Jimmy Wales

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. Before we dive in, a quick word about who I am and why we're here. I'm Jim Bier, corporate lawyer and restructuring professional. I've spent the last two decades helping companies navigate their toughest transitions. And about eight years ago, I found myself having fascinating conversations with clients and friends about everything from venture capital to the broader shifts happening in our economy and society.

Those discussions were simply too good, so the puck was born. Now while we started on venture capital, hence the podcast name, the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, We've naturally evolved to focus more on the and beyond portion of the title. Today, we explore how business intersects with the bigger forces shaping our world. I still run my restructuring practice by day, but now I get to host these conversations by night. It has become one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

Today's guest continues that tradition. This is all a way of talking about building trust. How do you build trust in the content of Wikipedia? Well, you've gotta grapple with all these ideas. You gotta do it fairly, and then you present the results to people in a way they can go, okay.

Right. I see. Like, I'm I'm now understanding something I didn't know before, and it's being presented to me fairly, not I'm only being told one side of the story and the rest is is not there. What does it take to build trust on the Internet at a global scale? Today on the Puck, I'm joined by Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia, the free, collaborative encyclopedia that changed how the world finds and shares information.

We talk about decentralized knowledge, debates over accuracy, and why trust, not technology, is the foundation of open systems. Those ideas sit at the center of Jimmy's new book, The Seven Rules of Trust. There's a lot to cover here, so let's get to it. Jimmy Wales, welcome to the book. Very good.

Thanks for having me on. So before we dive in, can you just take a moment for our listeners that may not know you personally? Just give us a little bit about your background and also if you wanna talk about how you came to the work that ultimately led to Wikipedia. Yeah. I mean, I could go on for quite some time as I've had a long life.

Yeah. So I'm originally, I'm from Alabama. I grew up in North Alabama in Huntsville where it's where the space program has all the scientists for the rocket science and so forth. So that was a big deal when I was a kid. So I think that's what got me into science and technology and so forth.

You know, started Wikipedia back in 2001. 01/15/2001 was the the launch dates. We're coming up on the twenty fifth anniversary, which is kind of an amazing thing. And, you know, it's been quite a quite a fun journey. The whole process of helping things grow and keeping us on track and and so on and so forth.

So, yeah, lots to talk about. Well, so you've got a new book, Seven Rules of Trust. I I guess, let's start with what prompted you to write the book, and I guess the follow-up question is for for those people that haven't had a chance to yet listen to it. Is there any way you can kinda summarize the seven rules for our listeners? Yeah.

I mean, so the way I came about this was I'm good friends with Richard Edelman, who does the trust barometer survey every year. And I've been watching that for a long time and, obviously, as many of us have watching the enormous decline in trust throughout society. So there's been a decline in trust in journalism, in politics, in business, in each other to some extent. And this is obviously causing a lot of problems in the world. If we have a world that's full of untrustworthy people and people aren't trusting other things, everything gets harder to do.

Everything in business is harder. Everything in politics is harder. You know, I would say the recent US government shutdown, the longest ever, was in those small part because neither side could trust the other to make some compromises and to sort of find a a mutually satisfactory way forward. So it felt like it's time for us to focus on trust and think about how do we get back to a culture of trust. And then, of course, Wikipedia has gone from being kind of a joke to one of the few things people trust.

And so I feel like I learned some lessons along the way that I think could be useful to people. Well, that makes sense. And I couldn't agree with you more that trust is is something that we're all struggling with right now. Is there a way to meaningfully give us a little bit of a preview of what the seven rules of trust are? The concept is pretty straightforward.

We base a lot of our thinking on the work of Frances Frei, who I interviewed for the book. And what she has in her framework, and she's not the only academic researcher into trust who has this similar framework, is a triangle of empathy, authenticity, and logic. And she says whenever you see a breakdown in trust, it's one of those three. And the rules are sort of drawing on my experiences and thinking about those three things and and thinking about, okay, what are some of the things? So there's things like make it personal, be positive about people, create a clear purpose, on and on.

You know, transparency is really important. And so for each of the rules of trust, we try and illustrate, with examples of, you know, where has this mattered. There's some really great stories in the book, stories about Airbnb, had a enormous crisis of trust early in the existence of Airbnb, and they got really, really serious about trust. They realized, like, hey. If we have a a service that people think, gee, if I put my apartment on here, it's probably gonna get trashed and nobody's gonna do anything about it.

I don't trust these people. We're not gonna have a business. And so they realized that fairly early on, maybe not early enough. You know? It took a a bit of a a a fiasco for for it to come clear to them, but it they made it an anchor of their business and obviously, it's gone on to be an incredibly successful business.

Let's switch that now to the experiment with Wikipedia. Obviously, trust, right, is a big part of making Wikipedia work and continue to work. And from the perspective of the principles in the book to what you're struggling with today, how does Wikipedia and those rules kind of come together? Yeah. I mean, so a lot of the rules are drawn really directly from my experience with Wikipedia.

I mean, I think one of the most obvious is, you know, Wikipedia has a very clear, good purpose. You know, we're here to write an encyclopedia. It should be neutral. It should be high quality. And that purpose defines everything that we do.

So it defines what the community is all about. It defines how the foundation operates. It defines everything, really. And we can make decisions very often much easier by just reference to that. Like, does it help build an encyclopedia?

Yes. Let's do that. If it doesn't, then, no. We're not gonna do that. You know?

