1251: Jimmy Wales | Building Trust the Wikipedia Way

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Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.

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Today, we're talking to the man who helped build the only corner of the internet that somehow still works.

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, patron saint of actually, let me check on that, and proof that trusting strangers on the internet can create something other than a raging dumpster fire.

Wikipedia is one of the last places online where the wisdom of crowds consistently beats the stupidity of mobs.

It's a site you can edit in your pajamas at three o'clock in the morning, yet somehow it's more accurate than newsrooms with multi-million dollar budgets.

It's the place where passionate volunteers, many of whom could give Harvard professors a run for their money in bridge engineering or ancient Sumerian pottery, collectively create an encyclopedia bigger than anything the Britannica editors could have pulled off, even with a warehouse of Red Bull and a pile of graduate students.

Today, Jimmy and I dive into how this whole thing even works, how it hasn't collapsed under the weight of trolls, vandals, propagandists, and corporations with Scrooge McDuck level budgets, and why trust in institutions, in each other, and in information itself is in free fall.

We discuss the crisis of parallel realities, why collaboration can raise humanity or imprison it, why transparency beats taking sides, and how assumed good faith is not just a Wikipedia rule, it's a life skill that we've basically forgotten.

All this and a whole lot more here today on the show. Now here we go with Jimmy Wales.

I'm going to start with the usual pedestrian question I think everybody wants to know, which is, how did Wikipedia come about? What was the original idea and why?

Yeah, so I've been watching the growth of free software, open source software as most people call it, and I saw programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways, you know, sharing their code and so forth, using a free licensing.

And I thought, ah, well, that's interesting. That kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software to all kinds of cultural works.

And then I had the idea for an encyclopedia, got very excited and started Newpedia, the predecessor, and plugged away at that for two years.

That was not successful for reasons we can get into, but basically it wasn't very fun for the users.

Then pivoted, we didn't say pivot back then, not a big Silicon Valley word, but pivoted to the wiki approach. And,

you know, suddenly we had more work done in about two weeks than we had in almost two years. So it was like, okay, wow, yeah, this might work.

This whole farming things out to other people thing, this idea has legs. Yeah, that's it's funny.
How many articles are on Wikipedia now? Tens of millions. I shouldn't know the number.

I just had it on a slide the other day. I want to say 60, 70, 80 million.
That's across 300 plus languages. Right.
So it's not all in English.

In fact, less than 10% of it's in English, which is kind of amazing to people.

I mean, you don't notice that because you're probably not clicking on

Wikipedia or Swahili. It's occasionally German Wikipedia.
Oh, yeah. Because it'll be like on Germany, but not in the United States one, especially if it's a Europe-based article.

It's like, oh, this small village in the former Eastern Bloc, there's a German entry, but there's not a Swanish entry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, that does happen sometimes.

It's actually kind of interesting how, you know, when we think about translating between languages, most people assume, oh, yeah, people like English Wikipedia is huge.

They're probably translating it into their own language. Well, no, actually, translating the other way is also a big thing.

I think if you are a German guy who is from the Eastern Bloc and you move, you still live in Germany, maybe it's important to you to write about your family's old village in what is now Poland.

But if you moved to the United States 100 years ago and now your great-grandkids want to read about that, whose hobby is really going back that?

I mean, certainly some people on Wikipedia, but I was looking at my own family and it was all

just kind of in German because it was so niche that only the Germans who had moved back to Germany from what is now Poland apparently cared enough to maintain that entry.

Yeah, you know what there was a big famous edit war in English Wikipedia and a big huge enormous discussion because the names of most rivers in Poland are known in English by their German names, which the Poles don't like because they're rivers in Poland and they're like, it's got a Polish name.

And there's a lot of... Historical reasons we might not want to use German words for Polish things as well.

Exactly. So it was a huge, huge discussion and sort of figuring figuring out compromise.
But yeah. I didn't realize that.

Do you have an example? Because I'm trying to name a single river in Poland and obviously I can't do it. I'm pulling a complete blank.
Does the Danube go through Poland? I don't know.

This is American geography, people.

Apologies, but I don't think we're surprising anybody by not being able to do this.

One of the reasons I love Wikipedia, actually, is it, this is going to sound a little hoity-toity, I suppose. It restores some of my faith in humanity.
Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.

Because it's kind of like the highest ideals we aspire to. Like, let's cooperate.
Let's all build something together that everyone can use.

We'll make it free or free-ish, almost free, operated at cost, whatever it is. And it's like, it doesn't matter where you are in the world.
Let's all do this.

It's like kind of what the internet wants to be everywhere or originally wanted to be, aside from a defense project.

But after, sort of after it was DARPA, right? It was like. Let's all share knowledge and let's just be like information wants to be free.

And it's all these sort of free-spirited hacker types from the 90s. And Wikipedia still is that.
But like Google's not that.

it is interesting because in the early dates of the project so when I started Newpedia and then Wikipedia a couple years later that was the era when it was the dot-com boom and there was a scourge for a little while of pop-up ads like every website you went to had a pop-up ad mostly those are blocked by browsers oh yeah punch the punch the monkey yeah that's right and uh I mean, one of my thoughts was like, you know what, most people, when you first saw the internet, they're like, oh, this is amazing.

We can share knowledge around the world. I'm like, I bet would like sharing knowledge around the world.
Let's try that. You know, like, it seems to be what this technology is for.

So let's do that first. And people loved it.
So I remember using Gopher as a kid, which is a base, I think it was like Way Dust to sort of surf libraries. Yeah, it was just before the World Wide Web.

It was a way of like.

digging through menus on different yeah most of it was libraries and stuff and i still you know up to a few years ago probably could have done the whole thing because it's all keyboard navigated right so you i could like sort of it was like g then this and log in then this this this this this this this dot dot dot i'm at IRC chatting with people from other countries, which was hitherto impossible.

Oh, yeah. And was like the, this feeling that you really don't get from many things nowadays where you're like, I've unlocked a secret portal to the entire world.

And you show your friends and they're like, let me get this straight. This person is in another country talking to you using the keyboard.
And you're like, yeah, mom.

And they're like, wait, how though?

And you're like, I don't know. Satellites or something.

And they're like, how much is this costing me? Nothing. And they're like, I don't even believe you.

No, I remember the first, you know, I got an email from someone in Australia and I was like, I wonder what that costs the university. Because I was at the university.

I'm like, does a computer there like dial long distance to here? I mean, I didn't know anything about how it worked. And then I started to learn because I'm like, oh, this is fascinating.

Well, remember getting excited? You'd hear, you've got mail. And you're like, oh, who could this be?

This is great. This is exciting.
Hold on, honey. I'll be right there.
I'll be down in a minute. I got email.
I got to check it. Got to check it.
Yeah, those are the days. It's a Nigerian prince.

He says, there's some money for me. You're never going to believe this.
We're rich. Our problems are over.

It is funny to hear you explain Wikipedia. I watched, in preparation for this, I watched a bunch of your interviews and you've been on your book tour, you went to the UK.

There was a journalist on, I think it was the Sunday Times, maybe, and it was like, but there's no editorial control. And you're like, well, there is, but they're volunteers.

And he's like, well, no one's getting paid to write. And you're like, no, they're volunteers.
But nobody checks anything. It could be errors everywhere.
And you're like, no, they actually check

everything. And they argue about everything.
Everything excessively. If anything, they're maybe checking a little bit too much sometimes.
And he's like, but they're not experts at all.

Well, many of them are bridge experts and they're writing articles about bridges.

And he's like, but no one's making any money on this. Like he's so confused.
And you could just see his career sort of flash before his eyes where he's like, how long do I have before retirement?

Because if people are working for free and the quality is decent and they're doing it all over from all over the world, like my days are numbered. Oh, that's funny.
Yeah.

Well, except, I mean, you know, it's interesting because one of the things I always say is nobody really works for free. It's got to be fun.

You got to have some reward from doing it, which is just like meeting other geeks who are into what you're into or just the process is just enjoyable to you and so forth. And it's really something.

I mean, you know how you stumble across a page and you're reading it and you're like, who wrote this? This is amazing. Like, how did somebody know all this? And why did they bother?

Like, they're amazing people.

And you just want to go, like, can I get you a candy bar or something you know like if anybody wants to sort of see how this works you can go to the talk page I do this when I prep guests especially guests that don't have a lot of information about them I go to the Wikipedia read the entry but then you go to the talk page which is where like for people who don't know this is where editors who are helping keep maintain the page they go back and forth on do we include the fact that his daughter is a famous person.

Well, yes, but like minimally. Oh, and then you're like, oh, who is that? I better look that person up.
And it's like, what about the crime that he got accused? No, he was acquitted.

This is just going to be a distraction. Let's keep it out of there.
And you're like, oh, he was accused of a crime. I better use that.
Yeah.

No, it's actually interesting because I say this to journalists a lot.

I'm like, actually, go to Wikipedia, get yourself oriented, but go to the talk page because there what you often will find is, you know, this source says this, but that source says that.

And like, we can't figure it out. And it's like, oh, there's your question right there.
Like this is something the world is interested in, but the existing journalism hasn't really fleshed it out.

So, you know, that's probably an interesting thing to ask.

One thing thing I've noticed that's kind of funny is I'll look for a question and I'll go, oh, they're going to, these editors are going to be so excited that this person clarified this thing that they've been talking back and forth.

And then I'll get them on record as the guest, for example, saying, oh, no, actually, it was my brother who was accused of this crime.

And then someone will add that and then someone will revert that and go, he's not a source. And it's like, but he's the person.
And it's like, well,

who's checking that he's not lying about that? And you're just like, okay. I was talking, I had Yuval Noah Harari on the show.
Oh, yeah. We were laughing.
We're talking about Wikipedia.

And it's like, we can listen to Yuval Noah Harari be like, this is the origin of why we evolve the ability to, I don't know, speak language. And people are like, wow, that guy's really smart.

And then he'll try to put in his own Wikipedia entry, like, actually, my real last name is this. We're from Lebanon.
And people are like, citation needed, pal. And it's like, but it's my life.

And it's, you trust me on so many more important topics. Why can't I clarify this? Oh, that's great.
Yeah. Yeah, I know Yuval.
He wrote a really nice blurb for my book. I was very appreciative.

He probably did that praying that you're going to let him edit this thing on his Wikipedia page that he's so impressed about.

But it's not up to you. It's actually kind of amazing that Wikipedia took off at all, in my opinion, because, and forgive me for putting it this way, it almost seems like a joke.

Like an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Come on, it's going to be full of total nonsense.
It's going to be vandalized.

