. So three different groups.

(58:05):
When you add up those people, there are 62 of them.
Of those, 6285% are anonymous and they go by account names
that I can't remember very many of the names, but they they
sound silly. The usernames it sound like old

(58:26):
chat room handles from the 1990s, which is what they're
based on right? And and yet these are some of
the most powerful accounts in media period.
Wow. No, think about it.
We're talking. About.
What, which is the like, the single most powerful media

(58:48):
source of its kind? It's more powerful than any
single newspaper. It's probably not more powerful
than than Google or X or or Facebook, but it's in it.
It's at that level, right? Wikipedia forms opinions.
It's sort of sets the standards of what is supposed to be true

(59:13):
for a lot of people. It's used by Siri, it's used by
AI, it's used to train AI, and people continue to to consult it
directly. And yet 85% of the most powerful
people who consult Wikipedia or who depend on Wikipedia for

(59:33):
their information are anonymous.Now, you might think this
doesn't matter. These are just like they're,
they're, they're hobbyists. They're, you know, college
students, grad students, retirees.
This is what I used to think, you know, and it was probably
true back in like 2004 or something like that.

(59:54):
I don't think it's true anymore because there's way too much at
stake, right? So, you know, I have been,
they've gotten mad at me on Wikipedia itself.
They, they've, they've pushed back hard on #6 but I say those

(01:00:15):
the people who occupy the positions in the power 62, they
shouldn't be allowed to be anonymous.
They should go by their real names and then they should be
indemnified by the Wikimedia Foundation.
So they if they're sued, then then they don't have to like
lose their the all powerful ghost author.
Is dangerous, right? Because this is what we're

(01:00:36):
talking about. Because if we gave them ratings,
we took those people and we said, OK, here's all the ghost
authors and the rating is biased5 stars, biased 4 stars.
If they had that kind of a rating, it would discredit what
they're writing. But right now they're just, you
know that they're the, they're the all powerful demigods of
Wikipedia, right? Yes, yes.
And I'm not saying that. Other Wikipedia's are not also

(01:01:00):
anonymous. They are, and the other
Wikipedians are are just as anonymous as the leaders.
But the point is, you would think that the people at the top
of the heap would be more responsible.
They would more be more accountable.
They would be the adults in the room.
But they're not. Yeah.
And and but then you have to wonder.
Maybe it's you. Know without, without inferring

(01:01:24):
too much or maybe maybe they're paid guns for hire, you know,
you know, maybe that's why they want to stay anonymous, because
I see stuff sometimes. If you look around, if you, if
you look at Wikipedia, I've looked at it years ago.
I don't know if it's still true.You used to be able to hire
Wikipedia editors on Fiverr and indeed and they would author,
you know, whatever needed to be submitted.
Now you could probably use AI now you could probably do it on

(01:01:45):
ChatGPT and get a better article.
But the point was you can hire them and they would craft an
article, they would submit it and then it would be approved or
not approved, whatever it was, and they would edit till it got
approved, you know. So the question is, are some of
those guys guns for hire? What are you, What are your
internal thoughts? Do you think that's true?
I think that considering that. Wikipedia itself has caught

(01:02:08):
many, many rank and file editorsin the act of paid editing.
Considering that one can prove that the the PR firms that are
editing Wikipedia are bringing in millions and millions of
dollars a year. Who knows how much it might be,

(01:02:29):
you know, in the hundreds of 1,000,000.
It's a it's a lot of money. This is this is what the people
who have looked into it. That's it.
Larry, we're going to form APR firm you.
Myself and George, we're going to start doing it.
We'll, we'll be raking it in, man.
Larry, is there any chance of you going?
Let's do it. Is there any chance of you going
back in there and cleaning Wikipedia up like what's what

(01:02:49):
I'm trying to do? I mean, that's that's the whole
point. I mean, you're like, OK, I'm
going to say it right. You're you're one of the.
You're the Co founder, right? So why can't you?
What's like are you not allowed?Oh, they don't like me there,
for one thing. Well, we don't like them, do
you? You got back up.
Where, where? Where are they based out?
Do they have offices? No, it doesn't matter where
their. Offices are, yeah.

