Jimmy Wales: What Happens When Nobody Trusts Anybody?

27:55Jimmy Wales:I was like, oh, it can be a call. It's fine. Like, whatever. That doesn't bother me at all that some people are billionaires. Like, that's fine. But then you look at the actual numbers, and you're like, wow. You know, that's actually quite something. And it's been, you know, like when we look now, wow, I just saw a number, Elon Musk is like up over 600 billion or something. And that's pretty mind-blowing because just a few years ago, you know, 60 billion, you'd be the richest person in the world. And it's like, oh, wow. That's 10x in sort of, yeah, 15 years. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that's interesting, to say the least.

28:31Jimmy Wales:And, you know, I think it will have some impact. What to do about it or how we got there, what are the problems? there's loads to debate, loads to chew on there. Because I'm definitely a person who, I'm sort of broadly pro-capitalism and all of those things. And yet I think, hmm, actually one of the problems that you get into, if you think of yourself as broadly like I'm in favor of free markets is when you start to get wealth inequalities that are so high that governments become corrupted by it. Yeah. And so now the uber-wealthy are no longer uber-wealthy because they made a great invention and made everybody better off because this amazing thing exists and we're all happy to pay for it.

29:23Jimmy Wales:Great. We're also maybe because they're squeezing out competitors with unfair laws and things like this. I mean, you see things. Regulatory capture. regulatory capture all of that and so there you say hmm actually you know this isn't great um and so i guess sort of part of extension of that you've been involved with the internet and i know you wouldn't think of wikipedia as a social media company but was definitely there at the kind of vanguard of it at the early days what are the mistakes that we might be in danger of repeating as we enter the AI era? Oh, that's very interesting. Well, I mean, I think some of the mistakes that are unfolding right now are being made by politicians.

30:13Jimmy Wales:And so it's too early for them to make it with AI, although it seems like they will eventually. But we're seeing really misguided regulation that is very unlikely to actually work and is going to cause a lot of damage to freedom of expression and human rights and so forth. And what sort of triggered this in me just now is, correct, Wikipedia is not social media, but it is social and it is media. So if you think about writing some regulation because you're mad at Facebook for whatever reason that harms Facebook, because you can harm Facebook, of course, whether that's good or bad, that's a value judgment people are going to make.

31:02Jimmy Wales:But to do that without also harming Wikipedia is beyond the capacity of most legislators to really think through a coherent way. So like here in the UK with the Online Safety Act, we're under threat of being categorized in such a way that we are going to have to identify everyone who edits Wikipedia, which we're absolutely not going to do. And so it's like, really? Like, is that? And it was really annoying sort of as this going through Parliament to see, you know, we mainly we were focused because it was too late by the time we got aware that this was bad. Because we were so tiny, we don't have the capacity to do it.

31:45Jimmy Wales:So, you know, we're watching. I was personally watching the debate in the House of Lords and just seeing Lord after Lord after Lord get up and say, well, of course, nobody wants to hurt Wikipedia. Nobody wants to hurt Wikipedia. Oh, we should do something. but no amendments passed. Nothing even got to the floor really and it passed. So it's like, oh, okay. And then there's this sort of in this legislation, there's like, don't worry. We've instructed Ofcom to be reasonable. It's not really how you do human rights. It's like, yes, of course, they could easily violate your rights and be perfectly within the law to do it.

32:18Jimmy Wales:But yeah, hopefully they won't. No, we need better protection than that. So what I see is this classic issue of here's a problem, we have to do something, this is something, let's do this. Let's do that. And so that doesn't work. And so that's a real problem. And it's what we're seeing in the UK and seeing other places around the world is starting with a simple idea of like, oh, the age restrictions on watching porn suddenly become age restrictions on using a VPN. and it's like it creeps because the original approach is completely misguided from the beginning and it's not really what we should have done to start with.

33:02Jimmy Wales:So here we are. So if we move then on to AI, I can easily see the same thing happening. What is that going to look like? It's hard to say. Yeah. What do you think politicians are perhaps understanding about AI and perhaps the mindset of these people? I don't know. It's really, I think because it's all emerged so quickly and emerging so quickly that I think there's so much diversity of opinion. There's also AI, you know, it's convenient label, but there's so many things underneath what you might mean by that that are very, very different. And so I think I haven't seen anybody say, oh, it's completely terrible that Google has sequenced every protein, alpha fold, and given it away as a gift to biology and as revolutionizing.

34:01Jimmy Wales:Like, everybody's like, yeah, that one sounds pretty good. Let's move on to what can we complain about, you know? And so a lot of that kind of thing. Also, similarly, like, you know, autonomous vehicles, driverless cars. I think most people are like, yeah, that sounds pretty cool. That would be a great thing if we can reduce the number of traffic deaths substantially. And there's quibbles around the edges and what does it all mean for this, that, and the other, of course. And both of those are all about AI, really. And then we've got the large language models, right? And then you've got all kinds of questions there about copyright.

34:37Jimmy Wales:And there, one of the examples that I would say where I do see some rumblings about what might happen. So there's the idea that the AI companies are stealing all the content and training and then not giving back to creators and so on. I have some sympathy for that. Just sympathy, not actual policy agreement. But the danger there that, again, it sort of falls into this category of like, you've got to be really smart and really careful about how you do these things. Because, you know, a lot of the scientific publishers, for example, would love to say you cannot use the facts from our science articles without paying us a fee.