It's going to be full of corporations that pay publicists to go in there, write nice things about them, and every celebrity bio is going to have people just crapping all over them it's going to be a waste of time and energy yeah i mean that's what a lot of people thought and and in fact it's one of the to me it's one of the more interesting things is to sort of take that initial thought that anybody would have and then really think through like okay but how do we do that like what is it how does it work you know and it's a lot of details it's uh a lot of it's in the seven rules you know things like transparency you can see every edit you know we try to be very open like anyone can come and participate and you know you you see something wrong, you can come in and change it, or you can come in and leave a note on the talk page and go, hey, hey, you know, did you see this source?

And then people hopefully will go, yeah. Or sometimes they go, yeah, but, you know, blah, blah, blah, like you just went through.
So,

yeah, it's remarkable, but I think it's a, it is a testament.

As you said, it restores a bit of faith in humanity that there's a lot of just really nice people who just are like, yeah, this sounds cool. I'm going to help out.

Why not just digitize something that already existed, like Encyclopedia Britannica? I mean, look, now it's 100 times, I don't know, a hundred, a thousand times larger than Encyclopedia Britannica.

It's a bit bigger, yeah. Yeah, a million times, I don't know.
But in the beginning, it's like because encyclopedias, I remember from being a kid, and I'm sure you're a similar age, right?

You look in the wall of your school in this whole shelf, this is one encyclopedia. So you're like, Yeah, we're just going to recreate that for free over time, and then eventually it'll be bigger.

It's almost like a Herculean task to think it's going to be bigger than World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, we actually looked at the 1911 Britannica because it was in public domain. So it was out of copyright because it was so old.
And we could just copy it all in and start from there.

And so people did. They copied a few articles in.
And then we were looking at them.

And you think, oh, right, go get the article about Thomas Jefferson. Like, what could possibly have changed? What has changed? I mean, a lot.
Like, it's, it's kind of interesting.

You know, oh, ancient Egypt. Surely they had it all figured out by, nope, nope, there's been a lot of archaeology and things like that.
And so, you know, like, I actually dug around.

I mean, I found in my mom's house an old encyclopedia. I don't remember which brand it was, but, you know, it's the article on bicycle.
It said,

man, a bicycle, men use it to go to work and women use it to go shopping.

Wow. Like, okay, yeah, maybe, maybe that's not really the best definition of bicycle in

the modern day. Yeah, no, because why would a woman wouldn't have a job or anything? That doesn't make any sense.
Impossible. Okay.
Yeah. Impossible.
Preposterous.

one thing that that i wanted to ask you probably for years now is what do you think of every high school teacher ever being like wikipedia is not a source you can't use it yeah well i mean it's interesting when people

if they say you shouldn't use an encyclopedia i wasn't allowed to use britannica and cite it oh you weren't no like britannica you should use it as a starting point and then go do further research i mean If you're 13 years old and you wrote something, you put a footnote, we should just say, great, you're moving forward.

That's fine.

But, you know, actually citing Wikipedia in an academic context, particularly at the university level or higher, no, it's not really a goal because that's not really what an encyclopedia is for.

Now, if you say, don't even read it, yeah, now you're probably wrong. And especially if you're telling teenagers, don't even read Wikipedia.

It's like, yeah, you can tell them don't listen to rock music as well. Like, it's not a thing they're going to do.
You know, they're 100% going to use it. But yeah, actually, that has shifted.

I just was talking to a high school teacher who just has always been an advocate of Wikipedia in the classroom. And there's always been people who are like, no, actually, they should use it.

And my thing is like, and this, we can come on to AI, I'm sure at some point, this is what I say about AI today. Like, don't tell kids don't use Wikipedia.
Tell them how to use it.

You know, like, what are the strengths? What are the weaknesses? You know, how do you understand it? Same thing with AI. Like, don't tell kids don't use AI.
Yeah. They're 100% going to use AI.

But now they need to know how to use it, right? It's going to be part of our lives going forward. So how do you think about the hallucination problem and all that?

I have questions about that that we'll get to shortly, I think.

People are probably wondering, how do you defend against trolls, vandals, the aforementioned corporations, like I said, who they had billions of dollars. They're going to want something.

They're going to want to control that brand image.

And even now, if you look up Ukraine or you look up China or you look up the Israel-Palestine conflict, I mean, these are their own small war zones of added wars back and forth. It's very difficult.

Yeah. Yeah.
So trolls and vandals, that's actually pretty easy. So the vandalism, somebody comes and replaces an article with poo-poo head or something.

We just revert it. Hopefully you get one morning, at least one morning that says, hey, you know, like, thanks for your experiment, but don't do that, knock it off.
And then you get blocked.

And then the patrols, you just get blocked.

You know, again, if somebody comes in and they make a single intemperate remark and they're new, hopefully somebody will go, hey, you know, like, this isn't Twitter. That's not how you do it here.

And then you get blocked if you keep it up. Those contentious topics is always like, it's really hard.
Like, there's so many things going on in the world.

What we try to do in general, and this does work reasonably well, is to say, go meta, go one level higher. Don't take sides in the conflict.
Just write about the conflict in a fair way.

Express what all the relevant sides say. And, you know, in my book, I talked to a Ukrainian Wikipedian who just, he's a real big advocate that Ukrainian Wikipedia should be neutral even about the war.

And his view is like, that's all we have to do. Just tell the facts.
Like the facts prove our case enough. And I'm like, yeah, that's actually brilliant.
That's fantastic.

And then, you know, things like we talk about Wiki voice, which means, you know, it's said in the voice of Wikipedia, Paris is the capital of France. We just assert that.
We don't say according to.

So when do you use Wiki voice? It should be very sparingly. Like ideally, in an area with lots of controversy, we should not do do that.
Like, we, we shouldn't be saying one side or the other.

We should be describing the conflict. That works pretty well, but obviously, there's a lot of struggle.
There's weird, a weird edge case that I'm sort of dealing with.

Like, I'll look at my page on there, which, by the way, was a war zone for years. It was

not notable enough. And then it was like deleted.
And then it was like, notable now. And people were like, well, he was deleted before.

And it's like, well, people get more notable as they get more notable. And so then it was like, Mark does not delete it.
And then people kept moving to delete it.

Then that got banned because it was like, obviously, you just have one out for this guy. And then another article got written.
Someone didn't like it, rewrote it, but it was really poorly done. Okay.

But it was more neutral in his defense. So people were going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
And then finally, someone rewrote the whole thing.

And I was like, it's just going to get reverted again. But that user had gotten banned who was reverting everything for calling another editor and threatening them.
Oh.

So they got like banned forever. That sounds dreadful.
It was crazy. And I was just thinking like, wow.
And this is my bio page.

I mean, it was other people's living bio pages, so it's less complicated. But I just thought, like, holy smokes, I'm basically nobody, right? On Wikipedia.

And like, there's a million, there are literally millions of more notable people than some podcaster on there. And this is, so people take this daddy seriously.

One thing that I'm dealing with now, I'm not asking you for advice. I'm just going to use this to illustrate something or ask you to illustrate something.

One thing that's very strange is people will put a fact in there, but it's got a little bit of like subtext that's odd. Namely, they'll go, Harbinger is Jewish.

And it's like out of nowhere, just in there in a paragraph about where I went to school. And someone will revert it and be like, I don't feel like that's in there just to illustrate.

That's very interesting. And then they'll put in, like, he's Jewish and has acknowledged this when discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict.

And that'll get reverted as like, oh, come on, you're implying that he's biased

because of that.

And then they're going back and forth, and then that user just sort of disappears, but it'll pop in every few months and then get taken. Yeah, no, it's actually interesting.

I mean, I would would say, you know, very often, like, it's one of the more complicated things of like, well, like, when do you note that someone is Catholic? So we'll switch it from Jewish.

And it's like, sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. Like, actually, sometimes it's relevant to the biography.
Sometimes it isn't.

And there's also an issue, in my opinion, I've seen both kinds of cases where you think, you just want to put it in there because you've got some sort of a bias against Jews, or you just want to put it in there because you've got some sort of bias in favor of Jews.

It's like, yes, we would like to claim the Nobel Prize winner in physics.

Yes, what about Bernie Madoff? Well, no, somebody wants to force it in there.

And it's kind of like, well, come on, people, like, let's be consistent. And like, for me, it's really about like, to what extent is it relevant?

So my entry, I don't know what it says at the moment about this, but it's like.

At one point, the categories is another, another issue, because unlike most things that can be rewritten and rewritten to sort of smooth out the rough edges to say you know so-and-so was born in a jewish family but isn't practicing or whatever you know you can you can and if that's relevant to their life because they talk about it or whatever but categories you're either in or you're out and so somebody had put me in the category american atheists and i'm like that seems weird to me i mean technically true in a certain sense but i'm in there with like Madeline Murray O'Hare, like people who campaign about Sam Harris or something.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, I'm not, it's not my issue.
Like, I don't go around, around, it's not a thing. It's like, it's my private belief and I don't make a big deal out of it.

And I sort of regret that it was ever made public because it's like, whatever, it's not a point. Right.
It's as relevant as you having a beer. And I think I've taken out.

And I think in that case, or similar cases, we try like with categories, it's like, well, but is it relevant?

Like just going around cataloging people who at some point were Christian or Jewish or whatever, either ethnically, belief system, whatever it might be, is like, generally, don't know.

I mean, it's interesting. Mine just recently, this is my funny thing.
I am both American and British. I have a British passport.
I didn't grow up there. I'm American by birth.

And then I became British and I've lived there for 15 years. And I was really happy.
It just made me like in a small happy way. It said two L is an American, British, American dash British.

I'm like, great, that's brilliant. And now it's gone.
I didn't, I haven't bothered to check. Like, somebody just read it out in an interview.
Like, oh, let me just read the first sentence.

I'm like, yeah. Oh, what happened to British? Yeah.
Somebody was like, not British enough for me. Sorry, Phil.
I'm not sure. Sorry, Phil.
I'm like, hey, what happened there? That's interesting.

That's kind of a bummer. It's always amazing to me how there'll be a news event and you'll see it on Breaking News on CNN or it'll be on Twitter.

And then you go to that Wikipedia page five minutes later and you're too late to make that edit yourself. It's already there.

In fact, it's already there, been reverted, been edited by somebody else, had that edited by somebody else.

It's already gone through 12 iterations by the time you're on minute number six of whatever notice. It's really, really fast.
And

like one of the things I've done in the past, it's sort of my little, little mini, mini, mini hobby is whenever there's been a royal wedding, I try to change the name of the person.

So, like, from Kate Middleton to Catherine and whatever her title, Duchess of Cambridge, you know, and I've been successful doing that a couple of times, and it's just sort of fun.

And I wait, I'm like, you know, I'm watching the royal wedding at the moment when they said, I pronounce you husband and wife, click. And it's like, other people are trying as well.

