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The Rest Is Politics: Leading
169. Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia vs. Musk, AI, and the Battle for Truth
01:13:05
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- [00:01]
Alistair Campbell
Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. Sign up to the Rest is Politics plus to enjoy ad free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the restispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com. Welcome to the Rest of Politics.
- [00:20]
Rory Stewart
Leading with me Alistair Campbell and with me Rory Stewart. And today we are going to interview Jimmy Wells. And Jimmy Wells is, is the founder of Wikipedia which is as everybody listening, I think for once I don't need to do one of these explainers for international listeners, as everyone listening will know is the world's great free online encyclopedia, which I think now has 99 times as many entries as the old Encyclopedia Britannica in English alone. A huge thing and something which from the beginning was astonishingly revolutionary. Instead of the old encyclopedias which used professors paid monies to write their specialist articles, it trusted that essentially crowdsourcing, getting members of the public to come in and just contribute to an article, they would be able to map out human knowledge. And my goodness, they've done it. They've done it in medicine, they've done it in history, they've done it in science. And it's become in a sense the underpinning for many things. A great deal of what we are relying on in AI and large language models relies on them reaching into Wikipedia. It's unpaid volunteers largely working in this and it's a non profit foundation lying behind it. And the man that we're about to interview has had a fascinating career. He's a guy that grew up in Alabama, he works in finance, he runs a very successful Internet company, has become personally wealthy. But at the heart of his life, a little bit like with Tim Berners, Lee, who we interviewed talking about the World Wide Web, has made his life around something which is a global public good. So Jimmy would love a vision of you as a child. Pick, pick any age really. But to give us a sense of the emerging Jimmy Wales and the home in which you grew up and the kind of person you were.
- [02:13]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, so. Well, I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, which is an interesting place because it's the Deep south in the US but it's also where the science for the space program took place. So after World War II, they brought over all of the German rocket scientists. When I was a kid, sometimes the windows would rattle in the house because we lived close enough to where they were testing the Saturn V rockets that it would shake the windows in the house. So that was all very exciting. And I remember I came back to visit as an adult many years later and saw one of my friends from high school, and then the local newspaper wanted to cover it, so they did an article about me. And he said, oh, well, they're just excited that somebody from Huntsville is famous for something other than bombing London because Werner von braun and the V2 rockets came. So my mom was a schoolteacher and later became a pharmacist. My dad, grocery store manager, and did all of the sort of classic Americana things. I had a paper route. You know, that was when I was, like, 13. So I would have to get up in the morning and Sunday mornings in particular. That was when the big, heavy paper had to be delivered and ride my bike and throw the paper and all of that, which people say, oh, that must have been a good start as an entrepreneur. And I'm like, yeah, definitely. It taught me. I definitely did not want to do manual labor for a living.
- [03:41]
Rory Stewart
Jimmy, can I. Can I just come in here for a second? Am I right in saying, though, that Alabama is to some extent quite strong Trump territory? Now, does that give you a sort of understanding of that world and the cultural ethos there and things that maybe in Europe we don't understand about places like Alabama?
- [04:01]
Jimmy Wales
I think it probably does, and I actually think that's very interesting. I remember when Howard Dean was running for president and he sort of sort of had to drop out after the Dean scream and that sort of weird sort of scream.
- [04:13]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, I remember the scream.
- [04:16]
Jimmy Wales
But what was interesting to me was, you know, at the time, a big cornerstone of his campaign was about the healthcare program they had put in for children and so forth. And what was interesting was he had a lot of talk about, oh, and they want the same thing down in Alabama with their pickup trucks and their, you know, whatever. And people in Alabama were really deeply offended because they had the same sort of program that had been passed, you know, and, you know, there was that sense of, like, flyover country that people didn't understand or didn't know. And of course, you know, Alabama's. It's got a lot of problems, and it's got a lot of backwardness and a lot of forwardness. I mean, I think Huntsville in particular has always been very interesting because it is quite tech and science focused and yet the broader culture and it is very trumpy around there and so forth. So, yeah, it's quite a mix.
- [05:12]
Alistair Campbell
You mentioned that your mum was a teacher, but she and your grandmother ran a kind of small school. Is that where you were educated? Were you taught by your mum?
- [05:21]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, I was. So it was like a one room schoolhouse, like Abraham Lincoln or something. So there were four kids in my year, but because it was so small, there were four years together in one room. So there were maybe 16 kids, you know, some years a little more, a little less, but you were in with different ages. And my grandmother had this concept she called each One Teach one, which I don't know, she claimed it originated in Africa. I have no idea if that's true or not. It's what my grandmother told me when I was a kid. And so we would, you know, the older kids would do reading class to help the younger kids learn to read and things like that. But it was, yeah, it was a completely. It was very different. It was. It sometimes has been reported that it was a Montessori school, but it wasn't technically a Montessori school. My mother and grandmother were influenced by Montessori techniques. So there was a lot of independent learning and things like that. But yeah, it was quite an unusual schooling. Of course, I had no idea it was unusual at the time because I was a kid.
- [06:18]
Alistair Campbell
But is it. How did it feel being taught by. So you, you know, your mum gets you out of bed in the morning, you get breakfast with your mum, then you go to school with your mom and she teaches you all day and you're in the same room all day, then you go home. I mean, were you very, very close?
- [06:34]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, yeah, I would say we were. I mean, to be fair, they, they would. We had outside teachers. I remember Mrs. Boozer was my teacher for a couple of years and she was not a boozer, despite the name. And yeah, so they, they were aware of that, that this is not ideal for a kid, like to have your mom down your throat all the time. But yeah, yeah, we're still quite close. She still comes over to the uk, she's coming on Friday, so she comes for three or four weeks at Christmas time.
- [07:03]
Alistair Campbell
Very good.
- [07:04]
Rory Stewart
Let's now take you through the next move. So you move from Alabama and then you go on to studies and university and you're obviously, you were quite a smart kid. Was there a cultural shock when you turned up at college? Did you feel that you came from a different world or was it a comfortable experience? What's your memory of that?
- [07:22]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, I would say that culture shock came not at university level, but when I went to high school, to secondary school because I suddenly went from four kids and my mom around and all of that to. And I was young, I was a year Young. And I was also an August baby, so August baby plus a year young. And then I was in high school with a bunch of kids, but again, because it was Huntsville, and my parents did send me to a private school, so at great expense to them because they weren't wealthy, but they were aspirational. And, yeah, it was a shock. That's actually where I lost my Southern accent, because a lot of the kids were the children of engineers who had brought in, you know, been brought in for the space program and so forth. And obviously, as a teenager, you're acutely concerned about how you come off. And I'm sure I had a very deep Southern accent, as my mother does to this day. So I lost the accent. So that was a bit. A bit of a culture shock there. Off to university was a little different, you know, that felt. I was sort of more adjusted to normal world at that point.
- [08:28]
Alistair Campbell
So give us a little bit of how you would have spoken as a child. Give us a bit of Alabama.
- [08:33]
Jimmy Wales
Well, my mom is from Alabama, y', all, and I grew up in Alabama. You know, I can't really do it. I feel like, you know, if I'm trying to. I feel like I sound like Dick Van Dyke trying to do a British accent in Mary Poppins. It feels really phony. But my wife says when I talk to my mom on the phone that I sound like Bill Clinton so that it can come back in that context.
