Larry Sanger - Wikipedia Is Broken and No One Wants to Admit It

Summary

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London Real Podcast: “Larry Sanger – Wikipedia Is Broken and No One Wants to Admit It”

Host: Brian Rose
Guest: Dr. Larry Sanger (Co-founder of Wikipedia, Philosopher)
Date: February 24, 2026

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Overview

In this extensive and candid conversation, London Real host Brian Rose sits down with Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and prominent critic of the platform, for an unvarnished examination of how Wikipedia—once hailed as the world's knowledge commons—has, in Sanger’s view, become ideologically compromised, vulnerable to both institutional capture and manipulation by hidden interests. The conversation spans Sanger’s regret about some unintended consequences of Wikipedia, the wider collapse of trust in media and information gatekeepers, the escalating role of AI and large language models (LLMs) in knowledge mediation, ideas for restoring neutrality and transparency in encyclopedic knowledge, and ultimately Sanger’s philosophical and spiritual journey.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Wikipedia’s Drift from Neutrality

• Personal Regret and Repentance
  • Sanger expresses regret for the platform’s current state:

    “Personally sorry for what you've gone through because of Wikipedia. I'm sorry to have unleashed this on the world. I did not intend for this to be an engine of libel as it has become.” (00:01)

• Weaponization and Lack of Recourse
  • Wikipedia’s anonymous editors make it difficult to address libel or misinformation.

    “You can't sue them because we don't know who they are.” (00:24)

  • Many high-profile individuals and organizations have had to pay for reputation management on Wikipedia, cementing its role in the culture wars and information battles.

2. Institutional Capture and Censorship

• Media’s Shift and Wikipedia’s Mirroring Behavior
  • Sanger tracks the transition from a "media monoculture" in the 1980s to today’s fragmented, opinion-driven, and often polarized environment. Wikipedia’s own source policies reflect this evolution, explicitly color-coding and blacklisting certain sources for ideological reasons.

    “The liberal center left sources could be used... basically all conservative sources... were all essentially blocked from being used.” (17:31)

  • The “Perennial Sources” page on Wikipedia categorizes and allows or bars sources, amplifying systemic bias.
• Spycraft, PR Firms, and Narrative Control
  • Sanger discusses the engagement of intelligence agencies and PR professionals in editing Wikipedia, suggesting institutional manipulation is real, if not always overt:

    “Spycraft... means using whatever tools are at our disposal to affect public opinion... If that's the case, why wouldn't they be spending time on Wikipedia?” (34:52)

3. The Role of AI and LLMs in Information Mediation

• LLMs as the New Gatekeepers
  • Discussion about platforms like ChatGPT and Grok, which frequently pull from Wikipedia, amplifying the reach of its biases and limitations.
• Experiment with Grok/Wikipedia Neutrality
  • Sanger conducted an experiment feeding politically loaded topics from both platforms to ChatGPT (blind to source); he found Grok articles to be measurably more neutral than Wikipedia on average.

    “On average, the Grokopedia articles were considerably more neutral than the Wikipedia articles... especially on political hot button topics.” (25:13)

4. Larry Sanger’s Nine Theses for Reform

• Enable Competing Articles
  • Let users easily publish alternative versions on controversial topics so that Wikipedia reflects multiple frameworks (e.g., “globalist, academic, secular, progressive”—GASP vs. other viewpoints).
• End Source Blacklists
  • All credible sources, including those perceived as "conservative" or anti-establishment, should be attributed and allowed:

    “Abolish source blacklists... go back to former practices of allowing a wide variety of sources and letting people make up their own minds.” (52:29)

• Revive True Neutrality
  • Shift from pretending at objectivity to true neutrality:

    “Neutrality is the strategy of acknowledging that people are ultimately going to carve up reality for themselves in different ways, and we ought not to impose our views.” (52:40)

• Reveal Wikipedia’s Leadership
  • Require real-name accountability for key administrators and arbitrators, as most remain anonymous:

    “Of those 62 [admins], 85% are anonymous... you would think they’d take personal responsibility...” (56:23)

• Open Article Feedback to General Public
  • Allow public ratings and peer review, as with most modern platforms.
• Adopt a Legislative/Editorial Assembly
  • Establish a clear editorial process or governing body to manage and legitimize reforms.

Notable Excerpt – Sanger on Editorial Reform:

“All I’m proposing is that there be an editorial assembly... that would actually have the authority to make needed changes to Wikipedia. So why not?” (61:38)

5. Wikipedia, Law, and Liability

• Section 230 Shield and Its Consequences
  • Sanger emphasizes how Section 230 shields Wikimedia from defamation suits, perpetuating cycles of “engineered” libel. Legislative amending of 230 could create new accountability structures (64:09).

6. Decentralization, Blockchain, and the Encyclosphere

• Failures of Pseudo-Decentralization
  • Sanger draws a distinction between true decentralization and what is often advertised in blockchain projects:

    “Most blockchain companies are not decentralized in any meaningful way... actual activity is going on [in] their servers.” (70:48)

• The Encyclosphere Vision
  • Sanger proposes a “blogosphere for encyclopedias”: aggregating, archiving, and federating knowledge from across free encyclopedias to form a commons that resists central manipulation.

7. Personal & Philosophical Journey

• Sanger’s Path from Skepticism to Christianity
  • In a moving closing segment, Sanger recounts how his dedication to truth transitioned from radical skepticism to Christian faith, influenced by a combination of philosophical reflection, the birth of his children, exploration of metaphysical arguments, and his reading of the entire Bible in 2020:

    “One by one, the various reasons to disbelieve fell by the wayside... by the time I had gotten through [the Bible]... I believed that God exists.” (81:21-92:00)

  • His forthcoming book (“God Exists”) lays out these philosophical and personal arguments.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• Sanger on Wikipedia’s Corruption:

  “I'm sorry to have sort of unleashed this on the world. I did not intend... for this to be an engine of libel as it has become.” (00:01)

• Influence of Wikipedia:

  “Wikipedia is considerably more influential than any other single media source. More influential than the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Times, the BBC...” (18:31)

• On Source Blacklisting:

  “Basically Wikipedia went from being an attempt to represent the broad landscape of opinion... to being a mouthpiece for the establishment.” (17:31)

• On Community Notes (Twitter/X):

  “...when somebody submits a community note for evaluation, if the opinion is divided... it’s ignored. But if people who have traditionally voted against each other agree... then it's promoted... It works well.” (31:46)

• On true decentralization:

  “The idea of decentralization is great because it implies freedom... But most blockchain companies are not decentralized in any meaningful way.” (70:48)

• On returning to religion:

  “I believed that God exists. I rethought all the traditional arguments for the existence of God... The whole can serve as an argument to the best explanation.” (81:21–92:00)

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• Wikipedia’s slide into bias, capture, and manipulation: 00:01–20:58
• AI, LLMs, and the echo of Wikipedia’s content in new platforms: 19:18–25:13
• Grokopedia vs. Wikipedia neutrality experiment: 25:13–30:52
• Wikipedia reform: The Nine Theses explained: 47:26–61:38
• Decentralization, blockchain, and the "Encyclosphere": 70:48–77:32
• Sanger’s spiritual and philosophical journey: 81:21–97:33
• Reflection on meaning, culture, and society’s “God-shaped hole”: 97:33–101:55

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Closing Thoughts

Brian Rose and Larry Sanger agree that knowledge is increasingly at the front lines of the battle for human liberty and informed citizenship. As AI and search further centralize our digital realities, the pressure is on to create new, transparent, and genuinely pluralistic systems of organizing knowledge. Sanger remains a radical advocate for decentralization, technical and epistemic humility, and the irreducible value of both human creativity and spiritual meaning.

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Additional Resources

• Larry Sanger’s Blog and Book Project: larrysanger.org
• Knowledge Standards Foundation & the Encyclosphere: encyclosphere.org
• Follow Larry on X/Twitter: @lsanger

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“The solution to bad information is always more information, never less information.” – Brian Rose (93:54)

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Transcript

[Larry Sanger]

Personally sorry for what you've gone through because of Wikipedia. I'm sorry to have unleashed this on the world. I did not intend for this to be an engine of libel as it has become.