And so, you know, just to give an example, somebody very early on in the history of Wikipedia I mean, we're older than Gmail, for example. But when Gmail launched, somebody said, oh, maybe you should have free webmail accounts as a way to help grow the site. And I just thought, you know, I don't know. Like, that sounds like a a very big distraction. Like, running a proper email service is hard.

Writing good software for an email would be hard. I don't think we should do that, and we didn't do that. And we you know? And that was a good decision because, you know, it would have distracted us and sort of sets us down a weird wrong path into being some sort of weird conglomerate web service provider of some sort. So that clear purpose is often It's really clarifying and really helpful to people in terms of building trust because other people can predict what you're gonna do, your partners, your staff, the customers, whoever they may be.

They understand who you are and they understand what you're gonna do. And so, you know, it's easier to trust you then. I'm about to exhaust my understanding of different modalities in terms of trust for these kind of distribution arms of, quote, knowledge, like an encyclopedia. I mean, if you go back to my childhood when Walter Cronkite Mhmm. Was was on the air, we had a situation with the fairness doctrine, and we had a situation where advertisers wanted to reach conservatives and liberals alike.

Mhmm. And so there really was a financial incentive to create more balanced news. Now, again, there's always a bias. I understand that. But Mhmm.

At least for a long period of time, the advertisers were not incentivized to make us angry and afraid. Yeah. Whereas now, with all these different sources of news, with these algorithms, if you're in a particular echo chamber, the economic incentives for a lot of these platforms are to make you angry and afraid and not to give you the truth. And in fact, we've watched people get angry at whether or not it's, you know, MSNBC or Fox News when you're too easy on the other side, so to speak. Yeah.

That's one aspect of it. Now now you take the puck. I'm the founder of the puck. I showcase who I wanna showcase. We have discussions.

And from my perspective, I'm looking for a balanced approach. But that's my subjective approach. Right? With Wikipedia, as I understand it, is a nonprofit Mhmm. And with the editor setup, how do you keep bias out?

What's your strategy for our listeners so that this encyclopedia essentially has a perspective, but that perspective is balanced? Yeah. So, I mean, I really think there is a huge connection, as you talk about, between business models and and the results that you get, neutrality being one that you might or might not get when you're talking about journalism. I actually one of the things I really enjoy here I live in The United Kingdom, and we have a a magazine for kids called The Week Junior, which is a kid's version of the week, which is a weekly news magazine. And one thing I've noticed about The Week Junior is it is politically very, very neutral.

They do a really great job of that. They you know, it's for kids, so they keep it relatively simple and straightforward. They cover politics as well as everything else. You know? There's been an election and, you know, whatever kids might be hearing, oh, there's an election.

Oh, who's running? What's going on? I don't know anything about politics. You know? And one of the reasons is because they're trying to sell magazines to parents, and the parents don't really you know, they want parents on all sides of the spectrum.

And it's a paper magazine, very old fashioned, you know. And I think that's, you know, that's still true, like, you know, advertisers don't even today, advertisers don't want to be next to super biased content. They just don't often have a choice these days because the business model of journalism has gotten so bad broadly that, you know, people are seeking whatever niche audience they can. And sometimes that means just winding people up and so on and so forth. And working in an environment where the social media algorithms and so forth do tend to promote content that is viral, and that means often catchy or, you know, it's sort of outraging people and and so forth.

And there's a lot of different pieces of the puzzle here. So Wikipedia is funded by the general public. So one of the rules of trust is independence, be independent. And our funding model is very important for that. So we're not funded by governments, and we're not funded by any big billionaires.

We do have some major donors. We appreciate them very much, but that's a small percentage of the money. The bulk of the money comes from people giving an average of about $10, and that's very meaningful, which means, yeah, we need to sort of think about everybody. We also you know, we have a very strong ideological commitment internally to neutrality. It's one of the earliest rules of Wikipedia.

It's the one rule that I say is non negotiable. Nothing can override the demand for neutrality, not community consensus, not the board, not anybody. Like, it's really fundamental to everything that we do. And then, you know, how do we get there? Well, it's it's a lot of work.

It's a it's a lot, and there's lots to debate. And there's lots of things that, you know, cases where I don't think we're getting there quite the way I would like to. And I think, you know, we always have to stand ready to improve and to think about, okay. How what can we do better? What have we got wrong?

Let's have those conversations. But when we have those conversations, it is interesting to see. I mean, sometimes people are making arguments that are maybe not that great, but nobody's saying, no. No. No.

We shouldn't be neutral. It's time to sort of become you know, follow an agenda, and certainly not at the organizational level. There's no business model pressure to become left wing, right wing, or anything else. Part of that is just because, like, what do people want from an encyclopedia? You don't want to go and only hear one side of the story.

You don't wanna hear jumping to conclusions. You wanna hear, you know, okay. Here's here's what a lot of different people are saying, and here's the facts, and here's, you know, so and so said this, and critics responded with that, and so on and so forth. You wanna you wanna learn about the debate, not be told only one side of the debate. And we have a really strong buy in on that in the community, and that's really important.

And then, you know, there's all all kinds of details about, you know, how do we think about that? What are the rules of editing and things like that that that matter? So, again, while we're in this bit of a black box, when you talk about we, is there a referee? Yeah. Is there not one referee, but it doesn't work like that.