(01:03:09):
Well, it does if we go there. We're talking about.
The offices of the Wikimedia Foundation and those would be in
San Francisco, but the, the, theWikimedia Foundation is not in
control of, or at least they saythey're not in control of what's
going on on Wikipedia. It's just like any sort of

(01:03:31):
journalistic enterprise, right? They're supposed to be this,
this wall between the the ownersand The Newsroom, right?
So in the same way, there is a big wall between the platform
owners of the Wikimedia Foundation on the one hand and
the just the the rank and file editors who are supposed to not

(01:03:57):
be paid. So if I were to have some
position at the Wikimedia Foundation, that wouldn't give
me any more authority over Wikipedia itself.
The only way that I could get any sort of official authority
over Wikipedia would be as if I were to be made into an

(01:04:21):
administrator. And then after I am an
administrator, they can add other sorts of of rights in the
system. Has anybody?
Has anybody ever hacked Wikipedia?
Hacked. Yeah.
Has it ever? Been hacked?
Not to my knowledge. Maybe it's about.

(01:04:41):
Maybe it's time that it does get.
Hacked. That's what we need.
We hack it. We write a.
Chat ChatGPT, we don't have anything.
I don't know what you're. Talking about No, no, no.
I'm. Just saying, here's my.
Here's my idea. You hack it, you write this.
Chat, chat, ChatGPT bot, and youhave it run.
Just set it loose. You block all other editors,
right? You block especially the top.

(01:05:02):
And then we just let the chat bot cut through and rewrite all
of Wikipedia into a neutral format.
That's it. Overnight.
The point is, it's not a an. Institutional secret that the
Wikimedia Foundation serves servers are are holding like the
identities of all the people they don't know they don't know
and and if you no, I mean. If you have the IPS and stuff,

(01:05:25):
you can find them. I can find them.
They they there is a role in theWikipedia system called the
check user is the people who canlook up the IP address, the
Internet Protocol address. OK, you can use that and and
that'll give you a clue, but it's only a clue and it isn't

(01:05:47):
going to, you know, disclose where the people are.
You know, that's not going to solve anything like doing what
you're talking about doxing. That's with no, I don't want to
dox anybody. No, I'm not looking to.
Dox anybody? I'm not calling.
You're already accused. No, he's looking for neutral
reporting is what Jordan hopes to dox everybody.

(01:06:09):
No, no, no, I don't. I don't.
First of all, I don't. I don't.
Believe in doxing Larry no. So what I would like to do is
get in there, blocked all those people from being able to enter
your information and go like Lance's route.
Make a ChatGPT bot and fix it all up.
Yeah, make it neutral. I don't want to dox any.
But here's the idea you. Had #7 you talk about?

(01:06:29):
Let the public rate the articles, Larry.
And that seems to be a great idea.
To me, that seems like an amazing opportunity because
people can say, oh, this articleis garbage, or I like it, or I
think it's accurate or I think it's completely inaccurate.
Yeah. Well, in order for that to
happen. Right.
There would have to be some means of adopting really radical

(01:06:52):
changes in the Wikipedia system,and I don't see that happening.
Like thesis #9 is adopt A legislative process.
Wikipedia lacks any method of major reform.
It needs something like a constitutional convention, which
it has never had. It has nothing remotely

(01:07:16):
resembling an editorial assembly.
It just doesn't exist. So it it at a certain level of
description, it, it, it remains a total anarchy, right.
So if you say, OK, let's just like en masse rewrite a bunch of

(01:07:37):
articles using AI, the, the rankand file editors would be up in
arms. They'd like read the same, OK,
we're going to fork. We're going to like make the,
the pure Wikipedia. And they're, you know, there's
always that sort of threat hanging over their heads.
Well, the the editor overlords, you know.
What and and I have to say, thisultimate power corrupts, right?