[Brian Rose]

We were being ripped apart on Wikipedia.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

I just couldn't believe it because I think we all just assumed it was this transparent, trusted source of information equal to the truth.

[Larry Sanger]

There's a fair number of accounts that will libel you mercilessly with no recourse. You can't sue them because we don't know who they are.

[Brian Rose]

When Covid happened and lockdown happened, we

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

were one of the few channels that started asking hard questions. We had the second largest YouTube live stream in the world and that episode was banned and deleted 10 minutes after we finished it.

[Larry Sanger]

Spy agencies are very much engaged in shaping public opinion in one way or another. It was shocking. We didn't think that there would be a censorship regime and Wikipedia was definitely part of that.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

The Twitter files, which were pretty much ignored completely by mainstream media. It was pretty shocking what they found. Now when we go look back, we realize that they were getting those directives from government.

[Larry Sanger]

When the government gets in the business of massaging what the people shall believe, that's very disturbing to me.

[Brian Rose]

How we can turn Wikipedia around.

[Larry Sanger]

All I'm proposing is that there be an editorial assembly to make needed changes to Wikipedia. Neutrality is acknowledging that people are ultimately going to end up carving up reality for themselves and we ought not to impose our views on others.

[Brian Rose]

Hi, it's Brian Rose from London Real. You probably know that we've just recently been replatformed on YouTube after 25 months completely in the dark. The truth is, I really need your help. What I really need you to do is click on that subscribe button right now, like this video, and maybe even leave a comment or share the link with friends. We're really fighting against an algorithm that's tried to keep us quiet for so long. And the more subscribers we have, the more people watch our content, the better guests. We can bring you the better content and we can continue transforming lives. We've been doing this for 14 years now. I want to do this for another 14 years, but I really need your help. So click on that subscribe button. Like the video, leave a comment, share this, and we're going to continue to bring you more and more great content.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Thank you. This is London Real.

[Larry Sanger]

I am Brian Rose.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

My guest today is Larry Sanger, the philosopher, Internet pioneer and co founder of Wikipedia. You helped build one of the most influential knowledge platforms in human history, shaping how Billions of people access information every day. But you also became one of the earliest and most outspoken critics, warning that neutrality, truth and open inquiry were being replaced by ideology, narrative enforcement, and institutional capture. Since leaving Wikipedia, you have focused on philosophy, free speech, decentralized knowledge systems, and the deeper question of whether truth itself can survive in a digital world dominated by power and incentives and artificial intelligence. Today, I want to explore how knowledge became politicized, why trust in institutions collapsed, how AI is accelerating epistemic failure, and what must be built next if society wants reliable information. Again, Larry, welcome to London Real.

[Larry Sanger]

Thanks for having me. Let's get into it. This sounds fun.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Yeah, let's jump into this. So, you know, in 2011, I walked away from my job as a banker in London, and based on my inspiration of Joe Rogan, who at the time wasn't even on YouTube, I mean, very few people knew about Joe. I was into my fighting and mixed martial arts, so I knew him as the commentator of the ufc, but I was watching his podcast when he was literally on a sofa with his friends on ustream. It was so low tech, it wasn't even funny. Larry and I decided to start my own Joe Rogan in London. And we called it London Real because I always thought London was a tremendous brand name and I thought I would just grab it. And you know, this was an 11. And I still remember getting our first Twitter account. And again, you know, social media is still new ish. You know, Instagram didn't exist back then. Facebook, it didn't even have like a business page. You had to kind of co opt a personal page. And you know, it was still the early days and you know, it was something we kind of grew up with the Internet, we kind of grew up with this publishing. And I remember in the early days, you know, just being recognized by something like Wikipedia would have been just a tremendous honor and a sign that we were now relevant, you know, as a show. And of course, being recognized by mainstream media was something we kind of always wanted as well. And so Fast forward to 2014, 2017, 2020, when Covid happened and lockdown happened, we were one of the few channels that started asking hard questions and having guests on that started going against the mainstream narrative. And famously, on April 6, 2020, we had the second largest YouTube live stream in the world, second only to Trump's coronavirus briefing that day from D.C. and that episode was banned and deleted 10 minutes after we finished it. And I had gone nine years, Larry never had a single episode taken down from YouTube. We were in their partner program. I would go down to the studio, they would take us to lunch and we started an all out war. And it wasn't just YouTube, it was systematically Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, everybody was taking us down. And then soon I realized that we were being ripped apart on Wikipedia. And I just couldn't believe it because I think we all just assumed it was this transparent trusted source of information equal to the truth, you know. And I started finding out firsthand how it wasn't. And Larry, I would tell people how it wasn't and they thought I was crazy. You know, they're like, oh, you're just a conspiracy theorist. I'd be like no, no, no. There's people on there that have it out for me that, that are, that won't allow me to change things or even update what I think are facts. And so I'm really curious what you make of, of our experience there. Just feeling that. And it started right around 2020. I will say that I may or may not confirm that I ended up having to pay someone just to hold my wiki status quo Larry. So to be as less libelous and slanderous as possible, we couldn't change it. But this guy was a vigilant there just to make sure it couldn't get worse. And I, I've had to live with that for the last few years. So that's been my experience. I'm curious, what's your take on that and many other stories like it?

[Larry Sanger]

I've. Well, your story is fairly typical. I've heard a lot of such stories. Peter Schiff actually reached out a couple of months ago and said that his story of being investigated by the government and then entire entirely exonerated was not properly told by Wikipedia. The, the fact that you're bad mouthed and well, I'm not really sure how you are badmouthed exactly by Wikipedia is, is certainly par for the course if you challenge the narrative generally speaking in, in fact there are podcasts I suppose that can be used as sources on Wikipedia. Not very. I'm sure that London Real is not one of them if it's even on the perennial sources page. That would actually be a, a win for you if you could actually be cited as a source. And you know that would be something to have your, your guy look at. It is absolutely true that people who can afford it will pay and, and have maintained their pages. But you know, PR firms that specialize in working on Wikipedia and it's required essentially otherwise they will absolutely take you apart and, and libel you Mercilessly, with no recourse. Part of the problem here is that you're dealing with anonymous people. You can't sue them because you don't know who they are. And you can't sue the Wikimedia foundation, which is the owner of the platform, because of Section 230 protections. So, yes, I, I'll tell you what I've told many people before. I'm personally sorry for what you've gone through. I'm sorry to have sort of unleashed this on the world. I did not intend to, for this to be a, an engine of, of libel as it has become. It's a real shame, I think, you

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

know, you've been been quoted as saying that, you know, when you, when you started Wikipedia, you also like to remind people that the media landscape was also very different then, when a lot of people today would not, it would openly say, I can't even believe the New York Times. Nobody was really saying that in 2010, were they? And that, and that changed. I think you were, you said to Tucker Carlson, that kind of changed overnight at some point. And then you saw Wiki kind of change with it. I wonder if you could speak on that because, you know, it's not entirely your fault.

[Larry Sanger]