- [08:57]
Alistair Campbell
Okay. Okay. So if you say to somebody, let's say you're with a fellow American, you just kind of bump into them on a train or on a plane or in a hotel or something, and you say you're from Alabama. What does the average non Alabama American think of Alabama?
- [09:13]
Jimmy Wales
Oh, well, I mean, they're like, really? Wow. I mean, as kids, though, actually, it's very interesting in Alabama because we had the space program and all of this. There was a bit of a chip on the shoulder about you meet somebody from up north and they. They want to know if you've got indoor plumbing and shoes. You know, so there is that sort of view. Obviously, that's antiquated now, but people do. They do wonder because it is very conservative. And, you know, a lot of the things you hear from Alabama, various politicians. There was a one, a judge who was sort of ruling very highly religious rulings that were getting overturned by the federal courts all the time. That sort of thing has always been a part of that culture. And, yeah, it's quite baffling. I mean, you know, when I was a kid, George Wallace was a third party candidate for president. He ran on a platform of segregation. He actually stood in the very famous scene, he stood in the schoolhouse door, stood in the front door of the University of Alabama to refuse admittance of three or four black students, who would have been the first black students until the. And they were in fact the first black students because the federal government, the National Guard, forced him to step aside. It was all theater, but it was quite a thing. And then he's a fascinating character because then later in his career, he won as governor again with the majority of the black vote. So terrible person, but a fascinating political figure. I want to hear his whole story on the rest is history. I think they should do that.
- [10:52]
Rory Stewart
Maybe we'll do it. The rest is politics. Jimmy, let's do a sort of strange move and jump forward to Wikipedia and then we can maybe move back and fill in some of the gaps in between. So this is an extraordinary thing. I mean, this is the creation of something which every listener will have touched, every listener will be familiar with, which is, you know, for two decades now, have transformed people's basic understanding of the world and has given them information on the most extraordinary range of things. And we can keep developing this, but let's get to what's unique about it. If you were trying to sum up why Wikipedia is revolutionary, what were the elements that made it startling?
- [11:35]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, I mean, I think even today, and possibly even more today, because of the broad understanding of how toxic social spaces on the Internet can be, I think it's sort of really amazing that Wikipedia is so open for participation. You can go even today to 99ish percent of the pages in Wikipedia. Make an edit without logging in, and your edit goes live immediately. I mean, it's completely mad. And yet it somehow largely works. And I think that was a real surprise to everybody, including me. I mean, I remember I would. I would wake up in the middle of the night and rush downstairs to check on the site because I assumed somebody was going to trash it overnight when it was very small. That was actually a risk. But I think that's. That's pretty amazing. And, you know, the idea that people can come together in a positive way, build a community with mutual trust and create something positive is fantastic. It's a really great thing that we should emulate in other parts of life if we can.
- [12:42]
Alistair Campbell
Why do you think the other kind of giant names of the Internet space, and particularly social media, why have they not got that? It is a sort of an outlier, isn't it? I mean, Most of them are just not like that.
- [12:58]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the keys, and this is one of the seven rules of trust in my book, is purpose. That Wikipedia has a clear and easy to understand purpose. We're here to write a free, high quality, neutral encyclopedia and that defines everything that we do. Whereas with social media, there often isn't an obvious purpose. There's a box that says what's on your mind, and you can use it for whatever you want, creativity for trolling, for whatever.
- [13:29]
Alistair Campbell
Didn't Zuckerberg say at the start the purpose was to. Was it to unite the world or draw the world together? They kind of.
- [13:36]
Jimmy Wales
And there's sometimes they had a purpose,
- [13:38]
Alistair Campbell
but it just doesn't work.
- [13:39]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, there's sometimes talk about, about Twitter or X as being sort of the global town square. And I think to some extent, you know, it's like it's a really, really bad town square. Like, you know, it's like you wouldn't, you wouldn't want to go there with your family on a Saturday night.
- [13:55]
Alistair Campbell
It's completely a lot of police hanging around.
- [13:58]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's quite dreadful. But yeah, no, I do think that, that, that for us and, you know, although I am critical of how a lot of social media is managed, I also acknowledge it's a really hard problem. And for us, it's made a lot simpler by just saying, look, we're not a wide open free speech space. You're not here to sort of give your random views of the world and what are your opinions about this, that and the other. But we're even the talk pages of Wikipedia. Your purpose is how do we improve the article? So when you go to the talk page of the article on Donald Trump, it's not to have a big fight about Donald Trump. There's loads of places on the Internet to do that. It's just like, hold on a second, what are you saying that could be used to improve the article? Because that's what we're here for.
- [14:46]
Rory Stewart
Jimmy. Another thing that strikes me, but maybe this is too romantic of me, is that the profit motive and the financial motive is a little bit different. I mean, I tend to think we underestimate in all our institutions the way in which money and making money actually distorts and creates weird things. So, for example, with normal social media, clearly these algorithms are there to get as much attention as possible. They get attention often through polarization, and that's because they want to sell advertising. So do you think, to some extent, the fact that you don't have the same financial model is also an important part of why it's not quite as toxic and polarizing.
- [15:27]
Jimmy Wales
I do, and I think that's a. It's a complicated and subtle point because I don't think it's necessarily about for profit versus nonprofit, although there's an element to that. But it is also about the business model. So our business model is donations. The vast majority of money for Wikipedia comes from the small donors. And that just gives us different motivations internally. Like we're not here to maximize your time on the site or page views. What we want to maximize is when you see that banner, you go, yeah, yeah, great, I love Wikipedia. That deserves to exist. I should chip in. Which means we're not trying to get you to stay as long as possible. We don't have like sort of the mail online sidebar of shame with a lot of tempting click bait, pictures and headlines and things like that. And it does matter. I think it makes a big difference. And you know, for the social media space, that advertising only model, and frankly for journalism as well, advertising only business model is really problematic because it does drive you in a direction that's not healthy. You know, just seeking attention, keeping people on the site as long as possible isn't necessarily providing a value that sort of at a deeper level, you need your site to be popular, you need it to be something that people want to use. That's fine, there's nothing wrong, you know, and you can see how initially you might say, oh, let's use an algorithm to show people content that they are, are interested in interacting with. Like that sounds completely fine, but if by doing so you ignore sort of the longer term health of the relationship between the person and the site, you're making a big mistake. And I think they all struggle with this and I think some do better than others, but it's a tough problem.
- [17:16]
Alistair Campbell
Joey, do you think if you had decided at the outset this is an amazing idea, this is going to really touch a lot of people, I can see how this could really explode. And you just thought, right, how do I monetize that for me? Jimmy Wales, do you think it could have been as successful as it has been?
- [17:37]
Jimmy Wales
I don't know. I mean, I think that's a really interesting question. I mean, I have Fandom, my for profit company, it's very successful and something like the number 20 website, and it's, you know, people writing about pop culture, mainly entertainment, gaming, TV shows, that sort of thing. And. But yet it doesn't have the same, obviously the same cultural resonance like Wikipedia is part of the infrastructure of the world. It's something everybody feels like is. Is a golden thing of our era. And that's really fantastic. And it might not have achieved that. And one of the things I've always been concerned about. So you could, you could have ads even as a nonprofit. Like we could put ads on the site. There's nothing, you know, really preventing that. But the problem with that would be the incentives in the organization would change and they would change away from, you know, the way we think about things now, which is like, come and read whatever you're interested in. It doesn't really matter to us. Whatever, you know, some obscure point in history, that's fine. If you were ad driven, you might think, ah, well, you know, all these people reading about Queen Elizabeth the First, there's nothing to sell them. We should try and get them onto topics that have higher monetization, you know, and we might start trying to tempt people over to, I don't know, the Kardashians or something. You know, it does, you know, it sort of infuses everything in a way that does make a difference for sure.