We aren't top down. We aren't, I'm not the editor in chief. We have lots and lots of different processes. So there is an arbitration committee in English, in all the other big languages. And the arbitration committee is kind of like the Supreme Court, but they don't rule on content issues.

So they aren't the editor in chief. They rule on behavioral issues. They rule on principles. And then, you know, really, I think the most fundamental thing is we have to remain, we meaning the community, we have to remain open to debate, open to discourse, open to dialogue, open to newcomers, like always welcoming newcomers to say, look, if you think we've got something wrong, come and help us. Like, let's figure this out together.

And so that, to me, is, like, my thought about what the most important thing for for me to do, for the Wikimedia Foundation to do, for community leaders to do is to think about community health. Like, as long as we've got the right people and they're and they're thinking really hard and they're accepting that there's gonna be some disagreement and debate, but that's a healthy thing, and we just gotta sort of stay open to that and stay keep thinking about how to make things better, then we'll be okay in the long run. Makes sense. Staying on this theme, one of the concerns that people have about college campuses is that you've got 90% or whatever percentage of faculty that's more liberal than conservative. And so, therefore, you're getting that subjective bias.

When you're a consumer like myself of media, right, you can do your own critical thinking, and we had Frank Bruni on the podcast, and we talked about the importance of critical thinking. Mhmm. And you can look at different sources of material and kind of come to your own conclusions. When you're looking at the box, so to speak, and the editors that work with you and your, quote, encyclopedia, is there any mechanism to try to get balanced perspectives from both sides? Same with the college example.

In a perfect world, right, maybe we would have 50 conservatives and 50 liberal professors, and you would be able to hear from both sides of the aisle, so to speak. And then as a critical thinking person, you would have a chance to determine your own subjective reality based on that. In Wikipedia, is there any mechanism or sorting so that there is a way to deal with our own subjective bias, so to speak? Yeah. I mean, we we try as much as we can.

It's a really complicated question. So I'll just give an example. I I love electric cars. I drive an electric car, not a Tesla, but I have an electric car. And I'm excited about the technology.

You know, I'm excited about a lot of things about it. And I live in London, and there are a lot of newspapers in London. But the two quality newspapers I mentioned is The Guardian and The Telegraph. K. The Telegraph is a right leaning paper, Guardian left leaning.

They're both pretty centrist, but they're both quality newspapers. And I could tell you if you if you gave me, you know, the last week of stories mentioning electric cars, just give me the headlines, and I could probably tell you which paper they came from. Sure. Because the Telegraph hates electric cars and The Guardian likes electric cars. Now I believe this reduces my trust in both of the papers.

And as a consumer, I do have to triangulate. Within Wikipedia, basically, the way we would approach that sort of thing is to say, yeah. Look. If you're if you're just citing sources from one side, you're you're making a big mistake. And, you know, there's no reason not to.

And if somebody comes in with a valid source saying, ah, but the Telegraph story pointed out this and the Guardian story pointed out that, great. Let's put it all in there. Like, let's actually chew on that together and present not one side of the story, but try and present the bigger, the fuller picture. You know, is there a magic formula for that or a mechanism? Well, not exactly.

Like, it's human. It's it's it's about dialogue. It's about discourse. It's about chewing on ideas together. And so that's actually super duper important is that we that we recognize there's no magic formula.

And, certainly, the magic formula wouldn't be, well, let's make sure we've got 50 people who like electric cars and 50 people who hate electric cars and let them fight it out. Because if you're fighting it out, you're you're doing it wrong in the first place. So one of the things one of the ethical values that we promote, that I promote a lot within the community and the community promotes as well is you shouldn't think of Wikipedia as a battleground. Like, if you come in trying to fight for your side in a debate, you're just really not being a very good Wikipedia, and that's not what we do here. If you come in and you say, okay.

Like, I understand there's different perspectives. I happen to agree with this one. But as a good Wikipedian, you shouldn't be able to guess what my own politics are. I should be there saying, okay. Look.

We're gonna grapple with all of the different perspectives. We're gonna treat them fairly. And, you know, it turns out that people who are highly ideological, but also really understand their own position very well, are actually quite good at this. The people who aren't good at it are the people who have a view and don't feel confident. They feel a little scared.

They don't wanna let the other side speak because they're afraid they're gonna find out they're wrong, or they're afraid they don't know how to answer the critique or something like that. If you feel like you know how to answer the you know, I was I love giving the example of a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist. And because I said kind and thoughtful, they can come together and write about abortion, and they can say, you know, like, okay. There are these different ethical perspectives on abortion. And, you know, you said the Catholic church position is this, and the pope has said that, and critics responded thus, and so on and so forth.

And people can do that. People can be actually very good at that even though they may have their own personal view that it's not gonna change, and they aren't gonna agree on the issue, but they can accept that and say, look. I'm not I'm never gonna agree with you about this. We can present it together. We can work together in a fair way to present it in such a way that other people can understand.

So then the other element that you you alluded to just a little bit is, of course, one of the issues that we humans now I'm not talking about just we, the community, we humans face is when we are so steeped in one set of ideas and we haven't even heard any alternatives, then it's hard not to be biased because we don't know any better. We don't know any different. You know, that is something that we all have to struggle with. I have a fun little silly example of this, which is if I ask you, who invented the airplane? Well, a trick question, I think, because I would say the Wright brothers well, not a trick question, but Oh.

I'd have to go to Wikipedia because Yeah. I would say the Wright brothers, but I know that's not true. It's true enough. I mean, the the thing is the reason that almost any English speaker would say the Wright brothers is we all learned it in first grade. Right.