I would say definitely not. Well, actually, I think that the history of the media landscape is really fascinating. And this is the sort of thing where we can, if you're old enough, you can just think back about how it has changed. If you've been reading enough news since, or watching news since the 1980s or 90s, then you've actually seen it unfold. So in the 1980s, in the early 80s in the United States, it was the, the, the news was entirely dominated by the big three, plus PBS and npr. And that, that was where you got your news from. They presented a unified front. It was like a media monoculture. And then along came Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, which upset a lot of people, of course. And then soon after that with the, the Internet, when, when the Internet became, well, widely used enough, it actually made this started making a difference to the media landscape so that in the 2000s, you started to see things like World Net Daily and, well, any number of other news sources. Epoch Times got a start around then, I suppose, and, and, and of course, Joe Rogan and others. And then they just kept building and building. Now, as, as we know, msnbc, fairly early on, I don't know even know if it was launched as a sort of opinion news. I don't think it was in the earliest days I think it pivoted to something more like the Fox News model. And for a good decade or more, it was just Fox News and MSNBC that were essentially purveyors of opinion masquerading as news. And then about 2013, 2014, there were a number of high profile panels at the UN and other international organizations that began loudly decrying the rise of misinformation. And this made a big difference. People, I think, don't realize just how enormous that was as a sort of watershed moment of how our society really changed. Because after that it became like overnight, okay, to attack free speech as such. You know, I remember just being shocked at my erstwhile liberal friends mocking free free speech as freeze peach right back 10 years ago or so, and again overnight, basically in, in the days of Brexit and Trump's first election, all of the media began to be just as opinionated as Fox News and msnbc. It was really shocking to a lot of us, of course, and I suppose the youngest adults out there today don't even remember a time when, when most of the media was actually making an attempt to be more traditionally unbiased, I guess, even if they weren't succeeding very well. And so now we get to the point. In 2017, I believe it was maybe 2018, on Wikipedia, a page was started called the Perennial Sources page. And it was a list of various media sources of various kinds. So not just broadcast news and newspapers, but all kinds of blogs and non profit organizations and think tanks and whatnot. They were all listed there as major sources and they were color coded. The ones that were color coded, green could be used without attribution, except in footnotes. So the things that they said could be repeated in Wikipedia's own voice, even if they were quite biased. Right. Things that were in yellow generally were discouraged. It's like yellow means caution. And it. And basically those things, you certainly had to attribute any alleged facts to those sources. And then there were two or three other gradations of credibility. On the Perennial Sources page there was red and gray. And if something is red, basically it's a no go. You're not allowed to use those sources, except perhaps to characterize what the source information about the source itself. So you could use the source as a source of information about itself and then the grade sources that would include things like Breitbart and any number of others. This is not to slam Breitbart. They couldn't be used even as a source for themselves. They were in the software. It's impossible to link that the software will stop you from linking to those sources. So what happened as a result of this effort to organize the Wikipedians opinions about how different sources could be used? It quickly became obvious that, that the liberal center left sources could be used or progressive sources generally speaking, unless they were extremely radical and anti establishment and basically all conservative sources between again 2017 or so, and I don't know, maybe 2021 they were, they were all essentially blocked from being used. And the only ones that, that are called conservative are ones that are very much establishment conservative. So we're talking about the Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph and beyond that, very little. And that's, that's essentially what has happened. Basically. Wikipedia went from being a, an attempt to represent the broad landscape of opinion on every subject to being a mouthpiece for the establishment.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Yeah. All the while without people realizing it was happening. And all the while being pretty much the number one search rank on Google and arguably 10 times, I don't know, maybe more. I'm curious what you think the number is more relevant, more important, more effective at changing public opinion than any other news organization in the world?

[Larry Sanger]

Yes, certainly it gets a lot more traffic than any other newspaper and people do spend quite a bit of time. I think people get more into the weeds reading articles for, you know, the New York Times or whatever perhaps. But no, people do the same on, on Wikipedia as well. I haven't, I'm not aware of any studies of impact or anything like that, but I think it is safe to say that Wikipedia is considerably more influential than any other single media source. More influential than the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Times, the BBC, you know, and so forth.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Yeah, I mean I remember obviously Google, when, if you ever put your name, your organization in Wikipedia would almost always be in the top three. And then recently, maybe a few years ago, before the AI came in, Google would usually do a quick summary in that right upper right hand column and that was almost always best based on Wikipedia. And then of course now we've got the Aima models and their first go to or the go to that's been around the longest is again that Wikipedia. Larry. I remember I was on a call with like about a hundred really high level influencers and ultra wealthy people and Alex Jones came up because he had just interviewed me and one of the guys said oh, Alex Jones, I just chat GPT him and this is what they said.

[Brian Rose]

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[Interviewer / London Real Host]

And I looked at him in front of all these people and I said, are you serious? Are you literally just going to trust what ChatGPT tells you? That's what you think about the world. You don't realize there's so much more going on. These were supposedly intelligent people, wealthy people, that that's where they were getting their information from, Larry, from, you know, the ChatGPT, maybe the Gemini, which is probably taking a chunk of it from the wiki, which again was co opted. And so I was just surprised that people didn't know what they didn't know.

[Larry Sanger]

Right. I mean we have to practice digital hygiene. I mean this is something that we should be teaching to our, our children routinely. And perhaps there's a slightly older generation that, that developed their instincts about how to consume media back in the days of the big three and, and just expecting there to be some source that they can consume, learn what the truth is and then just believe it. And unfortunately it doesn't work that way anymore. We actually have to concern, we have to consume more sources of a wider variety. I think if, if we want to be reasonably confident of any conclusion and when it comes to, you know, our, our opinions of the sources themselves, like Alex Jones, then of course, yes, we should, we should consume them a little bit and form our own opinions. Yeah, I was, I was interviewed by Alex Jones a couple of months ago and I was surprised that he, he was first of all a good interviewer and, and second of all he, apart from a few obligatory nods to the conspiracy outlook, nevertheless it was I think an informative, interesting interview.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

So yeah, yeah, it's, and look, I know I'm biased, every human is biased. But then I also know when I try to look at something objectively, I'm like, look, Alex is a lot of things, he's got some crazy ideas, but also if you look at his track record, he's also got a quite a pretty good record of predicting things that, you know, what happened many years before or calling things out before they ever happened. And I, I just don't think he ever Gets a fair shake on those kind of woke or left leaning places like Wiki and some of the others. So yeah, I'm kind of look that fairness, you know, look, I know you have some thoughts on how we can turn Wikipedia around and I really want to get into that, but I was literally yesterday, Larry, talking with my, my, my 22 year old daughter who's going to school in Boston and she was over here visiting me and I Wikipedia came up, I'm not exactly sure how, and I brought up the Grokipedia. Now of course I'm a little biased, okay, because I've been censored and I guess I am probably right leaning and I'm definitely freedom of speech leaning and I'm suspicious of kind of a lot of the things that happened, especially the censorship on the Internet, etc. And so I said, well, Garcipedia, it's AI based, you know, it's, it's clearly neutral, which I know objectively that's not true either. And my daughter, who's, you know, look, she goes to a, an institution of higher learning in America. So you know, it's, it's filled with probably left leaning views. You know, she went off on Elon Musk on one and I'm just trying to listen a little bit more than anything. And so I'm curious, what do you think of a Rockopedia? And I think you put out an article on that, which I kind of read through and then what do you think of also the concept of that where people are kind of trusting an AI to tell them the truth. This kind of goes back to my opening, you know, is truth possible in a digital information age?

[Larry Sanger]

So I'm kind of impressed by Wikipedia. Should watch out. It's still early days. We don't know what LLMs can do. Ultimately through iteration and just iteration of the current crop of LLM technology might be enough to make a, an encyclopedia that is better than Wikipedia. But let me get into some of the details. So when I looked at the article about myself, a subject that I know quite a bit about more than the Grokopedia or Wikipedia, I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of facts that were not even in Wikipedia that had been essentially left out. So Grokopedia is not just a copy of Wikipedia. They may follow the structure of articles, that's something that a lot of people have observed, but the fact that they are open to using a wider variety of sources makes a big difference. On the other hand, being an LLM Grokopedia draws Inferences which it, it really shouldn't. So because there is in, in an LLM, you know, artificial intelligence mind, a connection between science and a religious unbelief. Apparently the fact that my father was a marine biologist was taken as the explanation of why I ended up being an agnostic for most of my life. Well, it's true that I ended up an agnostic for most of my life and it's also true that my father is a marine biologist. But Grokopedia, or the, the engine that generated the article falsely, wrongly inferred that the one thing caused the other when they really had nothing to do with each other. And so it's interesting, a really interesting problem to figure out how to get rid of such bad inferences. There's a lot of problems right now. It is still early days. Didn't even go through the article enough times to catch all of the repetition. There was like three different introductions to my PhD dissertation in the article, just for example. So I've looked at a number of other articles and that seems to be par for the course. The articles on Grokopedia are as well written as could be expected from an LLM. So they have a slightly predictable, slightly turgid, long winded style. It's readable enough, but you wouldn't want to read through the whole thing. It would be quite a chore. But then that's also true of Wikipedia, so it's not really doing worse than Wikipedia in that respect. But I, I will say this. You know, they've grown already by their own account. I don't know if it's really true, from 800,000 articles to 1.8 million articles, which I can tell you is quite a, an achievement. Obviously they've, they've put some very talented people to work on the project. So you know, given Elon Musk's track record, it's, it's not surprising at all. There's one other thing that I wanted to say about Grokopedia and that is that I took the introductory sections of articles on 10 different topics and I on, on from Wikipedia and Grokopedia and I fed them both to ChatGPT, a neutral third party and I had chat GPT rate the, the bias of the two different articles not telling the. The. I did some massage to make sure that it couldn't say which was which. In fact, I didn't even say that it was from Grokopedia and Wikipedia. Okay. On average the, the bottom line is the Grokipedia articles were considerably more neutral than the Wikipedia articles. Now these are political hot button topics where the Wikipedia articles are all very much biased. And Grokopedia in a couple of cases took the opposite tack essentially and was biased in the opposite direction, but for the most part it was simply less biased. And perhaps we should talk a little bit about the very idea of neutrality versus objectivity. That's something that's a hobby horse of mine that I like to talk about, is actually relevant today, I think.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Yeah, let's talk about that. Just to finish up with the X platform. I was really curious what you thought, Larry, of the Community Notes on X. You know, and this is something that, that Elon believed I, I thought was maybe the solution to moderation, which I, I think obviously is one of the biggest problems on Wikipedia and many other places. You could argue, you know, the editors of the New York Times have the same problems. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the theory of Community Notes is that you allow the, the opposition to your point of view to correct errors on both sides. I don't even know exactly how that's done, but I believe it's done that way as a way to show how neutral that is. I'm curious what you think of it and what you know about it and if you actually seen that proof and then I'd love to hear your thoughts on neutrality.