- [18:59]
Rory Stewart
I think there's something, I mean, it's maybe bring Alistair into this bit because we were talking about this actually recently, about his own experience as a journalist and cigarette advertising and stuff in his early career. But, you know, obviously I'm very worried by the sense that a loss of journalism at the moment is driven by editors looking at how many clicks a particular article gets. So if you are a correspondent writing about climate change in Kenya, it's quite difficult to get the editor to publish your piece. If you find the bones of a Neanderthal, the editor will publish it. Because lots of people like sharing things. The advertising point, I think, sort of simply reinforces this. And I'm quite interested in the way in which there's something even more radical, which is, in a sense, you don't even need to worry about numbers in quite the same way. I mean, even Alistair and I are quite interested in how many people listen to our interview with Jimmy Wales as opposed to our interview with, I don't know, Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever. But we have to be a bit cautious about that because otherwise you just end up only doing interviews with the people that get the high numbers and you might be missing a lot of really interesting. Anyway, Alistair, can I you in on this before we come back to Jimmy?
- [20:09]
Alistair Campbell
The. The story that I was telling Rory, Jimmy, was that when I was a young Journalist on the Daily Mirror trying to write stories about the fact that smoking kills you. There is compelling evidence to that effect, constantly being told. We really are interested in those stories because amongst our big, biggest advertisers are the tobacco companies. Now, eventually along came a marvelous Labour government led by a gentleman by the name of Tony Blair, and that all led, that all became history. But I just wonder whether that it's the non monetization, non advertising that makes Wikipedia purer, I guess. And the other thing though is about what it says about human nature. You mentioned your book 7 Rules of Trust and you have this. The book ends in a way by telling us not to assume bad faith, which is quite a hard thing to do in the modern age when Trump is so dominant, when Elon Musk is such a powerful figure within the social media space, it's very hard not to assume bad faith. I think the three of us are quite good at it, but I think a lot of people find that very, very hard. So in a way, how have you managed to sort of maintain this positive, optimistic side to Wikipedia that most of these big names don't have?
- [21:27]
Jimmy Wales
Well, I mean, I do think the business model matters. I mean, I just, me as a person, it's just my nature. I always say I'm pathologically optimistic and I say the word pathologically because I know it's not completely rational always. But I also think, you know, to the extent that we are online too much and we're on social media too much, you can get a very skewed and very strange view of human nature simply because the algorithms are promoting the most divisive content and the most aggressive people. And, you know, it isn't healthy at all. And yet, you know, in our day to day life, in interactions, you know, you know, if you meet a thousand people, I'm going to say 990 of them are going to be perfectly nice people. There'll be nine of them who are very annoying and there's only like one who's actually malicious. And I think that that is an optimistic view, but I think it's reasonably accurate to say, I was just thinking of this the other day, like you go into a fast food restaurant where the norm is that when you're finished and you put all your papers into the bin and you put the tray on top, everybody does it and you know what will happen to you if you don't do it? Nothing. Like you could just walk out like a jerk. And people don't. People are basically decent. People want to Be decent. And they are pro social in lots of ways. And we all have experiences in life of someone we disagree with politically, but we still think is a great person. Like that's a normal kind of situation of like, you know, you know, that person's a bit, a bit too left wing for me or a bit too right wing for me. But that's all right. You know, we have a good banter and we have dinner together and it's all good so that, you know, like, we get it on a day to day basis, you know, that people are basically decent. And then you go online and I mean, just post anything you want on Twitter and just see what kind of screaming lunatic comes at you. And you're just like, wow, people are horrible. But they aren't. They really aren't. And that's important to remind ourselves.
- [23:25]
Rory Stewart
Jim, can I. I was just looking at the, the Wikipedia page on Donald Trump because I think this is sort of good, good route through because he is literally the most famous and contentious human being in the world right now. And it's quite interesting. I mean, it begins quite bland. It's a paragraph saying, you know, born to a wealthy family in New York City. And then it begins to mention that he's filed for six bankruptcies. And then it gets onto defamations and sexual harassment suits filed against him. And then it finishes the introduction with. Historians have listed him as one of the worst, the worst president in US History with footnotes. Fine. And then you get on to early life, whatever it is. Right. Take us a little bit into what's happening there. Give us a bit of a sense of what's hidden behind this and how one ends up in a place? And is that a sort of settled place or is something like the Donald Trump Wikipedia page something that sort of tidal waves back and forth and so that there are some warriors out there that are going to be trying to remove the line about him being the worst president in U.S. history. And if you go back there in a week's time, it won't be there. And then I'll be back again.
- [24:29]
Jimmy Wales
And I mean that. It's a great question, I would say, for a, a major page like that that's watched by hundreds of people and there's a lot of discussion about it, it's probably reasonably stable. I mean, those things can shift over time. But that will be exactly the sort of thing that people debate. And even good Wikipedians who don't like Donald Trump will question things like undue weight. It's like, yeah, this negative thing Is true. But does it belong in that first sort of the lead there. And that's the kind of debate we would have. And so something like that probably could come and go and drift over time.
- [25:07]
Rory Stewart
And who resolves this? Jimmy arbitrates. How does it work between the different voices? Let's say somebody saying, no, no, no, we shouldn't put this poll saying he's the worst president in history in the first. In paragraph three and other people saying we should. How does that get resolved?
- [25:23]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, I mean, it varies. I mean, sort of the, the last resort option, which is. Is not considered great, if we have to do it, is some sort of, we call it an rfc, a kind of a vote. It's not really a vote, but it's, you know, a straw poll in the community and to sort of see is there overwhelming support for this? Is it less support? You know, it's basically, it's always a discourse, it's always a dialogue, it's always open to change. And that's actually really, really important because clearly if you, anytime you have a situation where you've fossilized a page and there's a sense that it can't be changed, then as facts move, as history moves, as everything changes, you'll be off, you'll be. And you risk locking in something that later we think, oh, that probably was a bit much and probably shouldn't have had that. And you know, I. There are pages where it's harder and pages where it's easier. And you know, Donald Trump, in a way, isn't that hard.
- [26:28]
Rory Stewart
What have you learned about pages? Are other things that you did in the early days of Wikipedia that you learned were a mistake and that you altered in the way the thing worked over time.
- [26:41]
Jimmy Wales
There were things like. One of the big changes was the introduction of what we call the BLP policy, biography of living persons. And the idea here is that anything negative in a biography should be removed immediately unless there's a good quality source. And before that, there was a kind of a tendency for people to say, oh, there's no source for this negative claim. Let's discuss a debate. Can anybody find a source? And so on. No, no, no, take it out immediately and don't put it back in until you've got a good source. That sort of thing. As we became more and more popular and more and more impactful became more important, you know, that was that. But we always had the idea that Wikipedia should be neutral, that we should cite our sources, that we should use high quality sources. Like all of those values were There from the very early days, I think just over time, we probably codified it a lot more.
