Why Is Wikipedia Broken? | Dr Larry Sanger | Modern Wisdom Podcast 118

Dr Larry Sanger is the ex-founder of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is almost a public utility now, like water or energy. It's one of the most visited sites on the internet and provides millions with information every day. But all might not be as pure as it seems and the utopia of the world's biggest encyclopaedia may have some fundamental flaws. Today we hear from one of the initial members of the project as he explains why Wikipedia is so messed up. Extra Stuff: Follow Dr Sanger on Twitter - https://twitter.com/lsanger Check out Dr Sanger's Website - https://larrysanger.org/ Check out The Knowledge Standards Foundation https://twitter.com/ks_found Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #wikipedia #freespeech - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One of the reasons why Wikipedia is so messed up is that there is no formalized way of arriving at a decision about disputed questions. So you go there, you've got a question about, you know, what should the definition of racism be? Extremely hot topic. It should be possible for people to come up with a bunch of different options and maybe have a round robin competition or something like that and actually get a legitimate choice. That's not what they do. They pretend that it is possible to have a consensus about these things. And the consensus is determined, basically,

• 0:41Speaker 00

  by the people in power on the topic. You know, whoever has the most seniority or seems to have the most allies or whatever, those are the people who basically declare the consensus. So it's not a consensus. It's just putting a cynical description on what is not a consensus all. The decision-making process needs to be reduced to very specific editorial decisions to be made, and then taking legitimate votes based on that.

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Larry Sanger, who is the ex-founder of Wikipedia, among many other things. Larry, welcome to the show.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

• 1:29Chris Williamson?

  Really good to have you here. First things first, I've never heard the term ex-founder before. What can you explain? Can you explain what that means, please?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  I made it up yesterday.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Or then, okay, a couple of days ago.

• 1:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  I did a face or a Twitter poll about it, and over 50% of the people thought it was a good title for me to claim. So I was once considered by everyone, co-founder, even Jimmy Wales. But then, then he started denying me the founder, the title, like in 2005.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Which everyone thought was ridiculous, but he was insisting on it. So it's a little bit of a dig at him for that, but it's also, whenever I tell people online that I'm co-founder of Wikipedia, especially in the last, I don't know, three or six months, they've started getting hostile toward me personally. It's like, you know, Wikipedia is out of control, they say now. And, you know, you're, you must be the devil if you actually started it.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  And, and so I'm, I'm distancing myself from it because I have been a critic of Wikipedia for, well, I'm one of the first critics of Wikipedia, frankly, outside of the very original naysayers, but, you know. Yeah, and then, and then I've been gone for a long time. So sometimes when, when I tell people I'm co-founder and, and, but now I'm working on whatever my latest project is, they get confused and they think, oh, so you, they seem to assume that I just left it like a couple of years ago. No, I left in 2002.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  I permanently distanced myself from the project in 2003 and I've been working on all kinds of other things since then. So, but I got it started.

• 3:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and also world's first ex-founder, which is, I think so.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  That's right. I founded, I founded the term.

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are the world's, you're the ex-founder founder. So before we get into Wikipedia and where it's at at the moment, and also your exit, could you, could you tell us the genesis story? Could you tell us how it, how it started on your side?

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, I first met Jimmy Wales in the mid 1990s through our, our common interest in, in philosophy. Actually, it was Ayn Rand. I joined one of his mailing lists and later on made one myself and he joined that about philosophy. And.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  We lost touch for a few years, but then I was sharing

• 4:47Speaker 00

  idea that I had for what would later become a blog.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Around early 2000. And one of the people that I shared the idea with was Jimmy Wales and he wrote back and he said, "Don't work on that, work on this thing." You'd be, you know, editor in chief of an encyclopedia. And I was like, "Wow, this sounds great." That was practically my dream job. It's something, if I wasn't going to be a professor of philosophy, which by that time I decided not to be, even though I was all but dissertation at the time.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  It would be, you know, like an editor of an encyclopedia. That sounded great. So it was my job to start Newpedia, N-U-Pedia. And that was to be built on the principles of open source software. So there was this guy.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Wrote a, an essay called, called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." His name is Eric Raymond. I was told to read this, it's still a great thing to read.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  And it explains how volunteers can get together to build great things online, simply by sharing a common vision and a common need, solving common problems. But in a way that, that results in something that, that lives in the commons. And so that, that's, that was the idea. And the problem was, we wanted Newpedia to be as trustworthy as possible. So we had this seven step, really arduous editorial process. And not many people wanted to go through it, so we generated only a few dozen articles in the first year.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  And that wasn't good enough, so, so we were well agreed that there needed to be a new.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Source of content for the project. And so I made some different proposals and Jimmy Wales, he, he, you know, dismissed them all because that it would involve more coding. And then a friend of mine, January 2nd, 2001, told me about this software called Wiki Software, very uber geeky, where you go to a webpage and you click an edit button and you can, you can edit the text of the page right there on the page and hit save and your changes are instantly live.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  And it was an insane sounding idea, but you know, okay, I've, even by that time I had been living online for, you know, the better part of 10 years and, and so it wasn't that hard to imagine how it actually might work. So he, he got me excited enough about the idea that I, I started thinking, well, this could solve the problem that we were having with Newpedia. And so I ran home actually and made a one-page proposal to Jimmy Wales, basically saying,

• 8:17Speaker 00

  set up this software for me to, you know, work on a new project, you know, and originally it was going to be the Newpedia Wiki. But then the editors of, of Newpedia, they, they, they were mostly PhD academics, they didn't want to have anything to do with anything called a Wiki. It just did not have the sort of credibility and heft that they wanted to be associated with. And they were really good people, actually. There are some famous scholars even among them. And

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Well, so we decided, uh, fine, we still want to do this. Um, it just won't be associated with the Newpedia brand. Um, so I came up with the, the name Wikipedia and we launched it. And, um, internally on January 10th, I guess it was, um, I had already populated it with help pages and things like that, and we added some more, some first articles, and then we, we launched it to the broader world and the, the, uh, the Newpedia community included, um, on January 15th. And, and, um, because there were already like 2,000 people on the Newpedia mailing