[Larry Sanger]

I, I can't prove that it's successful. I can give you my opinion that it, it is pretty successful. So the way it work understanding is anyway that when somebody submits a, a community note for evaluation, then if, if the opinion is, is divided, generally speaking on, on partisan lines, then it's just ignored. But if people who have traditionally voted against each other in similar disputes, I don't know how that's ascertained, but they agree on this case, then it's promoted and shown to the general public. So I actually am in the Community Notes program, so I have some insight into how it's working on the back end. And people submit a lot of different competing community notes on hot button topics. And you know, it's, to my mind it works well simply because a lot of times there is an objective fact that has been left out of somebody's X post tweet. And it's possible for large numbers of people to acknowledge that. Yes, indeed. You know, there is this study or there is this news report or there is this statement by the person concerned that throws light on, on the situation.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

It's helpful. It is very, sometimes almost like a blatant piece of misinformation that might go. Go by in kind of the maelstrom of posts. All of a sudden it's like, no, that video was not a drone attack on children. That was from a science fiction movie. Or, you know, it'll just come out and say, no, actually that footage is of Maduro 12 months ago, not 12 minutes ago. And then it's just a nice piece sometimes where you're like, oh, oh, oh. And in that sense, I think it's quite helpful, I guess maybe that ultimately could be game too, because I know when you set up Wikipedia, you know, this concept of, you know, moderators, you know, it's, it's, it's a bit like communism. It works great in theory, but in practice it always doesn't work. So it just. Real quickly, before you go to neutrality, you mentioned various actors, and I was wondering if you could talk about, you know, your thoughts that there are many, many actors on Wikipedia, from intelligence agencies globally to PR firms to all sorts of other people with agendas that spend a large portion of their time editing posts on Wikipedia, which I would argue, Larry, your average American would not ever believe that's happening.

[Larry Sanger]

Perhaps not, but we are told, right, and we have some evidence of this happening. Right. And, and so I don't, I don't claim that Wikipedia is controlled by the CIA. CIA? No, I, I don't claim that. I've never claimed that. I don't know to what extent it might be true. All I'm saying is we are told that spycraft has changed in the last generation, that previously it, it involved collecting information about the enemy and, and perhaps a little bit of propaganda on the edges through things like, I don't know, Voice of America or whatever. But now we are told that spycraft to a very great extent means using whatever tools are at our disposal to affect public opinion in the interests of national. The national interest. Right. And that means then that it, and it has been established historically that spy agencies, and I don't just mean American ones either, are very much engaged in the business of shaping public opinion in one way or another. Right. If that's the case, why wouldn't they be spending time on Wikipedia? Why wouldn't they cultivate relationships with the most effective players, even hire them now? So I think some of that has to be happening. And in fact, one of the former CEOs of Wikipedia is on the record essentially saying that she has engaged in conversations with government agents and surrounding the COVID stuff, basically. So they tried to coordinate, she admitted, what sort of information would be shared on Wikipedia so that it was in line. The, the implication was so that it would be in line with government dictates. Now that's very disturbing to me as a libertarian free speech kind of person. When the government gets in the business of massaging what the people shall believe, that is a problem. The, the extent to which it is actually going on on Wikipedia, we don't know. We do know that there is, it's a fairly big business that, you know, PR firms are doing like what you have done, paying people to massage your reputation on Wikipedia. You wish you didn't have to do so. But the fact that apparently if you can afford it, you do have to do so in lieu of being able to sue someone, which you ought to be able to do, but can't. Well, that, that means that other entities, including government and corporate entities, can use the same sort of PR tactics. And again, surely do. They wouldn't be doing their job as PR people, would they? Of course not.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Yeah. And it's, it's probably great roi, whether you're a PR person or whether you're an intelligence agency. You know, why send 100 agents in the field when you can get 10 people online changing narratives? It just makes sense. And yeah, look, just to, to kind of finish out what happened to us in 2020, you know, obviously, Elon famously bought Twitter. And I remember one of my favorite quotes, he said, I didn't buy a company, I bought a crime scene. And then, you know, he, he put out, you know, the Twitter files, which were pretty much ignored completely by mainstream media. And a lot of people actually never even read that stuff. But of course we were up on it because we had felt, you know, that, that censorship. And it was pretty shocking what they found. You know, direct requests from actually many, many levels of government. I don't even know how they could keep their heads together there in San Francisco. When you've got, you know, multiple different parts of the government asking you to take this down, to quiet this person, to do this, do that. And I always used to joke, I can't wait for the YouTube files because we were actually deplatformed from YouTube.

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[Interviewer / London Real Host]

After having a lot of open arguments with them in 2020, funny enough, it was actually the BBC that put pressure on YouTube to take our videos down. And so there's all sorts of weird actors and then we systematically were taken down, Larry. Like I said, it was Dropbox, PayPal, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube pretty much in the same week. And honestly I wouldn't allow myself to think that there could ever be a single actor because I'm not some crazy conspiracy guy. That's Alex phones, right? So I, I honestly wouldn't even allow myself to think that. And I was angry, I was pointing fingers at the, the platforms themselves. But now when we go look back, we realize that they were getting those directives from government and now Facebook said that Google's now said that YouTube settled with Trump and we got replatformed almost three months ago and we had 2.2 million subscribers, half a billion views, a 14 year history, 14, 000 videos. We were not small potatoes. And now we're back. And now Larry, I posted every single piece of content that in 2020 and 2021 got removed. Got me strikes. I even made a movie called we will not be silenced about what YouTube did to us that is now on YouTube and they that they haven't said anything. And so it's just incredible for me to watch what can happen also from one regime to another. And the truth is I've said this to people that are on the left and I said, look, if Trump wasn't elected, we wouldn't have our channel back and a lot of these things wouldn't be happening. And I guess that also goes to show us. I had someone on the left say, well that goes to show you that we have to make sure these tech companies aren't monopolies. And I was like, well, that's another way of looking at it too. So anyways, just interesting to see what happened there. I guess we'll never know how much they pressured Wikipedia, but also then since there's the moderators in there, you'll never know what was also going on on that level.

[Larry Sanger]

Yeah, I remember those days and being shocked at, yes, there's the full court press against various players. You know, yes, it was, it was shocking. We didn't think in 2013 and all the years before that that there ever could be such a thing happening in the United States of America. The idea that, that there would be a censorship regime and that we would actually have to learn the concept of censorship, of course it's not going to be called itself. It's not going to call itself that is truly shocking. And Wikipedia was definitely part of that. So we have, we have evidence of that. The extent to which it's happening behind the scenes, the most influential people on Wikipedia seem to be pretty disciplined about keeping their mouths shut about what is going on. And I, I think there, there has to be quite a bit of quite a few paid players. There's a lot of paid editing going on. There's a fair number of account accounts in, in the hundreds, not the thousands that appear to be working full time on Wikipedia.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Must be a lot of money to be made there.