(01:07:59):
So the fact that these overlordscan go in there and, and, and a
whim, you know, take any, you know, article they want to take
and they can, they can modify itprobably very simply, you know,
and, and of course put any tilt they want on.
Nobody wants to give up that kind of power.
Cause Wikipedia is a tremendous amount of power.
Cause of course it's, you know, usually in the top of all the

(01:08:21):
search engines when you look, ifyou type something in, you want
information, Wikipedia being oneof the top one, it'll definitely
be on the front page, that's forsure.
So, yeah, I, you know, but it's,I guess, you know, is that what
the fear is? Are the overlogs so convinced
that they've got to, you know, keep the things?
Because my opinion is Wikipedia's in a tough moment in
their own way, not because of Grokapedia and not because of

(01:08:42):
competitors, because they're, they're, they're, they're losing
the plot right now. There's a, a massive amount of
change on the Internet, especially when it comes to AI.
Like George said, Google's got it.
The first thing, if you type something in and you want some
information about, you know, youknow, an echidna or some kind of
an animal, the first thing that comes up is Google's listing

(01:09:03):
about what they think an echidnais or what they think Bitcoin is
or whatever you're researching. So it would seem to me that if,
if Wikipedia wanted to stay at the forefront and, and if they
wanted to be the, the, you know,the entity they've always been,
that they have to embrace the change.
And I don't feel like they're doing that.
Do you? Absolutely not.

(01:09:24):
There's been a lot of resistanceto the use of AI.
There's been a lot of resistanceto reform generally, although I
will say that there have been there has been a lot of support
for my for my 9 theses. So maybe there is some hope.

(01:09:45):
I think there are a lot of people in Wikipedia who, who can
see the writing on the wall and that that you're describing.
And I know exactly what you're talking about.
Anybody, especially who's been using a lot of AI, who has
basically looked at Trump's, youknow, Trump's election really is

(01:10:10):
a, a turning point, a, a pivot point, along with, with the
change of ownership of, of X. Now, you know, Facebook and and,
and YouTube have to compete withXX, you know, for, for all of
its ongoing problems, is I thinka, a, a a little bit more open

(01:10:33):
and respectful of free speech that that pressures the other of
the big guys. And that that basically means
that basically the, the big techcorporations are realizing.
I think that the executives musthave realized if a few years

(01:10:55):
ago, perhaps even that they're no longer in control of the of
the narratives because people just aren't buying it.
They're going to vote with theirfeet.
They're going to they're going to object there.
There was a real wrenching time,you know, it is a, it's an
epiphany moment. Kind of it's a tipping point
because you're right, there is no doubt that of course, whether

(01:11:17):
it's alt media or whether it's, you know, Project Colossus, when
you start looking at the potential for information that
sits outside the scope in the, in the original, in the original
years, Wikipedia was that source, right?
They were kind of the rogue, right?
Because up until then it was a printed encyclopedia.
If you wanted it, you could search stuff, but there really
wasn't that source like what youcreated.

(01:11:39):
And I agree with you. I think, I think it is.
I think it is a tipping point. People are when I talk to people
and, and we, you know, we stay relatively neutral.
We've had liberals and conservatives on the show.
People are frustrated and frustration always causes change
because people want a solution. To me, I'd love to see Wikipedia
embrace, you know, embrace the suck, embrace the change and say

(01:12:03):
we're going to make this move. I don't want to run out of time
with you. And I want to make sure we talk
about this. So I'm going to switch gears a
little bit. You know, you as president of
the the Knowledge Standards Foundation, you, you know,
you're forging, I think alternatives like encyclosphere,
I mean, 69,000 books on a thumb drive.
I don't know if I have that right.
I hope I do. You know, you know, you know,

(01:12:23):
you see it. I can see in you that you
recognize that Wikipedia could be could turn into and I'm going
to use a, you know, kind of a a comparison that may not be fair,
but maybe is it the next Myspace?
Because even maybe what you're doing with encyclosphere is a
real competitor. Where do you think this is all
going looking ahead? You know, where where is this

(01:12:44):
all head right now? What's your what are your
thoughts? So.
To sort. To sum up, essentially I.
Think encyclopedias are going tocontinue to be needed because
the people who make it their business to, you know, research
and know things, the experts of the world are going to continue

(01:13:07):
to want to record the best of their knowledge in
encyclopedias. And even if those don't exist in
general encyclopedias like Wikipedia or Britannica, they're
still going to be a lot of subjects encyclopedias.
Now, you might say, what? Why am I talking about that?