35:23Jimmy Wales:because clearly you've just used it from there, which then could easily get caught up with, gee, Wikipedia, we see that you've published some information about this scientific research we published last year. Where's our payola? And it's like, hold on, that's not how copyright has ever worked. It's not how it should work. Free flow of ideas and so on. And even if we go back to culture, right, there's a lot of legal precedent, mostly pretty good, I guess. I'm not an expert in this area, about sampling music, reusing samples, a song that sounds similar to another song, but it's not the same song and all that.

36:03Jimmy Wales:And I don't know if I really dug in, would I agree with all of it? But broadly, it seems like that's a pretty established area and managed to find some balance between saying, you don't want to say, gee, that song sounds a little bit like the Beatles. Where's the money that you're paying the Beatles? because you took their ideas. It's like, no, I took their ideas because they're part of culture and I didn't steal their song, right? So that's a different question. And so those are the kinds of things that I can see are gonna be massively grappled with in the coming years. And, you know, right now in this country, right?

36:38Jimmy Wales:Obviously we've got Elton John and Paul McCartney who are quite anti-AI on this front. I mean, you can't say anything bad about either of those guys. They're actual legends. Well, apparently in your book, Elton John's one of the most disputed pages on Wikipedia. Yes, yes. Why is that? I think on every topic, there's just loads of passion. And, you know, it's sort of, you know, one of the things I talk about is how when people think about Wikipedia and they're like, oh, what about the debates and all of that? Their mind is immediately drawn to the political hot button issues of our time. And, yeah, of course, we do grapple with that.

37:17Jimmy Wales:But the vast majority of work in Wikipedia is on things that you're like, well, how controversial could that be?

37:28Jimmy Wales:And that's true. I mean, a lot of people are just working on the history of Poland in the 1800s or whatever. And you're like, oh, that's probably not too controversial. Well, until you dig in. And you realize there is something you can fight about about almost everything. I remember once I was at a conference at Cornell University, and there was a presentation about a bird that is possibly extinct. Actually, I should look it up and see what the current state of play is, because this is probably 15 years ago. That these scientists, I think from Cornell, had recorded the call of the bird and basically established that it is not extinct after all.

38:07Jimmy Wales:So this has got a lot of press coverage and a lot of excitement. So I went, and I was like, oh, this is in Wikipedia, so I think I'll add this. And I did and sort of put some sources. And then it emerged. I was like, ooh, actually, this is massively controversial within the bird science community because they didn't actually have a sighting. They didn't get a picture. They just recorded a call, which could be disputable as to whether it was a different bird or whatever. I was like, oh, wow, I guess anything can be controversial. And then ensuing 20-page discussion of how exactly do we present this.

38:41Jimmy Wales:because in Wikipedia it really should always be about that it's like okay we're not going to take sides on the dispute but how do we present it to make sure that we're being fair and not there is a dispute all of that all of that gets it gets into the weeds pretty quickly what was do you still edit Wikipedia what was the last thing you did I recently got involved in a discussion about a Bollywood movie that in Wikipedia it was said in the first sentence that it's blah, blah, blah, a propaganda film. And I'm like, oh, the word propaganda is pretty aggressive. And it is true that some media have said it's propaganda film, others have not.

39:26Jimmy Wales:But it didn't feel to me like it's a settled judgment sufficient that Wikipedia should say it in our own voice. So I just sort of waited on that discussion. and there was a, anyway, it's been removed now. I don't always win these battles, but that's the kind of thing that I'm taking a real interest in. What was the, oh, the other thing was fun. This one was really, really fun. So I was on Reddit and I saw this sort of, what did it, TIL, Today I Learned. And it basically said that such and such a person was a survivor of the Titanic. who then appeared as an extra in the movie about the Titanic because he wanted to go down with the ship a second time.

40:16Jimmy Wales:And I had a footnote, or no, this was on Reddit, and basically in the discussion, somebody linked to the Wikipedia page, and I'm like, oh, okay, so I'm going to go, like, that's interesting, I'm going to go read, it's just a human interest story. And I go to read it in Wikipedia, and sure enough, it says it in Wikipedia, but there's no source. I'm like, hold on. It's a very cute story, but how do we know that's true? Where's the source? So I started digging to the point that I actually, I ordered a book and read it. And I did, you know, I did all my homework. And I'm like, what I found was a source.

40:50Jimmy Wales:And I was like, oh, great, fine. I found the source. It was a newspaper article in the UK. But then I looked at it closely. And it's like, it's an excerpt from a fictional book that is written as if real. And it was an essay. And basically, it was fiction. And so somebody misread that source at some point and thought that that's where the story comes from. And then somebody said, oh, but hold on. This message board from about 15 years ago, somebody says it's in the biography of the producer of the movie. And I was like, okay, maybe that's the source. So I bought the book. I hunted in the book.

41:27Jimmy Wales:It's not there. So it's been taken out of Wikipedia. But that, I mean, it's so obscure, right? Yeah. But that's the kind of thing that it's, that's the spirit of what drives a lot of Wikipedians. it's like oh this might not be right yeah and i'm not going to be able to stop until i get to i need to know is this correct or is it not correct and in this case i'm fairly confident not correct the guy was a consultant on the movie and i think he may have been an extra but he didn't nobody ever said he did it because he wanted to go down a second time with it so so there we are how interesting and do you think as a sort of skilled job of the future studying history will become more important than for that ability to check sources so i mean it's a really good question i mean sort of as we all know studying history as a direct career path is not a very good one right because there are very few jobs as professional historians and they don't pay well.