- [27:40]
Alistair Campbell
You said that Donald Trump's quite a straightforward, easy page. What's a difficult page?
- [27:47]
Jimmy Wales
So sometimes the debates are so obscure that like, anybody outside would be like, are you really having a massive debate about the names of rivers in Poland? Like, really. But other times it is sort of obvious. I mean, wherever there are legitimate and very complicated questions in reality, like Israel, Gaza, that sort of thing, then it becomes hard. And issues around war. So if you think about how is Ukrainian Wikipedia and Russian Wikipedia dealing with that war? Quite well, I would argue, but it's emotionally difficult. I mean, we've had Wikipedians killed in Ukraine and that's hard. And it makes a difference because at the end of the day, we're humans. And so even though we have this really profound and deep commitment to neutrality, it can be hard. Like, if your country is being attacked and there's bombs going off outside your house, you're not going to be the one who raises your hand to say, gee, it seems a little unfair to Putin to have this negative thing right in the lead. Right? It's harder in those cases. The other areas where it can be quite hard to be as neutral as we would like is cases where we all, as a human species maybe have some blind spots and then things are changing and we haven't really realized it yet. And so then you realize, like, oh, actually, you know, this is problematic. I'll give an example that is a silly, simple example. But if you ask almost any English speaking, native English speaking person who invented the airplane, they're going to say, the Wright brothers. It's a simple fact. You learned it when you were six years old. And that's like that. Apparently, if you ask French people, you get a completely different answer. And the reality is both parties had a significant role to play. And the story we were told when
- [29:47]
Alistair Campbell
we were six is, who was a Blair?
- [29:49]
Jimmy Wales
It was some Brazilian guy who was living in France, if I remember correctly. And oh, but by the way, the interesting thing as I understand it is like the Wright brothers were the first to fly further with an engine than they would have with a glider. But they didn't figure out how to go up, which is an important part. The Brazilian guy figured out how to go up. And so, you know, it's like, yeah, great, an extended range glider might not be a full airplane. So anyway, hopefully when, when this was first noticed, somebody noticed it in the early days of Ouiki, it was like, hey, there's Completely, completely different stories. Then the pages got more sophisticated and people are like, oh, actually this is a more interesting story and we're not six years old anymore, so maybe we should improve that.
- [30:29]
Rory Stewart
I was just looking at your Gaza page and that too is an extraordinary way for people who are interested, because what you see is clearly people saying, we're going to locate the October 7th attack in history. History. You'll see people talking about Israeli attacks before October 7th to put the context. And then you'll clearly see people more on the sympathetic, the Israeli cause, emphasizing the horror of what happened on the day of the attack. Then you'll see people putting forward the Palestinian voice. And if you trace it through, they're different voices, they're different people filling in different parts of the picture. But I think quite an interesting way of thinking about truth because it's quite unlike the way a normal newspaper article would be written. What it actually seems to be is. Is dozens, maybe hundreds of different voices on slightly different sides putting in their own sentence with their own thing. And it ends up as a sort of balance. You do begin to get a richer picture of things, but it's a very unusual way, crowdsourcing of writing an article. I'm going to come back to Alistair on this again. I mean, presumably it's very, very unlike the way you normally think about journalism or telling a story to have a hundred different people writing different sentences from different backgrounds with different footnotes.
- [31:47]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, absolutely. Well, the nearest you ever get to it is occasionally you'll see something where there'll be one byline and at the bottom you'll say additional reporting and have sort of 10 different people in different places. You sometimes get that, but I think there'll be one. You always talk about who's holding the pen. What's interesting about Wikipedia is you're never quite sure who's holding the pen because anybody can grab it at any time and sometimes different people are grabbing it at the same time. Yeah, which it is. But Jim, just on that, do you think, Would you say that. I mean, I spend a lot of time criticizing modern journalism, particularly in the uk. Would you say that Wikipedia as a form of journalism is more accurate and more grounded and thought through than most that we. Most of the stuff that we define as journalism?
- [32:38]
Jimmy Wales
Well, so I don't know. That's a. That's a tough, challenging question. I mean, so the first thing I would say is we are definitely not journalists. And I think that's really important. We are synthesizing sources, but we really depend on that first line reporting, that first draft of history, that writing. I think when we're doing a really good job and there are cases I can point to that I'm quite proud of. I would say the page about Charlie Kirk in the aftermath of his assassination I thought was really good and it really balanced and really even though I would say the vast majority of Wikipedia volunteers would have many deep disagreements with Charlie Kirk and his ideas, but there was a real effort to be thoughtful, to be, to present, you know, the different views in a fair way and, and so on and so forth. It doesn't always work that well, for sure.
- [33:33]
Alistair Campbell
Would you have had that balance about Charlie Kirk before his death?
- [33:36]
Jimmy Wales
Probably.
- [33:37]
Alistair Campbell
Do you think?
- [33:37]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, probably. Pretty good. Although again, it. The, the more prominent a page is and if it's attracted the attention of like the best Wikipedians, then you get a better outcome, generally speaking. And so I think that that does help. Yeah, it would be. Actually, I think it's the sort of thing that I would love to encourage. Like I'm leading a neutral point of view working group in the foundation and one of the things that we're looking at is recommendations for researchers because we would really love to see more serious, thoughtful research on these kinds of questions. Like there's a great question, take a sample of pages like Charlie Kirk before and after a major news event, an assassination, or something like this. How do the pages change? Like what happens? And do they become more neutral? Do they become less neutral? Maybe there's no simple pattern to it, but I think it's super interesting.
- [34:27]
Rory Stewart
Okay, Jimmy Alastair, quick break and then back for more. This episode is brought to you by Aura Frames. Now, it's Mother's Day coming up and Aura Frames is what I'd call a thoughtful, lasting gift, especially if it's for
- [34:49]
Alistair Campbell
somebody who can be tricky to shop for.
- [34:51]
Rory Stewart
Every year you have the same fallback gifts of flowers or books. But Aura Frames are rather lovely. They're a photo frame with high definition images, but the images change during the day. So you can have a wonderful variety of family photographs coming up. It's something in fact, that I've just given my little sister and easy to set up. Absolutely. Takes you two minutes. Free, unlimited storage, all in a premium gift box.
- [35:15]
Alistair Campbell
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- [35:29]
Rory Stewart
That's a U r a frames.co.uk promo code politics. The deal is exclusive to listeners, so order yours now to get it in time for Mother's Day. And don't forget to add politics at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Jimmy, before we move on from Wikipedia into sort of bigger subjects, your book, you, et cetera, just give us a sense of some of the statistics, some of the scale of this thing so that people listening get a sense of what this beast Wikipedia is.
- [36:03]
Jimmy Wales
Well, we're in over 300 languages and that's a little bit of an overstatement because some of those languages are quite small. But we're in many, many, many languages and we're, you know, we, we have tens of billions of page views a month in English alone and then as much elsewhere, I would say one of the interesting facts about Wikipedia is that under 10% of the content is in English. And so we think of it as, as English because we're English speakers. But actually it's, it's quite big in, in all around the world and you know, we're seen by 2 billion ish devices every month. That doesn't necessarily mean 2 billion people because probably you see it on your phone and your laptop or whatever, but it's a lot. It's a lot. And so it's really kind of phenomenal to think about. And you know, I just, I work in my basement, you know, I'm a geek typing away in my basement and it's like, oh, wow, like all these people are out there.