• 9:41Speaker 00

  list, which I had collected in the previous year, uh, I and, and, and an assistant that, that we had, um, collecting people, um, we, uh, we actually were able to start, um, you know, hit the ground running, basically. Um, and yeah, it just, I mean, it grew faster than anyone expected it to. Um, and it was sort of my job in the beginning to teach the, the very idea of an encyclopedia article to people who wanted to use it, because it was just basically an online blank bulletin board that anyone could write anything to. So you could dictionary definitions, you could write personal essays, you could do whatever.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  And, and just gradually I pushed people toward, um, you know, writing an encyclopedia article begins with something like a definition or a general description of the term, you know, um, and, and, uh, and systematically lays out the, the basic facts and explain basic policies like neutrality. So I was a big advocate of that and I'm the, the main author of, of the, uh, original version of, of Newpedia and Wikipedia's neutrality policies.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  And various other policies too. So it it has changed a bit since the the first year, um, since like the end of the first year, but not that much actually. So it's interesting. The biggest thing that has changed since then is that um, it it was sort of taken over by people that back then I would have considered be trolls. Um, and or at least um, people who uh, did not always have the interests of neutrality, um, and a a serious um, approach

• 11:37Speaker 00

  to the subjects at heart, um, often had axes to grind and also were just difficult to get along with unless you played their game. So that's when that all that started toward the end of the very first year of the project.

• 11:54Chris Williamson?

  Really? Even that soon?

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's actually why I ended up um, distancing myself. So after like, uh, I worked on it for the first 14 months, got it really going. Um, Jimmy Wills actually, um, basically, he's given me credit for coming up with the idea and later denied the same thing and and um, that I was like essential to the project. But then it actually turns out that I wasn't essential to the project. I mean, it was set up, that's the nature of a wiki. It was set up so that it could be to a certain extent self-managing.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  It's pretty robust, um, you know, and um, but I I uh, permanently distanced myself from the wiki um, community like a year after being laid off because they couldn't afford to pay me, basically. Um, the the bottom fell out of the the dot com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. And um, yeah, so they lost their contracts and were not able to pay any of the new people. Um.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Anyway, yeah, and a year after that, I basically said, this, this project is, you know, becoming dominated by people that I would have considered bad actors before. And you're, you are absolutely driving away some of the very best people that we recruited for New Media. And if this is the case, then it's going to end up being a real problem, you know? And I think I, I was right. So I gave, I gave Jimmy Wales an ultimatum. So you do something about these problems, or I'm going to distance myself from the project permanently.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  And he simply denied that there were any of the problems that I listed. And so I said, okay, bye bye. And I, I've been kind of a critic ever since.

• 14:09Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to me when we have these, these big projects, you know, I recently had Roger McNamee on from Facebook, early investor in Facebook, a personal advisor to Mark Zuckerberg, he's the person that brought Sheryl Sandberg in. And he said the same thing. His, his story tallies up with yours that very soon after he was involved in a project which would end up changing the face of the internet. He was able to see a particular trajectory that this project was moving on, which concerned him. And he highlighted it very early.

• 14:49Chris Williamson?

  And again, with that, the people who he highlighted it to, the powers that be, said, don't think it's a problem. Apparently they, his, his analogy was that they treated him like a PR, a PR concern to be dealt with. And replied, he sent, I don't know whether you did this, but I think he actually created quite an extensive press release slash proposal, which for him was a thesis laying out where the issues lay. It was his conceptualization of exactly what was going on. And apparently the reply that he got from, from Mark and from Sheryl was similar to how a bad, you would, you would deal with something in a press release, bad press release, which I thought was really interesting.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, well. I was nice. I didn't like go to the make a public spectacle of the thing in 2000. I mean, I think I considered it. I didn't actually go public with any criticisms until 2004. And that really pissed Jimmy Wales off. One of the things he responded to that on it's on a now defunct group blog called Kur5hin.org. Anyway, and he basically said,

• 16:15Speaker 00

  "Yeah, I was thinking of, you know, hiring you back and getting you back involved, but not now." And I said, "Well, I wouldn't have come back if you had asked, dude," because the problems were not getting better. And some of the things that I saw, which is a tendency to ignore the neutrality policy, have gotten worse. I mean, that's been a problem since, I would say, a couple of years after I left. It started when when one could begin to see an ideological tilt to at least some of the articles, not always.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  But that goes back to like, maybe 2004, 2005. Then it started getting really pronounced like 2010. Lately, though, like in the last three or four years, basically, in the same time that mainstream media has decided to abandon all pretense of objectivity, Wikipedia has more or less followed suit, as far as I can tell.

• 17:28Chris Williamson?

  That's so, that's so upsetting for me to hear. So first off is I did a little bit of background reading into this particular situation. Had a good chat with Vizy, who's the guy who put me and you in touch.

• 17:41Chris Williamson?

  As a part of that, I've definitely seen recently, I was watching Steven Crowder and he was, he said something, this is only the other day about the fact his Wikipedia page has been locked down, apparently it's had malicious edits made to it and is now locked down. And this is, I'm not even kidding you Larry, this was a week ago and I heard this for the first time. And I'm, you know, spend a fair bit of time on the internet and I swim in these sort of circles, hadn't heard anything. And you're talking about something which is nearly two decades deep now with regards to this particular pathology that's going on. So I'm thinking about this and then

• 18:15Speaker 00

  It's gotten worse though, is what I'm saying.

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh yeah, you saw the seeds of it, right? Back in the day.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Oh yeah.

• 18:22Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain to us in your world, what would make the perfect wiki? And how does that, how does that contrast with what you saw? And then how has that begun to diverge further as time's gone on?