(01:13:27):
Well, there's a reason those sorts of encyclopedia entries,
they represent the best of our research on various topics.
They, they are summaries. And what a general encyclopedia
will try to do is to give a, a simplified version of that sort

(01:13:53):
of take. So the Stanford Encyclopedia
philosophy is like the best in encyclopedia philosophy.
The people who are writing the philosophy articles for
Wikipedia will look at the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy
articles, right? But there's they serve as a kind
of reference. You see what I'm saying as as OK

(01:14:14):
now when it comes to AI, right? The AI does not generate
knowledge on its own. All it does is aggregate
knowledge in various not terribly creative ways.
Now it it, it aggregates it, andthe ways in which it aggregates
it are very new and interesting.It can draw inferences a lot of

(01:14:38):
a lot of times the inferences that it draws are, are crap.
Sometimes they're interesting, right?
But for the most part, it, you know, any interest drawing
itself is so complicated, it requires a human being to do it.
What is my point? My point is that we're always
going to need people summarizingthe best of our knowledge.
That's called an encyclopedia, and it is going to require a

(01:15:00):
human being to do it right. OK, so we're going to have to
keep writing encyclopedias even if the human beings aren't
directly consulting them. My guess is in 10 years people
will not be looking up things onWikipedia very much.
It will be asking AI interfaces,and the AI interfaces will be

(01:15:25):
quoting Wikipedia. Maybe, but if they're better,
they will be quoting Wikipedia'ssources or they'll be quoting
more reliable encyclopedias. Now as as far as the
encyclosphere goes, we, we're actually, we want to collect all
of the free encyclopedias online.

(01:15:47):
Ultimately we'd like to have allof the encyclopedias period, but
that's probably going to have tobe a for profit venture and we
are running a non profit ventureright now.
We've got over 60 of them and this can be used as a training
material for AI and I, I, we arenow actually looking for

(01:16:14):
funding. We've got some people who are
interested in in continuing to support our work, and it's not
cheap, unfortunately, that the sorts of things that you have to
do to aggregate all the world's encyclopedias in one place under
a single unified encyclopedia format, the ZWI.

(01:16:36):
That means zipped Wiki, the ZWI file format for putting all of
the encyclopedia articles in theworld in this format.
Wikipedia. We have to get you connected
with Elon Musk. I bet he'd be.
Excited about the thought of this.
I don't know whether it fits, but I could see what you're
recommending. I could see him having great
interest in that. You know what, I'm going to take

(01:16:57):
short form contact and when I. Put it on next.
I'm going to tag you, Larry. I'm going to tag him, too.
Let's see if we can get it done.Yeah, it'd be great to connect
the two of you because I think. That you could have maybe
Grocopedia could be the answer. I mean, maybe it could.
And maybe with what you're doingin an encyclosphere, maybe you
could find the funding with ElonMusk.
And my hope would be that you could create something

(01:17:18):
incredible, the new age of you know, what Wikipedia, what it
what was and what it should be moving forward.
So he he has actually been. Sharing the 9 theses he actually
he announced Grocopedia the day after the 9 theses came out.

(01:17:40):
Now I'm I was, I was not workingwith him and not only that, but
he, he made the announcement as a comment on a post about the
the sit down that I did with Tucker about the 9 theses.
So, so basically he, he and A and a lot of, let's just say a

(01:18:05):
lot of Grokopedia fans, whether human or otherwise, have piled
on my threads about the 9 thesespromoting Grokopedia.
So I think we're we're on Elon'sradar or yeah.
And that could be amazing. I think that could be amazing.

(01:18:27):
I mean. Assuming you're, you would be
excited about that and and he hehas said.
That Grocopedia itself is going to be open source and and you
know, I have tweeted to him and I think he's aware that we are
going to make ZWI files out of the Grocopedia articles and add
it to the encyclosphere. So I mean, which is great

(01:18:49):
because then there's the whole thing is going to be incredible
synergy there, that's for sure. I can see an amazing.
Amazing, amazing future for a cyclosphere.
I'd love to see that connection.I don't know.
Well, George, like he said, he'll do some short form.
We'll try to make it happen. I know some people that are
friendly with Elon. Maybe I can give that a little
nudge behind the scenes for you.Because of course, what an what

(01:19:09):
an incredible source of capital.It would allow you to have the
power to do exactly what you want and you wouldn't be you
wouldn't be worried about the editor overlords, you know, any
longer. You know what, hold on.
I got a question because you brought up capital and you.
Said Wikipedia has an endowment.How come sometimes then when I
when I go into Wikipedia to havetheir looking for money like
donations or whatever? Well.