[Larry Sanger]

Exactly, exactly. And then of course we don't know who those people are and all the more we don't know who is paying them.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Right, right. Larry, just quick, as a quick aside, how do you feel about being the guy that created, you know, this, this, this incredible platform that for a while was lauded as just this just amazing resource and it truly was an incredible resource that just didn't exist at the time. You couldn't find these answers on Google, you couldn't find these answers on YouTube and yet Wikipedia could tell you so much. And then to watch it kind of get co opted into something is probably the opposite of what you wanted and then also have people reach out to you and blame you for that and then maybe hopefully you've come full circle and resolved yourself. I'm just curious what that emotional journey was like for you.

[Larry Sanger]

I've been pretty philosophical about the whole thing. I have been bothered, almost distraught I suppose, on behalf of people whose reputations, even whose income has been taken a hit, of course for things that happened long after I left. But I try to do what I can, I suppose to help. But realistically there, there hasn't been a lot. But one of the main reasons why I started the nine Theses reform project was to again try to make a difference, to make the world a little bit better. I think that Wikipedia, if it is improved in the ways that I've listed in the nine theses, it well could make a difference to the world. Perhaps there would be fewer people libeled, perhaps the information would be fairer. And so yeah, I think it's important that we try to fix it if at all we can.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Can you give me the, the dates when you were actually involved? And then I'd love to, to get the nine theses or a summary of those because it seems like your theses don't just apply to Wikipedia. Right. They apply to all information in the Future.

[Larry Sanger]

Yeah, basically January 2000 to March 2002. So very, very early days, the prior project to Wikipedia and Then the first 14 months of Wikipedia itself. My involvement was absolutely key. Not only did I bring the idea of Wiki encyclopedia to the table, I also set up the most important defining policies of the early days. So the neutrality policy, the fact that we're focused on an encyclopedia as opposed to many other things that you can use Wiki to produce and seeking sources for information and a lot of other rules. So in the end though, a lot of the, the biggest changes that were made, they, that all happened after I left. So I can't really take the blame for the ways in, in which it was co opt. Co opted from a operational standpoint.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

So how do we change it? Right, well, it'll be relevant in three years if things like Grokopedia catch up and LLMs come in. Do you think it still will be?

[Larry Sanger]

The jury is out actually at this point it's possible. I don't think it's very likely, but I think it's possible that Grokopedia in three years will be not only larger than Wikipedia, but more provably more reliable, will have a better track record measured against the research by fact checkers, et cetera. So we'll see though, right? It's, there's a lot that is up in the air at this point as far as I'm concerned. So it's still worthwhile. I don't think Wikipedia is going anywhere anytime soon and it is worthwhile to spend time, in fact, I'm going to be spending time on Wikipedia this year actually getting my hands dirty, making edits on Wikipedia. So just go through the list, you can find this list on LarrySanger.org, the first link to the Nine Theses. You can just find it, you can click through, not just to the paragraph, long elaborations of the theses, but also to essays supporting each one. So the theses themselves have basically two parts. There's a problem and a solution. Essentially. I'll just go through them very quickly, maybe not even all of them. Number two is that we should enable competing articles. So on Wikipedia there would be in fact many thousands of active users. Now the number of really active contributors to Wikipedia any given month is more along the lines of hundreds, not thousands. There would be thousands of people if you enabled them to write competing articles. You know, so that if you don't like the article about Venezuela or about Donald Trump or about gold or whatever, then you could write another one that would draw on a different framework. As I say, I won't get into the details, but Wikipedia right now definitely uses what I call a gasp framework, which means globalist, academic, secular and progressive. Gasp, right. It's quite a list.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Yeah. And so it's interesting because when you go search on Google Trump, you're going to get articles from Epoch News, maybe you'll get articles from New York Times, you'll see a bunch of different opinions, and as long as you don't trust the AI to just spit out what the truth is, then that's. Then you get to see different points of view. And you're saying why not have that on Wikipedia itself?

[Larry Sanger]

Exactly, why not? The third thesis is abolish source blacklists. So we discussed earlier about how Wikipedia basically blocks the use of certain conservative, especially conservative sources. And anything that is remotely anti establishment is generally blocked. That should not be. And I, I simply advocate that Wikipedia should go back to its former practices until about, I don't know, maybe 2010, 2015 of allowing a wide variety of sources and attributing the, the claims made by them to those sources and allowing the people to make up their own minds, obviously, which is a good way of describing the neutrality policy, by the way. So the fourth thesis is to revive the original neutrality policy. And a good way to sum up what the original neutrality policy was all about is when there is a point of debate or dispute, Wikipedia doesn't take a recognizable side, allowing the user to make up his own mind based on a fair representation of all the competing views. That's what neutrality is supposed to be. It does not have to do with objectivity. Neutrality is not objectivity. Objectivity is, is like scientific, logical, rational attempt to limn the reality at the joints, to carve it at the joints so that we have only truth and no falsehood. That's what objectivity is all about. Neutrality is the strategy of the media, strategy of acknowledging that people are ultimately going to end up carving up reality for themselves in different ways, and we ought not to impose our views on others and we should give them the tools that they need to make up their own minds. That's what neutrality is about. And I'm simply saying Wikipedia has abandoned that as a policy and they should take it up again. Let's see, let's skip another one. Number six is reveal who Wikipedia's leaders are. So if you look at the groups of Wikipedians that have access to tools that give them more authority on the platform, I'm talking about the arbitration committee, which is kind of like the Supreme Court of Wikipedia, the bureaucrats who have the ability to create new administrators, administrators who themselves have the ability to block accounts. Well, if you take three of the highest powered groups of Wikipedians, you count them up, there's 62 such people, or there were last summer, and of those 62, 85% are anonymous. We don't know who they are, they don't give sufficient information. A lot of times they don't even say what their nationality is, they don't give a first name, they don't give us a picture, etc. And maybe they are known to each other to some extent. But the point is, you would think that the most powerful people in this platform, which is in some ways the most powerful information platform in the world, you would think that they would take personal responsibility for the decisions that they make, but they don't. Right. So I think that the Wikimedia foundation should indemnify them, should enter into a formal relationship with such people and require that they reveal their identities. And of course, if somebody doesn't want their identity revealed, then they can feel free to resign from the position. So I think that would be very reasonable. Right. The problem is there is simply no one that can be sued on Wikipedia for the, the abundant libel that happens on Wikipedia. So, and ultimately the Wikimedia editorial staff, volunteer though it is, has to sort of grow up and, and own up to the, the influence that they have.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

You mentioned I, I know you've been said in the past that it's basically become a commercial entity and it'll probably take in $184 million in donations last year. Right. The estimating that the servers are going to cost less than 5 million. First of all, curious, first of all, as a org, does it, does it have even more legal protections than a corp? And then second of all, yeah, what kind of questions does that bring up when it's bringing up that much money, not to mention the side hustle some of the moderators might have, that might eclipse the 184 million.

[Larry Sanger]

I think it probably does. In fact, again, considering the number of PR firms that specialize in Wikipedia, the fact that such organizations are apparently pretty wealthy with offices in New York City and so forth, you would think that there are some very well paid people who are not admitting that they're paid at all, working on Wikipedia or simply making strategy decisions behind the scenes and instructing the people who are actually in control of the accounts what to do with the accounts. Essentially, that sort of thing can actually make a big difference. In other words, strategizing about how to deal with problems on Wikipedia can make a big difference in the outcome of disputes that are going on Wikipedia. So does that answer the question or.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Yeah, it did. And had you finished with the main theses that you wanted to cover or.

[Larry Sanger]

There just a couple more real quick. So the general public has no way to rate or give feedback on Wikipedia articles? Why not? I mean, all the other big platforms do. You can't. You can't rate Wikipedia articles. Why not? You would think that. That there would be a big system for peer review on Wikipedia outside peer review. There isn't one. Why not? Okay. And then so you.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

It's so unique because it's so old, Larry. It's because you started it back in 2000 that before any of that stuff happened and since it became so relevant and so important, it's almost like got grandfathered in, you know, to where it didn't have to do those things. And now it doesn't. Doesn't need to. So it doesn't. But you're right, it's extremely archaic and in Internet norms.