• 18:36Speaker 00

  Well, I'll give you first, what I think is would be the perfect wiki. And then I will, I will give you the way I think encyclopedias generally should go, which is not necessarily in the form of wikis at all. So let me tell you about a couple of projects that I worked on and the very best version of a wiki encyclopedia might combine both. So I actually started a competing wiki project called Citizenium, as in the Citizens Compendium, back in 2006,

• 19:16Speaker 00

  2007. And that was just when Wikipedia was enjoying its steepest growth curve. So it never really took off, but it had a really great start. And so the distinctive features that it had really weren't enough to really distinguish it from Wikipedia, but they were important differences. One was you had to use your own real name. So anonymity anonymity was not, was not permitted, except in special cases, in which case we allowed pseudonyms, right? So if somebody wanted, if somebody were a political dissonant, they would have

• 19:56Speaker 00

  to trust me at least, and I would like, you know, approve of an account. And then they could just like Use a pseudonym. All right.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  That, I think, just takes care of a heck of a lot of the problems. It did. In the years that I was working on Citizendium.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  And the other thing that that helps basically solve a lot of the problems with Wikipedia is making all of the people who contribute to the project agree to a a statement of fundamental principles. And now Wikipedia itself has, you know, some bedrock policies that that it has stated. But the the

• 20:51Speaker 00

  its commitment to neutrality in particular is is really on the ropes. So

• 21:03Speaker 00

  I I think that if people were made to to agree in advance with policies that, you know, are specifically devoted to strict notions of neutrality and and other important policies, it goes a long way, basically. And then a third thing is we had a essentially a a constitutional system of governance, of project governance. It's not mob rule. There are actual elections that people

• 21:46Speaker 00

  people can actually change the rules through a legitimate legitimate process. They can adopt new projects through a legitimate process. And there that doesn't really exist on Wikipedia, as crazy as that might sound. It just doesn't.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  So and that's in large part because they don't have one person, one vote. The reason for that is that, well, they allow anonymity. So that's one of the one of the problems there.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  So.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  The other project that I want to tell you about is one that I've been working on since late 2007. So I have been Chief Information Officer of Evrepedia.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  And Evrepedia is the encyclopedia of everything. That's why it's called Evrepedia. And it's now built on the blockchain. So it's the first blockchain encyclopedia. It is a fork of Wikipedia. And we have decided to allow contributions from all different sources, from all, about all different topics.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  So we're much more open as to contributors and topics. Whereas Wikipedia tends to shut people down quickly. They tend to be much more closed than they used to be anyway. So we are going back to some of the more positive early tendencies, I guess, of Wikipedia in that regard.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  But one thing that Wikipedia never had was this idea that you could have an article about absolutely anything. So I have an article about my left thumb, just to demonstrate that it is possible to have an article about anything. And it changes the nature of the project. So if Evrepedia really takes off in a big way, and it very well could, then the result might be the mass creation of not five million articles in the English encyclopedia, but 500 or 5 billion articles about everything, all proper names, as one of the co-founders put it.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Anything that has a proper name would have an article that would be attached to it.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  So here's the, here's another thing that is not part of that system yet, but which I think any system of collaborative encyclopedia writing has to have. And that is a

• 24:41Speaker 00

  A democratic dispute resolution system. Usually what happens, and this is why Wikipedia, one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so messed up, is that there is no formalized way of arriving at a decision about disputed questions. So you go there, you've got a question about, you know, what should the definition of racism be, you know, extremely hot topic. It should be possible for people to, you know, come up with a bunch of different options

• 25:21Speaker 00

  and maybe have a round robin competition or something like that and actually get a legitimate choice. That's not what they do. They pretend that it is possible to have a consensus about these things. But the consensus is determined basically by the people in power on the topic, you know, whoever has the most seniority or seems to have the most allies or whatever. Those are the people who basically declare the consensus. So it's not a consensus.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  It's just putting a cynical description on what is not a consensus all. So, no, it needs, the decision-making process needs to be reduced to very specific editorial decisions to be made and then taking legitimate votes based on that.

• 26:28Chris Williamson?

  So for me, I've never submitted an article to Wikipedia or I've never tried to make an amendment to Wikipedia. I think probably maybe back in the day when I was a teenager, I'd have searched to see if I was on Wikipedia for any reason. But other than that, and other than using it for definitions, like probably most people haven't, can you just briefly explain what the process is? Let's say I want to, I go on and I search for racism and I think, oh, I have some information which relates to this that I think is missing. How do I go about trying to edit the article?

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Well, it's in one way, it's as simple as it could possibly be. You don't even need to make an account, except for protected accounts like the one that you were mentioning before. You just go to the page, you press the edit this page link, up comes an edit box, you type in what you want and you hit save and your your edit will be saved immediately. And it used to work pretty much that way back back in the day. And then gradually, things became more and more locked down. I think it really started happening, maybe in like 2008, 2010.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  And now it's just, it's really difficult to to for for anybody who is not in an inner circle, as it were, to edit any important article at all, really. I mean, you can propose edits and maybe if they're, I don't know. But yeah, it's hard.

• 28:01Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting, because I would have thought.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  You'd get banned. I'll tell you something, if you were to go and edit the definition of racism in the article about racism, I'll bet you'd be banned just for trying.

• 28:13Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I am pretty damn sure. I'd love for somebody to prove me wrong.

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  Someone try. There's going to be thousands of people listening right now. Someone go and try and edit an article about about something contentious and send us a screenshot.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Well, you don't do it that article, okay?

• 28:32Chris Williamson?

  Not that one. Do it about something or do it about how to make jelly or, you know, something, something that's kind of, yeah, nondescript. So.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  No, no, no. It has to be something to be a real test. It has to be something that is controversial. Just don't do racism, geez.

• 28:47Chris Williamson?

  Not that one, something else. So I can immediately see, and the listeners will be able to think as well, if you allow people to make instant edits, the opportunity for trolls there is prevalent, obvious, right? That you can just have someone go on and change every word of the to poo, and then it just destroys the article.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's easy to fix.

• 29:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay, there's a revert button, is there of some kind, I'm gonna guess, on the back end?

• 29:16Speaker 00

  Yep, exactly. There's that's it's all made been made automatic. It's much easier for for you to to revert somebody's illicit change than for the person to make it in the first place.

• 29:30Chris Williamson?