I'm like, I did it. I did it.
It's amazing. Yeah.

but there was a funny uh incident once that was a very strange there was a pro wrestler who uh wasn't expected to be on stage and just didn't turn up and it turned out they had died but then like the weird thing was somebody had vandalized the wikipedia entry to say they had died at about the time that they did die and so then there was like this like

what's going on here like was it a suicide and they did it about themselves on wikipedia or whatever turned out somebody it was just random somebody randomly vandalizes a joke it was reverted very quickly and then it emerged that sort of several hours later this person had in fact died they were ill and whatever right that was weird yeah but because when when this came up i'm like oh wow

so do we call the fbi and give them the ip address of this person who maybe murdered the wrestler or do we let it go because they're 13 years old

tell someone who's never heard of wikipedia but only knows it's an encyclopedia that's editable by anybody tell that person dad

why they should trust it because news agencies, pundits, right, they'll often say, oh, Wikipedia, left-wing slash right-wing liberal, whatever the bias is, you know, this page, what do you think of allegations like that?

Yeah, so I mean, I think,

you know, the important thing is like our core policy is very, very strong. And I'm sort of campaigning about it all the time, which is neutral point of view.

Like neutrality is so important to our being trusted that we have to maintain that. So when we're accused of bias, what I always say is, let's take that seriously.
Like, let's have a look, right?

And sometimes you look and it's sort of like we treat the New England Journal of Medicine better than we treat a social media influencer who claims something like crackpot. Thank God.

No apologies, right? I don't call that bias. I call that sort of editorial judgment and being thoughtful about it.
And other times, you know, I look and I'm like, you know what?

We could be a bit better. Like this is saying something in wiki voice that probably shouldn't.
And like, you know, we need to grapple with that.

And so, you know, overall, what I believe is like what trust comes from is that ongoing willingness to get it right. This applies to all kinds of businesses and things.

Like people will forgive, like a business screws something up.

Okay, people will forgive that as long as like, oh, you were really good about the refunds and you sort of examined your process. Like, how do we put out this crappy product?

And now we've got to give the refund.

And whereas, you know, stonewalling pretending it never happened continuing to put out you know oh we've got the new version and somebody bought it and it's like yeah it's just as much sucks as the old one did yeah then you lose trust and so you know i think we shouldn't think that the only way to get to trust is by being perfect right it's like being like oh transparent honest and going like oh actually like the one of the the rules of trust is be transparent, especially when you have something to hide.

You know,

to go like, actually,

we aren't perfect here.

Like that we didn't get this one right uh you know like we're we're gonna have a big discussion now and figure out what happened and try and fix it i would love to talk more about trust because we're facing this global crisis of trust across all news media outlets obviously but yeah even among citizens really i mean there's just yeah we're kind of living in a i mean to use the cliche what the most polarizing time most polarized time divided time whatever you've made a pretty good argument for why trust is key in society i mean the workplace you need it in the workplace you need it in the home yeah and americans aren't just really divided on their opinions.

We live in these sort of different realities, right? Where we each have our own facts.

And it's someone who's on the opposite end of a political spectrum will actually have different historical facts than somebody on the other side, which is crazy to me, having grown up in the 80s, where that kind of wasn't a thing.

It's really troublesome. And we all learned the expression alternative facts when it was Trump's first inauguration, and there was a dispute about how many people attended.

And it's like, well, there is a fact there. And, you know, like, you can't just say alternative facts.
It's like, there's only one fact. That was a Kellyanne Conway band.

You know, I don't really know anything about her and so forth. I'm just like, probably she regrets saying that.
Oh, I doubt it. I think that's her like, that's at the top of her tag.
It might be.

I don't know. But, you know, like, I do think this is a problem.
And when we think of an issue,

so I live in the UK, which like many places like the United States, immigration is a big political hot topic.

And I'm like, okay, like the question of immigration, like, okay, what should our immigration policy be? How many people should we let in every year?

What do we do about people who came here like unauthorized? Like, how do we deal with this, right?

100% all absolutely valid questions, which we can then start to chew on and people have different views on that and what we should do.

But if we don't start that conversation with a real grasp of like, okay, but what is the situation? Like, you and I disagree. Like, you think we should have a lot fewer immigrants.

I think we should have a lot more. Fine.
How many do we have today? Okay, we better start there because otherwise, who knows? We might actually agree on the actual number.

You just think there's 40 million a year and I think there's 4,000 a year. And so suddenly it's, no, hold on, there's 47,000.
And you might go, oh, well, that's not as high as I thought.

And I'm like, oh, that's a lot more than I thought. And then we suddenly are like, oh, okay, fine.
I've seen this happen in real time. I mean, look, this is a complicated issue, so don't at me, folks.

But I remember somebody was saying, I can't believe Trump is just deporting deporting all these people. And then someone else was like, do you know that Obama deported way more people than this?

They didn't know. And we got the numbers out.
And it was like, oh, that was also bad. And it was like, oh, okay, that's kind of the right.

Cause if you're just on one team and not the other, then when your guy does something, it's okay. And when the other guy does it, it's not okay.
Exactly. But it was like, oh, I didn't know that.

So it's kind of funny to see that. But you're right.
You need to actually have the facts. And we can all fall into that trap, you know, where

we've heard one side of the story and we're like, oh, okay, well, now I i have a view on that and then it's like oh oh i didn't even have the facts right like i i came to a judgment about what we should do based on incorrect information nobody likes that no like i don't think anybody likes that and actually sometimes i've had journalists who are like are you sure like people really want to believe i'm like no nobody wants to make a decision based on false information like you end up doing the wrong thing and feeling like an idiot And so this is one of the problems with the polarization in the media.

I live, as I've mentioned, I live in London, London, lived there for a long time now, and we've got two newspapers that I think are good newspapers. So the Guardian and The Telegraph.

The Guardian's center left, Telegraph's center right. They're politically biased.
That's okay. But what's funny is because they are a little bit too clickbaity at times.

So I have an electric car. I love my electric car.
I'm interested in electric cars. I don't have a Tesla.
I have a different brand. How dare you? Yeah.

And

so I like to read about electric cars. And I've just noticed you can just show me a headline from the last three days.
There'll be some story about electric cars in one of these papers.

I'll tell you which paper it's from, just for the headline. Because The Guardian loves electric cars.
The Telegraph hates electric cars. And I'm like, now, what about trust?

I actually don't trust either of them on this topic. Right.
I sort of enjoy in some very thin way. The Guardian articles, which are positive about electric cars, because I like that.

But that's not what I really want to hear. Right.
You know, like one of the questions about electric cars is they're heavier. So the tires wear it on cricket.

So the particulate matter of tire pollution is worse for electric cars. I think a very basic fact.
I mean, to the Telegraph, this is just like, oh my God, it's killing us all.

And to the Guardian, like, that's not even interesting. And I'm like, oh, well, hold on.
Like, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yeah.

And so where I end up is like, actually, I would really like to be able to go to my preferred paper. and just say like, oh, okay, well, like, here's the balance.

And then they're going to be slightly different and all that, but try a little harder. Yeah, that's interesting.
I hadn't thought about the entire thing.

You give an anecdote in the book about Charles de Gaulle. Can you go through that? Because I don't think we could be any further away from that kind of relationship with our allies right now.

I don't remember what I said about Charles de Gaulle. Oh, that's funny.
I'll refresh your memory. And you know what? That's, I don't, it's funny.

When you people write a book, they expect you to remember every single line in it. Yeah.
I mean, I, and you probably wrote it two years ago, this particular year.

I did, but also, I mean, the funny thing is, I just, about a month ago, I did the audio book and I read the whole thing. So I'm just spacing out to that.

I could also have the name wrong, and then I'll be the a-hole on this one. But what it was was somebody had gone to, I believe, Charles de Gaulle and said, the Cubans are getting missiles from Russia.

And they had all these documents and photographs. And Charles de Gaulle said,

you haven't heard of the

president. It was a throwaway line.
Yeah, exactly. Yes, now I totally remember that the word of the president is good enough for me.
Yeah.

I was like, wait, that's it? That's all you need? Yeah, yeah. Now I remember that.
I said it's true.

Believe us.

Yeah. And I mean, I think that is, yeah, it's a shame that we don't have that culture anymore where, you know, where politicians don't feel basically a fundamental obligation to the office

to not be completely partisan and politicized in every single thing you say so that you can just like deliver neutral facts to another world leader who will then believe you because you like it's the president like obviously they're not going to just make some shit up you know

and uh yeah no that that's exactly right and i really was quite proud of the u.s from a distance living in London when it was Obama versus McCain because got my agreements and disagreements with both of them, you know, some policies here and there and all that.

But you know what? They're both proper people. Either of them is going to be presidential.
They're not lunatics and so forth. And can't really say that these days.
It's quite a shame.

You give some really interesting examples in the book, which I also hope you remember

about, I'm kidding, about brands that have used symbols or built trust in certain ways. I'd love to talk about this.
I always find this stuff fascinating. Quaker oats, not apparently made by Quakers.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's sort of funny one.
Because

there is a bit of an irony in the story because the story is really about Quakers and their, like the reason the Quaker oat people chose the brand is because at that time there was a lot of food adulteration.

You might buy oats, but maybe there's a lot of sawdust in there to pat it out or whatever. Like it was a problem.
To be fair, could you really tell the difference? Maybe that's what they thought.

But the word Quaker, what it said to people was, it says oats on the box. You know what's going to be in the box? Oats.
Like that's pretty straightforward.

And it's because at the time, the Quakers had a really good reputation in business that they would do what they said.

In an era when there was a lot more haggling, which broadly speaking, I would say Americans hate haggling. It's just, it's very stressful.
Nobody likes buying a car for this reason. And so on.

And the posturing and the lying that goes on of like, oh, this is absolutely the lowest price I can accept. Are you kidding me? And that's not really your lowest price.

For the Quakers, if they said, this is the lowest price I can accept, that was take it or leave it because they told you the true price that they would take or leave.

And it was part of their religion, part of their belief system, which at first people thought, well, I mean, obviously you're going to fail in business because you're not playing the game.

They didn't care. Like, that's our religious belief.
So like, this is how we live our lives. But it actually worked really well because suddenly it's like, oh, like they do what they say.

I mean, I say this about, for example, Amazon. Like Amazon, you're going to have lots of complaints about Amazon.
People do fine. I'm not talking about that.

I'm just talking about you order the thing from Amazon. It's going to come in the mail.
It's going to be the thing you bought.

And if there's anything wrong, you send it back and they give you your money back. Or even if you complain, sometimes they go, we'll refund you.

Don't bother sending it back because it's too much trouble for everybody. I mean, if you do it too often, then maybe they'll start, you know, giving you a little grief.

But generally, they're very good about it. And that is trust.

Like nobody thinks, I'm not so sure about putting in my credit card number on this funny Amazon thing because who knows if they're ever going to send my thing? No, they'll send your thing.