[Larry Sanger]

Right, right. And even by 2002, when I was like after I left as the chief organizer of Wikipedia, I still made a proposal back then to basically make a review role for experts and it was thrown back in my face. So Wikipedia, even at that early date, had become very insular.

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[Interviewer / London Real Host]

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[Larry Sanger]

So and then finally, I would say that to adopt a lot of these sorts of changes, it might ultimately be necessary for Wikipedia to adopt a legislative process which they have never had. There is no editorial board, there's no editor in chief, there is no one at the controls, so to speak, of Wikipedia. And you can say they like it that way, and that's how it's supposed to be. But the fact of the matter is when it comes to making significant changes, needed changes to the way that Wikipedia is run, it really can't be done institutionally. You have to follow this very arcane, disintegrated process which ultimately doesn't have the authority to make big changes like allowing competing articles like, how is that going to really ultimately be made official, even if a bunch of people on the platform want it? Ultimately, I think perhaps it would have to be the board of trustees of the Wikimedia foundation. But there isn't even any established process for those people to make editorial changes. So all I'm proposing is that there be an editorial assembly, so called, that would actually have the authority, the institutional authority to, to make needed changes to Wikipedia. So why not?

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Who, who could do, who could push something like this through? I mean, I'm thinking of Google. I mean, what is their relationship with Wikipedia? Could they come out and say, look, you know, we've made changes in our YouTube, we've made changes in this, we made changes, we've addressed the errors that Gemini made when they depicted the founding fathers as African Americans and now we want to address what everyone says about Wikipedia. Lord knows we support them with our search. Is that the, for me, that seems like the only type of entity that could push something like that through unless it was legislative. From D.C. curious for your thoughts on that and what, what their relationship is.

[Larry Sanger]

It is rumored that they have a very close relationship, but probably the basis of such rumors is just the fact that Google has given to Wikipedia quite a few million dollars. I don't know what the total sum is over the years. Right. I don't think it would be Google that would make the, you know, they might propose a change, get behind it. I think legislature, legislatures of various countries might actually propose and, and get some, you know, whip up public support. I think a lot of, you know, grassroots public support of, of the idea might make Wikipedians rethink the idea, but ultimately the, the entity that would adopt such a thing would be the Wikimedia Foundation. They own the platform and they are ultimately responsible for the rules that the platform operates under, whether, whether they like it or not. Whether I mean the Wikipedians like it or not. They don't in fact like the, the, the very suggestion that the board of trustees would, would actually impose something from above on them. They rebel strenuously against any such thing. Of course, I think a lot of that is kayfabe, a fair bit of that going on. Nevertheless, yes, I, I do think that the board of trustees ultimately would have to get behind this and the board of trustees in turn could be influenced by various, various players, governments, whatnot. So I don't really know what the way forward is. I can say this. I have heard from a number of different, you know, famous people who have said that they would sign on to an, a letter of protest against Wikipedia to the effect that they take issue with the way that they have been treated by the platform and how the platform is run. And I think that if copies of that were sent to the Board of trustees and Congress and other entities, a high level public discussion could begin. It doesn't just have to take place among the lower rank and file on the Wikipedia platform because Wikipedia is really that influential. It's actually the sort of thing that kind of demands a diplomatic, international solution. I almost hate to say that I shouldn't put it that way. It doesn't demand such a solution and it would be better if it didn't have to be subjected to it. I'm just saying that if the problem cannot be solved in any other way, then perhaps some pressure will eventually have to be imposed by governments. And again, I am about as strong a free speech kind of guy as you can imagine. So I don't like the idea of the government stepping in and saying, you shall adopt the following policies. But one thing that is very possible is, and that is to make a legislative carve out out of section 230 for the Wikimedia Foundation. So the Wikimedia foundation has basically been relying on section 230 to allow Wikipedia to be an engine of defamation. They apparently like it that way. And that ultimately is a creation of the government. Right? It, the, the fact that the Wikimedia foundation cannot be sued for the libel that occurs on the platform that they own is something for which Congress is responsible.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Yeah, very much so. You know what would do it quickly, Larry, is if, if Trump sued them, then it would probably change things quickly. I mean, again, he did it to YouTube, he did it to Facebook. They quickly changed policies. And sometimes it's the catalyst that gets them to update their system to something a bit More current because if you wait for Congress to make the change to 230, that could be decades, it seems.

[Larry Sanger]

Right. Right.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Larry, you mentioned decentralization. In the past, we spent the last four years pretty deep into the blockchain community. We've invested about $25 million into various startups. I've had the big players on, like Michael Sailor and the rest. And of course blockchain talks about how decentralization is the future. And again, they've even tried to start social media platforms recognizing the problems that we, we face with what they call these web two institutions like YouTube. And censorship is one of the perfect ex examples. Of course, you know, blockchain has struggled to gain as much momentum as we had wanted. And sometimes the decentralization without a clear leader stops progress, if I'm honest. And this concept of a DAO or a decentralized autonomous organization, again, a bit like socialism in theory, sounds good, but sometimes you need a Steve Jobs at the front cracking the whip to get things done. And I'm just curious if, when you think about decentralization, have you looked to some of the things happening in blockchain and, and what, what might you have in mind?

[Larry Sanger]

I actually worked for everipedia back when it was called Everipedia for a couple of years and helped them get an encyclopedia. It's actually after it was started, but to work on some of the policy and to promote it. The idea of a blockchain encyclopedia is interesting, but there, there are issues with it. We don't need any to go into the details there. I do have something that I think is quite relevant here. The idea of decentralization is great because it implies freedom. If the decision making authority to set policy and decide which content is going to be published is spread out, then everyone has a role to play and that is empowering to people. That's, that's how it's supposed to work. But most blockchain companies are, are in fact not decentralized in any meaningful way. As a matter of fact, they, they like to talk about having a decentralized network, but most of the actual activity is going on on their servers and nobody else's made a copy or very few others have made a copy of their data or anything like that. And they ultimately have control. You know, we were talking about decentralization long before crypto was a thing at all. And crypto simply co opted that in fact Wikipedia itself, I remember I used the word decentralized, applied it to Wikipedia itself on the theory that, that it really mattered, that People could work on Wikipedia as and when they wanted to without taking orders from any one entity. Right. So it's decentralized in that sense. I actually think that, that true decentralization really is empowering. It's just that there's not a lot of money in it. Right. If you, if you want to make a lot of money, generally speaking, it's hard to know how to do it short of Bitcoin and, and something that has an objective, approvably, objective value. And, and you know, that, that really never was the point of, of decentralization. You know, back in the 1980s, 80s and 90s in the original web. The, the Internet itself is decentralized. And that was a, the, the reason why Internet libertarianism was so big, especially in the 1990s, was, was that the, the Internet was radically decentralized. Anybody could register a domain name and you couldn't tell people what they were going to put up there if it was, unless it was illegal. And then maybe they would be investigated by the FBI or whatever. But yeah, and so what I think needs to exist as far as a free decentralized encyclopedia, is a network of all of the encyclopedias. And I actually have started such a thing. I call it the encyclosphere takeoff of the blogosphere. Right. And the idea is we make copies of all the free encyclopedias. There are more than just Wikipedia, and we put them in the zwe file format. Z W I means zipped wiki. It's like a zip file, but it's for wiki content. Collect it all in one place, but then allow anyone to make a copy of that. And we've actually proven that you can have ZWEI files shared with each other and different selections of encyclopedias held by different servers. So about a half a dozen people have done that. That would be a truly decentralized encyclopedia network. And again, people aren't going to get rich from that. Probably. Maybe somebody will find a way. But it's the public comments, see, that's the thing. What we have forgotten, I think, is that the true decentralization is simply the public comments. That's what it is. And well, if you think to your basic economics, the commons is not a thing that people ought to be able to especially profit from. Right. If you, if you are, then you're ruining it. That's the tragedy of the commons.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

I think that we're very early still in blockchain. And you know, I know some of the players that are out there building, you know, education. And the one thing about the Blockchain that's beautiful is its immutability. And you know, for example, Satoshi Nakamoto inscribed, you know, on some of those first blocks back then, I think it was the front page of the FT when there was the financial crisis. And you know, that can never be taken away. If someone in North Korea describes, can actually validate a block on bitcoin, they can actually inscribe something in there that can never be taken away. We know the Wayback Machine on the Internet can be tampered with. At least that's the rumor. So you know that that in itself, in addition to what you're talking about with the decentralization, could prove extremely valuable in the future when it's in certain powerful interest to literally erase history. And, and look, I know a lot of the players and there's been ups and downs and it's a very volatile, volatile industry by nature of it and the price. But I would see something 10, 20, 30 years from now definitely being decentralized with a blockchain component that would be information based. I'm sure it will happen.