42:30Jimmy Wales:But studying history to become an analytical, well-rounded person, and a lot of people with histories do end up with fantastic careers and would credit it to their study of history, even though it's not a skill-based degree in the sense of, I mean, there's skills. I'm not saying there's no skills in history. I'm saying It's not like I learned to code. Yes, not technically. Yeah, it's not that sort of thing. And so will it become – I think it will become very important. I think it is already very important and certainly for a well-rounded life and also to understand the world. And I do think loads of times – actually, I just was this morning thinking about – I thought, well, I'll use AI.

43:21Jimmy Wales:That's probably how I'll do this. actually I would like to have a reading list of just two or three books maybe a few academic papers I would like to know more about the Luddite movement and not just at the level of reading the Wikipedia entry I would like to read and see what my hypothesis is true which is that a lot of the noise about jobs and AI will be exact parallels and replicas of the arguments about machinery and jobs in the Industrial Revolution. And I bet there were forecasts back then that were laughably wrong today, that we're going to have mass unemployment and starvation because the machines are going to put everybody out of work and so on and so forth.

44:09Jimmy Wales:And we obviously see a lot of that. Now, to be fair, obviously AI is substantially different from a loom. you know. But I just thought, oh, actually, what do I know about that period of history and what life seemed like to people who were like, oh, actually, we've got X number of weavers in the world. Clearly, we're not going to need all of those in the future. And technology has had massive disruption. And that's not to say that I believe, oh, it's all silly, don't worry about it, Because I do think worry about job disruption is definitely going to be fast and huge. But does that mean we're all going to be, you know, starving to death and poor and only the billionaires will have robots serving them?

44:54Jimmy Wales:I doubt that. That's silly. On the other hand, does it mean that, like my favorite example of this is always, like in the U.S. alone, there are about 2 million long-haul truck drivers. and in the US, the long haul truck drivers are driving on the interstate highway system which is big wide roads and quite easy and if you think, oh, what could automated driving take over first it's pretty straightforward like just to say, okay, you need to truck, I need you to go from New York to LA, straight across the country on the highways and maybe you need a human to come and do the last mile or whatever and so if you say okay, those jobs seem very much likely to disappear within, I don't know how long, 10 years.

45:39Jimmy Wales:And that's 2 million people. It's 2 million people who are unionized, largely, in unions that do have a history of violence. They are people who are not necessarily being, have other skills, like they've trained to do this job. But you can't tell them all to become coders. That's just not a serious answer. It's It's like, well, what are those people going to do? How are they going to react first when they all start losing their jobs? The answer can't be ban driverless trucks because it's obviously so much better if human beings don't have to do this sort of thing. But that transition period, and this is an area where I would say that governments are a little bit asleep at the wheel to really say, okay, we should be thinking about retraining because even just from a law and order safety point of view, two million men suddenly out of jobs who are possibly going to start burning things, you need to really think about that and get ahead of it because they're going to need to be doing something that's meaningful to their lives.

46:53Jimmy Wales:It should be a step up for them, not a step down. And I just don't, I don't think we're really there yet. We're not preparing. And we've actually got the data to prove that. We did some exclusive Jimmy's Jobs of the Future polling with Salesforce and FocalData on exactly this issue. And we found that 61 % of workers have had zero AI training from their employer. Yet over half the population think AI will take jobs away. It is the biggest technological change of our professional lives and we risk being woefully underprepared. The full report is available at jobsofthefuture.co. Link is in the comments in the description below.

47:37And check out our episode with the Salesforce UK and Ireland CEO Zara from a few weeks ago. Right, back to Jimmy Wales.

47:47Jimmy Wales:And ironically, like it's, that's talking about driverless vehicles, right? The other thing is, if you look at what is AI actually really good at, I think the junior lawyers are very likely to be out of a job. I don't know how many junior lawyers there are in the US, but let's say there's 2 million. And if you think 2 million unemployed truck drivers are dangerous, how about 2 million unemployed lawyers? They're going to be suing the hell out of everybody. It's a joke, of course. But it's like the disruption that's coming from this technology, one of the differences between this and the past is technology has traditionally much more disrupted or impacted the lives of workers, people doing physical work, because suddenly the machine can help you be much more productive.

48:37Jimmy Wales:And that's had enormous positive benefits on the world. The amount of wealth that we create with the same number of people working is amazing. And obviously, job disruption and all that, but we're not in a world where everybody is suddenly poor. We're actually much, much richer than we were in Victorian times, and that's a fantastic story of progress. But we've not really had a situation that I'm aware of. I mean, I'd love if anybody thinks I'm wrong. I would love to chew on alternative. Where the middle class, where the college-educated middle class suddenly finds that a lot of the things they've been doing are not necessary to be done by humans anymore.

49:17Jimmy Wales:that's interesting right that's a different category and you know will we say you know it's like again like it's not that easy to just say oh retrain so you just as you can't say to the truck drivers go be a coder you can't say to the junior lawyers have you thought about being an electrician or a plumber like because those jobs aren't going away anytime soon oh well no and I I have no interest in doing that. So I don't know. I think we are going to see quite a lot of noise and disruption. Do you think civil unrest is a serious possibility? I do, but civil unrest is already with us from time to time.