Like, it was like a simple fact, and it was completely uncontroversial. And it turns out, I have been told that if you ask French people the same thing, they have an equally uncontroversial answer that's different. Right. And it was a a Brazilian guy who was living in France. And so, you know, I looked into it.

Actually, the the real story and, actually, a lot of us I grew up with kind of this this idea of, like, oh, remember you've seen the old news reels Absolutely. People, like Yep. Riding a bicycle with the flapping wings and sort of Right. Funny nonsense. And then the Wright brothers invented the airplane.

Wow. Amazing. But it turns out, actually, there were it was in the cards. Like, people there was a lot of research, a lot of engineering, a lot of things. People could see that it was probably possible.

It might be possible. And a lot of different groups were working on it. The Wright brothers got there first in one sense. So, basically, this is my understanding. I'm not a an aeronautical historian or engineer.

The Wright brothers went further than they would have without an engine. So they were better than a glider. That's that's powered flight. They didn't figure out how to go up, which also, to be fair, is kind of important. And the Brazilian guy figured out how to go up.

So I'm like, they're they're actually both interesting. Right? And the point is, one of the reasons that you you might have an idea like, oh, the Wright brothers have invented airplane, uncomplicated. I think, hopefully, by the time we get to be adults, we realize, a lot of the stories we're told as kids are, well, there's more to it, and it's more complicated. It's more interesting usually.

But if you never heard about this other guy, you never heard about this, you would just have a very simple idea. And so when we're thinking about, like, what are the things that we think we know today that future science will overturn completely, there must be a few things. Right? We don't know what they are. We might have some guesses.

Right? If some some area of science is looking a little shaky and maybe, you know, we're we're on the verge of a a real paradigm shift in in how we think about something. But in general, we are gonna have these blind spots, and that's just part of being human. And those blind spots can be sort of universal for the whole planet, but they can also be per culture. You know?

Oftentimes, people in in a certain country or a certain place, they've never even come into contact with some other ideas. And so, therefore, it sounds like super foreign to them and alien. But hopefully and that's part of the idea of Wikipedia. Like, we're global. We have people from all over the world editing Wikipedia, and people may come into things with a completely different perspective.

And they might be wrong, but let's grapple with that. I have this great story. I met this young kid. I say kid. He was in his 20s, I guess.

And I was in Taipei, Taiwan and he was assigned to drive me around. And he told me, he said, Oh, I was raised in a very nationalist Taiwanese household, and I was taught that the mainland Chinese were like robots. They were all sort of brainwashed, and they had no idea about history. And then I started working with some of them in Wikipedia. And he said, well, I still think they're wrong.

But on a few things, I think they've got a point. And I'm like, wow. This is great. This is like, this is progress towards peace. It's progress towards mutual understanding.

You started thinking of them not as robots, but as people who have ideas, who have views, who may not always agree with the Chinese government, but who may not agree with you either. And now, like, wow. Like, boom. Like, you're growing up intellectually, and you're saying, oh, okay. Actually, there's some really interesting things to grapple with.

And, you know, a lot of things, stories in history are like that. You know, it's all messy, and you might wanna think your side never did anything bad, but they probably did and so on and so forth. Anyway, so for me, this is all a way of talking about building trust. You know, it's like, how do you build trust in the content of Wikipedia? Well, you've gotta grapple with all these ideas.

You gotta do it fairly, and then you present the results to people in a way they can go, okay. Right. Like, I see. Like, I'm I'm now understanding something I didn't know before, and it's being presented to me fairly, not I'm only being told one side of the story and the rest is is not there for me. When you look at, for instance, Sam Altman in his interview with Tucker Carlson, it was interesting to me because Tucker Carlson was coming at it from the perspective of who's God.

Meaning, Sam Altman, you're you're answering these questions, and we're dealing with things like assisted suicide in Canada, which could come to America and be legal here. And, you know, I'm Tucker Carlson, and I believe in the, you know, the the Bible. And, you know, at the end of the day, who is setting these rules, right, that are gonna influence culture going forward? And I think culture does matter. When you think about an encyclopedia, like, at least when I first heard you talk about encyclopedia, I think of Encyclopedia Britannica.

Sure. And I think about my childhood, and I think about picking up a book. And it it presumably would not have been unbiased when it was talking about the Soviet Union, for instance. I mean, you know, we were living in a culture where we we were afraid of the Soviet Union and we had the cold war, and there really was, from my perspective, a bias against the evil empire, so to speak. When you're looking at the world today, 8,000,000,000 people give or take, and you're looking at it from the perspective of the gatekeepers and where Wikipedia is going with respect to the truth, where do you come in in terms of, you know, China versus The US?

Is this is this an attempt to have a worldwide perspective? Well, I mean, there is only one reality and lots of ways of describing it. But, you know, I think from the Wikipedia perspective, you know, I think the way to get to a shared understanding of the world is not to go heavy on one point of view and demonize the other, but it's actually to say, okay. What are the what are what are the perspectives? What are different people saying?

Some of them are wrong, by the way, and some of them are lying, and some of them are problematic. But until I, as a reader, until I actually understand what people are coming from, what is the evidence they're putting forward, and so on, I don't have any tools to grapple with it. So, you know, for me, I just think we have to grapple with ideas. You know, I think we have to really, really work hard and use our brains and and think a lot and say, okay. Look.