  Great point. Yep, great point. There's a lot more work. So there's an asymmetry in terms of work that someone who wants to destroy something has to do, which is actually quite rare, isn't it? Entropy doesn't usually work that way. But no, yeah, good point. So, okay, we have we have that. We have we have this particular system. But you've mentioned about the fact that you have this this particular ideological leaning with regards to Wikipedia and what what it is and isn't allowing, and also the fact that you have this

• 29:58Chris Williamson?

  less than fair distribution of power with regards to the editing of articles. How how's that manifesting on the actual platform? So if I go on, I try to edit something, it just doesn't get allowed, it doesn't save straight away. So there's certain protected articles? Is that the way it works?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Certain protected articles, unless you actually have enough have made enough edits in the system, you're not allowed to touch them at all. But, you know, it doesn't take that long to to get to the point where you actually are licensed in the system to to edit even the protected articles. But, yeah, I mean, I don't actually think that that in itself is is such a terrible problem, because, I mean, there are popular articles need to be locked down for the simple reason that it's it ends up being just a chore to to

• 30:57Speaker 00

  clean up after the the vandals, right?

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  You'd be constantly reverting things, right?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Exactly. That's exactly what happens. So there's I'm not complaining about that. The complaint that I would have is is the abuse of such a policy, the locking down an article so that that people that you who are outsiders, they have legitimate contributions to make to the article, but you disagree with them, those people are excluded. That's a that's a problem. Yeah.

• 31:33Chris Williamson?

  That must be such a effortful process on the back end, on the, on the end of Wikipedia, to constantly be looking at what, what article falls within the par view of our protected racket? Is this edit in line with our particular thinking? Does it blah, blah? Like, that's, that's a serious, unless, I suppose unless it's just a, it doesn't get through, this is a very, very hard wall.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Well, it's not like there's some centralized rules and, and worldview that is, that is enforced by everyone. I mean, to a certain extent, that's a kind of true, but not really. It, but it doesn't matter, right? Because, because there's all kinds of, of people who have made their own little fiefdoms on their set of, the set of articles that they sit on. And there's just a game that you have to play in order to get anything done on Wikipedia. And that game appeals to only a very few people. So if I may, let me, let me explain

• 32:48Speaker 00

  what's going on now with me, because it's, it's, it develops, you're basically asking, what is my notion of the, the perfect wiki or the perfect encyclopedia system? So here it is. So I, I said that I have been the chief information officer of Everapedia. Well, actually, as we speak now, I am no longer. So I, I resigned in, in September in order to start the Knowledge Standards Foundation.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  And we are going to be developing something that I call the encyclosphere. Now, the encyclosphere will be, hopefully, have as a partner, Everpedia, but also Wikipedia, and Ballotpedia, and Britannica, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the rest of them, not necessarily partners in the sense that we'll have a written agreement with them, but what we're going to do is, we're going to take metadata about all of their articles and make it freely available as part of a public commons, everyone can

• 34:02Speaker 00

  use, and if their articles are free, as in the case of Wikipedia, Everpedia, and Ballotpedia, and actually quite a few others, if it is free, then you'll be able to see the articles themselves, they will also be shared and made available as part of a public commons. So what do I mean by a public commons? I actually mean something like the blogosphere. So you can, you know, right, if you start up a blog, if you don't tell it not to, then WordPress, for example, will publish your posts using a standard called RSS, really

• 34:46Speaker 00

  simple syndication, right? So it makes what's called a feed, and that feed can be slurped up by, by blog readers. And so you can go and look at Feedly, for example, and Feedly will allow you to subscribe to different news sources and blogs, right? And then your blog gets collated in with other things that you might want to read, and so forth. Well, we need to build that kind of system for encyclopedias. That's what needs to exist. See, if you wanna work on an encyclopedia now,

• 35:25Speaker 00

  you have to work, and you wanted to work on the biggest, most influential encyclopedia in the world. Well, that's Wikipedia, and you have to work with that weird crew, with their strange policies,

• 35:45Speaker 00

  you know, and put up with their ideological editing and so forth. You have to work on one article per topic. They don't allow multiple articles, you know, competing articles or anything like that, of course, right? Well, I submit that there are probably millions of people who, if given the chance, would be writing encyclopedia articles about what they know if they could be submitted into a general commons in the same way that people submit blog posts into the general commons of the blogosphere. So what we need to do is create an encyclospere

• 36:27Speaker 00

  that enables the millions of people who would like to write encyclopedia articles, but who don't wanna put up with the BS of Wikipedia. So that's the idea. That's what we're building.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  How do you get around, so you would presumably have multiple articles on the same topic, multiple encyclopedia entries on the same topic? For me, I may be judging what I consider to be an encyclopedia incorrectly, but presumably there should eventually only be one for most things. Is that incorrect? Is that the wrong way to look at an encyclopedia?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  I think that's the wrong way to look at it.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so here's the problem. I personally am an objectivist about truth. I believe that there is such a thing as a mind-independent reality, and we can get closer or farther away from a correct description of it, all right? So there's a mind-independent reality, and it constrains what we can know about it.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  But the problem is that there is no generally accepted methods and certainly no political entities that everyone can agree with for determining what that truth is, right? And the best way to arrive at the truth is to get all the views on the table to be

• 38:09Speaker 00

  as as open as possible to proposals and then allow people to to rate those different articles. And then we can, if we have a proper user account system set up, right? Then if I've confirmed that I am in fact Larry Sanger, then I could say things like, well, I'm an American, I'm male, I'm, you know, over 50, I have a PhD, I have degrees in philosophy, I'm a member of this organization, I have, I went to these colleges and so forth,

• 38:54Speaker 00

  right? And then based on those categories, or political party, religion, whatever, based on such categories, you can say, okay, show me the top rated article according to all of the, you know, white male Republicans, or how about black female Democrats, or, you know, on, on, and on certain topics, those categories probably won't matter. On other topics, they'll matter a lot. And it would be really, really interesting, I think, to compare the top rated article about jihad according to, let's say,

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Uh, American college professors versus imams living in the Middle East. Um, I'll bet they would be different. Um, and it would be really interesting to compare those articles, right? What would the, what would the top rated article according to those categories of people be? Um, and, uh, so not only would it enable us to articulate different points of view, it would actually incentivize by creating a, a worldwide, but completely decentralized, leaderless, centralist, uh, contest to write the best article about

• 40:21Speaker 00

  every topic from every point of view. So you wouldn't be, you wouldn't just get an article, um, that is approved by American college professors or whatever. It would be the best one according to them. And there would be this constant

• 40:42Speaker 00

  competition to write a, a better one. So, um, yeah, there's all kinds of things to, to be said about that. But I'll, I'll just leave it at that and let you ask questions.