50:01Jimmy Wales:Not that badly, but we have seen things, movements. There's protests and things. Yeah, protests and things. And some of them you might agree with, some of them you might not, and all of that. And, you know, these are things, I mean, certainly, you know, we haven't seen, you know, but I mean, I just saw somebody threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house. That's pretty bad. That's, I just saw someone's been arrested, so I don't know the story yet. But, you know, probably a lone nutcase. America's got plenty of those, you know. But is it foreboding? Is there going to be, you know, sort of mass issues around this kind of thing?

50:42Yeah, I don't know. But there was an extraordinary stat at the end of your book about sort of 40 % of, I think it was 18 to 24-year-olds, had sympathy with the United Healthcare murder.

50:56Jimmy Wales:Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's – it's astonishing, right? And one of the issues that comes with this decline of trust in society is, it's like, okay, if you and I are having a disagreement, but I trust that you're basically a decent person and it's a policy disagreement, and I know you're not going to do anything crazy and so on. That's one thing. But if I actually think you're completely toxic and I don't trust you at all, it starts to look like violence is the only answer. If reasoned discourse is not the answer, there's not much else you could do. And that kind of thing, that sympathy there is very, very troubling.

51:43Jimmy Wales:Even if you say, as I might, I don't know much about this particular guy in this particular case, it's like, health insurance is fucked up in America, some of these companies are really bad, and the way they treat people, and the whole system has got systemic problems. Yeah, okay, I agree with all that. that doesn't mean you shoot the guy you know and that's not the answer and and having sympathy for that is troubling because what else will you have sympathy with um and that gets to be you know kind of a big big big deal yeah and and it's also i'm just surprised by some of this that it's the younger generations that are becoming more extreme with that like yeah yeah yeah i mean you know Oh, it's interesting.

52:25Jimmy Wales:I had a debate with my brother a few years ago, and I will claim that I was right at the time, but history kept moving in his direction, and I think I might revisit it and say, now you're right. And it was about the affordability of housing, and we were discussing it in the U.S. context. I've lived here for a long time, but he was talking about in the U.S., so we were discussing. And I was like, okay, but look, the average size of a house, when people are comparing housing affordability in the 50s, 1950s to 50 years later, or 60 years later, whatever it might have been, the average size of a house and the square footage per person was dramatically lower.

53:08Jimmy Wales:People live in much bigger houses, much higher quality houses as well, even though you might moan about new build construction, they're actually quite good and so on and so forth. I was like, actually, this isn't real. And there is a problem, like the houses that are being built, there's a lot of houses being built that are sort of McMansions and sort of going, again, that income distribution. And yeah, for young people on the ladder, it's tough to get started and all of that. By the time I was like, I don't see this as a legit problem. And then actually housing affordability got much, much worse.

53:45Jimmy Wales:And so the idea that for a lot of young people in their 20s, starting out at work, even with good jobs, even if you're doing well, depending on where you live, it's pretty unthinkable. Like, I live here in London. I think it's pretty unthinkable for a young person. You know, if you're working in London on, well, I just know, like, starting salary for journalists a few years back was, like, median of, like,$23 ,000,$24 ,000. Yeah, yeah, you're never going to buy a house. Like, that's hard to conceive of anywhere in London except maybe the far, far outskirts, but even there. And so that idea that housing and affordability is going to cause young people to be pretty radicalized about a lot of things.

54:35Jimmy Wales:Yeah, for sure. Like that's a problem. And, you know, what's the answer? I don't have a magic solution or I run for prime minister. No, but I think as well in terms of definitely a generation that were told to go to university. That was the established thing. they loaded up quite a lot of debt not as much as having the states um and then they can't find good paying jobs etc then yeah that's going to be a um that's going to be a huge problem i think um and you can see why they'd be um they'd be angry um yeah what what would your advice be to you know if a young jimmy wales was you know in his 20s in the 2020s where do you think you'd be looking to build your career yeah it's a good question because i think it's it's very personal to the person uh so it's kind of hard to say um if it were me i think i would be doing pretty much what i'm doing anyway but right now which is i'm playing with ai and i'm i've just uh i've got a couple of open claw instances about autonomous agentic ai and i'm not a great programmer i'm quite a bad programmer, but I am tech savvy, you know, and because I see at this moment in time,

56:01Jimmy Wales:like, there's about to be massive changes and massive disruption in the economy, as we've been talking about, and huge opportunities to do super interesting, cool things that are going to be amazing for us all. And so I would find that is very interesting, but I'm a tech geek, and I, That's what I would enjoy doing. I do it now for fun, right? Not everybody's like me. Not everybody's like that. And so I do think sort of broader advice that applies to pretty much everybody is about

56:37Jimmy Wales:learning to be good at resilience, problem solving, those kinds of skills, which are They're not soft skills, but they're not clearly defined like learn to code, right? I definitely think anybody who is learning to code today, great. I'm not in the camp that says, oh, coding is dead because machines can do it. I actually think it's really you learn to code not because you're going to write a million lines of code in your career, but because you're going to be able to manage bots and create stuff. And just the idea that some fluffy-minded person with a, you know, there's this stereotype of like the wannabe entrepreneur who's got a million ideas and just needs a technical co-founder.