We all know that we accept that. We don't even think about that as being part of trust.
But of course, that's business. Like, you can't do business otherwise.

And so, this is why we tell the story of Airbnb, Uber, like companies that have had a real crisis of trust. And how did they recover from that? I try to do that to some extent.
I mean, it's a podcast.

I don't sell anything directly, but we have ads on the show. And years ago, there was a company that did something that was not kosher.
And a lot of people had bought this because I had advertised it.

And so I ended up going to that sponsor and saying, you've got to refund my people who are over the 90-day thing because you

kind of lied about this. It's the right thing.
And they did up until they basically realized they were going to lose a lot of money. And then they decided they didn't care.

So I ended up refunding some people out of my own pocket, which really stings, right? Because it's like, it's not my fault. They lied to me.
No, no, no, no. But it's kind of like the buck stops here.

And I had to make this weird decision where it was like, do I want my listeners to continue to trust me, even if they're not sure about trusting that particular sponsor?

So I watch a lot of tech hardware videos. I'm a super nerd, right? And I'm building out a home server and all that.
So I watch all this. Wirecutter videos.
And there's not a wirecutter.

That's actually, do they have videos? I should look into that. I'm actually not sure.
I'm not sure YouTubers, right? Yeah, Linus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of them do,

you know, they have sponsorship and they have, and they're generally good about disclosing. I think it's a rule on YouTube.
FTC, the Federal Trade Commission will come down.

But

you do wonder sometimes. And, you know, but and I like, you know, for some of them, you think, well, I know this YouTuber, there's never been a negative review of any product on this channel.

And whether they're getting paid or not, because I'm like, they're trying to suck up to get more free stuff. I mean, that's what I feel like.

So I like a YouTuber who like, oh, yeah, thanks so-and-so for sponsoring the video, but they didn't have any prior approval.

and i also know sometimes they like i want to see you do that and then go they provided the product i gave them no promises and a good thing because this thing sucks you know like that'd be great yeah and then other people might be less willing to send them stuff and so i always talk about that's youtube but also like I like boats.

I'm interested in boats. And I used to have a little speedboat in Florida.
I loved it and so forth. And I like boat magazines, but I've never seen a negative review in a boat magazine.

Those are for sure all sponsored. Yeah.
And well, are they sponsored? Or they just don't want to rock the boat in the industry? Like, whereas it's slightly different with car magazines.

Some of them are powerful enough that they can run a negative review. But I think these are little magazines.
There's not that many people reading boat magazines, you know.

But, um, and I'm just like, oh, that's interesting because it means the reviews, I just don't quite trust them as much, right?

Even if they're not sponsored, you're just like, well, you never say anything bad. Or you learn to read between the lines.

Oh, we'd like to see a little more horsepower in this one. Like, oh, that means it's weak.
You know, like,

Wikipedia has a million nerds with unlimited internet and no bedtime. You know what else never rests? My shilling of the fine products and services that support this show.
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people will ask me well your ads are all effusive about the products so obviously we can't trust that my retort to that is I just don't accept the sponsors for whom the product sucks.

I usually get the product in advance, and if it falls apart in my hands, I just say no. That's right.
If it's gambling or crypto related or vaping, it just doesn't appear. You never hear.

The reason I don't have a negative thing to say about it is because I tell them to kick rocks and we never take their money. Yeah, totally.
And I think that's right.

I think it's right to talk about that because otherwise, what does it mean for the whole of your podcast and the whole of the and I, you know, I say this about, there was, um, I used to be on the board of the Guardian newspaper, and they had this real struggle because they don't have a paywall.

They're ad supported. They're a nonprofit or owned by a nonprofit.

And they've got a big trust fund. And so, you know, like it's complicated, like, and they're really trying to thread the needle on lots of things.

And they really struggled with accepting sponsored content in the paper. And it would be clearly marked in all of that.
But like one of the ones was

Volkswagen. Volkswagen was promoting their blue, they call it, their green initiative was called Volkswagen.
Is that the one they lied about and had to scrap all the content?

Well, and then and then the scandal broke and it was a little bit awkward so even though it said at the top this is paid content right so on and so forth it didn't feel great for the journalists there who had been assigned to write the stuff as sponsored content and so on for the brand for the paper didn't feel great and i mean in this case there was nothing wrong with this content the content wasn't lies it was like they had i don't remember the exact sound they had faked some tests or something like that yeah what it was emissions tests it was the there was firmware on a chip that goes on the engine that was designed to, when it was being tested for emissions, run a certain way, and when it was on the street, run a totally different way that didn't pass the admissions test.

I mean, it was blatantly fraudulent nonsense. It was absolutely crazy.
And I think all the more shocking, again, to bring it back to thinking about trust, because

there are certain companies which over promise and under deliver all the time, and you wouldn't be surprised, but like Volkswagen? Pretty boring brand, to be honest.

Like, it's a perfectly good car and fine. And, like, you wouldn't think Volkswagen's gonna scam you, but once a century, they do something pretty

terrible so far. So, yeah, exactly.

It's crazy. There was so much food adulteration.
You mentioned in the book that the food used to just be dangerous and kill people until 1906. Was it 1906?

We started to pass laws about, hey, if this says it's milk, sorry, but it's got to actually be milk. That's insane to me that we didn't have any laws before that.

I mean, it's funny because that's even if you take quite a libertarian view, yeah, that's just not defrauding people. Yeah.
Like, this isn't like

an onerous regulation. Like, it's sort of like, yeah, don't do things that are stealing money.

There are certain laws where they're treated more harshly because literally every even remotely well-adjusted member of society knows not to do that, like kill someone or stab someone.

And these are certain crimes where you go, if you park in a certain place and you weren't supposed to park there because it's Thursdays and everybody in that city knows that, it's like, that's way less of a crime than you stab someone, you go, I didn't know I wasn't allowed to stab people.

It's like, no matter where you live on planet Earth, this is not allowed. And so those crimes are treated a little bit differently.
It is funny how like social norms around certain things can be.

So I have a house in the countryside in the UK where I live. And in the little village, there's one little grocery store.
There's like two parking spaces in front.

And then like a double yellow line up and down the street. And when I first moved there, I was like, oh, well, you can't park there.
It's a double yellow line.

After some time, I realized like literally everybody does, and that's it. And nobody has ever gotten a ticket.
And like, that's just the rule. The rule is you sort of park anywhere along there.

And I'm like, oh, some like the local council should probably like repaint the street because either that or start giving tickets.

But believe me, there's going to be some outrage because, like, people need to go to the grocery store, you know,

they need to fix it.

And I'm like, that kind of little stuff actually, this is one of the things about like when the speed limit was 55 and basically people ignored it because it was ridiculous yeah it's something like if the law doesn't make sense and people are just ignoring it and that's okay because like it doesn't make sense then you undermine respect for the rule of law and that's like not a great thing this reminds me of you know how every year the dictionary says hey this word that doesn't actually mean this well it means that now because everyone's been misusing it so much

so literally now means figuratively or literally so it's lost all meaning because you can either mean it literally or you can just be completely talking out of your ass.

I mean, I thought you were going to say something about six, seven.

Oh, God.

I just saw a story that's being added to the three-year-olds are saying that.

I don't understand what it means. They're laughing.
And I'm like, can you explain this? Of course, they cannot. They cannot.
No one can. No one can.

One Wikipedia cultural rule, I guess if I can call it that, that I love is you always assume good faith. And I would love to hear more about that.
I feel like we need to do that in life generally.

Yeah. And you see it on Reddit, but usually you don't.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, assume good faith.
It's not a suicide pact, right?

You don't sort of always assume everybody's of good will, even after they've really proven that they aren't here to build an encyclopedia.

But it's like, sort of, that initial thing, like, I mean, the simplest kind of example is you see somebody doing something wrong in Wikipedia.

And chances are, and like the evidence proves this and like long experience, is like they probably just need to be helped out a bit. Like, have it explained, like, oh, that's not how we do it.

Or actually, like, I just reworded your sentence, it was a little bit punchy and shouldn't be.

Or the worst would be is if you got in trouble because your footnote was not formatted correctly, like that would be so annoying. It's like, nobody's required to learn our formatting footnote rules

before they add it. It's like, they added a link.
That's great. Yeah.

And so that assume good faith, it's even more important. So it's important in those first interactions, somebody first comes to sight, but also when there's a heated argument, right?

To try to remember, remember, this is a person on the other side, and they're different from you, and they're like you, because they're people, and people are all like that.

You know, like, don't interpret every single thing they say as some kind of hostility.

It's really easy to do online, as we see in social media all the time, to jump to the wrong conclusion, read something into what they said. Are you really saying this? I actually didn't say that.
No.

And, you know, it's very helpful.

You know, that civility in the book, we say,

your mother was right. We teach it to toddlers to like be nice to other people.
And it's actually good. Like it actually works.
It's actually a very profitable mechanism.

Not I mean making money, but it's like it's a positive thing. It's like if you treat people as if they are all up to no good, well, first of all, you're going to have a miserable life.

But also people like they'll maybe live up to that, right? And that's not great.

And and instead, you know, I actually I talk about this a lot in the context of teenagers and parents, because I have a teenage daughter and one who's now grown out of it and one who's about to be a teenager.

And, you know, it's like, okay, like with teenagers, what do parents need to do? Well, you need to start trusting them.

And I, you know, I sort of advise, particularly if it's a bit of a problem situation, it's like, say, I'm going to trust you. Like they want to go out and do something.
I'm going to trust you.

I want you to live up to that trust. And then we're going to have a better path forward.
You go out a few times.

you don't come home drunk i'm gonna trust you more you come home and you didn't do what you said you know you whatever you forgot to pick up your sister from school whatever uh i'm gonna lose trust and you know what kids respond really well to that like they really want like we all do a rational framework in life where like things make sense and it's like oh yeah actually my parents aren't tyrants they're a little strict but like they do trust me a little bit and if i live up to that trust they're going to trust me a little more great like now you've got a positive family situation, and that applies everywhere.

Like, in companies, like, I'll tell you, though, now I'm on a rant. No, I like

crossing off things in my notes that you're coming to me.

The worst things I've seen are like these companies that, when people work from home, they're using software to monitor their keystrokes and their mouse movements to make sure they're not away from their desk for more than a few minutes.

And I'm like, what in the hell is that? Like, or you go to Etsy and you find that there's a device that will just move your mouse constantly so that you can go to the grocery store.

Like, so you're trusting somebody to do their job, job, whatever that is, but not enough that they are going to, and so it's like, you know what?

Actually, there's a reason why people want to work from home. It's because of the flexibility.
If you said, you know what, we're not going to monitor everything you do.