• 40:53Chris Williamson?

  I think it's cool. It, it kind of sounds a little bit like Reddit, I guess, where you kind of upvote, you upvote particular articles and the ones that are the most active. Although I guess you wouldn't have the time degrading element of that.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Well, the difference, there's a difference. Uh, Reddit is, uh, doesn't constrain the, uh, the type of thing that is submitted to a subreddit. Right? This is just encyclopedia articles.

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  Understood. I agree. Um, how, how useful do you think that this would be? Or are there any concerns about how useful this would be for a typical layperson? I want to find out about Christopher Columbus, right? I don't want to find out about the. I might do, but broadly, I probably want the most aggregated understanding of what Christopher Columbus did. Now, there may be someone way, way out there who believes Christopher Columbus went back in time from the 22nd century and et cetera, et cetera. Do you understand what I mean? That you have this potential for disinformation to leak in there. Conspiracy theories and alternative points of view whilst valid.

• 42:02Chris Williamson?

  Is that is an encyclopedia the place for those?

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Well, let's put it this way. Some things that were once considered encyclopedia theories are now regarded as

• 42:17Speaker 00

  true. Any encyclo- any conspiracies. Sorry, I think I've misstated that. So any conspiracy theories of the past, rather, that they're now regarded as have been discovered or are no longer conspiracy theories, they're just true, right? But at one point, they were conspiracy theories.

• 42:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Right? Okay. So it, the point is that, that

• 42:49Speaker 00

  yes, there is a way to, to approximate the mainstream view on any subject, right? You just have to adjust the groups of people, you know, the groups of accounts that you're going to follow for purposes of determining what the ranking of articles is. You see what I'm saying?

• 43:18Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I mean, it's, I don't think that's necessarily going to be easy, but I think it's like, it's a great idea and I think it's one that we ought to be trying out.

• 43:28Chris Williamson?

  I think it sounds like a fascinating challenge and I think depending on how sophisticated the data is, which you can crunch on the back end, it would be absolutely fascinating to start to identify the differences between, you know, we're talking here broadly about.

• 43:47Chris Williamson?

  Quite nebulous differences between this is how someone may write something ideology is difficult enough to define as it is, right? It's kind of very wishy washy. But if you were able to really draw out in hard data where the exact differences lie between one interpretation or perhaps one platform's interpretation of a particular issue, I think that would be that would be absolutely fascinating.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Right, right. No, I agree. I'm really looking forward to it.

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  Is it technically, is it technically a challenge for whoever, whoever the unfortunate person is that's got a code, try and code this thing?

• 44:28Speaker 00

  Well, it's not one thing to code, except insofar as we're talking about the standards, right? Because, you know, there's, and when you're talking about the blogosphere again, to go to return to the analogy I like to draw, it's, there is no one set of software for the blogosphere. There's just the standards. There's just the specification, RSS and Atom, and that's it. So that actually is not going to be easy. Just making sure we have the right standards

• 45:03Speaker 00

  expressed. So I've actually started a WordPress blog, actually. And you might not even be able to tell that it's a blog by the time we're done with it. We're adapting it so much. But yeah, it's going to be a big old group discussion, but a serious, long form discussion about what the standards should look like. And I'm, I've already started reaching out to a lot of people. And we're going to try to get as many relevant experts involved and make sure that that we've got everything nailed down as much as possible, but also in a way that that isn't.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  That isn't interfered with by big money interests and and and the power brokers of the world, just don't want them involved at all. So we're not going to accept any corporate money. We're not going to accept any money from governments. Any any large contributions we accept from individuals or or maybe found family foundations or whatever, we're going to actually check them out, going to make sure that they're not another Epstein, you know, that that kind of thing. We want the mighty to be clean and we want to make sure

• 46:33Speaker 00

  that there is no quid pro quo involved. So because knowledge is power, right? And and the if we actually succeed in developing the the project that that I'm talking about, it could be extremely powerful, actually. And I think there might be people after after it to exert influence so that there's special favors done to certain people. And that's

• 47:14Speaker 00

  that isn't going to happen. I want it to be as neutral of and democratic of a standard as as the classic standards of of defining the Internet have been.

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  Understood. Yeah. So when you're talking about the knowledge standards foundation itself, the actual platforms, I'm going to guess that you're dealing with Wikipedia and stuff like that, in terms of repurposing their content and pulling them across, are they all within a format which is usable at the moment for you to rip that metadata out?

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Um, not really. No.

• 47:52Chris Williamson?

  So do you need to do you need to get them on board with what you're going to do?

• 47:57Speaker 00

  No, not necessarily.

• 47:59Chris Williamson?

  Understood.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  I mean, it would help.

• 48:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Um, we could probably use their help, but I don't think it will be necessary. Uh, in the case of, of, uh, MediaWiki, that's the name of the software that, that Wikipedia uses.

• 48:11Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Um, um, yeah, we can, um, uh, we can write basically a, a scraper for MediaWiki sites that extracts the, the right metadata. Thing is, people do use MediaWiki in different ways, uh, so that, that would itself need to be adapted. I'm pretty sure we're gonna have to, to adapt our, our scrapers for, for basically all the different sites. And I'm not just talking about a meta search engine, though. To, to be very clear, uh, what I want to exist is like, uh, plugins for, for, um,

• 48:54Speaker 00

  for WordPress or for, uh, browser, uh, browser plugins that you could use when you're working on a Medium article. For example, you press a button, um, it imports the data on the page into a form. And then you fill out other fields to make, and make sure that everything is, is correct. Um, and then it republishes it on a feed, in a feed. And then that feed could, maybe another thing that it could do is ping one of the, one of the feed aggregators. Right? And that will pull in different encyclopedia feeds from different encyclopedias. But also, and this is the point, individuals.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  If you just wanna put up an encyclopedia article about your hobby and you like, "Okay, I don't know a lot about a lot, but I can write, you know, a dozen articles about, about..."