57:25Jimmy Wales:Meaning somebody's going to actually do all the work, right? And their job is to go out and floof around talking about changing the world or whatever. It's like, no, actually somebody's got to do the hard yards, you know. But I would say that. But broadly, that's not for everybody. So broadly, I would say be aware that a lot of things are about to change in the next 20 years. And that whatever you start out doing in your career is probably not where you're going to end up. And so the kind of skills, so things like trust building, things like being adaptable and independent in your thinking, and all of those things are just, they're always going to be valuable.

58:08Yeah, coalition building, I think, will be a big one and getting things, how to get things done in government as well because that often requires coalition building will be big sort of jobs and skills of the future. So what projects are you kind of working, like what, how has your OpenClaw experience been this far?

58:26Jimmy Wales:It's been great. It's been fun. I'm playing with a couple of things. I'll just tell about the more fun one. So I live in a Victorian house that, through my own research as a nerd, digging in newspaper archives, was owned by Hugo Pearson, who was an admiral in the Royal Navy. He was an admiral after he owned the house. He was a captain when he owned the house. Okay. and ended up being an admiral he was the admiral of the australian navy um for queen victoria so cool stuff right yeah yeah and um there's i have a picture of him because he was on the front of a navy magazine and i'm i love i'm a geek and i love ai and i have home assistant running and all of that and i'm slowly changing all the switches and things to be a smart home so i want to replace alexa with the ghost of admiral pearson and he'll be a character and my idea for the character is um in in some limited sense his knowledge of the world is is stuck in sort of 1912 yeah and so you know if you ask him about things he'll talk about oh the newfangled this and that you know He'll know about the telephone.

59:52Jimmy Wales:He'll know about certain things. But things like if you ask him, because I have security cameras which can identify animals. So in the morning you say, oh, Admiral, how were things on the night watch? And he'll say, there were two foxes in the garden. Anyway, it's my stupid idea, but I love it. And I'm just playing with it. And I'm so far from having it built, right? But it's the kind of thing, it's like every piece of that, I do partly because I need to stay on top of tech. It's kind of like what I do, right? And there's so many different, oh, so like, oh, what should the voice be like? And how do you make a voice that sounds like a Victorian admiral, you know?

1:00:33Jimmy Wales:And so all that kind of stuff. So that's one of my fun projects. And that will be like an agent that's running 24-7 that will have a memory and so on and so forth. And, you know, I have... And it'll be through your Alexa. Pardon? It'll be through Alexa. it'll be it'll replace Alexa so I'll have microphones and speakers in the house and all that kind of stuff anyway yeah come and visit me but it might take me five years to do but yeah but I think it's important for people because the hardest thing is yeah if you are in the early stages of your career it can be a bit hard to sort of you haven't got the you haven't got the knowledge like yeah and the experience to yeah the bits of knowledge together right because it's one of the things people say is like oh well we're gonna eradicate the need for knowledge which again i'm a bit skeptical of that a bit like the coder thing because i just think we've got you you're going to need it you can't just be a sort of yeah vanilla bot and be able to do stuff like there's totally human agency still gonna require you to have some maybe lots of knowledge of of different things yeah it's kind of the future yeah and you know one of the things i i would say is like, it's like, there's, when you need knowledge in life, right, it's not as simple as, like, it's, it is true.

1:01:59Jimmy Wales:So when I was a kid, right, one of the things that we had to do, every American kid, I guess, had to do it in fourth grade, you had to learn all the states and capitals, the capital of all 50 states, right? You had to memorize it, and there was a big test where you had to write down all the states and capitals. And it was the bane of my existence, right? But we all did it. And I got it successfully. I still know most of them. And you could say back then that was already a useless thing to do. It was probably done more about training us to sit still and memorize things, right? But now it's quite clear.

1:02:37Jimmy Wales:That is a completely useless activity. If I need to know the capital of Colorado, I can find out in literally three seconds. I don't have to have that stored in my brain. Just like you don't need your friend's phone numbers in your head anymore. The technology, we don't need that. At the same time, if there's something that you're trying to do for work, again, I'll go back to tech as the example because it's what I know. But if you, you know, some new technology like, I don't know, let's say a transformer model or something like that. If you go and read a Wikipedia entry, so yeah, in one sense, that knowledge is right there at your fingerprint.

1:03:16Jimmy Wales:You just go and get it, or you can ask an AI to explain it to you. It's going to be super superficial, right? And so maybe what I'm trying to get at is that if you think of information, knowledge, and then wisdom, the wisdom piece, right, that's still super important. And it doesn't come, you can't skip over the other steps. in order to really say, like, okay, I want to, I have an idea for, I want to start a restaurant chain, right? And I'm 25 years old. Okay, there's a huge number of different elements of that that you need to learn about. And sometimes you can do it on the fly, sometimes this and that.

1:03:53Jimmy Wales:But it's not like you can just say, oh, oh, how to run a restaurant. I'll ask ChatGPT and then I'm set. You know, like, no, you need deep knowledge of a lot of things. And only then you might be successful and sort of be able to make decisions. Like, I mean, and I'm not just talking about details about the restaurant, but like, oh, how about managing people? Like, how do you, you know, all of these things are skills and knowledge that are still going to be super important. So there's no sense in my mind that knowledge won't be important in the future. I mean, I don't know what you would do if you, you know, try to get an AI to help you do everything.