There are certain things you got to get done. You get them done.
That's fine. And, you know, we're going to trust you and all that.

And like, by the way, everybody understands like you work from home this week because your kid's sick. That means, guess what? You're not going to be moving your mouse every five minutes.

The kid's sick. You got to go out of the room.
And you know what? We kind of expect you to make up for it. Stay a little late.
Hop on for an hour at night because you missed an hour during the day.

And we're just going to let you do that. I mean, just the goodwill that you destroy by having that sort of paranoid approach to the people you work with, you're not going to get creativity.

You're not going to get insight. You're going to get people working to rule and nothing more because they're like, these people are not.
proper people and I don't have to do this.

And I'm looking for a job. Like your job.

Now, the reason I didn't move my mouse for five minutes is I went to the other non-work computer and looked for a job. Right.
Yes. Exactly.

No, I mean, look, I'm not running Samsung or Microsoft, but I always just trust my team to get things done on their own time. And we got guys like Bob who's going to edit this in the show notes.

And he's going to do it at 4 o'clock in the morning Pacific time. You know what? Fine.
Fine. And my engineer, Jace, is in another time zone because he's from the UK as well.

And it's like, he's going to do this at a weird time on a weird day when he's back from his vacation. And that's fine.
The only time it's not fine is if something doesn't work.

And that is so rare in our business.

It's so rare that something happens that is objectively like, oh, because you did this too late or at a weird time that it's not worth the juice ain't worth the squeeze to solve the problem with some sort of tyrannical solution.

100%. Yeah.
And like the main thing is, did it get done and the podcast out on time, then the rest is not matters.

And that objectively, you know, obviously something, I'm not saying businesses, and you're not saying businesses shouldn't care about time and all that.

Like, I mean, it's sort of like yeah the grocery stores open until you know these hours to those hours so coming in at 4 a.m.

ain't gonna help right right yeah the store is closed right on the other hand it's sort of like at every moment when you can think about okay is there a way I could just extend trust and build a better relationship with the people I'm working with or who are working for me if you're you know a manager or whatever that's great because you're going to get so much more out of people and they're going to like it so much more.

Like then it becomes part of their life to do a good job as opposed to you beating them down and they're just like whatever the other thing it does is let's say i say something on this show that sounds like it's iffy it makes me sound i don't know casually accidentally misogynist or racist or something that's clearly not my intent yeah my team will catch that they will edit that and they'll go you probably didn't mean to say like that and i'll go oh god did i say that well you cut off one sentence and then you started another one and it sort of sounded like maybe we fixed it but if you are on their ass about everything they're going to go, you know what?

Every time we make an edit, he doesn't like, he crawls down my throat. I'm just not going to deal with this.
He said it. He said it.
Let him deal with the consequences. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's great.

But it's like, if you give them that trust, they'll go, I'm not going to get in trouble for changing this. Oh, yeah.
And then you go, oh, my God.

Thank God you took that out of the video because that is clearly not what I meant. And they go, yeah, we got you.
Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, no, no, no, exactly.

But also with your listeners, if you say something a bit punchy and they know you and they're like, oh, he didn't really mean it that way. Yeah.
Well, they might. Some people go crazy.

I mean, it's the internet, you know, but broadly speaking, you know, like track records matter. In your book, you discuss what happens when companies or organizations take sides politically.

I'd love to talk about this because

I've only seen this go wrong and maybe that's a selection bias kind of thing, but I feel like I've never seen a company come out squeaky clean doing this, ever. They can.

So I will give a counterexample because I do think it's worth noting up front.

So Ben and Jerry's has always been a socially active, socially conscious company. It's part of their brand.
So nobody's going crazy at Ben and Jerry for being woke because it's Ben and Jerry.

Like if you don't like that, you probably weren't a customer anyway, and that's part of their brand. It works for them.

Most brands, most companies, the problem with it is basically first, nobody really wants to hear from you on this issue. Like, I don't really care what Pepsi's views on trans are.
Like, I don't care.

Like, it's not what I'm, this is not the relationship. I just want to know, is your sugary drink killing me? Well, probably, but, you know,

but it's delicious. So, yeah, so I, yeah, I like it, but yeah, okay, now, now that's our relationship.
And yeah, as you say, like, it generally goes wrong.

And, uh, you know, it's sort of, you've annoyed half the people. You probably haven't persuaded anybody.

You know, I talk about this in the book because it's like one of the mistakes I think people make is like, don't fight other people's fights. Like it's just not worth it.
It's not the right thing.

It's sort of like my, I try, I don't always succeed, but broadly speaking, I don't talk about general politics.

Like, you know, if you ask me my views on Obamacare, I'd be like, my views are about as important as any other random person. Like, I'm not an expert in healthcare policy.

Like, just because I'm known for one thing, that doesn't make me an expert on other things. And frankly, I don't think people should care.
And I don't think I should campaign about it.

If you say, oh, but Jimmy, I saw you make quite a pointed statement about internet public policy and freedom of expression. I'm like, yeah, that's relevant to me.
Like it does matter.

That is my fight. Like I've got Wikipedians who've been arrested in various places for speaking the truth.
I've got, you know, like all these things going on.

And it's like, actually, open public discourse is a value that means a lot to keep Wikipedia going. So I'm going to, I'm going to go to bat for that any way I can.

But But I do think it's a mistake, right? If sort of I start a campaign, I mean, maybe just in my private life, when I'm retired, I'm never going to retire. I'm just like, this is my life.

But, you know, maybe I'll pick up a cause and start campaigning for that. But broadly, I don't think I should because it doesn't work.

And so, you know, another example that I probably am out of step with a lot of my friends, which is to say, like, when Jeff Bezos, you know, instructed the Washington Post to not endorse a presidential candidate, I actually think that's that's a good idea.

I think he was right.

Although the timing was terrible, like doing it just before the election, it was interpreted as him doing a favor for Trump or whatever, that he secretly supports Trump, which I doubt, you know, whatever.

But if they had done it at a proper time, say after the previous midterm elections or something, you know, sort of just like, okay, like we're done.

And the evidence, there's like research on this that shows that. Political endorsements by newspapers lowers people's trust in the journalism, even if they agree with the endorsement.

I would agree with that. Yeah, just from my personal.
Because you suddenly are like, well, like, now is the news headline, is that part because the paper's going to bat for their guy?

Like, maybe they are, and maybe they're not, but I don't know. I don't trust it anymore.

And also, there's evidence that's like, okay, the Washington Post endorsed the Democrat for like 15,000 years in a row. Right, except for.
Except for one. Is that right? Ever since, whenever.
Since

basically my entire lifetime and then some

of the Democrat, yeah. Nobody was like, I'm a Trump voter, but oh, the Washington Post, well, and I better reconsider.
No, of course not.

And all your readers who are, you know, left-leaning because of the left-leaning paper, they're not choosing their mind. They're going to vote that way anyway.
So the whole thing is pointless.

It's like theater for to make, I don't know who, feel good, but it's not really the right thing. And,

you know, so I'd like to see fewer endorsements or maybe a rare endorsement would be probably more effective. It might damage trust, but maybe you feel like actually we have to this time.

You're right. It has to be court of the brand.
I mean, nobody is machine gunning cases of Ben and Jerry's, but Kid Rock, I believe, didn't he machine gun a case of Bud Light?

Because they were like, hey, we got to do a trans thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it got blown way out of proportion. I mean, it got blown.

I mean, it was all ridiculous, but in this sort of era of crazy culture wars, it's sort of like, what's the point? Like, Bud Light, it's just like a pretty straightforward beer.

Is it Chick-fil-A, the fast food company that they're only open six days a week? Oh, yeah.

And there was a large boycott because they were, I'm going to get at this wrong because I'm going off memory, but basically they were like anti-abortion. There was a large boycott.

And what they did, instead of saying, look, this is a religious franchise. This is how we feel.
Instead of doing that, what they did is they, this is the opposite of, this is like anti-transparency.

They sent a letter to millions of people and it was,

hey, I'm just a small franchisee. I own the Chick-fil-A on the corner of, you know, Van Dyke and East Jefferson.
You're hurting my business because of the corporate policy. I beg you to reconsider.

But what they did is they sent that to every franchisee to plug in their location.

So it was like not from that franchisee. It was actually from corporate to go against the boycott, but they didn't say that.
They made it look like, hey, I'm just a guy who owns a Chick-fil-A.

Don't boycott me. I'm one of the people.
But it wasn't. It was straight out of corporate communications.
That was like a torpedo. to the hull.
Yeah.

And, you know, it's sort of like, that's a good example because Chick-fil-A, they're closed on Sundays because the owners are religious. Right.
That's fine. But then, yeah, overstepping the line.

And then, yeah, being a little bit, I don't know, like, that's kind of weird. Yeah.
I don't know.

One of my favorite YouTubers, I'll even give him a shout out, Network Chuck. He does internet like networking, but also AI videos.
He's really fun to watch. He's great.

He's just recently started for like 30 seconds at the end. He stops and he prays for you, the listener.
And he's really sweet. And I'm like, okay,

not my thing. But he's also really good.
He's just like, yeah, you can click off now. We're done.
He's like, maybe this isn't for everybody, but it's what I believe. Jesus saved my life.

I'm like, you know what? I like this guy. Yeah.

Like, he's done it right at the end. If he sort of infused and started like preaching at me, I'd be like, well, now I'm out.

He's doing it for himself on your behalf, not doing it to try and recruit you into his own. No, and I'm just like, yeah, cool, cool, dude.
Like, whatever. That's fine.
Like, it's a free country.

I found it interesting that you mentioned that even people who agreed with the agenda that the corporation takes, they lose trust in the organization, which is kind of surprising.

The only increase in trust is from extremists who also agree with that perspective. So you're basically, unless you are Ben and Jerry's where it's inside, like the part of your ethos is this,

you are losing. When you do that, which sort of brings about the question, why do organizations take stances at all? Like whose idea is this if this data is relatively well known?

I think the data may not be relatively well known. And I just think there's often the case, you know, there's a lot of different reasons.
There can be like internal pressure and so on.

Like, why aren't we making a statement about X?

And then I think you need to have, as a leader, you need to have a good answer to that, which is to say, well, like, you know, we're not the right people.

Obviously, you know, if it's something about discrimination or something like that, then it's like, yeah, but I mean, our statement is our company policy. And like, we're going to do the right thing.

We're not going to campaign about it because, frankly, we sell coffee cups. Like nobody cares.
Like that's not something we should be weighing in on. Transparency, you mentioned that earlier.

Not hiding things, call balls and strikes, even if it's against your own side, that's crucial. Definitely.
The Airbnb example is really good. Would you take us through that? Oh, yeah.

So Airbnb, like early on in the history of Airbnb, they had this huge trust crisis. So what happened was this woman.

put her, I think she was here in San Francisco, she put her apartment on Airbnb and then somebody rented it and absolutely trashed the place.

