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

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, tells Brian Rose why he believes Wikipedia is broken, what his Nine Theses would change, and how he came to believe in God. 💰 Source hot AI deals in our Investment Club https://lr.academy/ai-investment-club/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_content=40213415&utm_campaign=ic 🏦 Invest in luxury Dubai property https://lr.academy/property-investment-g/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_content=40213415&utm_campaign=pc 🍿 Watch the full interview with chapters and transcripts for free https://londonreal.tv/larry-sanger-wikipedia-is-broken-and-no-one-wants-to-admit-it/ Chapters 2:43 Intro: Larry Sanger and Wikipedia 3:46 Brian's story: deplatforming and Wikipedia 8:57 Anonymous editors and Section 230 10:22 How the media landscape changed 14:43 The perennial sources page 18:08 Wikipedia, Google and AI chatbots 24:47 Grokipedia 31:45 Community Notes on X 34:19 Intelligence agencies and PR firms on Wikipedia 39:13 The Twitter Files and being deplatformed 45:09 Sanger on what Wikipedia became 47:26 Sanger's role in founding Wikipedia 50:13 The Nine Theses 57:11 Libel, money and accountability 1:03:28 Who could push reform through 1:09:40 Decentralisation, blockchain and ZWI files 1:18:48 Sanger's spiritual journey 1:37:33 Religion, socialism and society 1:42:26 Where to follow Larry Sanger

• 0:01Speaker 00

  I'm 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.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  We were being ripped apart on Wikipedia. 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.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  When COVID happened and lockdown happened, we were one of the few channels that started asking hard questions. We had the second largest YouTube livestream in the world, and that episode was banned and deleted 10 minutes after we finished it.

• 0:48Speaker 00

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

• 1:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13Speaker 00

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

• 1:20Speaker 01

  How we can turn Wikipedia around.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  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

• 2:30Speaker 01

  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. Thank you. This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. 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

• 3:15Speaker 01

  knowledge systems, and the deeper question of whether truth itself can survive in a digital world dominated by power 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.

• 3:44Speaker 00

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

• 3:47Speaker 01

  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. Uh, cause I always thought London was a tremendous brand name and I thought I would just grab it. And, you know, this was in 11 and I still remember getting our first Twitter account.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And again, you know, social media is still newish, you know, uh, Instagram didn't exist back then, Facebook. Um, 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, uh, it, 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, uh, a sign that we were now relevant, you know, as a show. And, um, and, and, 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,

• 5:15Speaker 01

  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, uh, famously on April 6th, 2020, we had the second largest YouTube livestream in the world. Second only to Trump's coronavirus briefing that day from DC. And that episode was banned and deleted, uh, 10 minutes after we finished it. Now 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,

• 5:59Speaker 01

  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'm 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 of what you make of, of our experience there. Just feeling that, and it started right around 2020.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  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?

• 7:14Speaker 00

  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 entirely exonerated was not properly told by Wikipedia.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  The, the, the fact that you're bad mouthed and, well, I'm not really sure how you are bad mouthed exactly by Wikipedia is, is certainly par for the course if you challenge the narrative, generally speaking.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  In fact, there are podcasts, I suppose, that can be used as sources on Wikipedia. Not very many of them. 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 win for you if you could actually be cited as a source. And, you know, that would be something to have your guy look at. It is absolutely true that people who can afford it will pay and have maintained their pages.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  But, you know, PR firms that specialize in working on Wikipedia. And it's required, essentially. Otherwise, they will absolutely take you apart 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. You can't sue the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the owner of the platform, because of Section 230 protections. So, yes, I'll tell you what I've told many people before.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  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 for this to be an engine of libel, as it has become. It's a real shame.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  I think you've been quoted as saying that, you know, 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, would openly say, "I can't even believe the New York Times." Nobody was really saying that in 2010, were they? And that changed, I think 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, I would say.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  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 that the news was entirely dominated by the big three plus PBS and NPR.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  And 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 internet, when the internet became, well, widely used enough, it actually made, it started making a difference to the media landscape. So that in the 2000s, you started to see things like WorldNetDaily and,

• 11:42Speaker 00

  well, any number of other news sources. About Time's got a start around then, I suppose. And, and of course, Joe Rogan and others. And then they just kept building and building. Now, 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.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  And for a good decade or more, it was just Fox News and MSNBC that were essentially purveyors of opinion masquerading as news.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  You know, I remember just being shocked at my erstwhile liberal friends mocking free speech as freeze peach, right, back 10 years ago or so. And again overnight, basically 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.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  And I suppose the youngest adults out there today don't even remember a time 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...