It's one thing. I mean, I think we can make certain distinctions. Right? So if I can understand, for example, what something I completely think is I think Russia's completely in the wrong invasion of Ukraine and so on and so forth. But I think, also, I'd like to understand more.

I'd like to understand, like, why do they think this is the right thing to be doing? And why do ordinary Russians think is the right things to be doing? And what are the pieces of the puzzle? And what are the real motives and all of that? And to do that, the very first thing you have to do before you jump to a conclusion is listen and and sort of go, okay.

Like, tell me. Explain this to me. You know? Like, what what what exactly are you saying here? And why do you think that?

Because I'd like to know more about that. And then sometimes, if you do that, I'm just thinking about, you know, the ethics of life and so forth. Sometimes when you do that, you're gonna find out, oh, actually, I was the one who was mistaken. I didn't really know about this fact or that fact or whatever. I don't think I would find that out in this case.

But in other cases, you you're like, oh, okay. Like, now I I sort of understand, like, the reason ordinary Russian people believe these things is because they're fed a steady diet of propaganda by the government who control all the media and etcetera, etcetera. You know, like, there there's reasons I can understand that are also useful to know. You know? So for me, I just think there is something about that first step that first step where you say, alright.

I'm not gonna go in with an agenda. I'm gonna go in to learn some facts, and I'm gonna listen. I'm gonna sort of say, okay. To show me your evidence and so on. I really wanna understand that first because if I start dismissing evidence before I even have heard it, I'm probably you know, I'm gonna end up stupid.

So Well and, Jimmy, I haven't read the Wikipedia page on Russia, and my initial bias would be that Russia was the, quote, you know, wrong party here in terms of invading Ukraine. But just playing devil's advocate for a second, there is a narrative out there that talks about NATO encroachment and this notion of the West getting closer and closer. Mhmm. And how would we like it, so to speak, if the Chinese and Russians were doing this in our backyard? You and I, it sounds like we could have that debate right now, and we could talk it through.

Yeah. And it sounds like, you know, that that's the truth you're looking for or that's the process you're looking for. But how do you ensure as a nonprofit going forward that your editors and your team will always go into these very, very complex issues and try to provide a a balance to that when you're gone? Well, I mean, I there are no guarantees. It's a human institution and, you know, it's sort of like there are things that we can do, things about the design of the processes, the design of the foundation, the business model.

All of these things are important to sort of ensuring, you know, how to build things that last is the subtitle of the book. It's like, how do we ensure that we continue to earn the trust that we've earned to not lose it by screwing things up too much and so on and so forth? And I don't you know, there's no magic answers. I mean, the the thing that gives me some degree of confidence is there are institutions who have been remarkably consistent, for many, many, many, many, many centuries. You know?

And if you think about the design there, you think about putting ideas front and center, you know, I I think it's entirely possible. And I and I do think it's you know, when I talk about the business model, for example, like, the fact that we are a nonprofit that, you know, gets our money from the general public means that we can afford to, you know we're not easily pressured by anybody. And so the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't feel like sweat because, I don't know, Elon Musk doesn't like us, the richest man in the world. We're like, yeah, we don't care. That's his problem.

Right? You know, like, that's it's fine. And, you know, my my point is to say, like, yeah. But okay. What's his complaint?

And let's treat that seriously. Let's, like, let's work through that. Like, what's gone wrong? How do we fix it? How do we make it better?

You know? If there's something he's got legitimate to say, we have to take that seriously because otherwise, we're not being Wikipedians. So Yeah. I mean, as a corporate lawyer historically and as somebody that's day job is restructuring companies, I mean, I've spent a lot of time looking at how do you turn the kingdom over to the next generation. And you see certain companies, whether it's IBM or Apple with the transition from Steve Jobs or Microsoft.

I mean, there there are certain institutions that have been able to keep their culture Mhmm. And transfer it down to the, quote, next generation. But it'd be naive to say it's a simple thing to do For sure. As there is a real difference between states people and politicians. And in fact, there was a recent discussion on The Daily where three senators who were no longer in office were basically talking about that one of the challenges with standing up to the, quote, powers to be is that they're gonna lose the next election.

You know? And they they were talking about term limits because that you needed the economic incentives to be such that you could tell the truth. Mhmm. And so it sounds like what you've done by creating this nonprofit is you've you've set yourself up in a situation where at least financially, you can't be influenced, so to speak. But in your bylaws, in the way you recruit, in the way you deal with editors, and you build your board at the nonprofit, I mean, does it keep you up at night, or do you think you've got your institutional DNA set such that this will continue?

I mean, I keep me up at night is a bit strong because I'm very relaxed person, and I'm a pathological optimist, I always say, which means and I say pathological because I know it's not completely sane, but I think things are pretty good. These are the kinds of things that I'm always looking at and I'm always thinking about. And, you know, we've just gone through a process to hire a new CEO, and that's great. Our most recent CEO is fantastic, Mariana. She's, just time in her career, she wants to move on.

And Bernadette, I think it's gonna be great. And, you know, as a part of that process, it is something to sort of think about. It's like, you know, how do we think about the direction of the organization? What kind of vision does this person have? And, you know, it is important that the board is very clear, like, neutral point of view is not something we're gonna change to get more traffic in the short run or anything like that.