[Larry Sanger]

I'm not ruling it out. I've never said that it's impossible. It's just that I think what the whole blockchain community is fighting now is the bad reputation of all the shitcoins. Right. So, yeah, and that's, that's really hard to. It's hard to persuade responsible investors to part with their money after being so many people being burned.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

So it's interesting, I'm reading a book right now called 1929 that's unfortunately written by the very leftist Andrew Sorkin. But it's an interesting tale of what happened 100 years ago. And it's fascinating to hear about all these bank failures that happened and all these local banks that weren't very well capitalized and people lost all their money and you know, things we would never conceive of, Larry. Where in the beginning of the banking world that was something that was much more common. And so, yeah, look, it's been an ugly few years in blockchain and it's a shame because it's such a beautiful empowering technology, but it's, it's had its ugly years like I think a lot of things do in the early days. So yeah, I'm optimistic. Look, I wanted to close on, on learning a little bit more about your spiritual journey. You know, you don't hear a lot of philosophers that end up, you know, becoming spiritual. I don't think either one of us are spring chickens. And I'm finding in my later years I'm much more open minded to the concepts of religion than I was when I was 12 years old and my mom dragged me to Sunday school. I even old Grace sometimes at the table and my kids are looking at me like, who is this guy? I'm just kind of curious if you could tell us about your journey and you've been public about it. And I've also noticed there's a real emergence of that in America. From Tucker Carlson to, you know, Donald Trump of all people who would probably tell you he was the last guy that was religious. Maybe being shot at helps, but I don't think it's just that either. And there seems to be a real resurgence of that, maybe even globally. Dubai's ultra luxury property deals surged tenfold in five years. That's a 25% increase every single year for 10 years. It's like a statistical impossibility, but it's happening here. 142,000 millionaires relocated last year. Most of them came to the United States, Arab Emirates. I'll take Dubai any day of the week over London, Miami and la. It's that good here. If you're a billionaire and you move to Dubai, where you live is a statement.

[Brian Rose]

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[Interviewer / London Real Host]

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[Larry Sanger]

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[Interviewer / London Real Host]

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[Brian Rose]

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[Interviewer / London Real Host]

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[Brian Rose]

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[Interviewer / London Real Host]

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[Larry Sanger]

I think you're, you're right. I, when I was in the process of conversion, I was noticing this already on X, that, that already there were a number of people, not just high profile people, but people who were announcing that they were turning to Christ.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

So

[Larry Sanger]

I was a, an agnostic for three and a half decades, basically from about the age of 14 or 15 until, well, 2020. And I, I've always regarded myself as first and foremost a philosopher. All three of my degrees are in philosophy. And very early on in my life, I made it my life's goal to seek the truth, essentially. And I thought there was nothing more important, that people waste their lives away and destroy their lives because they believe false things ultimately. And for that reason I thought it's extremely important to make sure that, that we know what we believe, why we believe it, and that there are reasons for our beliefs are correct. But as a result, I became a skeptic, methodological skeptic. In other words, as a point of methodology, I simply was agnostic about everything. And that of course included God. I thought that the arguments for the existence of God were not very good. I still think that the arguments for the existence of God individually are not very good, but taken together, actually they are remarkably good, which perhaps I can explain. But let's just to make a very long story short, and people can read this on my blog on LarrySanger.org how a skeptical philosopher Becomes a Christian. I think that's what it's called. It's about 45 pages. So long form, short book, but it's free. And I, I got married and I noticed that I would be willing to die for this woman. And I had a couple of boys and I noticed that I'd be willing to die for them. Now, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I fancied myself something of a follower of Ayn Rand. Not, not, not too much. I didn't, I was a skeptic after all, so I didn't really go in for everything that she said. But it was interesting because I, I did tend to think that that ethical egoism was, was correct. Ethical egoism is the view that if you want to understand why we should do what we should, then ultimately the only explanation is in terms of our own rational self interest. Right. And it seemed to me it was not in my rational self interest to sacrifice myself for my boys. I will have no interests if I'm dead, right? And yet it's the right thing to do. Well, that means then that I'm acting in their Interest and they actually have a value independent of me. It's very important. And so because Ayn Rand is as influential as, as she is, a lot of people, I think a lot of libertarian types became, well, unbelievers, whether, you know, agnostic or atheist, due to her influence. But here I was, I was like rebelling against Ayn Rand's influence there. I said, well, what else was she wrong about? Similarly, I thought I had no concept of God at all. Like what, what was the idea of a, of a creator who with a thought brings something into existence from nothing? I have no concept of such a mind because my mind can't do that. All my mind can do is like, you know, grab something and pick it up. And that's how, that's what my mind does. It sends a signal to my hand and. But that's not creating something out of nothing. So I have no concept of what God is in his most essential activity of creation. And then we started thinking about the whole idea of virtual reality, of ring world type scenarios where technology after the singularity has developed for a billion years or something like that. What really would be possible with mental prosthetics, brain prosthetics, then with a thought, perhaps you could make a planet pop into existence. And then I said, well, if I can conceive of that, am I not conceiving of God? So basically, one by one, the various reasons to disbelieve fell by the wayside. And then the straw that really broke the camel's back as far as my resistance was concerned, was the Epstein stuff, which I was apprised of in 2019. I didn't realize, I mean, it was absolutely news to me that there were any number of high profile pedophile rings. It's not just some. And you can learn about these in the mainstream media and they don't, they aren't talked about as much as they should be. To my way of thinking. It's, you know, human trafficking, including the trafficking of children for sex, is a, is a thing. And the people who are involved in it, as a friend of mine impressed on me, are, have, let's just say, a strange sort of religion. And at least, at least some of them, some of them, I'm sure, are merely, you know, creeps. And he, he was pushing these various occult books on me and saying, if you really want to understand how they think, then you need to read these things. And I said, well, being a skeptic, I think such things could be true. I didn't believe any of them because Again, I'm a skeptic, but I left open the possibility that there might be a spirit world, for example. And I said, well, if I'm going to read these, I'm going to take them at all seriously. Then I'm conceiving at the possibility of a world in which there really are demons and whatnot, in which case I want to keep any such spiritual doors firmly shut. And I know that I would be on the side of the angels in that case, that's for sure. So I said, I finally concluded that if I were going to read anything along those lines, it would be the Bible itself. Because the occult is an inversion of a twisting of a reaction to the Bible and to Christianity and traditional Judaism. So a few months Passed by and December 2019, I decided just as bedtime reading not actually related to anything any of that directly, I, I decided to pick up the Bible. And I at first I thought I was just gonna read a little bit here and then, but now and then I got really fascinated at just in a few days. And after a few weeks I had adopted a 100 day reading plan or 90 day reading plan. Took me 100 days. And by the time I had gotten through it by spring of 2020, I believed that God exists. I rethought all of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. So I have a PhD in Philosophy, I used to to teach philosophy of religion and I was entirely aware, familiar with the main traditional arguments for the existence of God. But I the following thought basically occurred to me. There's a lot of thoughts that have occurred to me on this that really made a difference. But the one that made the biggest difference is the, the best argument to draw from something like the first cause argument that the, the universe could not have just sprung into existence all by itself. It doesn't make any sense. Had to have some sort of cause. Isn't that God exists which is the cause? Because that just doesn't follow like what's God, right? It's all that follows from that is something that is independent of the universe, of what we call creation would have to have some sort of explanatory relation to the universe, right? And it would have to exist necessarily. But the thing is this is the thought. If you combine that conclusion that there is a necessary being, that its activity, whatever it was, created the world. If you combine that conclusion with the conclusion of many other of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, the whole can serve as what philosophers call an argument to the best explanation. So the idea is There is an explanation of. Of all of the data which, when people are thinking about religion, they sooner or later acquaint themselves with. Right. And that is that not just God, but the God of Christianity exists. I'm now writing a book, I'm like 650 pages into it called God Exists, and I don't have a publisher yet. I've actually had offers to publish it, but it's too long and I'm not going to make it shorter. So I'm going to finish writing this and then maybe I'll write a popularization. But I'm just basically recording the sort of philosophical grounds on which I've changed my mind about God. But since then, took me five years to pick a church. But I'm now in the conservative or traditional branch of the Anglican Church in the United States. It's called the Anglican Church in North America. And I go to church every Sunday now. And I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord and that he died for my sins. And that that's one of the most important, worthwhile ways that we can spend our time is to read the Bible, to study it, understand God's word to us.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