• 14:32Speaker 00

  A page was 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 nonprofit organizations and and think tanks and whatnot. They were all listed there as as major sources and they were color coded. Um, the ones that were color coded green could be used with without attribution except in footnotes. Um, so the things that they said could be repeated in Wikipedia's own voice, even if they were quite biased, right?

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Um, things that were in yellow generally were discouraged. It's like yellow means caution. And it and basically, uh, those things you certainly had to attribute any um, alleged facts to those sources. And then there were two other, two or three other gradations of of um, credibility on the perennial sources page. There was uh, red and gray. And if something is red, basically it's um, no go. You you're not allowed to use those sources, except perhaps

• 15:57Speaker 00

  to uh, characterize what the source, information about the source itself. So you could use the source as a source of information about itself. Um, and then the the grade sources that would include things like Breitbart. Um, and any number of others, this is not to slam Breitbart. Uh, they they couldn't be used even even as a source for for themselves. Um, they were uh, in the software, it's impossible to link that the software will stop you from linking to those sources.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  So what happened as a result of this effort to organize the Wikipedia's opinions about how different sources could be used, it quickly became obvious 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,

• 17:21Speaker 00

  they were all essentially blocked from being used. And the only ones 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 essentially what has happened. Basically, Wikipedia went from being

• 17:56Speaker 00

  an attempt to represent the broad landscape of opinion on every subject to being a mouthpiece for the establishment.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Yes, it certainly 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,

• 18:45Speaker 00

  you know, the New York Times or whatever, perhaps. But people do the same 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.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  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 AI 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 100 really high-level influencers and ultra-wealthy people, and Alex Jones came up, because he had

• 20:00Speaker 01

  just interviewed me. And one of the guys said, oh, Alex Jones, I just ChatGPT'd him, and this is what they said. Dubai real estate is exploding, and the biggest money is being made where almost nobody is looking, in premium luxury transformation projects that have historically delivered 40% to 90% annual returns. That is incredible. For years, these opportunities were locked inside private networks. You never saw them. You never had access until now. I've spent 15 years on Wall Street and five years studying Dubai up close. And today, for the first time ever, you can invest directly alongside my team. We have just received a brand-new project with

• 20:44Speaker 01

  real potential for outsized returns, and early allocations always fill fast. Click the link and apply now. Your opportunity starts today.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, we have to practice digital hygiene. I mean, this is something that we should be teaching to our children routinely. And perhaps there's a slightly older generation that developed their instincts about how to consume media back in the days of the big three 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, and we have to consume more sources

• 22:14Speaker 00

  of a wider variety, I think, if we want to be reasonably confident of any conclusion. And when it comes to, you know, 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.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was interviewed by Alex Jones a couple of months ago and I was surprised that he was, first of all, a good interviewer. And second of all, apart from a few obligatory nods to the conspiracy outlook, nevertheless, is, I think, an informative, interesting interview. So, yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  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 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 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, uh, yeah, I'm kind of look at fairness. Um, 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,

• 23:57Speaker 01

  talking with my, um, my, uh, 22-year-old daughter, who's going to school in Boston, and she was over here visiting me. And, uh, Wikipedia came up, I'm not exactly sure how, and I brought up the Grokopedia. 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. Um, and I'm suspicious of kind of a lot of the things that happened, especially the censorship on the internet, et cetera. And so I said, "Well, Grokopedia, 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,

• 24:42Speaker 01

  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 Grokopedia? 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?