You know? Other elements like, we don't compromise with, you know, authoritarian governments, in order to gain access to markets. So we've never given into any government pressure anywhere in the world and never will as far as I'm concerned. But we have to talk about those things. We have to keep those active values so that everybody who's coming on board understands, like, this is where we are.

This is these are the things we are and we are not going to do. You know, if somebody said, wow. But, you know, this government's offering us 200,000,000 a year if only we'll come into their country and let them manage, well, yep. Nope. We're not gonna do that.

Like, that's just not who we are. Also, I mean, most of the things like that are fantasies anyway. You know, most of these things don't actually happen. But I'm really glad, you know, you can you can roll things back ten years and imagine if Elon Musk had said, yeah. Just stop fundraising.

It's fine. I'm just gonna foot the bill. You know? Whatever. It's 50,000,000 a year.

I can afford it. It would have been a real disaster to have accepted that because we would have lost our independence. And it never happened. He never offered it, but I hope we would have said no to that because it would have been very toxic in the long run. When you look at the role of AI and the way that whether it's ChatGPT or it's Grok or it's Google's new AI, There definitely is this new movement out there where more and more of us are gonna get our news from these AI platforms.

I mean, where you you say to Chet g p t, hey. What do you think about this? And if you don't really understand Sam Altman and the and and his perspective, right, you wouldn't understand whatever subjective bias was built in. Same same thing with Grok, which is Elon Musk's bias. Sure.

I actually have fun Mhmm. Asking different questions to different platforms to see the perspective. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. In your world where you are trying to obviously position this so that going forward, Wikipedia can continue to be such a reliable source and trusted source for information, When you're seeing these platforms gaining more and more strength and more and more resources, how does that at all fit into what you're trying to do? Yeah. I mean, you know, at least so far, large language models are not good enough to really write an encyclopedia article about most things. Some things they can passable first try.

You know? But the problem of hallucinations is still quite severe, and it's more severe the more obscure the the thing you're looking at. That's where they really start to fall apart. You know, you ask about something, and it doesn't quite know, so it just starts making stuff up and plausible stuff. It's really problematic.

One of the things that large language models will continue to lack is transparency because partly the technology is quite hard to be transparent about. You know, when we've got, you know, this probabilistic matrix, which is guessing the next token and using various algorithms, it's really hard to predict. It is really hard to understand. But, also, the way the companies train is not generally easy to explain. Even if they try to be super transparent, you know, we're seeing quite a lot of open source models coming out of China, and they're far more transparent than, you know, the big proprietary US players.

But even if they're far more transparent, you like, there's only so much you can know. Like, what did you train on? What did well, you know, how did you do it and all of that. And it's it's quite hard to to be certain. Notoriously, a lot of the Chinese models are quite funny about certain Chinese things.

They just refuse to talk about them. You know, ChatGPT refuses to talk about all kinds of things. It depends on what you're trying to do. I asked I actually had a really interesting conversation with ChatGPT the other day about there's some open source software. So it's freely licensed.

It's under the GPL if you're a a geek like me and stuff like that matters to you. But the software has a a paywall, and you have to pay to use it. Well, I mean, okay. That's fine. Like, it's a weird thing to do.

That's not normally the case. I prefer if they did it a different way, but whatever. I thought, well, maybe I'll just compile the software and take that out. So I asked Checkatrade to help me, and it absolutely went insane. It was like, oh, no.

I can't help with circumvention. I'm like, it's not circumvention. It's open source software. Like and he said, yeah. Of course.

You're fully allowed to. Like, there's nothing wrong with taking out the code, change it, modify it, use it as you wish, but I'm not gonna help you with that part. I'm like, okay. You're really weird, and that's kind of weird. I probably could've argued with it for a while and gotten my way, but I just think that sort of thing is interesting.

And I I you know, I think it is a great exercise to go around and ask to different models different things. Partly because that lack of transparency, you know, you might you might get some indicators of bias or so forth. I suspect pretty strongly, it's not necessarily Sam Altman's worldview or bias or even Elon Musk's, although he probably has his thumb on the scales a bit more, simply because it's such a huge thing. Like, you you feed trillions of documents to, an AI, and you tune some parameters, but it's pretty uncontrollable in in a certain sense. So it's interesting.

It is. And in listing some of your discussions in the past, I've heard you talking about, I think, you know, recipes and different things you can play around with. And, again, trying to prophesize a little, I I do think the hallucination problem is likely to get improved. Whether or not we get to general intelligence, I'm skeptical that we ever will, but that's my bias. But one thing I would say is that if you're using it to get your news, the way they are set up, again, if you look at Sam Altman in his interview with Tucker Carlson, I mean, he is going to try to present his, quote, unbiased view, but that's gonna cover both sides and basically let majority rule win.

Meaning meaning, assisted suicide is not legal here, so we're gonna, you know, play it down. But if all of a sudden it becomes legal in The United States, it's it's gonna change. Well, in a world of a billion, right, and depending on how you handle that, I mean, is there any thought, like, for instance, I mean, this this is a little from from right field, but, like, is there any thought that Wikipedia having its own AI? Meaning, if I wanna find out facts, like, I wanna know what what's the best cities in the world to live in based on cost of living and this? Well, again, some people may push you towards a red state, some might push you towards a blue state, some might push you towards America, some might push you towards Canada or China.

How does Wikipedia in the world of where we're gonna be fighting over the next twenty years for unbiased news, and we're asking and we wanna do it from our iPhones, so to speak, and we wanna do it as simply as possible. Is is there a universe in Wikipedia how Wikipedia plays into that? I mean, yes and no. So I I mean, there's a few different things that you touched on there. So one thing I just wanna mention is kind of an aside.