And they got bad advice, PR legal advice to basically stonewall, don't admit responsibility, da-da-da, you'll make it worse.

And after a few weeks, they were like, it was just getting worse and worse and worse because this woman wrote a very emotional, you know, like, I'm sitting in the stairwell of my apartment building in tears.

I can't bear to go back in and see what happened. And the company was doing nothing to help and so on.
And they realized, and people have been saying this to them for a long time.

Like Like a venture capitalist told them, you're going to get somebody killed. Like, this whole thing is crazy.
And they have been killed in Airbnbs or hospital. Oh, yeah.

I interviewed Brian Treskey and who's like a really good dude, as far as I can see. I think that's right.
And it's very rare, right?

But it's like they rent the place out, but then they have a key and they're hiding in the closet when the person comes.

Again,

it makes the news because it's like, what in the psychopath just happened? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they realized, like, if people think a normal thing that's going to happen, you put your house on Airbnb and it gets trashed, we're going to have no landlords.

We're going to, nobody's going to participate. So they basically like pushed the brakes on the whole company and said, like, everybody has to work.
We have to think. We have to brainstorm.

Like, how do we build trust? Like, people aren't trusting us. In fact, it's gotten really bad because we screwed up this whole situation so badly.
And they did a lot of things.

They made a lot of changes at that time. Like, I mean, at the time, apparently you could rent a place with just an email address

anonymously. So, like, some rando who can't even be tracked down after the fact is going to get your keys and go and sleep in your house.
Like, oh my God, like, that's clearly a stupid idea.

And this isn't about, oh, but I mean, I actually think anonymity online is a good thing. It's, you know, like, but largely, that's not somebody sleeping in your house.

So once they're in my bed, I draw the line. I want to know who you are.
Yeah, you gotta, and so now you have to upload your ID and sort of prove your existence and all of that.

And a lot of the, oh, like, you know, indemnity, like insurance. It's like, yeah, if somebody trashes the place, then every me's got a policy of like, we're going to make you whole.

We're going to fix it for you. I was like, oh, that's actually really good.
Like, that, that sounds like a good thing.

I'm kind of surprised that they didn't start off with that, but I guess they just weren't thinking about that particularly. I think that was.
And it was kind of, it was one of these examples.

This is my opinion on it. It was one of these examples of 20-something tech bros who don't have certain fears because it's not been part of their experience, just not thinking it through.

You know, it's like, oh, like that never occurred to me that people would be afraid about that because I'm not.

You know, you think about like for my mom, she was very nervous about Uber for a long time. And it was actually reassuring to her to learn it's GPS.
Like your phone is on GPS.

Uber knows where you are every second of the journey. The driver knows that Uber knows where you are.

Like they can't just drive off with you and dump you off in the woods somewhere because it's all going to be tracked. Your phone's tracking and so on.
Oh, I hadn't thought of that.

Oh, and by the way, like, Uber does vet the drivers. Like, you don't just sort of sign up on the app and start driving.
Like, they actually check into you a bit and things like that. Oh, okay, great.

Like, those steps taken to build trust because it's quite a thing to like, you know. But as a guy, you're like, whatever, I'll just choke him if he blogs me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, I never, I never struggle about that. Yeah, I could take him.
Yeah, Yeah, we all think, what, only one bear? Yeah, exactly. I could take one bear.

But like, that's, when I get into a Prius, I'm not thinking, I hope this person's not a psychopath. I hope I get to the airport, right?

But I guess, you know, if you're a 15-year-old girl, maybe you're a little rightfully more concerned that this person. Yeah, no, and there's great stuff.

Like, I didn't talk about this detail in the book. I just happen to know about it.
Like, Uber now has like Teen Uber. which my daughter uses in London.
What's the difference?

The difference is when she requests a ride, she's a a sub-account under my account. I get notified.
I can track where she is. Parental control Uber.
Parental control Uber.

And it's like, it's really great. It's sort of like, you know, like, oh, do I let my 15?

I mean, she's very trustworthy, but you know, like for some people, I mean, like, when I was 15, 16, I, and I was driving around. That was actually, frankly, quite a bad idea.
I was loose, you know.

But I was hitchhiking in Ukraine when I was 20. I don't know if I have any room to be like, this is a terrible idea.
Yeah, exactly. No, but

it's like, oh, okay, like, how will parents think it's okay for their kid to take an Uber? It's like, well, I get notified when they get the Uber. Yeah.
I can see, oh, almost on, you know, it's great.

How do we take a trust inventory of our organization? I mean, this is, I could ask this question a million different ways. Sure.
How do we stop taking trust for granted?

How do we rebuild trust in our organization? How do we rebuild trust across society? Pick whichever very hard question you would like to answer.

Yeah, I mean, I think that trust inventory in an organization is really, I just picked the easiest one, but like, you know, I think organizations that have had a trust crisis or you have a trust problem, this is really obvious.

But I even think companies that don't should actually take a moment and companies are always doing like away days and things like this to brainstorms. Oh, do it on trust.

Like, say, like, actually, we need to think about what are the things that we've done in the past that caused our customers, our partners, our employees to trust us, and where did we maybe fail?

How can we improve those things?

Because like trust buys you a lot of space. Let's say you've got a customer and you suddenly realize like, actually, we're going to deliver, but we're going to deliver two days late.

If you have a good trust relationship and you can go to them early and say, like, we're seeing this problem emerging and you know they aren't going to go mental and like, it's all going to be fine.

And they're going to trust you and they're going to like. want a discount and whatever, but you can cope with that.

That's much better because you've built up that trust, a relationship where people are like, oh, yeah, well, like stuff happens, supply line problems, whatever, like, oh, like half your staff quit because of whatever, you know, like, okay, like, we'll, we'll work it out.

We'll find a way through. And, you know, that's just like good business.
The classic trust example I always go to is how the government kind of bungled it with COVID and masks.

And, you know, even if you talked about this in a couple of your media hits, which was like, don't buy masks. Why?

Because they don't work. Oh, okay.
Well, then we won't. Wait a minute.
You're getting masks for the hospital. Well, I thought those didn't work.

Well, actually, actually, we just told you that because we didn't want you to go buy the masks when we needed them for the hospital. Now, by the way, they're mandatory.

And now it's like they're mandatory. So wait a minute.
So then we're panic buying it. And then when they go, you don't really need to worry about this.
We're like, well, you said this other thing.

We can't trust anything that comes out of your mouth because the stakes were too high. In the UK, we,

I frankly think it cost the Conservatives the election, although they might have lost it anyway. But it was this very emotional, like this spectacular photography, spectacular, sort of poignant.

When Prince Philip died, died, the queen, you know, her husband has died. She's in Westminster Abbey, the church for the funeral, and she's sitting literally all alone.

No family, no, no nobody, because they had to protect the queen from COVID. Oh, okay, fine.
So that's very moving. It's like, oh, these are really tough times, and everybody loved the queen.

She's just no trouble at all. She was great.

And then we emerges a little while later that the night before in number 10 Downing Street, which is like the equivalent of the White House, they were having a party.

And people were like, are you kidding me? Like, at a time when none of us were supposed to be doing anything, you are having a party while the queen's got a, like, that's just not okay.

You've seen the Gavin Newsom thing where he was at like French laundry up in Napa having a party with no mask on. Yeah.
Yeah. And it was like the same day he had told us to all stay home.

And we were just like, this guy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and it's exactly like, oh, wow, like that piece of trust.

And, and, you know, like, the queen, like, whatever your views are in the abstract on the monarchy, like, people trusted the queen. Sure.

You know, and so actually, when she came out at the beginning, I mean, they trot the queen out. Everybody listens, and she says, This is a serious thing.
We've all got to stay home.

We will meet again. Brilliant.
And everybody's like, all right, yeah, we're British. We're going to do that.
We're all in this together. Well, except for those people.

They don't have to follow any examples. Those people who are supposed to be in charge of the country.
Yeah, not okay. Not okay at all.

And so that kind of stuff, it's bad in the moment, but it's also corrosive in a longer-term way. Definitely.

You know, that you're suddenly like, and you know, if you've got a situation where people are like, well, they're all liars they're all criminals now I'm gonna vote and if you tell me my guy you know committed a scam of some sort I'm gonna be like yeah they're all like that and like oh no they're not all like that or they shouldn't all be like that your guy's worse though and in fact I think as voters got to be pretty harsh on these things you know to go like actually you're in a position of leadership you're in a position of trust like a teenager we should say to them i expect you to live up to that trust i'm going to be really disappointed in you if you don't don't, you know.

Well, we reciprocate the trust we get from our government, and we do. Yeah, and so there's all kinds of things that can undermine that.

On Wikipedia, you can ban bad actors and people who don't assume good faith or act in good faith. You can't really do that in society at large, I think.
Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, if you're talking about the problems of social media, we can get quite in a depressed mood of like, oh, it's so toxic. The different podcasts,

exactly. And if we

think about this, like you go to McDonald's and you eat your food and you've got your tray and you've got your like bits of paper and so on. What does everybody do?

They go over, they put the paper in the garbage can and they put the tray on top and they walk out. And nothing bad would happen to you if you didn't do that.
You'd be a jerk.

You know, in Europe, they don't do that. You know how weird that you ever go to Europe and go to McDonald's? You don't clean up your system? That's all right.
Yeah.

And you go, I'm just going to leave it here. And my friends are like, yeah, you leave it and they clean it up.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I got to throw it away.

And I'm walking around looking for the trash can and it's not there because they take it and they put it in the one different system.

Right, so you're like, I can't just, I remember the first time, I was like, you can't just leave your rappers on the McDonald's table, you, you caveman.

How dare you? This is offensive. And they're just like, no, dude, you can have a beer from the machine and you can leave your crap on the table.
Those are the different

that. So it's a different system, different rules.
But, you know, it's not that Europeans aren't trustworthy in the same way. It's just, okay, different rules.

But like, you know, whenever you feel a bit of despair, you're like, you know, look at that guy in his MAGA hat or look at that lefty yeah

blue hair guess what they're all just gonna put their stuff in the bin speaking of bad faith untrustworthy internet grifters it's time to pay those bills we'll be right back

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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Jimmy Wales.

Speaking of left and right-wing bias, do you think Wikipedia has a left-wing liberal bias? Because some people definitely accuse y'all of having that. I do and I don't.

So I think broadly we're in a good place on that. And not always.
Like I just think, you know, what we have to say is like neutrality is our policy and we should vigorously pursue that.

Now, some of the complaints we get are just not reasonable.

Like there was a think tank or something that put out a thing saying something like, you know, Wikipedia has banned all conservative sources.