1:04:30Jimmy Wales:then that's just not going to work you know so yeah yeah uh and still about you know knowing those 50 states and the capitals are meeting somebody and knowing what the capital is being able to make a conversation off the back of it as well like that kind of thing i mean for sure yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it seldom comes up when i meet people you know the capital of iowa but it could i'm waiting for it uh but no wait but your point i mean i'm making fun but the point is yes, of course. Well, if you want to think about it, it's sort of like I was saying, it's like you want to think in an analytical and proper way about what we've been discussing.

1:05:09Jimmy Wales:What are the likely outcomes in terms of social unrest, of massive job adjustments due to technology? Actually, it would be very useful to know about the Luddite movement and the history of what happened there. What about the history of unionization? What caused unions to arise what caused them to decline to some extent and so on and so forth and yeah of course it'd be very useful you could go and have a chat with an ai about it but in terms of really having that analytical understanding oftentimes having the ability to even know what you want to ask the ai yeah is is it is about knowledge so yeah what

1:05:50yeah that's um that's it what do you um what do you oh so this was one of the things at the end of the book you talked about public consultation and how we and how ai might change public policy making which i think is interesting because one of the things that i had been worried about a little bit is that we end up with and it's not ai slot but it's just like huge amounts of consultations being generated responses and so on and actually sort of just a lot of you know crap being sort of put into the system that doesn't get read but of course it can be summarized yeah as well and actually you'd be able to do this so corporates and trade bodies are very good at doing this now um but actually you would get potentially a lot of the public

1:06:37Jimmy Wales:being able to do it as well no i think it's very exciting i think it's very interesting i mean i I remember when I first came to the UK, I went in for a meeting at number 10 with Rohan Soba, who was an advisor at the time. I'm going to tell this from memory, but the government had put out something. It was the early days of the Cameron administration saying, we want to hear from people about examples of waste in government that we could solve. We want to cut expenses, but we're looking for waste. And it was very successful in one sense. They got like 30 ,000 responses. But then they're like, oh, crap.

1:07:16Jimmy Wales:We had 30 ,000 responses. Like, how do we even go through all this? And a lot of them were pretty detailed and meaningful. Some of them were just opinion pieces, which weren't actionable. And, you know, like loads of well-meaning stuff. And people, you know, poured a lot of time into it. And then it was kind of unfortunate. And like one of the problems is, how do we get through it? Now you can say, actually, it's not that hard. and it's not that hard, but I think where people think if they play with AI and think, oh, this isn't going to work, it's going to hallucinate, it's going to whatever. But I think if you really think seriously about how you might do that, it wouldn't be just like, here's 30 ,000 comments, give me a summary.

1:07:56Jimmy Wales:You might do that as a piece of the work, but you might actually go through them one by one by one and have a series of prompts to sort of think about those and sort of begin to surface themes, begin to surface specific individual things that actually could be actionable if routed to the right person those kinds of things um you know that sounds super interesting uh you know that you could actually in a much more effective way respond to citizen concerns because the ai can help you work through a big body of complaints or whatever kind of cool yeah i think the role of a backbench MP as well like a lot of it is being a router for constituents yes right like it's constituents getting in touch being like I have a problem with x y and z and then you being like this is either a local council problem or it's a problem at the whichever department they're writing a letter to the secretary of state yeah and actually you could end up almost all of that being automated which makes it very interesting about then what a what a member of parliament obviously will still take some cases and so on but it just seems yeah yeah well i mean it's certainly um if the result of that is sort of just better government services in the most basic sort of functional way that sounds fantastic you know and i think what we're what we're likely to see i was just in a conversation last night with some people about this is some aspects of the government will be much better at this than others.

1:09:27Jimmy Wales:So the person I was talking to suggested they thought HMRC is going to be pretty good at sort of improving services using AI techniques and all that. I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. They also said probably the NHS won't because the NHS has huge internal friction. You know, like the NHS is brilliant and it's terrible. All the things that we all know about the NHS. But the possibility of some parts of the government to move relatively quickly in an agile fashion to better serve the public, that sounds great. And actually, even aspects of the NHS, I think it's sort of obvious how certain elements, it's like, how much time are doctors spending on paperwork?

1:10:17Jimmy Wales:Can we get rid of most of that paperwork or parts of it? or can we make it faster for them so they can spend more time with patients, right? And that human part of healthcare. And then you think about broad data analysis kind of stuff where maybe instead of having very expensive and very hard to do sort of studies of the effectiveness of various remedies or whatever. Here's what I have in mind, like Manjaro and Ozimpic. Like we know there are massive health benefits, but it's expensive. So like how do we do that? I assume and I hope that someone in the NHS is doing a proper scientific statistical study looking at all the data.

1:11:02Jimmy Wales:But you're only going to be able to do that for something really big like that. But could you automate a system where suddenly an AI pops up and says, oh, by the way, we've been doing this. And maybe we could do it that way. And people then go, yeah, you're stupid. You're an AI. You got it wrong. Or, oh, actually, yeah, and we didn't have time to look into that, but, you know, it's right here in front of us. So I think there's huge opportunities that could be very exciting. Can I talk to you a little bit about London as well? Because you've made London your home. Yeah. And you're originally from Alabama, been lots of places in America.