It just came into my head. It's like, one of the things I am pretty enthusiastic about is the business model for AI being a subscription based model, I think, is healthier than an advertising based model simply because, you know, I use AI quite a lot for recommendations, and it's actually really important that those recommendations be unbiased. And I think most people get that immediately. And, you know, that's not even about political bias. It's just about if I ask for the you know, what are some things to do with my kids in New York City?

I kinda want it to be reading Reddit and seeing what people said and sort of saying, oh, lots of people enjoyed this, and some people didn't like that and so on. Not, well, these are the top five sponsored results. You know? I just don't think that's what I want from an AI. Right.

And it'll be hard to be transparent. So that that's a that's a little aside. In terms of Wikipedia and AI, like, I do think, you know, one of the things that I find very interesting, and we have a machine learning team and we're Right. Working on all this kind of thing, is is the question of, learning team and we're Right. Working on all this kind of thing is is a question of, you know, is there a like, to interact with the knowledge base of Wikipedia right now, if you go and use our search engine on the on the website, it's just keyword based.

It's very basic. You know, you you if you ask, I don't know, how old is Tom Cruise? Well, our search engine doesn't know, but it can find Tom Cruise, so it's gonna be the article. And it's not difficult to think about using some of this technology to say, okay. Now you can understand a question someone asks, and you can give them the relevant Wikipedia articles.

But you can also find the section that's relevant and quote that to them. So the idea here would be to say, don't let it answer any questions on its own because that's gonna you're gonna end up in hallucination land. Right? But if it's only allowed to respond by saying, here's some stuff I found in Wikipedia that seems like is relevant to you, I bet it's pretty good. I bet it's a lot better than simple keyword based search.

And I think that kind of thing is really interesting sort of to say, you know, here's some, you know, ways that you might interact with the content that are new and make use of this technology. The other thing I'm interested in is, can a large language model help us by I wrote a little script, and it's it's very basic, and it's just me. Like, I I just did this on my own, that you give it a short Wikipedia entry that has maybe five sources, and it reads the entry and it reads the five sources. And then I ask it, is there anything in the sources that should be in Wikipedia but isn't? Or is there anything in the Wikipedia entry that's not supported by the sources?

So those two questions, it's pretty okay at answering. It it it does come up with things. Now in my very rough first stab, it also it got it wrong quite a lot, and it was kinda weird. And it you know? But I thought, actually, with some little prompt engineering, you know, if I actually worked at it and sort of told it, like, only give me good quality, you know, things.

Only quote direct quotes from the articles. Don't just give me some ideas that you think you thought of when you were reading. Mhmm. And I think you would make it a tool that the community might find useful. So you would still want that human oversight at the end.

But if you could do that, then and so a lot of people come to Wikipedia and they're like, oh, I I wanna help. Like, what can I do? Give me an idea. And if a bot were saying like, oh, actually, three of these five sources mentioned that this person was born in Mississippi, but the article doesn't mention it. Here's the quotes from the three.

Do you think you would wanna add that? Then people might go, yeah. Actually, I can add that. That sounds useful. And I go and I check and and all that.

So I think that we will use AI in some sparing ways to support the community, to try to come up with, you know, ways to make Wikipedia better. And that makes sense. I I'm just, again, trying to think about where the world is going and where we get our information. Because I do use AI a lot, and I I play with it. I test it.

I see if it tells me what it wants what I wanna hear, which it candidly often does. I'm not trusting of it. Meaning, I'm I'm using it as a way as as a tool, but I verify. So it's like as a lawyer, if you have a young lawyer do work, you check their research. And so I I do go back and check it.

But if you take an issue like a a fact, you know, how how many Americans are there or how many people in the world are. It's going to go out, and it's gonna find that fact somewhere, and it's gonna tell you, right, what it believes to be the truth. Now, presumably, right, if I'm a Wikipedia fan and I have confidence in Wikipedia and I say, look, you know, tell tell me picking a very emotional subject that I know you've talked about. Tell me whether or not what's going on in the Gaza Strip is genocide or not. Okay.

Well, I'm gonna if I ask Al Jazeera, I'm gonna get an answer. If I ask Fox News, I'm gonna get an answer. And if I ask Wikipedia, I'm gonna get an answer where I know you have struggled with it. You've gone back and forth. But if I'm just the average Joe consumer, right, and I'm using Google or I'm using perplexity or AI, How do we, as the consumer, ever understand the basis in which and and where these facts are coming from?

Yeah. I mean, I I think one of the keys, and this is a really simple answer to a very deep philosophical question, so I apologize. One of the keys is attribution. You know? And and the AI is currently aren't that good at attribution.

I think Google does a pretty good job. But, you know, just the simple act of of putting a link there to see where you got it from. And so I know, like, if you say well, I mean, to me, a a great answer, you know, would be, well, the BBC said this, but Al Jazeera had a very different take, which was that. Okay. That's actually useful.

Right? Mhmm. You know, I think that that helps a lot in many cases, and I think they do need to get better at, you know, citing their sources. That's a very Wikipedia thing to say. You know?

Like, where's your source? Like, that's actually important. And then, you know, I I think there are a lot of other very complicated deeper problems in our information ecosystem. So the demise, and I don't think demise is too strong a word, the demise of local journalism Right. And small towns is really serious.