- [37:01]
Alistair Campbell
How many, how many times a day do you look at Wikipedia?
- [37:04]
Jimmy Wales
Oh, I don't know. You know, in my book I quote Diane von Furstenberg who says we all use Wikipedia more often than we pee. Which I thought was a great line.
- [37:14]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the rest, let's just, you know, some of these key, some of them we've mentioned already, but Elon Musk in particular, he seems to have a real thing about you and about Wikipedia. And I just wondered, do you know him? How well do you know him? What do you make of him? What should we make of him, those of us who don't know him? And you know, if I can put it in a very non Wikipedia world, is he a kind of a threat to democracy?
- [37:48]
Jimmy Wales
Right. Well, so I've known Elon for, for years, many years. I'm not sure when I first met him, but a long time ago. You know, I've seen it reported that we used to be friends. That's overstating it. I've known him, I've Known a lot of people from the industry and so forth. I would say one thing to know about him is he's much calmer and quieter and more polite in person, or he always has been with me. He's got a public Persona and I think a lot of what we see, we should kind of think in our minds like, okay, this is his public act. And I think a lot of politicians are like that and so forth and sort of privately less flamboyant, maybe. And so there's that. With Grokopedia. He has had a thing about Wikipedia for quite some time.
- [38:37]
Rory Stewart
Am I right, Jimmy, that he said that he was going to give a billion dollars if you would change your name to Dickapedia, Is that right?
- [38:44]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, he did say that. And I sort of worked for a day on a response and just decided it. Just let it, let it hang there. He said it. There's really no response. Like, okay, Elon, like when you're. When you're no longer 13 years old, let's have a conversation, you know, like, actually, yeah, once, actually my most successful tweet ever. Somebody. He was complaining about Wikipedia on Twitter. It might have still been Twitter at that time. No, maybe he had just bought X. But anyway, and a journalist tweeted at him, you should just buy Wikipedia. And I just said, not for sale. That went super viral. It was very, very successful. But ultimately. So with Grokopedia, he claims Wikipedia is biased and it's gone super left wing and woke. And I don't think that's true, although I think we always should grapple with questions of bias and say, okay, hold on. Which, by the way, I think the BBC needs to take a serious look at themselves on this front, even if the natural reaction is this is all overblown and so on. Sure, but you're the BBC, you've got to take it seriously, you've got to grapple with it. You've got to really think about your processes and procedures. Where have you fallen down? Where could you do better? All of that. So I think we should do that. But also, you know, it's like he claims that Grokopedia is more neutral than Wikipedia, even though it seems to have quite a lot of agreement with some of his more unusual political views. And I think that isn't my idea of what neutrality means. Certainly, you know, when you ask me about various pages in Wikipedia, their pages, where I'll say, I think that page is terrible. I think it's. I think it's not neutral. I think it's got A lot of problems. And I think that's okay as long as the process is working. As long as we're moving in the right direction over the long haul, then figuring out grappling with these deep issues in society and so on is just. That's what our job is. That's the core of the work. And so I think he fails to get how hard it is. And also, large language models are really, really not good enough to write Wikipedia articles or Grokopedia articles. One of my favorite. I always test new large language models and I use a lot of different. I'm fascinated by the technology. One of my great tests is, I always ask, who is Kate Garvey? My wife, who is not a famous person, but she's a known person. She worked in the Blair administration and is in a lot of the books about Tony and the Blair years. She's done stuff promoting the global goals, sustainable Development Goals. She's gotten some interesting, you know, profiles and things like that. But she's kind of perfect for the large language models because they sort of kind of know who she is and they just love making stuff up. So one of my favorites, it said that she. That she set up a nonprofit to promote women's empowerment in the workplace. So if you know Kate, that sounds plausible. That sounds like Kate, but she didn't actually do that. That she did this with Miriam Gonzalez, which is Nick Clegg's wife. Again, never happened. But of course, I know Nick from his work at Meta. We know them socially. Our kids go to the same school because London is London. You know, it's like. And I showed Kate and she was like, wow. Like, that that could have happened. Like, it could have easily happened. We were at a dinner party and we sat together, and before she started Project Everyone, she could have done that. And it just didn't happen. But then my favorite is I ask and who did she marry? And this is absolutely golden. It's often very plausible. So it's people in the UK political scene. I don't think it's ever been either of you, but you would be suspects for sure.
- [42:21]
Alistair Campbell
Too old.
- [42:22]
Jimmy Wales
It was definitely James Purnell once. That was good. But my favorite James Purnell. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, Alexis is my publisher in the uk, James's wife. And so that was quite amusing. She got a laugh out of that. But my favorite, my favorite, and this is a little bit on the less plausible side, is it recently said Peter Mandelson, which. And I said. I said, oh, isn't Peter quite Famously gay. And then it got very. Woke with me and said, it's not appropriate to speculate about people's personal sex lives and gay marriage is legal in the uk. So anyway. So anyway, it's not good enough to write a Wikipedia entry about Kate. It will just get things completely wrong. But plausibly, in most cases.
- [43:04]
Rory Stewart
Well, Jimmy, let's maybe use this to transition to something I'm fascinated in, which is that the dozen people at the heart of this AI revolution have a great deal in common. I mean, many of them are very bright like you. Many of them were early movers in the space, the Internet. Many of them were on record back in 2016 saying that there are many problems with AI and they were worried about AGI and it needed to be regulated. And then almost all of them, having initially expressed caution, have now joined the camp of let's put the foot down on the accelerator, build these models as quickly as possible, generally in order to stop some other one of this group building one. So, you know, if you're Zuckerberg, you're building it to stop Sam Altman, if you're Sam Altman, to stop Musk, et cetera. I mean, the whole thing is like extraordinary. And they're all doing it to stop China. Now, what I wanted to know is your sense of the mindset here, here. Are we right to be a little bit concerned about very bright, powerful people with an enormous amount of money and very few of them pushing ahead, building these enormous models in this way?
- [44:12]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [44:12]
Jimmy Wales
Although I'm in the camp, having sort of used them quite deeply to say there's a great. Gary Marcus is a great AI researcher who's become quite known for his skepticism. He's not anti AI, but he just thinks large language models are a bit of a dead end and we're not seeing the scaling lead to the same results that we did in the first few steps. So I think, although it's all very exciting and very scary and positive and negative and all of that, I think it's going to be longer than some people think. And so I think that this current competitive environment is really about. It is a very useful technology. And Google, you've seen commentary in the press like, ooh, maybe Google's over. Maybe everybody's going to start using ChatGPT instead of Google. So Google clearly has to respond to that. And clearly the AI summaries and the advances they're making are incredibly useful for their customers and, you know, their users. And so it's kind of natural that there's this amazing new technology and a lot of investment is flowing into it. So we can get a little worried in a science fictiony way, right? Are we headlong creating a successor that's going to kill us all? But I'm kind of like, don't think so. So I'm, you know.
- [45:28]
Rory Stewart
But Jimmy, let me push beyond the technology to the question of the people. And this, this odd question. I mean, you're not worth $140 billion or $400 billion yet you're a very wealthy man, but you're not quite this sort of weird group of people. Is there not something a bit strange culturally, historically, about a group of people with that amount of wealth, with these particular ideas being in control of so much of the US Stock market, so much the development of future technology? Is there not an issue here to get into the psychology of these people and what they're up to?