• 25:13Speaker 00

  So I'm kind of impressed by Gracapedia. Wikipedia should watch out. It's still early days. We don't know what L L M's can do ultimately through iteration and and just iteration of the current crop of L L M technology might be enough to make a an encyclopedia that is better than Wikipedia. But 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 Gracapedia or Wikipedia.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of facts that were not even in Wikipedia that had been essentially left out. So Gracapedia 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 L L M, Gracapedia draws inferences which it it really shouldn't.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  So because there is in in an L L M, you know, artificial intelligence mind, a connection between science and 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 Gracapedia or the the engine that generated the article

• 27:21Speaker 00

  falsely, wrongly inferred that the one thing caused the other when they really had nothing to do with each other. And So it's it's interesting, a really interesting problem to figure out how to get rid of such bad inferences. There's a there's a lot of problems right now. It is still early days. They didn't even go through the the article enough times to catch all of the repetition. There's like three different introductions to my PhD dissertation in the article, just for example.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  So I've 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.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  But 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 an achievement. Obviously, they've they've put some very talented people to work on the project.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  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

• 29:23Speaker 00

  I took the introductory sections of articles on 10 different topics.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  And I, from Wikipedia and Grokopedia, and I fed them both to ChatGPT, a neutral third party. And I had ChatGPT rate the bias of the two different articles, not telling.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  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 Grokopedia 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.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  And we, perhaps we should talk a little bit about the, the very idea of neutrality versus objectivity. That's something that I, that's a hobby horse of mine that I like to talk about. It's actually relevant today, I think.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's talk about that. Just, 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, it's done that way as a way to show how neutral that is.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  I'm curious what you think of it and what you know about it, and if you've actually seen that proof. And then I'd love to hear your thoughts on neutrality.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  I can't prove that it's successful. I can give you my opinion that it is pretty successful. So the way it works, my understanding is anyway, that when somebody submits a community note for evaluation, then if if the opinion is divided, generally speaking, on partisan lines, then it's just ignored. But if people who have traditionally voted

• 32:21Speaker 00

  against each other in similar disputes, I don't know how that's ascertained, then 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

• 33:03Speaker 00

  a lot of times, there is an objective fact that has been left out of somebody's ex-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 the situation.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  It's helpful.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  It is very.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Sometimes, almost like a blatant piece of misinformation that might 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. Um, I guess maybe that ultimately could be game two. Um, 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.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Um, but in practice, it always doesn't work. So, um, it just real quickly, before you go to neutrality, you mentioned various actors and, um, 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, uh, 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.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Perhaps not. Um, but we are told, right? And, 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. 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, um, that spycraft has changed in the last generation. That previously it, it involved collecting information about the enemy. Um, and, and perhaps a little bit of propaganda on the edges through things like,

• 35:36Speaker 00

  I don't know, Voice of America or whatever. Um, but now we are told that spycraft to a very great extent means using whatever, uh, tools are at our disposal to affect public opinion in the interests of national, um, the national interest. Right? Um, and that means then that, uh, it, and, and it has been established.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Historically, that 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?

• 36:42Speaker 00

  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

• 37:08Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and 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 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.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  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, to do that. And I always used to joke, I can't wait for the YouTube files because we were actually deplatformed from YouTube in 23. Dubai is the fastest growing real estate market on earth. And the biggest profits are not happening in off plan speculation. They are happening in luxury transformation projects that have historically delivered 40 to 90% annual returns. Yes, 40 to 90%.

• 40:14Speaker 01

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• 41:13Speaker 01

  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 Owens, right? So I honestly wouldn't even allow myself to think that. And I was angry. I was pointing fingers at the platforms themselves. But now, when we go look back, we realize that they were getting those directives

• 41:58Speaker 01

  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 they haven't said anything. And so it's just incredible for me to watch what can

• 42:41Speaker 01

  happen also from one regime to another. And the truth is, I've said this to people that 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.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember those days and being shocked at 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 that would be a censorship regime, and that we would actually have to learn the concept of censorship. Of course, it's not

• 44:00Speaker 00

  going to be called itself. It's not going to call itself that. It's 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, they, the most influential people on Wikipedia seem to be pretty disciplined about keeping their mouths shut, about what is going on. And I think there, there has to be quite a bit of, quite a few.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Paid players, there's a lot of paid editing going on. There's a fair number of accounts in the hundreds, not the thousands, that appear to be working full time on Wikipedia.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Must be a lot of money to be made there.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Right, right. Larry, just as a quick aside. How do you feel about being the guy that created, you know, this incredible platform? That for a while was lauded as just this 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 that's 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.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  I've been pretty philosophical about the whole thing.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  I have been bothered, almost distraught, I suppose, on behalf of people whose reputations, even whose income has been taken a hit.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  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 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's, well.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Can you give me 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.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  My my involvement was absolutely key. Not only did I bring the idea of Wiki Encyclopedia to the table. I also

• 48:03Speaker 00

  set up the

• 48:06Speaker 00

  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 to produce.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  And

• 48:25Speaker 00

  seeking sources for information.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  And a lot of other rules. So

• 48:34Speaker 00

  in the end, though, a lot of the the biggest

• 48:39Speaker 00

  changes that were made, they

• 48:43Speaker 00

  that all happened after I left. So I can't really take the blame for the ways in which it was co-opted from a operational standpoint.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  So how do we change it?