1:11:35Just what your kind of take is on London at the moment. Because it's, again, in one of these worlds of where there's lots of opinion, you know, you've got some people talking London down. you've now got the London maxing kind of meme yeah what's your what's your take and why have

1:11:53Jimmy Wales:you made London your home yeah so I mean there's lots to say there I mean uh certainly uh a uh tech investor guy I've known for many many years was sort of ranting on Twitter about London being a collapsed hellhole yeah and I was like I just didn't do it publicly I just DM'd him and I'm like dude like I actually live in London it's really nice like and it's like if you look at the statistics, it's safer than where you live, by the way, but it's safer than a lot of American cities. And it's a big city. It's got some big city problems. They all do, right? It's not terrible, though. And the idea that London is collapsed and is in flames is nonsense, right?

1:12:32Jimmy Wales:It's a really nice place to live, and it's great. And so there's that aspect of things, where I'm like, yeah, there is a sort of doing London down that I don't agree with. And then, yeah, I love London. So one of the things I have said many, many times about London, so like if I lived in Silicon Valley, I would pretty much only know tech people. And, you know, the U.S., you think about, oh, like entertainment, Hollywood, that's in L.A. Tech, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, finance, accounting, New York. You've got politics in Washington. all those things are here in London. And therefore, the people I'm friends with in London is just a much more intellectually diverse group of people.

1:13:22Jimmy Wales:I know all kinds of people from different aspects of society and so on. And I just think London's the richer for that. It's also a slight problem for the UK that it's so London-centric. So that's not for me to solve. But it's because London's great and it's amazing. And so I really do love it. And I just actually just heard about this London Maxing thing. And I'm all over it because there's a fun weekend coming up pretty soon. My wife is going to Australia. She's speaking at a conference there. And I've got the kids for the weekend. And their nanny is running in the marathon. And so rather than go to the countryside, we're going to stay in town and we're going to go see her at some point.

1:14:05Jimmy Wales:We're going to figure out where we can sort of see her run by and cheer her on. but I'm like that day I'm gonna we're gonna do London maxing I don't know like I'm just take the kids and I'm like we're gonna do London we're gonna do the most Londony things we can think of I mean starting with uh you know a full English breakfast yeah whatever it might be you know I'll have the kids drinking I mean they're they're 12 and 15 I'll have them on a pint of Guinness by the evening or whatever it might be uh but no so that's the kind of thing that is also the most london thing by the way it's like the standard drink is actually some irish style i thought for a second i'm getting that wrong i'm like no i'm actually getting that right for whatever reason no uh you know we might go for a curry you know but i do think there's something uh i lovely about that i actually think um i would love to see this be a trend in a lot of cities yeah i think you know sort of new york maxing that sounds pretty cool like what could you do to say like let's be the most stereotypically New York in the coolest way possible for a whole weekend.

1:15:08Jimmy Wales:Brilliant. Yeah, let's do that. And I want to ask you, because you've got three daughters as well. So I've got three daughters. And so I was like, what your advice was on raising daughters? Yeah, well, I mean, the good news is your house is quieter and not as beaten up as if you had three boys. I'll stand by that difference. I think a lot of parents who want to be sort of modern and progressive start out thinking, oh, no, I'll just treat them completely the same. And then you've got them. You're like, oh, they're actually not the same at all. So, well, actually, I do. I think in the context of trust, actually, in the context of children and all that, it's like building trust with children and teens, especially, in both directions is hugely important.

1:15:58Jimmy Wales:and great for your calmness and peace of mind, just the ability to say, and I think you should have kind of open conversations about trust and to say, like, the job of a teenager is to rebel. Not really rebel. That's a strong word, and it's kind of just putting it a certain way. It's to push boundaries. Well, it's to grow. It's to become an adult. And, you know, you don't just sort of go from toddler to adult in one day. You know, it takes years, which means there's going to be some questions about, oh, what about this? What about that? And so on and so forth. And, you know, I think the biggest thing is to really be say, look, yeah, you've asked if you can do this.

1:16:44Jimmy Wales:I'm going to say yes. I'm going to say yes because I trust you, but I expect you to live up to that trust. And that's really important because if you do the trustworthy thing, it's going to be easier next time that you want to do something that's sort of beyond the scope. you know like can i go with my friends to westfield on our own and not have the nanny with us this was a couple years ago yeah and it's like yeah yeah but actually the first time you know what she's gonna go with you but she's promised she's gonna lurk around the corner you won't see her and then next time maybe you can go on your own and that that sort of thing and if you screw it up yeah we're gonna have to dial it back in you know and then on the other side of things like you know The thing is they need to be able to trust you.

1:17:26Jimmy Wales:If you present a world to children that is chaotic and unreliable, then that damages their sense of trust in the world. When we think about people who have, in their lives, they've had a horrible childhood, maybe, abusive or whatever. Or maybe they've come out of a horrible, abusive, romantic relationship. And then they have a really hard time trusting after that. well this happens we understand that but we also understand that as something that they need to work on and solve and like you've got to figure out and maybe some therapy or maybe you know like it's not where you want to be in life oh i can't trust anybody because my mom and dad were so unpredictable and they would whack me for no reason yeah that's sad like try and get past that because that's not a great way to live your life and so i think for kids like that safe environment where it's like, okay, there's rules, but they're not crazy rules.