- [46:05]
Jimmy Wales
I mean, it's interesting, it's plausible. I'm not sure how much of an issue there really is. I mean, I do think it's when we think about the stock market, for example, and the question of is it a bubble and so forth. Well, I've seen bubbles and lived through the dot com crash, and this feels a lot different in a way, you know, when people get sort of agonized about it, I'm like, well, at least, you know, Nvidia is making computer chips and making profits and it's selling to customers who are becoming more profitable. So that doesn't look like it's going to collapse anytime soon. But you know, broadly, having a handful of people making very important decisions for society, that's not unusual in history. And it doesn't always end well and it doesn't always end badly. So I just, I don't know, I think I'm with you and asking the question, and I don't have a very strong view. I mean, certainly, you know, certain people, like Demis Hassabis is so thoughtful and so kind, and when you talk to him about these kinds of issues, he's very nuanced and very interesting. And you think, okay, yeah, I think we're all right as long as Demis is, you know, in charge of things. Other people who are a little more chaotic and wild, like Elon, you're like, oh, you know, I'm not so sure that this is going to be a great outcome. Depending on, depending on what you mean by outcome.
- [47:23]
Alistair Campbell
You know, Jimmy, just to go back to your book, it's about trust. And the context, in a way, is the falling trust. Of a lot of the institutions that used to have high levels of trust. So for example, you quote the US federal government, 50% trusted it in 2001, 16% by 2023. Trust in the mainstream news media, 53% in 2001, 32% 2023. Worst of all, I thought was this one. The percentage of Americans who believe most people can be trusted fell from 35% in 2000 to 25% in 2022. So what's your analysis as to why I think we all three would agree that those trust levels have fallen right around the democratic world. What's your analysis as to why? Is it politics, Is it media, Is it a mix of both? Is it technology, Is it the pace of life? What is it?
- [48:20]
Jimmy Wales
I mean, I think it's a confluence of those things and I think it's quite hard to isolate the exact cause. As a simple story. Certainly, you know, when we saw the, the demise, and I think that's not too strong a word of local journalism. So all around the democratic world, all around the world really, local journalism has very much collapsed. My hometown, you remember I talked about throwing that newspaper. Well, my hometown, we had two newspapers when I was young. There was a morning paper, an afternoon paper. The morning paper died years ago. The afternoon paper is now published three times a week and it's published out of a city 100 miles away. The number of active journalists working in Huntsville, Alabama is dramatically less than it was. And that kind of personal journalism, where it's things are being reported on that are part of your day to day life, was part of that building the trust relationship in media. Now most news and most journalism is about far off characters who don't seem to know anything about who you are and what your life is like. I mean, certainly in the uk, that's
- [49:29]
Alistair Campbell
technology, that's media and technology, it is
- [49:31]
Jimmy Wales
in part a technology. Right, because suddenly the shift from, you know, from, from print to digital meant things like classified ads didn't make sense anymore. Display ads still made sense, but just subscriptions kind of went by the wayside and so forth. And so that business model for local journalism has been destroyed. And that, that caused a lot of lack of trust and also means, you know, I always joke, it's probably a great time to be the brother in law of a mayor in a small town in America and own a construction company because nobody's scrutinizing those contracts, you know, like that, the new building contract, like who's looking at that? Who's complaining, complaining about the nepotism and so forth, it's just fallen apart. And that does have a corrosive effect on society that we don't feel like anybody's watching. And now suddenly, you know, you can get to a point in a culture where, okay, you're a person who believes in following the rules, you're kind of a sucker because, you know, the only way to get ahead is to cheat and the only way to get by is to cheat in some places. And that's super toxic and it's not good for, for prosperity in the long run, but it's an equilibrium you can get into. So there's the technology piece. I think some of the responses. So the media, I feel like, has often become click following and that clickbait headline and the sort of seeking outrage has been. And becoming more partisan is problematic. I always say this. I love electric cars. I'm fascinated by the technology. I think it's a great thing. I own an electric car, not a Tesla. And you can take for the last week, go and grab every headline from the Telegraph and the Guardian to quality newspapers in London and I can tell you, I'd say with 90 plus percent accuracy, which headline came from which paper, because the Telegraph hates electric cars and the Guardian loves electric cars. And sometimes they're reporting on the same research that came out and you can just go, well, here's the negative view and here's the positive view of that. I don't think that's healthy in the long run and I understand the pressures that have led people there, but I also feel like, you know what, actually what I want as someone who I would tend to probably prefer that Guardian story because it flatters my own view of the world. I also, I want to hear about, oh, oh, they're heavier and therefore the tires wear out sooner and there's more particle tire particles around. I want to know about that. That sounds interesting. Like that sounds problematic. It doesn't mean the end of my love of electric cars, but like, oh, what can be done about that? How big is that problem? I don't know. And who do I trust? I don't necessarily trust the Guardian or the Telegraph alone. I have to read both and kind of triangulate and that's not great for a sense of trusting the media and on politics.
- [52:22]
Alistair Campbell
How does global trust get impacted by the presence of Donald Trump as the most high profile politician in the world?
- [52:32]
Jimmy Wales
I think it's, I think it's really important and really core. We can't lay it all at Trump's feet. So I Sort of started with business model and journalism and things like this. But. And is it a cause or is it an effect? You know, it's both. And certainly when you have someone who is really aggressively actively undermining people's trust in some basic facts, that's really problematic. And, you know, can you imagine how stunned we would all be if Trump came out tomorrow and said, actually, I feel like what we really need is to have a deeper understanding of immigration, like, what is actually going on? Who is coming in? What are some of the solutions to the problems that we. No, he doesn't do anything like that. He just rants and attacks anybody who disagrees with his preferred solutions, whatever they may be. And that's deeply problematic. And he's not the only one. We see this around the world. I mean, I would argue there was a clear, in my view, this is an amateurish watcher of the news, but I feel like Bibi Benjamin Netanyahu also adopted a kind of Trumpish kind of style when he saw how successful it was for Trump. And he sort of moved from being a politician I have many disagreements with to somebody who's a bit bombastic and a bit like this and that. And that isn't great. And we see that in lots of different places where we see the rise of characters who are charismatic and populist, but not so grounded in the real complicated nuances of policy, which is really where the work has to take place.
- [54:12]
Alistair Campbell
When you said it's problematic, where in your assessment could it lead? Where's this kind of heading? Because it feels to me that term two is so much more problematic than term one. And he's only, he's not even a year in it yet. I'm just kind of trying to work out where could this go?