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Right, well.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Think it'll be relevant in three years? If things like Grokpedia catch up and LLMs come in? Do you think it still will be?

• 49:11Speaker 00

  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 Grokpedia 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? There's a lot that is up in the air at this point, as far as I'm concerned. So, it's still worthwhile.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  So, just to 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.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Number two is that we should enable competing articles. So on Wikipedia, there are, 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,

• 51:33Speaker 00

  or about gold, or whatever, then you could write another one from, 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?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Quite a list. Yeah. And so, it's interesting, because when you go search on Google, Trump, you're gonna 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?

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Exactly. Why not?

• 52:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Um, that should not be, and I, I simply um advocate that Wikipedia should go back to its former practices until about, I don't know, maybe twenty ten, twenty fifteen of allowing um a wide variety of sources and attributing the, the claims made by them to those sources. Um, and allowing the people to make up their own minds, obviously. Um, which is a good way of um describing the neutrality policy, by the way. So the fourth thesis is to revive the original neutrality policy.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  And a good way to um sum up what the original neutrality policy was all about is um when there is, 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 uh like scientific, logical,

• 54:17Speaker 00

  rational attempt to, to uh limb the reality at the joints, to carve it at the joints, and uh so that we have only truth and no falsehood. That's what uh objectivity is all about. Neutrality is the, the, the strategy of uh, the media's 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.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  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, 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

• 55:31Speaker 00

  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, et cetera.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  And maybe they are known to each other to some extent.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  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,

• 57:06Speaker 00

  then they can feel free to resign from the position.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  So um, I think that would be very reasonable, right? The the problem is there is simply no one that can be sued on Wikipedia for the the abundant libel that happens on Wikipedia. So um, and ultimately, uh, the Wikimedia editorial staff volunteer, though it is, has to sort of grow up and and um, own up to the the influence that they have.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Um, I I know you've been said in the past that it's basically become a commercial entity and it'll probably take in a hundred and eighty four million dollars in donations last year. Right. The estimating that the servers are gonna cost less than five million. I'm 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 hustles some of the moderators might have that might eclipse the hundred and eighty four million.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  I I think it probably does, in fact. Um, again, considering the the uh, number of PR firms that specialize in Wikipedia, the fact that the such organizations are apparently pretty wealthy with offices in New York City and so forth. Um, you would think that that um, uh, there are some very well-paid people who are not admitting that they're paid at all, working on on Wikipedia, or simply making um, strategy decisions behind the scenes and and instructing um, the people who are actually uh, in control of the accounts, what to do with the the accounts, essentially.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  You know, that that sort of thing can actually make a big difference. In other words, strategizing about how to deal with um, problems on Wikipedia can make a big difference in the outcome of of disputes that are going on on on Wikipedia.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  So.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Does that answer the question?

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it did. And had you finished with the the main theses that you wanted to cover? Or there are a lot?

• 59:33Speaker 00

  Just a just a couple more real quick. Um, 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? Um, 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. Um, and then

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  So you it's so unique because it's so old, Larry. It's because it 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 it it it got grandfathered in. You know, so 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.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

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

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• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  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 control, so to speak, of Wikipedia. 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.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  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 make needed changes to Wikipedia. So, why not?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  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've 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 DC. Curious for your thoughts on that and what, what their relationship is.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  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

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  quite a few million dollars. I don't know what the total sum is over the years.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  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 get some,

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  Whether, I mean, the Wikipedians like it or not, they don't, in fact, like the very suggestion that the Board of Trustees 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 do think that the Board of Trustees ultimately would have to get behind this.