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  Table tennis or something.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, trainspotting.

• 49:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Whatever, um, then, then, uh, uh, that's fine. You'll be able to do that.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  And they will be collated in and ranked against all the others.

• 50:01Chris Williamson?

  I think I just can't get over how big of a technical undertaking this is. Like it sounds, it just sounds like, because obviously from your side philosophically, it is very interesting. Another thing that I've got in my head at the moment is how similarly this matches up with what's happening with blockchain technology at the moment, with decentralization of currencies and stuff like that.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  This is why I joined Everpedia, right? And Everpedia is still committed to using this sort of system. But when I, when I joined Everpedia, I said, okay, so this is the project I really want to work on. So I said, okay, well, you develop the ideas and, and you know, you can give speeches about it. And that's what I did. But, but also early on, I said, eventually somebody is going to have to actually define the standards, the common standards that are used. If, if people are going to be submitting articles to the Everpedia network, then, then they would have to have common standards for doing that.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  And I eventually came to the conclusion that if it's really going to be open and not controlled by Everpedia Inc., then it actually has to be something that is built not on the blockchain, but built on, on the world wide web, basically. So just, it'll, it'll be basically a text feed, right? And, but of course, you know, Everpedia will in fact be able to tokenize that work. Perhaps you'll have to do something special in order to get an article submitted to Everpedia. Maybe you'd have to have an Everpedia account in order to earn IQ tokens for doing that, right?

• 51:52Speaker 00

  But you're, you're not at all wrong that, that the whole idea of decentralizing content development is, is something that people are really excited about blockchain for enabling, so.

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting, isn't it, that this particular pathway is acting across multiple different domains, so to speak, within tech?

• 52:22Chris Williamson?

  This this push towards decentralization.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just it's a it's a movement, basically, to to um take power back, um take it out of the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and uh and his ilk, right? Um, yeah, it's a I I think it's a huge problem that they have um decided to ignore our privacy rights and um even though our content is what they have built their, you know, multi-billion dollar

• 53:06Speaker 00

  corporations on, they insist on censoring us. The arrogance is mind-boggling to me.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  And that wouldn't fly if you were talking about blogs, would it?

• 53:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  There's no central blogging authority. Why the hell does there have to be a central tweeting authority or a central, um, you know, uh, social update, Facebook update kind of authority? There doesn't have to be.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  It's it's increasingly now I'm hearing this discussion about is it a pipeline versus platform or pipeline versus publishing, um, which is the analogy which is being used that um they are either simply the delivery vehicle for whatever people put on there or they're a publishing platform which curates the content which goes out. And apparently there's some very different rulings legislatively, uh, in terms of copyright, in terms of a whole host of other things, um, which every platform right now, YouTube, uh, Twitter, there's again, to go back to Steven Crowder, he unloaded a load of stuff in this one one video I watched the other week. He was talking about he showed his analytics on his YouTube

• 54:21Chris Williamson?

  channel and apparently YouTube has made a a essentially a forthright declaration of the fact that there will be restricting political speech in the buildup to the American election. And I was thinking like, this it's crazy. It it.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  It's absolutely insane. Yeah.

• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  And but that's because maybe for me, I don't see the.

• 54:45Chris Williamson?

  I hope that these particular organizations are these big transparent enablers of of of information freedom, right? That's what I think. But as these organizations-

• 54:55Speaker 00

  That's what we all thought 10 years ago.

• 54:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, absolutely. And as these organizations grow, they need tax breaks, they need favors, they potentially get into some legislative problems, they need to favor off someone, someone needs to favor off them, they grow a bit more, they grow a bit more, they get someone on the board. And you can see how these sort of this, the beautiful princess of purity dressed in all white, kind of gets a bit more mucky as time goes on and the dress gets a bit dirty and torn and then she's, you know, grown an extra arm and kind of become this horrible gargoyle after a while. And it is, it's bizarre and it's, you know, again, same that Roger McNamee said, the same thing Tristan Harris is talking about at the Center for Humane Technology and a lot of the people that I'm very interested

• 55:41Chris Williamson?

  in at the moment, yourself, who now added to that list, Larry, it's interesting that this movement is towards decentralization, towards more transparency. And I wonder if we'll see some of the large organizations either dig their heels in aggressively try and claw at particular projects or what some of the reactions will be because there's no chance that they're going to go down without a fight.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Okay, I have a data point on that. It's interesting. So last spring, I had this idea that we really need to decentralize social media. And I gave a speech at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And I, I asked just out into the public space, I asked Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, three questions. So question number one was, will you agree, Jack, to let us republish our tweets into a common-

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Data format that could be used on other platforms like Facebook or brand-new platforms. And will you also enable us to import posts into our Twitter feeds on twitter.com or the Twitter app from other sources? So say my friend isn't using Twitter but is posting a lot on Minds and I want to see all of the social media activity in one place. Will you enable us to import those posts? And then third, I said, will you just generally give us a hell of a lot more control over

• 57:28Speaker 00

  the algorithms that shape our feeds? And somebody, you know, wrote down the questions and tweeted them at Jack and Jack responded. He said, yes. So I actually clarified. I said, okay, here's question one. Do you agree? He said, yes. Here's question two. Do you agree with that? Yes. Question three. Do you agree with that? Yes. So he was on the record on Twitter saying yes to the decentralization of Twitter. It hasn't happened yet, though. It hasn't happened yet. And I'll tell you more.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  I'll tell you something else. I had a half-hour-long discussion. So out of the blue, I got a message from Jack, a direct message, and proposing that we chat. So I had a half-an-hour-long discussion with him on the phone. And he read to me what sounded like a plan that somebody had written that went into details about the sorts of things that I had asked questions about.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Like this is, I mean, it sounded great. Like it was, it was a real plan. Of course, they haven't talked about this plan publicly.