- [54:33]
Jimmy Wales
Well, this is where I, you know, I recently was. Was on a similar show, and I, I talked about how I'm, I'm a great optimist. And then I answered this question and, and the, the other person said, you know, you're not sounding like much of an optimist, Jimmy. Like, I thought you were going to cheer me up. And so I just sort of came down to, I don't think he's going to get away with the coup. But, you know, if you look at a lot of the different things, like, you know, firing a lot of generals, you know, undermining the courts, undermining the Justice Department, politicizing, sort of saying really blatantly two weeks ago that a group of senators who said, actually, it's an established principle of American law that soldiers can and should refuse illegal orders. And him saying that's sedition and they should be arrested. Wow. Like, that's not even, like, legally, there is no controversy in saying that, like, illegal orders should not be followed. That's a bedrock principle of American law and military law. And there we are. And so when you see all those kinds of things and you think, well, like, what is he trying to accomplish? If he's trying to bully soldiers into thinking they need to follow orders no matter what, whether it's illegal or not, maybe it's just about he really thinks it's important to kill every last person on a Venezuelan boat. Or maybe it's about softening things up for other things. Like, we were talking about sending military into cities, which is just not a thing that's okay. And sort of doing all the legal work, like, what are you laying the groundwork for? And the answer may be nothing. It may be just he's aggressively pursuing his policies and he feels like a deep state is blocked getting things done and so on, or war. But there are things, like, things that people who don't really know that much about the American system do need to be aware of is it's not within the power of the president to cancel elections because they are run by the states and the states are completely independent and they're going to run the elections. To stop the states from running elections would be open civil war. That's not easy to do. It's not like in the uk you could probably. A bad prime minister could probably say, we're going to postpone elections three years longer than it's supposed to be. What's the only thing that's going to stop them if they've got the majority in Parliament? What, the king, Maybe we hope. But broadly, in the us, the decentralization of the system, which makes lots of things hard to do and so forth, does mean you can't just run roughshod over the entirety of the law.
- [57:09]
Alistair Campbell
I hope he's running rough shot over a hell of a lot of it already.
- [57:13]
Rory Stewart
And I also think, Jimmy, there's a bit of a risk with I don't think he's gonna cancel elections, but none of these guys cancel elections. Putin still has elections, Maduro still has elections. But I think we often end up setting weird bars for Trump and saying, oh, well, he's not gonna cancel elections, so he can't be that bad.
- [57:28]
Jimmy Wales
That's fair.
- [57:29]
Rory Stewart
That's a fair point, Jimmy. Let's get. As I come towards the End. Final question for me. You've written a very, very interesting book, and I'd like you just to take us through some of what you think the PR are for. Rebuilding trust. Right. So a lot of this conversation has been about trust in an age without trust.
- [57:47]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah.
- [57:47]
Rory Stewart
Talk us through your recipe for trust and the kind of things we. We need to do. And maybe out of your list, because it's a. It's a comprehensive list. What are one or two kind of unusual and unexpected items on your list you think people might think about more?
- [58:01]
Alistair Campbell
Number five. I'm. I'm going for number five, Jimmy.
- [58:03]
Jimmy Wales
Okay. Well, you. I haven't. I haven't learned them in order, so you'll have to remind me which ones.
- [58:08]
Alistair Campbell
Of course, you've only got seven. Number five is your mother was right.
- [58:13]
Jimmy Wales
Oh, your mother was right. Civility. Yeah, civility. So, yeah. So the book. So we've talked. Because this is, you know, the rest is politics. We've talked a lot about the broader political context and trust and so on and so forth. But the book is about that. But it's also much more about building trust in business and organizations, in your personal life and so forth. And so, yeah, a couple of them. One I already talked about that I do think is very important, is purpose. So I think having a clear purpose is really important at building trust. I mean, one of the things I would say, and this also applies in a political context, is if you have an understanding of the vision of where you're going and, you know, sort of. And you are predictable on that basis, it helps people trust you. You sort of know where you're going to come down, you know, where you. Not a lot of surprises. And you can say, okay, I can trust this politician, even if, by the way, I have some kind of a disagreement on some political issue. I always talk about Obama versus McCain, I thought was a very proud moment for me as an American because I thought, oh, I have political agreements or disagreements with each of them, but I know who they are. I know where they're coming from. They're proper people. We're going to be fine. I might not agree with the policy of John McCain, but I admire John McCain. I think he's a good person, and I think he's. He's okay. The other one. Yeah. So, yeah, civility, your mother was right. Is basically talking about the practicality in, in most circumstances of, of being kind and thoughtful and sort of neutral is a big piece of that. In a lot of ways. It's like saying, you know, think before you act and, and judge. And I do think civility, obviously, is one of the big casualties in social media, particularly in the political social media, where just the level of toxicity is just appalling and it's not conducive to being a thoughtful town square where, well, people of different ideas can come together and we've got a respect for free expression, so we can have hard discussions, but we'll do it in a productive way. Like, let's take a really tough and complicated issue like the trans issue, and let's even go narrower trans issue around sports. Well, okay, that's. To me, that's a hard problem and an interesting problem where, gosh, you know, I actually do think people should have a right to participate in sport. But also, I'm not that comfortable when I see this person who recently transitioned beating all the women in swimming in the US I don't know where to put that. I would like to think about it more. I'd like to be able to talk about it openly. I'm feeling. Feeling a bit nervous even saying this on the podcast because it's so toxic. What will I be accused of? And that's not helpful to advocates on either side, to be honest, that we can't have, like, oh, let's chew on this issue. Let's try to make things better for everybody, and we're gonna have to give a little hair and take a little there, and we're going to find some way through as the way we do things. It's a muddle, but it's okay. And civility goes a long way towards that to saying, okay, like, oh, I disagree with you, but I think you're a human being. And, you know, some. Some of the stories that I love about Wikipedia in this context. I met this young guy in Taiwan. He was driving me around, a young Wikipedia volunteer. I was there doing a little of a press tour and a Wikipedia conference and so on. And he. I got to know him over the day and he said, yeah, I was raised in a very nationalist Taiwanese household, and I grew up believing that mainland Chinese people were all brainwashed like robots. And they didn't know anything about history, they didn't know anything about the world. They've been subject to propaganda, didn't understand a thing. Then I started working with Wikipedia and I met a lot of mainland Chinese people. And he said, they're still wrong about a lot of things, but in some things, I can see where they're coming from or they've got a point. And so for the first Time in his life, he thought of the people he had disagreements with as human beings and he could sort of put himself in their shoes a little bit and have a dialogue about it. And I was like, that's fantastic. Like, that's exactly what we need, to have peace, to have prosperity, to get forward in the world. And it does start with saying like, oh, actually this is another person just like you. Let's have a conversation. Let's remember, you know, they probably. Their mother told them to be nice as well.
- [62:43]
Alistair Campbell
My final question, Jimmy, is whether is in your kind of sense of identity now, how British do you feel?
- [62:50]
Jimmy Wales
I mean, fairly British, I would have to say, but it's hard to say. I mean, it's been a long time since anybody yelled at me on. I once commented about something about British politics and I wasn't yet a citizen in the uk and somebody yelled at me because it was Twitter, you know, and said, you know, shut up. What do you know? Like, you don't even live here. I'm like, actually I. I live in London. Like, I think I can comment on politics. So. Yeah, yeah, quite, quite British, I suppose. But I, yeah, I'm a Londoner, I would say. Definitely.
- [63:23]
Alistair Campbell
Very good. Listen, thanks for your time. Thanks for Wikipedia. Rory's got a bit chat GPT these days. I've got to tell you, Jimmy, he's kind of. He's definitely moving on to the LLM stuff.
- [63:38]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, just be careful.
- [63:40]
Alistair Campbell
I stick with you for a lot of my basic research. I still go Wikipedia.
- [63:45]
Jimmy Wales
Brilliant.
- [63:45]
Rory Stewart
Thank you, Jimmy. Lovely to see you.
- [63:47]
Jimmy Wales
Bye.
- [63:47]
Rory Stewart
Bye.