And it's like, yeah, if you think the Wall Street Journal is a communist rag, then yeah, maybe so. But like, we haven't banned all conservatives.
That's nonsense.

At the same time, you know, it's sort of like, okay, let's grapple with it. This is always my approach is like, okay, if there's a complaint, let's figure it out.

Like, let's assume good faith in the complainer. to start right and then you dig in a bit and then you're like oh okay actually nothing here and in other cases you're like, ooh, hold on.

Let's chew on this a bit more. Yeah, if they're complaining that you can't link to, what is it, like Der Sturmer or something like that in Wikipedia, maybe we're not the problem.

Well, and I do think like one of the issues is we do have a rise in low-quality media. I would say that the right, just objectively speaking, has a few more of those that have gotten quite popular.

And it's not about the left or right bias of that outlet, but we can cope with that. But it's like, oh, what about the quality? Like, are you correcting errors?

Are you running inflammatory stories that don't hold up?

You know, I've been saying, like, if any sort of right-wing billionaires want to start funding some kind of really high-quality, thoughtful, intellectual, conservative media, I think that would be a good thing.

Because the right deserves better than some of this crap that they're following. And, you know, like, let's have a real intellectual boom on the right.
Like, why not? Like, that would be great.

A lot of the sources, I know people are are going to get upset about this, but a lot of the sources I see on the right that are crap are kind of like just clickbait farms.

It's not even like, oh, you disagree with this opinion.

You won't read something well-reasoned on some of these, what is it called, like grays, gateway pundit. It's like they're just making things up.
It's not news, but with a right slant. It's just fake.

So I just want, because we have listeners all across the political spectrum. I want people to be clear.
We're not talking about the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, yeah.
We're talking about

one of the messages that I want to have for people all across the political spectrum is like, be kind and thoughtful and come and help us.

Be network Chuck, you know, and like believe what you want to believe, do good work, you know, treat other people with respect. That's fantastic.
Like, you'll make a great Wikipedian.

A lot of people think that you personally make millions or even billions from Wikipedia. I would love to talk about that because I was hoping to have our next conversation on your yacht.

Yeah.

No, no. So Wikipedia is a charity.
So nonprofit organization.

We are, you know, largely volunteer driven. We've got a few hundred employees, mostly more here than anywhere else, but a few dotted around the world.

About 175 million-ish budget, annual budget. So quite low compared to any other top five

website. Sure.
And yeah, and by the way, I am not an employee at all. I'm a volunteer.
So I make my money in other ways. And if people think that's great, they should buy my book.

That's why I was going to say those book dollars, man. Keep them rolling in.

But, you know, broadly, you know, for me, so like one of the common questions I get, you know, from journalists is like, ooh, how does it feel to not be a billionaire? And I'm like, I don't know.

How does it feel to you? Like, how does it feel to all of us? Like, that's not a thing. How does it feel to not be a billionaire? I don't know.
Ask literally everyone on the planet who's not.

There's a few more options. So, you know, yeah, no, we're a funny fish.
And actually, I think our business model, which is donations and not, we're not funded by a few wealthy donors.

We're not funded by governments. We're funded by the small donors.
Got my five bucks a month rolling in. Yeah, it's massive.
And it's really important

because it gives us intellectual independence. The community has intellectual independence.
Nobody can lean on us and go, oh, right.

Well, this article, you know, like, I'm your biggest donor and this article, I don't care for it.

Then if we were financially under the thumb that would be bad you know sometimes people say ah you know like why don't you get uh you know google and facebook and well why don't those guys what could go wrong yeah i'm like yeah i'm like they should donate more sure but i don't think we nobody wants that uh

because yeah just think that through like that might not be great and it's not because i'm anti yeah you know

have uh vladimir putin donate while you're at it see if he wants to change any of the content of the article yeah yeah yeah i know and you know that that's i'm sure there are multiple authoritarians who would be happy to open the checkbook for us.

And it's like, no, I don't think so. So how does Wikipedia respond to government pressure? Is there, there's probably not from the United States, I would assume.
Mostly not. Mostly not.

Tell me more.

We got this really weird letter from the DC

interim district attorney, but he didn't get the permanent job. That's sort of the end of that, I guess.
I guess.

Like really asking a lot of pointed questions that I thought were deeply inappropriate in a society with the First Amendment.

Like, that's not a thing that you're the government, you're not allowed to do that. This is where I said, like, it's great that we've got staff who actually run things in a very calm and sensible way.

Cause back in the day, I would have just written, you know, go fuck yourself. Like, you know, and that's not the best thing to do.
On legal letterhead, though. Yeah.
On legal letterhead.

What we did was we just responded. Like, we're like, okay, let's assume good faith.
We'll just answer your questions. It's like, yeah, you know, yes.

As a matter of fact, we do allow foreigners to edit Wikipedia. We're a global website.
Like, that's not a thing that you could be upset about. So, anyway, we just try to do that.

Around the world, basically, yes, we've been blocked in China for quite a long time now.

We were blocked in Turkey for about three years, and we fought that in the courts in Turkey until we won at the Supreme Court in Turkey, which I'm quite proud of. That's actually

shocking. And we didn't compromise one spec on Wikipedia.
We don't censor content to satisfy governments. And we were very fortunate.
So actually, this is one of the areas.

So a lot of internet companies have been, some are better than others in various, you know, we get down to the details. They're better or worse.
But, you know, generally they cave in quite quickly.

Even Elon Musk, proponent of free speech, just caved in to censorship in various places.

And I think they thought we would, but we're like, actually, we're principled and no, we're not.

And in fact, what's interesting about our business model, a lot of money from small donors who really believe in Wikipedia and believe in the ideas that I'm putting forward about the fundamental human right to access knowledge and to participate in dialogue and discourse about the facts of the world.

Our donors would probably punish us quite hard.

For sure. If you changed stuff to go into China.
Yeah. Big, like great news.

We've decided to go into China and we've allowed like a Chinese university to take over Chinese Wikipedia and they will handle making sure the content is legal in China.

People would say, oh my God, I'm so disappointed. Like that is so out of character.
That's so wrong. This goes back to our thing about when should you take a political position?

In our case, like that's one we'll take. Like we don't censor Wikipedia.
We're not going to.

And, you know, it's actually getting to be more complicated because all around the world, we're seeing the rise of more legislation that is, you can tell the people writing it, their mental model is Facebook or Twitter or whatever.

They don't really understand how Wikipedia works. And so they want to impose duties on the organization to do the content moderation and things like that.
I'm like, well, we don't do that.

Like our community does that. And in fact, if you forced us to have to do that, we would be undermining our volunteer community.
Like it's not going to work. It's a bad idea.

And, you know, other things, you know, like restrictions that would require us to identify users and things like that, gather data we don't gather now.

Like, basically, you know, I do try to be diplomatic a bit, but I'm also like you know what we didn't do that in china we didn't do that in turkey we're not going to do it in your country either so yeah yeah you know take us as we are i've got a friend who's an editor from iran and this person is anonymous which is not and they use a vpn and they they think they were blocked for a while and they had to be like hey the reason i'm using this is because if i get caught doing this i'm going to jail no it's legit and i like that's uh you know user privacy is massively important i assume wikipedia is blocked Iran?

No. No, I'm very surprised.
So here's a funny thing that happened. So we used to be not encrypted and now we're encrypted.
So just for most people, they may not know what that means.

So like if you visit a website and it's HTTP, then that's in the clear. Anybody spying on your connection can see what you're reading and all of that.

HTTPS, like when you go to your bank, They can see that you're talking to us, but you can't see which page you're reading or what the content is.

So when we moved to HTTPS many years ago now, we thought this is going to be interesting because at the time, a lot of countries were, they were often filtering out political opposition and things like that.

So there was a lot of that going on. And I was like, well, okay, when we do this, we should expect we're going to get blocked in a lot of countries around the world.
No, we didn't.

And I think what it came down to is because they could no longer filter certain pages, they had a decision to make. You can block all of Wikipedia or you can have all of Wikipedia.

And a lot of them are like, I guess we'll just have Wikipedia then. Like, because they know we're not radical, we're not whatever.

But that's really important because it does mean, like, if you are in Iran and you have questions about human sexuality and you want to read about it, like you need privacy.

Like you need to be able to do that anonymously. It's really important that you can do that.
And, you know, I think what they decided was like, actually, Wikipedia is so useful. Whatever.

Can't control everything. That's interesting.
And that's great news. Where is Wikipedia blocked? China.
China. North Korea, probably.

What I always joke about North Korea is like the one guy with a computer can look at anything he wants right you know so right they've got a broader like yeah so I wouldn't say Eritrea probably is blocked I would imagine I don't think so really that would surprise me if they were open there so just China just China

wow yeah well we've had you know we've had various short-term blocks and things like that we've dealt with over the years but you know that's the only one that's really right now and wow yeah where are the servers all over the place yeah kind of all over i mean but fundamentally in the us but we do have caching servers and things because you've got to deliver

like the speed of light uh to go all the way around the world is like a half a second so which is surprising but it's true for me it was surprising it's that slow i didn't realize that but i just thought it well yeah if you're loading a web page that's meaningful and so we need to like stage content near people yeah but we have to be very thoughtful about where are those servers are they in safe places and so on yeah i was curious about that because what you i mean it would be crazy if you just never know if if they're even if they're in the united states hey we're shutting this down until the DOJ investigates that all these are uh compliant yeah i i i've not in the past worried much about that these days i think you have to at least do a little bit of contingency planning and think these things are i don't think there's any imminent threat but uh crazy times yeah crazy times exactly what do you think are the incoming challenges for truth for sourcing news and information from ai generated content because sure before you'd see a photo on twitter and it would be like look what Israel did and then somebody would be like three days later this is a photo from the Syrian civil war

yeah like yeah but now it's like you can put Israeli flags and Israeli soldiers and people that look like real Israelis in there and it's just fake yeah no so I think uh this is a problem we've been fortunate that people are widely aware these days that like just seeing a photo actually I think it was a really important and positive moment.

There was a very famous photo of Pope Francis wearing an expensive puffer jacket. And it went viral and it got a lot of news coverage because it's like obviously fake.

Like this is Pope Francis was quite famously,

he didn't take advantage of any of the luxury. Like he lived in a dorm room and that sort of thing.

Like he would be, it wouldn't be my first choice of a pope who goes in for the grandiosity of the office, right?

But people knew that. And that like, oh, wow, like it really looks real.
And that's important that people should know.

Like, just because you see something floating across social media, that doesn't mean it's true. And I hope it's actually pushing people in the direction of saying,

actually,

I do care about old school journalism. Like, I want to know where that photo came from.
Is it from a trustworthy news organization? If it's from Reuters, that's one thing.

If it just rocked up in my Twitter feed, that's completely different.