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  Stuff. You've got Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter on the phone for half an hour to speak about something you brought up at South by Southwest to do with decentralizing Twitter.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  That is, that's, that's big. That's really big.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  You would think it's big, but nobody ever wrote any, any news stories about it. Ever.

• 59:30Chris Williamson?

  I think it's pretty big.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  I thought it was pretty big too. So, uh, nothing, nothing happened and, and that kind of pissed me off. So I didn't really pull any punches.

• 59:42Chris Williamson?

  How long ago, how long ago was this? Sorry?

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Oh, well, the, the, the conversation, I think it was in March or I think it was March.

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  This year.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:52Chris Williamson?

  Cool. So it's, I mean, in the, in the tech world, things move fast, but in a big company like Twitter, I guess there's probably a, like, things move pretty slow, right?

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  It could, it could still happen. It could still happen for sure. Okay. But there's another thing. Okay. Um, I, I decided to do a social media strike in, uh, in July, July 4th and July 5th. Um, I invited people to sign a declaration of digital independence. You can still sign it.

• 1:00:24Chris Williamson?

  I love it. That's cool. That's cool.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. You should read it and sign it. Um, it's still up. It's on my blog, larrysanger.org. Just search for declaration of digital independence. And I told people, uh, strike on July 4th and 5th. Um, and a bunch of people did. I don't know, thousands and thousands of people did. And they, they were declaring that they were on strike and so forth. I got, there were dozens of articles written about it too. Um, I was on CNN. I was on, um, Fox talking to, um, uh, what's his name? Um, anyway, yeah. Um, and, and, um,

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  So it was, as far as getting the idea out there goes, that was a success. Not that many people actually went on strike, but it was still, it's a fair few. And here's the interesting thing, after that, like, beginning toward the end of July and since then, Facebook has gone down from an Alexa rank of three to five. Twitter has declined from 11 to 30 today. Their Alexa rank is 30 today, used to be 11, right?

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  I've written an article about this on my, on my blog. There's various others that are big decliners, like Instagram is another one. It's gone down like 25 or 30 places.

• 1:02:08Chris Williamson?

  This Alexa ranks publicly available?

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  It's just, I've never heard of it. It's the ranking of how many people are asking Alexa to do a particular thing, is that correct?

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  Nope, nope. And it's, it's, it's the, it's the, the rank, ranking of websites. It's not Alexa, it's also a, an Amazon product, but actually predates the, the Alexa device.

• 1:02:33Chris Williamson?

  So what is it?

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  It's, it's a web traffic service, basically.

• 1:02:39Chris Williamson?

  Understood.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think it's.

• 1:02:42Chris Williamson?

  So this is much more serious than people not asking their smart speaker to not, to, to access Instagram. This is general traffic going down.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  This is general traffic going down. Oh, Wikipedia has gone from a, a, a ranking of, it is, it used to be the fifth most popular website. Now it is the ninth, just in the last six to eight weeks.

• 1:03:07Chris Williamson?

  Have there been any notable ascensions?

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, there have been a few. It's interesting. Bing has gone up, the search engine. Microsoft Office has gone up, eBay a little bit, Stack Overflow has gone up a lot. Stack Exchange has gone up, Apple for some, for whatever reason.

• 1:03:30Chris Williamson?

  Released a new iPhone, that's why. Happens when you release a brand new iPhone.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  You're probably right. You're probably right. Medium. And then, then all kinds of mainstream traffic sources, sorry, traffic sources, mainstream news sources have gone up. I think they've absorbed traffic from declining social media sites. This is my theory. This is my theory. So BBC, ESPN, New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, Breitbart, Wall Street Journal have all gone up significantly in the last three months.

• 1:04:06Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that interesting?

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, another one that that has gone down a lot is Pinterest.

• 1:04:15Chris Williamson?

  Pinterest, I don't get Pinterest.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  I agree. Quora, how the mighty has fallen. Quora used to be at rank 82. And it's now down to 200 and let's see what the latest is here. Um, just a second, 262.

• 1:04:38Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Did you see?

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  It's dropped 180 points.

• 1:04:42Chris Williamson?

  Did you see the big hoo-ha between them and Jordan Peterson about a month ago?

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  I'm not sure I did.

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so Jordan Peterson's book, 12 Rules for Life, was originally based on a Quora post. Someone asked him, what are the best pieces of advice that you would give someone for life? And he wrote, he wrote 40 maxims or aphorisms, whatever you want to call them. He wrote a list of 40.

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  I remember that. Yeah, okay.

• 1:05:09Chris Williamson?

  I've got the poster of all 40 outside in my, in my hallway and next to my bathroom.

• 1:05:16Chris Williamson?

  So he wrote these 40 and it's like one of the most engaged Quora posts of all time. It's legendary and it got taken down because it because it contravened community standards. Then he appealed it very, very, very publicly screenshotting what the processes he's going through with Quora. And they came back to him and said, we're very sorry, we're not going to reinstate your post because we've reviewed it manually and it does indeed contravene our community standards. So it's down and you are never getting it back. And he put, he put this post up online, his followers reacted appropriately.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  And then he got a DM from someone who worked at the standards department at Quora, just a, just a guy, some guy. And he was like, give me, give me a couple of days, like just hold on, give me a couple of days. And again, he's publishing this, publishing, publishing this exchange with this particular, this, this gentleman. And he reinstates it, but it not, not until they've been through this big process that just every single time that this happens, every time that Steven Crowder's article gets locked down, or that Douglas Murray, right, released a podcast with him today, you know who he is, he doesn't have a blue tick on Twitter. I've got a blue tick on Twitter. And I went on a TV, I went on a TV programme

• 1:06:44Chris Williamson?

  seven years ago, and I've got a blue tick.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  I didn't have a blue tick until, until May, until after I talked to Jack.

• 1:06:53Chris Williamson?

  You created, you created Wikipedia. Oh yeah, that's it. Excuse me. By the way, like I just got one favour to ask you, mate, while we're, while we're having a quick chat. Can you just sort me out with that blue tick thing, please? So yeah, like, how doesn't Douglas Murray have a blue tick? And it's right. Did you listen to Jack Dorsey when he went on Joe Rogan twice, both times?