That's incredible. My daughter's actually a philosophy major, so I'm sure she's going to enjoy listening to this. They say a sign of a man's intelligence is how often he can change his mind. So, yeah, my congratulations, because very few people would be able to do that. And it gets harder for most people the older they get. You know, I think it's a really healthy sign. It. It's. It's one of the core principles here at London Real. I've had so many people come on my show that I fundamentally disagreed with Larry that my skin would bristle when they would go on their diatribes. But I always tried to get myself to shut my mouth and listen to their point of view. And. And I almost always would find myself changing my mind months, years to go past to consider these opinions. And that's why we've always had conversations with different people. And that's why I was always shocked when people tried to silence us, because I thought, you really do want to listen to as many points of view as possible. Again, the solution to what people call bad information is always more information, never less information. So, yeah, great to hear you say that. Yeah. I remember when Dr. Jordan Peterson came on my show in 19, and I. Look, I. I was a student at MIT and, you know, there's a lot of religion going on at a place like that, and I was always very scientific. Okay, maybe I was too co opted into science at some point and. But throughout this show I've had some great experiences with people like Dr. Jordan Peterson, who at one point you said, Brian, he's like, the stories of the Bible are in our DNA. He said something to me like that. And it just, it really took me back and I thought, wow, these are, it's almost like human technology. These are lessons that are built into who we are as people and you know, they're kind of reflecting back to us, who we really are. And so I'm still on my journey, obviously, but it's constantly changing and it's quite fascinating and I think it's really good for people to hear people like you talk about that. So, yeah, thank you for that. I love the title Nice and Simple. And I like the fact you're not gonna make it any shorter. That makes me happy too.

[Larry Sanger]

My mother read it. I was, I was shocked. I mean, she never reads anything that I, I write and especially if it's like philosophical and she, she said she read the whole thing. So yes, I was, I was amazed at how viral it it was. You can never tell what you, you're right, is going to go viral. And I definitely did not expect this to, but it did.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

You know, it's an interesting time, Larry. You know, some would argue that we, we stopped, you know, religion, we stopped, you know, worshiping deities and we started worshiping, you know, concepts and you know, we, we replaced, you know, following religions with following, you know, other forms of thought. Right. Feminism, different parts of science, etc, and, and maybe deep down, on an unconscious level, collectively, we're all realizing that, that maybe that's not right. Maybe we're not finding what we're looking for and maybe we need to revert back with something that, that's kind of been fulfilling people over thousands of years and were created, you know, to, to, to fill this need. So it's an interesting time and we're seeing it now play out on social media and the more people talk about it, it seems like there's more people listening. So. Yeah, very interesting times.

[Larry Sanger]

Yep. I think that the, there's been a backlash against socialism in the, in the last generation and especially in the last 10 years since Obama made it socially acceptable on the left to, you know, advocate for socialist policies. You know, one of the basic things that has been said about socialism generally is that it makes a God of the government or of society. And some of the backlash that you describe could be a backlash against that. Our notion that the sort of rituals and core values and credos that we accept are determined by some anointed class of social organizers, essentially a new kind of priestly class of socialists, you know, that, that can appeal to perhaps some, some young people and, and to collectivists generally. But for those of us who have actually paid attention and reacted as, as they should, in my opinion, to things like the, the COVID nonsense, that, that really helps us to, you know, reorient our, ourselves, like the idea of, of government or media or some professional anointed expert class as it were, lording it over us is simply wrong. Right? And, and if we're throwing that away, if we're rebelling against that way of organizing society, then there is a God shaped, God shaped hole in our, in our souls and in the way that we interact with each other. I think the Charlie Kirk's assassination and the reaction to it sort of revealed

[Brian Rose]

that Dubai is in a moment that will not last. And the biggest money is being made in luxury transformation projects that have delivered 40 to 90% annual returns. That is incredible. I spent 15 years on Wall street and I know this. When an opportunity like this appears, it never stays available for long. We just received a brand new project with major, major upside. Potential allocations will fill fast.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

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[Brian Rose]

This will not last forever.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Yeah, no, it's, I was just thinking of Turning Point when I was just talking about this resurgence And I mean, 10 years ago you couldn't conceive of something like that happening of young people, especially rallying around the conservatism and the religious aspect and, and, and, and people outpouring like that. And it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I've had many, many different discussions, you know, over the years about this and it's, it's always illuminated me, each one more and more and more. I mean, some, some argue that the basic tenets of United States of America, you know, only, only apply if it's, if it's based on a layer of religion. Without that, you know, none of that stuff applies. You know, it applies on the assumption that we're going to behave in this Christian manner and without it, you know, the principles kind of fall out the window and other concepts that I had never really considered or pondered because they didn't come up in my, my history books at school. So yeah, I think whatever you do, Larry, you're going to have to do a podcast series alongside the book. Is that a deal?

[Larry Sanger]

Well, I, I appreciate that I'm actually this year going to ramp up my blog at least. I have never actually monetized my videos, my blog, or, or my ex posts. And I'm, I'm finally doing that. And so you'll probably see me do some more podcasting eventually. I don't know if I'd be very good at it. I don't really have the face, you know, for it.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

I think there's a lot of examples of people without the face that are doing great. So.

[Larry Sanger]

All right.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

But yeah, all right, so if people want to obviously read your blog posts and your extended ones, it's Larry Sanger.org other ways for them to follow you

[Larry Sanger]

or stay in touch with you on XL Sanger. Beyond that, well, yes, there's the Knowledge Standards foundation if they want to put their name on the mailing list. We don't, we don't spam you, that's for sure. That's at Encyclosphere, just like it sounds like encyclopedia, but it's encyclosphere.org and if you're a developer, we might be starting some new projects or you might pick up where we have left off on our Mattermost forum and you can find a link to that on encyclosphere.org, but that's where any sort of activity for the Knowledge Standards foundation is taking place on the Mattermost forum.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

All right, fantastic, Larry, thank you so much for your creations and also your objectivity about your creations and then these ideas and your theses on how we can turn it all around. Such an important time right now, especially as we start leaning more and more on these kind of one stop, shop one answer LLMs. We need to really maybe condition ourselves to, like you said, look for the three different articles on the new generation of Wikipedia or ask the LLMs their sources not just to worry about the hallucination factor, but also making sure that we really get the truth in a, in a world that's getting more and more digitized. And sometimes I laugh to myself. I mean, Alex Jones calls his show Infowars. The future will be an information war. And that's pretty much all it will be. So your ability to discern the truth, your truth, is probably going to be the single most important thing. And I think your thoughts on it are excellent. So thank you so much, Larry. Appreciate this. And all the best with the new book.

[Larry Sanger]

All right, thank you. Appreciate it.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Excellent. Take care, everybody. We'll see you next time on London Real. Bye.

[Brian Rose]

Hi, it's Brian Rose from London Real. You probably know that we've just recently been replatformed on YouTube after 25 months completely in the dark. The truth is, I really need your help. What I really need you to do is click on that subscribe button right now, like this, this video, and maybe even leave a comment or share the link with friends. We're really fighting against an algorithm that's tried to keep us quiet for so long. And the more subscribers we have, the more people watch our content, the better guests. We can bring you, the better content, and we can continue transforming lives. We've been doing this for 14 years now. I want to do this for another 14 years, but I really need your help. So click on that subscribe button, like the video, leave a comment, share this. And we're going to continue to bring you more and more great content.

[Interviewer / London Real Host]

Thank you.