My little personal story about this was: I saw, you remember there was a dam in the Ukraine war, a dam in Ukraine, which got blown up and flooded like a huge portion of the country a few years ago yeah a few years ago and people have been worried for uh some time that this because it it's like a major piece of infrastructure there and then i was actually in the in the us at my mom's house and uh it was late at night and i just saw on social media i saw this little short video of like drone footage of water gushing through the dam and they're like oh my god the dam's been blown and i was like

has it because it's not on the bbc it's not on cnn it's not on reuters

It's not in the news. And, you know, I said, like, this could be fake for all we know.
And then somebody goes, oh, no, look, look, you can see the water flowing. Like, you can't do that with AI.

And I'm like, well, I mean, this is a few years ago. By today, I think everybody would go, well, of course you can fake water flow with AI.

Anyway, as it turned out, I didn't believe it until the next morning. And then I got up and it was in all the news everywhere because journalists had checked it and da da da da.

And I'm like, yeah, okay. I'm proud of myself in this case.
I didn't jump to a conclusion. Turns out it was true, but I was was waiting to check.

And I think that's what a lot of us should do, particularly, you know, when we live in an era of social media pylons that can be just ridiculous and toxic. Like, just don't believe it.

Just like go slow down a bit. Do you worry about people relying on things like ChatGPT and its attendant hallucinations?

Yeah, I mean, somewhat. Again, I think people are aware, but I think they need to be aware that, you know, AI hallucinates a lot.

And there was a lot of hype just before the launch of ChatGPT-5, the most recent version, that you know, like it was going to be a lot better.

It's a little better, you know, but it still gets things wrong. And certainly when we look at it from the Wikipedia point of view, it's like if you want to write about

something obscure and you ask ChatGPT about it, the chances of hallucination are much higher than if you write about something famous.

Like ask it, you know, write a Wikipedia entry about the Eiffel Tower. It's probably going to have some mistakes, but it's going to be pretty much passable.

Ask it to write about somebody who was a contestant on Philippines' version of American Idol in 2003. It's going to make stuff up.
It's going to get it all wrong.

It has, I mean, one of the first things I'd be working on if I were them is to have, to train it to go like, I don't know. Like, it beats me.
Like, why are you asking me such an obscure question?

Yeah. I can make something up for you.
You know, like, let's be a little more. cautious.

But we know that we can't really use it to write Wikipedia entries or to even help that much.

Although there are areas where we are looking at, okay, like, yeah, are there things it could do that would be useful to us?

So this summer I was talking to a French Wikipedian, longtime community member, and she said, oh, yeah, I don't have time to edit much anymore, but my hobby is I find broken links, like a dead link, it's gone 404, the website's moved or something like that in French Wikipedia on old pages I haven't edited a long time.

And I see what was that link supporting, and then I go and I search and I find a new source and I add that. I said, oh, but do you think, what if you had a tool?

So finding a dead link, you don't need AI for that. The link is dead, right?

So you find a dead link and then it could look at the article, see what the sentence before was, what was being supported by that.

Then it could go and read a bunch of sources, find something that looks like it's it, and make a suggestion to you.

Like it could find two or three sources from known good quality sources, and then all you got to do is click on it and confirm that it's right.

She's like, oh, wow, that would be like that would speed up my work quite a bit. And I'm like, yeah, I think that will work.

I think an AI could do that because it's just got to do like a very simple task. And because it's only going to make a suggestion, if it gets it wrong, that's fine.
Like you're still going to do it.

It's just like what you were going to do anyway, which is click on a bunch of sources and read them. It filters through and finds the most likely ones.
And then you go and read those.

And it's like, great. So I don't think we should be afraid of that.
kind of technology and be like, ah, it all sucks and it's terrible. It's like, no, let's use it appropriately.

Unlike, say, Gracopedia, where they're trying to write the encyclopedia from scratch using, yeah, that's not going to be great. What's your favorite article on Wikipedia?

One of the ones that I've always found interesting and amusing is there's an article in Wikipedia called Inherently Funny Words. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I'm familiar with the startup.
Yeah, my great, the great story about it is there was a moment in time when it almost got deleted because it had become kind of a dumping ground in the early days.

Like people just like go by and just add some word they thought it sounded funny, no sources and all of that. And so if somebody's like, Oh, this is nonsense.

Like, people are just writing random words, you know, that's not that's not.

And so, it they nominated for deletion, then we have a whole process, and somebody's like, Wait, wait, wait, hold on a second. This is actually a legitimate concept in the theory of humor.

And a lot of famous comedians and humorists have talked about it. And, like, they went through and like rigorously sourced it all, and uh, it became quite a good article.

Yeah, the only real casualty of this, there used to be a picture, it was a cow with horns like strapped to its head with a rope. And it was just like a funny picture.

And then the caption was very dry humor. It just said, according to some, cow is an inherently funny word.
I don't know why I think that's so funny, but I loved it.

And it had to go because there was no source. Could you remember any inherently funny words? I'm trying to think of one right now that's appropriate for the show, and I can't.
Badger. Badger? Yeah.

That is kind of an

it didn't really work. You smiled a little, but yeah, but like I was thinking more along the lines of like the jazzled.
You know, that's an yeah, yeah, no, I think inherently funny.

So the the part of the theory is like words with a G, like yogurt, are funnier than other words without a G.

The theory for comedians is like, you've written this great joke, and if the punchline is a inherently funny word, it just hits harder somehow.

We'll have to link to that article in the show notes and people can

find me some examples of funny words. I know we're out of time.
You've helped create something that impacts humanity to a large pretty decent degree. I mean, that's, you know, good flex.
Yeah.

What advice do you have for people, maybe especially young people who want to make some sort of similar impact in their life somehow?

Yeah, I mean, I think I have a few bits of advice, and most of them are quite standard. So I'm just repeating cliches, but I actually believe them.

So one is just get started, you know, so read up on the lean startup methodology. I'm not necessarily endorsing every aspect of that, but the idea is like, get to a minimum viable product.

And that doesn't necessarily mean you're making a product, whatever it is, but just like test like early, like get out there doing it and find out, is it even remotely going to work?

Is it even helpful? Are people interested at all?

Because there's a big, you know, problem with wantrepreneurs is the term I've heard, like a want to be entrepreneur who basically spends their life writing and rewriting long business plans.

And it's like, yeah, great. Maybe you do need a business plan.
Maybe you don't. But if that's all you're doing, you're never going to find out if it's going to work or not.

So you just kind of have to take a shot and go. And, you know, the next five years, I read this when I was a kid and I was like, it was the most profound thing I had ever read in my life.

And I still come back to it a lot. Like the next five years will go by no matter what you do.
That's kind of interesting, right? To say like, oh, okay.

So you might as well do the thing because you're not going to stop the progress of time and you've only got so long. So just get started.
And you know what?

If it doesn't work out, you can still be proud. Like, I tried something.
And actually, this is one of the great strengths of Silicon Valley.

In a lot of cultures, it's a lot harder for people because it's like, well, if I try something and it fails, I'm going to have this black mark on me. I'm not going to be able to, whatever.

I've got the shame. My family's going to.
Whereas here, people are like, oh, that was cool. Like, you tried that.
It didn't work. Yeah, whatever.
Most things don't work. That's true.

At least you tried it.

That's better than, you know, you kept your job you hated in a bank and you wrote business plans for five years.

This is one of the few places I think on earth where you could lose millions of dollars of someone else's money. And they go, well, we gave it a shot.

Thanks for coming in. Great.
And thank you for coming in. This has been really fun.
We gave it a shot. Hopefully the podcast is entertaining.
We'll see how it goes. We'll see how it goes.

Thank you.

What happens when the only way to survive is to lie so well you forget who you really are?

FBI veteran Scott Payne went undercover with one of the most dangerous biker gangs in the country and almost didn't make it out. This is the way I was trained, and this is what I think.

Anytime you are something that you're not, pretend to be something that's opposite of you for a long period of time, especially in deep cover, generally one or two things is going to happen.

You're either going to slip up and they're going to catch you or you're going to become it.

Because there's so many horror stories and undercovers, it sucks that the same mistakes are being made today that were being made in the 80s.

You got a small department, you got somebody just running the undercover, but that person is also the case agent who is going to get promoted if the case succeeds.

I'm not saying people are going to do the wrong thing. It's just a bad foundation.

I guess people is kind of my business.

Even as an investigator, at the end of the day, you need to be able to sit down with somebody and have a conversation with them and gather intelligence, get information.

Because if all else fails and computers shut down and phones list, that's great. It's all good stuff, but it's all human intelligence and you just need to be able to talk to people.

You got to be believable. And this is where a lot of people think about undercover.
And when I'm out training and speaking, I mean, I'll ask, what do you think undercover is? Some people say acting.

I go, okay, what else do you think it is? Lying.

Pretend to be something you're not. The true definition of undercover work is you're forming relationships that you're most likely going to betray.

That sucks if you look at it that way, but you need to be able to figure out a way you're going to do it and rationalize it in your mind so it doesn't have an adverse impact on you.

Go Inside Basement Strip Searches, A Brotherhood Built on Betrayal, and the Psychological Damage That Still Lingers on episode 1120 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Big thanks to Jimmy Wales, a guy who helped build something that has shaped how billions of people learn, argue, collaborate, and sometimes rage edit one another.

And look, whether you're a student being told, hey, Wikipedia is not a source, or somebody whose bio page was once a war zone, hi, yes, been there, Wikipedia is one of the last standing examples that trust, openness, and transparency can actually work at scale.

If you want to rebuild trust in your organization, your community, or even just your household, take a page from Jimmy's playbook, assume good faith, be radically transparent, and call balls and strikes even when they land right on your toes.

You'd be amazed how fast this compounds into credibility. And for those of you wondering how to make an impact like Jimmy's, you don't have to found the next world encyclopedia.

Just start by solving a real problem, obsess over quality, and collaborate like your idea depends on strangers showing up and doing the right thing, because it probably will.

Links to all things discussed will always be in the show notes, transcripts in the usual place.

And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with somebody who still thinks anyone can edit it means no one checks anything.

And remember, advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are, of course, also on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

Please consider supporting those who support the show.

Our newsletter, WeeBit Wiser, it's specific, it's practical, it'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships, and it's only two minutes of reading per week.

We promise. Well, it depends on how slow you read.
But if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. Test me.
It's a great companion to the show.

JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com.
I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sedlauskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others or by drinking a ton of caffeine, which I have done today, if you can't tell.

The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspirituality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation?

Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation.

It's called the Conspirituality Podcast.

The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening.

It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that.

From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspirituality podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirituality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored in part by Everything Everywhere Daily.

You've heard the phrase, learn something new every day? Sounds nice, but do you actively do it? That's where Everything Everywhere Daily comes in. This podcast makes it effortless.

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