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  And the Board of Trustees, in turn, could be influenced by 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 a letter of protest against Wikipedia, to the effect

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  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 be, 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.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  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... And such a solution, and it would be better if it didn't have to be subjected to it. I'm just saying that if, if the problem cannot be solved in any other way, then perhaps some pressure will eventually have to be imposed by, by governments. And again, I am about as strong a free speech kind of guy as you can imagine.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  And that ultimately is a creation of the government, right? 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.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much so. You know what would do it quickly, Larry, is if, if Trump sued them,

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  then it would probably change things quickly. I mean, again, he did it to YouTube, he did it to Facebook. They quickly changed policies.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  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, ah, that could be decades, it seems.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  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 Saylor 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 face with what they call these web two institutions like YouTube. And censorship is one of the perfect 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

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  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 what might you have in mind?

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  I actually worked for Everapedia, back when it was called Everapedia, for a couple of years and helped them get an encyclopedia, well, it was 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 are issues with it. We don't need to go into the details there. I do have something that I think is quite relevant here. The idea of decentralization is great

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  because it implies freedom. If the decision-making authority to to, you know, set policy and decide which content is going to be published is spread out, then everyone has

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  A role to play. Um, and, and that is empowering the people. That's, that's how it's supposed to work. But most blockchain, um, companies are, are in fact, uh, not, uh, decentralized in any meaningful way. As, 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 has made a copy or very few others have made a copy of their data or anything like that. And they ultimately have control.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  Um, you know, we were talking about decentralization long before, uh, crypto was a thing at all. And crypto simply co-opted that. In fact, Wikipedia itself, I remember I used the word decentralized, uh, applied it to Wikipedia itself, uh, on the theory that, that it really mattered, that, um, people could, uh, 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.

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  It's just that there's not a lot of money in it, right? Um, if you, if you want to make a lot of money, generally speaking, um, it's hard to know how to do it short of Bitcoin, um, and, and something that has an objective, approvably objective value. Um, uh, and, and, you know, that, that really is, it never was the point of, of decentralization. You know, back in the 1980s, 80s and 90s and the original web, um, the, the internet itself is decentralized and that was a, the, the reason why, um, internet libertarianism

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  was so big. Especially in the nineteen nineties 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 has have started such a thing.

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  I call it the encyclospere, a takeoff of the blogosphere, right? And the idea is we we make copies of all the free encyclopedias. There are more than just Wikipedia and we put them in the ZWI file format. Z W I means zip zipped wiki. It's like a it's like a zip file, but it's for wiki content.

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  Collect it all in one place, but then allow anyone to make a copy of of that. And we've we've actually proven that you can have ZW files shared with each other and different 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 there and somebody will will find a way, but it it's the public comments.

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  See, that's that's the thing what we have forgotten, I think, is that the a 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.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  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 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

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  certain powerful interests 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

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  It's it's I'm not ruling it out I've never said that it's impossible it's just that um I I think what they're the whole blockchain community is fighting now is the the bad reputation of of all the the shitcoins right so um 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 um so

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah 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 of 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, uh, yeah, I'm optimistic.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Look, I wanted to 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, uh, the the concepts of religion than I was when I was 12 years old and my mom dragged me to Sunday school. Um, I even old grace sometimes at the table and my kids are looking at me like, who is this guy? Uh, I'm just kind of curious, um, if you could tell us about your journey and and you've been public about it. And I've also noticed there's a real emergence of that in America.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  From Tucker Carlson to, you know, Donald Trump of all people, who would probably tell you he was the last guy that was religious. Um, maybe being shot at helps, but I don't think it's just that either. Um, 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 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 moved to Dubai, where you live is a statement. So what is a luxury transformation? It's simple.

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• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:21:44Speaker 00

  So I was an agnostic for three and a half decades, basically, from about the age of 14 or 15 and 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, I made it my life's goal to seek the truth, essentially. And I thought there was nothing more important

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  that people waste their lives away and, and destroy their lives because they believe false things ultimately.

• 1:22:37Speaker 00

  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 our reasons for, for our beliefs are correct. But as a result, I became a skeptic, methodological skeptic. In other words, I, as a point of methodology, I simply was agnostic about everything. And that of course, 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

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  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 forty-five pages, so, long form, short book, but it's free. And I got married, and I noticed that I would be willing to die for this woman. I had a couple of boys, and I noticed that I'd be willing to die for them. Now, when I was

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  in my late teens and early twenties, I fancied myself something of a follower of Ayn Rand. Not too much. I was a skeptic, after all, so I didn't really go in for everything that she said. But it was interesting, because I did tend to think that ethical egoism 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

• 1:24:50Speaker 00

  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. They actually have a value independent of me. It's very important. And so, because Ayn Rand is as influential as she is, a lot of people, I think, a lot of libertarian types became...