(01:19:33):
What they will tell you, especially what what Jimbo said
for many years, is that most of their fund funding comes from
small donors, like people givingfrom one to 10 or $20.
Is that true? I don't think that's true
anymore. I I.
I'm not. Sure, though.
So I, I, I can't say for sure, but I, I can say that they do

(01:19:59):
receive a lot of institutional funds at this point.
They have received a lot of money from Google.
Got you. And yeah, no surprise there with
Google. They love to.
Control the media, that's for sure.
That's that's all about the controlled, very powerful group.

(01:20:20):
Well, listen, Larry. I know we're out of time today,
but before we cut, we break off here, you know, I call this the
shameless plug. Let's mention your social media,
let's mention any of your websites, anything that people
can do to support you. Maybe the people that watch the
show that would be interested ingetting involved and helping you
fund some of this stuff. Give it the give it the go, man.
The shameless plug. Go for it.

(01:20:40):
All right? I'm at Larry.
Sanger.org, that's my well, other people have a sub stack.
I've got an old fashioned blog. I own it, damn it.
And if you go to the front page of larrysanger.org, then at the
top there is the 9 theses. I encourage you to read that and

(01:21:02):
follow up on it. If you've got a Wikipedia
article, what I want you to do is to go to Wikipedia, and
especially if you have been leftout just for the next couple of
months, I want you to get involved and and let them sweat
a little bit. Show our numbers there.
I think there are not that many people at work on Wikipedia any

(01:21:26):
given month. If we simply get a few 100
people, we can actually change the way that it works.
So this is a hypothesis of mine and I'm testing it.
So that's why I'm taking taking the time to tell people to do
that on XI am L Sanger and I'm I'm also a a an advisor to bit

(01:21:49):
shoot. It's OK.
It's a Rumble competitor, but wewere there before Rumble, so.
OK, yeah. And it's.
Yeah, yeah. And, and so I, I post my videos
there first when I do post videos.
And yeah, I guess that'll probably do it.
Well, we appreciate. First of all, thank you so very.

(01:22:10):
Much for taking the time out of your life to share it with our
audience. We appreciate we're going to
make short form and long form. If you want the notifications
follow, follow us back and you'll see when we're posting
and putting up the short form content.
Feel free if you want to scrape this interview and use it on
your own platforms or anything you want to do.
We want you to do that. Take it, share it foreign wide
George can put it in a drop box for you or anything else if

(01:22:33):
you'd like to use it. So we really appreciate you and
for anybody out in the audience,really take the live link,
repost this interview. Great stuff.
Maybe dump it into Elon Musk feed over on X.
Let's give him a little nudge nudge.
Maybe we can make something happen here for Larry.
I'd like to see a neutral editorial, new version of
Wikipedia. Maybe it is Grokapedia.

(01:22:54):
I don't know. At the end of the day, if you
like the show, don't forget the thumbs up, share, comment,
subscribe. If you can do the paid
subscription, it's 5 bucks a month.
It's nothing if you can do Rumble Premium.
Listen, these guys are the true free speech platform.
We've been here. They take care of us.
You can find us here on Rumble and locals.
And of course, don't forget to follow L Sanger, G Valentine,

(01:23:15):
Lance from the outer and the bigbig show on X.
You can also find us on Gab Getter Pickaxe, true social.
You can follow us over there also.
So George last words. My brother just thought us out
if the people if the people on Wikipedia see this show.
They're going to put a negative article about me.
Look, he wants a hack Wikipedia.Well, exactly I.

(01:23:37):
Wouldn't put nothing negative about me, I'm just saying.
But anyway. Yeah, it's Friday.
Have a good weekend. I got.
Friends, Larry. Trust me.
All right. Have a good.
Have a good weekend, stay blessed.
Stay healthy. I might have.
I might. I might have.
I might. Have I might I might have to let
it see it. Got it.

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