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  Well, I listened to one of them for three hours.

• 1:07:16Chris Williamson?

  Was that the one where he had himself and Tim, what's his name? Not Tim Urban?

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  Yes, Tim Poole.

• 1:07:23Chris Williamson?

  Did you listen to that?

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Yes, I did. It was really good.

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  The one before that was pointless. So just as well. But yeah, that one with Tim Poole and Tim's right. Like, it always appears to be to be kind of viciously left leaning. It always appears to be the people that hold a slightly more conservative viewpoint or don't perhaps adhere to the social justice mentality as much that the ones that are suffering. So yeah, every time that this happens, it just makes people lose faith in tech. And do you know the one, the one group that Roger McNamee of the whole thing, this big conversation and there's this footnote at the end. And I was like, so tell me like, we need to use technology. I want to get an Uber. I want to direct myself from where I am to the hotel that I'm staying in tomorrow night. What, what's the best of the bad bunch? And Roger's

• 1:08:11Chris Williamson?

  diamond in the rough was Apple. So he said that Apple is genuinely committed to user privacy. He said that it's, it works incredibly hard to do a number of things that are losing the money. So he said Apple Maps loses tons of money. So once you've finished your journey, it splits it up into 10 pieces and then scatters them across the, the god knows where deletes them. So they can't be found. People can't track your route, all this sort of stuff. But across the board, it would appear, you know, the old establishments of the internet, Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube, Google, fucking Quora, like

• 1:08:52Chris Williamson?

  they're not, they're no longer the same sort of trusted institutions. And I guess that's exactly where things like the Knowledge Standards Foundation and, and other organizations. There is a gap in the market for someone to come in and first off, create a standard. And then secondly, be a voice of reason.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's actually the way I would put it is there are things that are considered markets that didn't used to be considered markets and should no longer be. Do we talk about the blog market? Right? No, do we talk about the email market? No, they're just communication media. And of course, you can make blogging and email products. There's nothing wrong with that. And in the same way, you'll be able to to make, you know, encyclopedia apps and things like that. There'll be nothing wrong with that either. But I had to comment on what you were saying about about Apple. So I mean, I am not that impressed.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  I mean, I agree that Apple talks a good game and have taken some public stands that indicate that they are more serious about about privacy. But there's a lot of things that they do that are not are not that great for privacy and and and security. So I actually recently bought, I pre-ordered and will soon have delivered the first mass-produced Linux phone. So it's made by a company called Purism, and it's called the Librem 5.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  It's the first Linux phone. Oh, wow. How cool is that? It's a third phone ecosystem. It's a third smartphone ecosystem. You'll be able to actually access the command line for your phone. You'll be able to plug it in and show the desktop, you know, run it like a computer. And, you know, anybody will be able to make apps and, you know, have to get special permission from Apple to to run the apps. And so I'm excited about that. I think that's really how it ought to be.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  I don't know if it'll ever get as big as, you know, Apple and Android, but. Well, you can always hope.

• 1:11:27Chris Williamson?

  Convenience, convenience is so high though, right, for users.

• 1:11:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:30Chris Williamson?

  That it needs to be the the kiddies sandpit version of of whatever it is that we're talking about. It's the same reason that I'm not running Linux on my on my laptop. I'm using I'm using a MacBook because.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  I'll tell you, Linux is easier than Mac. I'm telling you, I wouldn't have said that when I first first installed Linux like back in 2002 or whatever it was.

• 1:11:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Um, I I installed like red hat Linux and this is it was definitely for geeks only then. Now.

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  Now it's totally different game. I basically it's easier to install Linux, first of all, than it is to install Windows, or at least some versions of Linux, like like Ubuntu and and a few others. But the actual day to day use, if you if you wanted grandma to to have a daily use machine and she didn't know about computers, wasn't used to anything, you'd give her Linux. And it would it would be better. She's never going to have to go to the command line anymore. Linux rocks now, I'm telling you.

• 1:12:39Chris Williamson?

  Could you imagine if you gave your grandma Linux for a couple of months? And you came back and she was just like she had a vertical a portrait external monitor and she was doing hardcore coding. You're like, Grandma, have you been on have you been on Reddit at all? I have, I have indeed.

• 1:12:56Chris Williamson?

  That would be awesome.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  That would be awesome.

• 1:12:58Chris Williamson?

  Larry, today's been awesome. Can you tell we've we spoke about your blog and the Knowledge Standards Foundation. Where can people go if they want to learn a little bit more? Where should they head?

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Well, I I hope they would do a couple of different things.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  You can look at at my blog if you're just interested in my thoughts about life, the universe and everything, actually mostly mostly tech and education because I homeschool my boys. But.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  If you want to just like keep up with me, then please subscribe or follow me on Twitter. It's Elsanger. And then also on Twitter is KS underscore found as in knowledge standards foundation. If you could follow that. I just put out a call for people to like to follow that. And for some reason, it went viral and I went from 60 followers to like, I've almost got 150 now. All right. Sorry. 1,500. So in just a couple of days.

• 1:14:06Chris Williamson?

  Not bad growth.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  So, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:08Chris Williamson?

  That's your mate. That's your mate, Jack. That's your mate, Jack going, Larry's a good guy. Had a good chat with him a couple of months ago. We'll keep up. We'll keep up. We'll let the algorithm work for him for another couple of months.

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  I any, any sort of, of image that I share is, is locked down as sensitive content. I swear to God, I just said, I just posted something. It was just saying, thank you for putting us up over a thousand. That's what it said. That's all it said. And it was marked as sensitive content.

• 1:14:39Chris Williamson?

  Some X rated sharing that you've obviously got going on there, Larry. I've had a few ex guests that have done that as well. But yes, everything that we've spoken about knowledge standards foundation, your blog, Larry, and your Twitter will be linked in the show notes below. I'm excited. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens over the next few, the next few months. It'll be, it'll be exciting to see if you guys manage to change the, the space of the encyclo- encyclo-sphere?

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  Encyclo-sphere, just like the blogosphere, encyclo-sphere.

• 1:15:09Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Larry, thank you so much for your time.