• 1:25:26Speaker 00

  Well, unbelievers, whether, you know, agnostic or atheist,

• 1:25:34Speaker 00

  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, and, and pick it up. And that's how, that's what my mind does. It sends a signal to my hand and, and,

• 1:26:18Speaker 00

  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, of, you know, virtual reality, of a 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.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  And then I'd said, "Well, if, 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, the straw that really broke the camel's back, as far as my resistance was concerned, was...

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  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, 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

• 1:28:05Speaker 00

  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'm not, 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.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  And I said, well, if I'm going to read these, I'm going to take them at all seriously, then I'm, I'm conceiving of the possibility of a world in which there really are demons and whatnot. And 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.

• 1:29:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:29:38Speaker 00

  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 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, just in a few days. And after a few weeks, I was, I had adopted a 100-day reading plan, or 90-day reading plan. Took me 100 days.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  And by, by the time I had gotten through it, by the 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 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

• 1:31:02Speaker 00

  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? All right? It's, all that follows from that is something that is independent of the universe, of what we call creation, would have, have to have some sort of explanatory relation to the universe, right? And, and it would have to exist necessarily.

• 1:31:45Speaker 00

  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 all of the data, which, when people are thinking about religion,

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  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 finished writing this, and then maybe I'll write a popularization. But I'm just basically recording the sort of philosophical grounds

• 1:33:09Speaker 00

  on which I have changed my mind about God. But since then, it 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, and understand God's Word to us.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  That's incredible. My daughter's actually a philosophy major, so I'm sure she's gonna 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'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.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  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 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?

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  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 he 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.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  And I like the fact you're not gonna make it any shorter. That makes me happy, too.

• 1:36:09Speaker 00

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

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  You know, it's an interesting time, Larry. You know, some would argue that we, we stopped, you know, relig-, uh, 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, et cetera. 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 we're created, you know, to, to, to fill this need.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  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 uh, yeah, very interesting times.

• 1:37:33Speaker 00

  Yep. I, I think that the um, um, there's been a backlash against socialism in the, in, in the, the last generation. I mean, especially in the last 10 years, uh, since Obama uh made it a socially acceptable on the left to, to uh, you know, advocate for socialist policies.

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  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, and some of the backlash that you described could be a backlash against that. Our notion that, you know, the sort of rituals and core values and, and credos that, that we accept are determined by some anointed class of social organizers, essentially a new kind of priestly class of, of socialists.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  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 ourselves. Like, the idea of, of a government or media or some professional anointed expert class

• 1:39:35Speaker 00

  as it were lording it over us is, is simply wrong, right? And, and if we are throwing that away, if we are rebelling against that way of organizing society, then there is a, a, a god-shaped, a god-shaped hole in our, in our souls and in the way that we interact with each other. I think Charlie Kirk's assassination and the reaction to it sort of...

• 1:40:13Speaker 00

  Revealed that.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

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• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's I was just thinking of Turning Point when I was just talking about this resurgence. And I mean, ten years ago, you couldn't conceive of something like that happening of young people, especially rallying around the conservatism and the religious aspect and people outpouring like that. And it's a it's a beautiful thing. And I've had many, many different discussions, you know, over the years about this. And it's always illuminated me, each one more and more and more. I mean, some some argue that the basic tenants 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.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  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 gonna have to do a podcast series alongside the book. Is that a deal?

• 1:41:54Speaker 00

  Well, 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 my X posts. And 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. I don't really have the face, you know.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

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

• 1:42:25Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  But yeah, all right. So if people want to obviously read your blog posts and your extended ones, it's LarrySanger.org. Other ways for them to follow you or stay in touch with you?

• 1:42:38Speaker 00

  On XL Center, 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 encyclo sphere, just like it sounds like encyclopedia, but it's encyclo sphere.org. And if you're a developer, we, we might be starting some new projects or you might pick up where we have left off on our matter most forum.

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  And you can find a link to that on encyclo sphere.org, but that's where any sort of activity for the, the Knowledge Standards Foundation is taking place on the matter most forum.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  All right. Fantastic. Larry, thank you so much for your creations and also your activity 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 L L Ms. 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 L L Ms 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.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:44:35Speaker 00

  All right. Thank you. Appreciate it.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  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. Thank you.