- [63:47]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, thank you.
- [63:48]
Alistair Campbell
Take care.
- [63:49]
Rory Stewart
Bye.
- [63:52]
Alistair Campbell
Okay, Rory, so not as tough with Jimmy as you were with Zach Polanski.
- [63:58]
Rory Stewart
I mean, to be fair, Jimmy is not actually running to be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, as you point out, he is a British citizen. But I think there are things that are fair to do. And grilling elected politicians who are standing for office is a little bit different to grilling somebody who set up a global nonprofit. But listen, here are some things that we could have pointed out if you wanted to. One of them is, of course, that it is true, of course, that it's quite liberal leaning. If you come from the far right, if you read Wikipedia, and that's partly because of the sources. If you have to source everything, a lot of the mainstream media, the New York Times, the kind of things that cite sources will back up a particular worldview, which is not the view of Elon Musk or Trump. It's also quite male leading the majority of people contributing Wikipedia Entries are men and there are more articles about men by men than there are about women and by women. So there are points that you can make about Wikipedia as a cultural icon. Nevertheless, I think in a world of contested horror, it's quite a good thing. What do you think, Alice?
- [65:09]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, I think, look, I, I know Jimmy very, very well, not least because of his, his wife Kate, who worked with me for years and years and years and years and in fact I played the bagpipes at their wedding. So I'm, I, I think, and I do think Wikipedia is, is a, is an extraordinary modern phenomenon and it's part of the theme that you were pushing at is it's, it's sort of, it is positive, it is optimistic and of course there are things you can pick about it and you can, you can, as Trump, as Musk and Trump have done at various points, you can sort of attack it for this and the other. But I think in terms of what it set out to do, the creation of an online encyclopedia, it has done that and it's, and it's become such a useful resource to so many people for so many things. So. No, and I think he's got a, I think Jimmy's got a kind of nice, charming modesty about himself. I've talked to him about this before. I, I think for a lot of people, someone. I talked to footballers who were sort of big stars in the 70s and 80s and okay, they made a reasonable living, okay, but compared to, you know, an amazing world beating footballer in the 70s will have earned in his lifetime less than a kind of average championship player makes in a year. And sometimes you'll get footballers who will be honest and they'll say, yeah, it really pisses me off, but most of them don't. I get the sense with Jimmy, one of the questions he gets most irritated by is, you know, you didn't become a billionaire, you know, all these other tech guys did. And I genuinely don't think it bothers him. I think he actually feels that he's created something thing incredibly powerful and positive and that means as much to him as money does.
- [66:53]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I know him a little bit and I, I wonder what it feels like when he goes to see all these other guys that he knows so well and have known him forever. Because it's very important to them how wealthy they are. You know, they watch each other's wealth all the time. It's a huge status symbol. It's actually not really about spending. They can't begin to spend 1/10,000th of the amount of money they have. It's competition. And I wonder whether he doesn't sometimes get a bit irritated. I also struck by the fact that a little bit like some of the other really kind of big global American figures we've interviewed, Bill Gates would be example maybe Anna Winter would be another. He doesn't quite see the world in the way that I would. I mean he doesn't sort of see these billionaires as a sort of group. He's reluctant to kind of generalize about money and power. I'd be tempted to say that there's actually something inherently problematic about middle aged men worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars controlling the fate of the world. He tends to be on these things a little bit more nuanced. I don't know why that is. Is that, that, that's just his personality. Is it that actually a bit like Bill Gates, he's doing business with these people, he's having to work with them and operate with them and he can't really afford to slag him off.
- [68:17]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, but he did nonetheless. Well, he snuggled off musk a bit. He did nonetheless kind of buy into the notion, I think that one of the reasons why Wikipedia has maintained a sense of integrity is because nobody looks at it and thinks somebody's getting really, really rich out of this. So I think, I think that, that, that is a powerful fact. I think Jimmy's a kind of modern day hero in a way. I mean he's, he's created something and he has a very nice life and he swans around the world making speeches and runs his own businesses and what have you. But I think Wikipedia is a sort of gift to the world and.
- [68:53]
Rory Stewart
Oh, it's unbelievable.
- [68:54]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [68:54]
Rory Stewart
Let's finish on an idealistic optimistic note. I'll reinforce you on this and hand back to you. I think it is one of the most extraordinary things to have done with one's life. To contribute something like that to the world is unbelievable. It really is. It's something that very few human beings will be able to do in their lives. It's like being a really extraordinary Nobel Prize winning scientist or a really consequential politician. I mean that is to create an institution of truth that is central to our lives is it's got to be something that very few people could say they can put on their tombstone.
- [69:28]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, I've still got on my bookshelf at home the, in the Encyclopedia Britannica that my parents sort of bought it the very old fashioned way. They Just sort of, you know, you get it bit by bit. And it is amazing when you think about the other world has changed. It's like Britannica. And I mean, it used to be a joke, didn't it, about, you know, what you do. I'm a door to there and door to door encyclopedia salesman. Um, but that was like a thing. That was how the, that was how the then equivalent of Wikipedia was born. It was like, you know, here's a great idea, get some, you know, and I can, I can remember to this day some of the kind of, you know, the, the way that bold was used and the way that italics were used and, and I used, I actually did. And Jimmy, apparently age three, his mum bought him an encyclopedia. And that's maybe where the, where the thought was sort of, but that sense of, you know. And he said Encyclopedia Britannica, which is kind of like that. And they have produced the English Wikipedia alone, which I think. Did he say it was 20% English language?
- [70:30]
Rory Stewart
Yeah.
- [70:30]
Alistair Campbell
Or 10%. Well, he said, but English Wikipedia alone is 93 times bigger than the whole of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So you add it in all the other languages that it's in. It's, you know, it would be.
- [70:42]
Rory Stewart
You wouldn't be able to fit that even on that large set of bookshelves that I see behind you in your French house. There are. It would be many, many rooms worth of bookshelves.
- [70:50]
Alistair Campbell
Get all that in next to the picture of me and Diego Maradona.
- [70:53]
Rory Stewart
Yes, I, I did see that. I actually guessed that's what it was, to be honest. It seemed to me clear that that must have been the nature of the picture. Anyway, finishing with two of your heroes, Diego Maradona and, and Jimmy Wells. Thank you very much, Alyson.
- [71:06]
Alistair Campbell
See you soon.
- [71:06]
Rory Stewart
Bye bye. See you soon.
- [71:14]
Jimmy Wales
It's tax season, and at LifeLock, we
- [71:16]
Rory Stewart
know you're tired of numbers, but here's
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Jimmy Wales
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- [71:44]
Rory Stewart
Did Vladimir Putin interfere in the US 2016 presidential election? I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.
- [71:52]
Jimmy Wales
And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. And we are the hosts of The Rest is Classified. And in our latest series, we're going deep inside the 2016 election to reveal the true story of whether the Russians helped Donald Trump take the White House.
- [72:06]
Rory Stewart
This is the unbelievable story of of how Russian spies first hacked and then leaked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton's campaign,
- [72:16]
Jimmy Wales
how Julian Assange got involved with Putin
- [72:19]
Rory Stewart
spies, and how 2016 marked the point that the world changed forever.
- [72:24]
Jimmy Wales
Get the full insider scoop by listening to the Rest Is Classified. Wherever you get your podcasts,