And it often means there is no source. Like, nobody's actually doing the original research, and nobody's actually doing the first draft of history that is journalism. And I think we're gonna that's gonna come back to bite us over a long period of time. And one of the side effects of that is, I think, that the news becomes impersonal. It's it's about famous people in a faraway place.

It's not about things I can see and touch, politicians I could go and meet. It's about whatever. It's like it's about the president and congressman, and it's not about my local city. It's not about that road they're thinking of building. And I have a view on that, and I actually understand the local geography.

It just that's not even covered anymore. And suddenly, the road's being built, and nobody asked me, and I didn't even know what was gonna happen. You know? So that's the kind of stuff that I think is really a crisis. And, sadly, it's the piece of this I don't have an answer for.

I wish I knew how to fund local journalism, but, it's quite hard. As you were explaining that, I I I understand the crisis. I as you would say, I I certainly don't have a solution for it, but I understand the importance of it. When you look at the voice and the role that Wikipedia plays and that you're playing in this dialogue and you look at the world community, is there any organization or group of people that share your passion and concerns and that are a place where you guys work together almost like you don't have an antitrust issue. Right?

With with businesses, you're not allowed to get together and price fix. But in the in the area of truth Mhmm. And and what's to be a statesperson, there are people that I think believe strongly in what you're doing. And is there any thought to or any benefit from trying to institutionalize the the the discussion, so to speak, so that there are a lot of people having this discussion in an organized fashion? Yeah.

I mean, I I think that's a great idea. I don't know of anything quite like that. I mean, certainly, if I were to point to people who matter, who do agree on a lot of these issues, there are a lot of journalists, good old fashioned journalists who actually are not happy about the state of the media, who do think that the loss of trust is goes hand in hand with the increase in partisanship. And in the book, we I interviewed Christiane Amanpour, who's one of these great journalists who is widely respected on all sides because she calls it straight. And as she says, if we don't have a core of facts that we agree on and, yeah, you can do with those facts what you will, but we agreed on the facts.

And now how wait. How are you gonna value that and what policies you're gonna do? That's that's the open question. But if you don't have a basis of facts, then you're lost. You're completely lost.

And then you you know, I another interview was with Tom Friedman who, as he says, I'm a I'm a New York Democrat, and that's who I am. But I try to call balls and strikes. And, you know, sometimes people aren't happy with him because he's not he is not widely viewed as, oh, he's just a left wing show. He'll say whatever the current president is, he'll agree with them. If they're a Democrat, they'll disagree with the world.

No. He sometimes agrees with the Republicans. He sometimes disagree with the Democrats. He calls them like he sees them, and that builds his trust. Like, people are like, okay.

I don't always agree with Tom Friedman, but he's a straight shooter. Like, he he's gonna tell me what he really thinks. And I think those people who value, you know, those kinds of things, I think, are part of the solution here. You know, really saying, what do we do to rebuild trust in journalism? And I think that's that's really important.

Yeah. And and I have my own short list of people that I would throw into that Thomas Friedman bucket, and I even hesitate to throw them out because we're living in such a polarized world right now Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That people would say, oh, well, that person's biased.

That person's biased. But I I do one of the things I've been secretly trying to do is I interview people, you know, and and and I am the gatekeeper. Like, I I I don't I don't put people on and showcase them if I if I have a really strong bias against what they're saying unless I'm gonna say I have a strong bias against what they're saying. And so I've been doing kind of my own research to find who are those gatekeepers out there and adults in the room. And and, again, one of the reasons I think I was drawn to you was because I I saw you struggling with these incredibly complex issues that there are no easy answers to and whether or not it's Frank Bruni or David French or Barry Weiss.

And I just broke my rule there. I mentioned people that I I know. Those are great. But but in the week, for instance, I'm an avid reader of the week. It's trying to to do that as well.

Uh-huh. There are people out there really trying to do it, and it seems to me that whether or not there's a a a, good housekeeping seal of approval or other way to be the referee, one one of the things I think it that is is lacking right now is anywhere you can go and have somebody say, look. You know? Yes. MSNBC is biased.

Yes. Fox is biased. Yes. This is biased. But but, you know, Wikipedia is really trying to do the right thing here.

Right? Yeah. Exactly. You know, and the free press is trying to do the right thing here. David French is trying and to the extent you point that out to people, it gives them some place to go to know that at least the people that are putting out that news are struggling with it as opposed to purposely trying to make you angry and afraid.

Yeah. No. That's exactly right. Well, one thing I will say, because you've named a lot of quality people and quality things, is my belief is that to the extent we can bring ourselves away from the addictive nature of social media, we'll realize there's actually quite a lot of good stuff going on out there. I mean, I was on Twitter because I heard Rob Reiner died, and I clicked to look and, oh my god.

It was ridiculous. Like, the whole thing is toxic and not grounded in fact and and so on. And I'm just like, you know what? I would have been better off to have not gone on Twitter to look at this because I didn't find out anything new that was true. I found a few new things that were turned out to be absolutely not true.

You know? And, you know, I just feel like, actually, let's just go back to reading quality journalism. It actually matters. Yeah. Jimmy, this was really, really fantastic.

Thanks, Jimmy. Yeah. Great. Lovely. Bye bye.

The POC venture capital beyond is produced by CMVG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Feel free to leave a review while you are there and maybe even a five star rating. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with a new episode.