1:18:23Jimmy Wales:We can discuss them. And by the way, I'm reliable. If I said I was going to do the thing, I'm going to do the thing, even though I might regret it later. And the worst, and everybody knows this, but I just think, again, it's worth just saying, it's like, well, why can't I? Because I said so, I'm your dad. This is a terrible, terrible answer. You're basically reducing trust. You're basically saying, it's arbitrary, and I can't even explain myself, and I don't have a reason. Far better if you can say, oh, okay, right, so I'm not going to let you do the thing, right? And let me tell you why. The last time you did this and that, and it was dangerous and so forth, or I think we should have a conversation about this before you do whatever.

1:19:07Jimmy Wales:Whatever it might be. There's a million different categories. For my girls with their pocket money. It was kind of fun. One daughter wasn't spending any of hers and was like filthy rich. And then she started kind of, she got in the mode. She sort of found Vinted online and she blew through all her money. And then she's kind of moaning that she's broke and I'm like, let's have a chat about that. You were the richest kid in the world. I mean, you had twice as much money as your older sister and now you're skint. So let's talk about money management and let's talk about you know as you're spending money like really think of and she does she'll come and she'll talk about like oh i really want to buy this but i also want that and i have to figure i'm like that's budgeting that's great and so that that again that trust of not saying oh well you're just a little kid i'm not gonna let you have your own money and make decisions i'll tell you what you're gonna buy that's not helping them grow and then trusting them to like screw up sometimes yeah uh yeah that's all right you know That's part of it.

1:20:09Jimmy Wales:Yeah, it's all part of it. Interesting. As a final thing, what kind of makes up Jimmy Wales' day now? And what does the sort of future look like? I mean, you're clearly very interested in politics. You reference it in the book and so on. Would that ever appeal? Has it ever appealed? Not in any material way, no. I mean, certainly, I feel like it's so toxic. politics and it's gotten worse and it's sort of toxic enough being in the public eye at all although it's really great i mean this is you know like because my wife uh she worked for tony blair for 10 years there was once there was a piece in the new york times i was just sick about it's so mean to me and it's just horrible and then tony texted her and says how does jimmy get such great press and i'm like okay actually i'm i'm i've sort of crawled up my own ass here and actually nobody's called me a war criminal so you know like actually it's gonna be okay you know um but like in politics it's just like it's so toxic and horrible but i do find it intellectually interesting so you know if i were a crossbencher in the lords i'd find that an amusing way to be when i'm 84 years old yeah yeah yeah and blair says some very nice things about your wife and his book didn't he but actually like managed the diary of a steel and there's a whole phd thesis to be written on Prime Minister's time, which I totally agree with, by the way.

1:21:39I think it would be fascinating.

1:21:40Jimmy Wales:Yeah, yeah. No, it's great. Yeah, I always, people want to know my politics and I try to be a little circumspect about it. I'm very centrist, basically. When there were a few years ago, I think it was particularly the left were sort of banging on against centrist dads and I'm like, yeah, I'm a centrist dad. I'm a dad and I'm a centrist. I actually think there's a lot of policy questions. I've got my views on them, but I also think there's reasonable alternatives and all that. But, yeah, yeah, it's sort of fun. Centrist, Adam, proud. And what do you make of the – and just what do you spend your time doing now?

1:22:19Because the Wikipedia office isn't here. Just how's your day's week structure?

1:22:22Jimmy Wales:So it's structures. I'm not good. I mean, I actually will say, as we've talked a lot about jobs of the future and young people, I'm very fortunate to have become successful because I'm a pretty bad employee at anything. So I just like to get up and do the most interesting thing I can every day. So what does that look like? It's just every day is different to some extent. So I do block out days now. But I'm in a very fortunate position. I don't actually have a job. And I make money from giving speeches, and I've got my book out and all of that. So I spend a lot of time working on promoting the book.

1:23:03Jimmy Wales:and sort of doing that. I'm traveling a lot this year for that. And, you know, there's a lot of details in the work involved in that. But then I block out days that are in my diary as creative days. And I don't have any meetings and I don't have any calls or anything. And that's when I work on Open Claw. And it's either a fun, silly project like that, but I also have other, like, vibe coding ideas and things like that that I'm working on. and I can't tell you yet, ask me in five years, was this just me? Was it consumption or production, right? Am I just enjoying it as a hobby and I do it and nothing actually business or professional comes out of it?

1:23:48Jimmy Wales:Or is it actually, wow, this is like great. And yeah, well, actually I've got somebody working with me on it, but we've made a PR bot assistant because my book has been sold in 20 languages. and it doesn't make sense to hire a PR company in every language of the world. I wouldn't make any money from the book if I did that. Yeah, yeah, quite, yeah. But I do, like, I can do press. I can talk to a journalist, but it's like, oh, somebody's got to do the outreach. I'm not letting the AI do the outreach, but a lot of the background, like, oh, like figure out for me the sort of the five publications in Greece and find the email addresses and write a pitch letter, which I will then send, you know, that kind of thing, just to save me time.

1:24:33Jimmy Wales:And it's just like, so would I be better off just paying a PR firm to do that for me? It's a toss-up maybe. But do I find it fun to do it this way when there's all this buzz about open claw and agents and all that? I'm like, oh, I should just do it that way because I need to know about that because, well, because people like you wouldn't interview me if I didn't have something interesting to say. Say something covered in one day. If you ask me about AI and you're like, you know, I've heard of that. I don't really know. Yeah, I think you really would prefer me to go like, oh, here's what I'm seeing and here's what I'm playing with because that's just more fun.

1:25:08Jimmy Wales:So is it work? Is it play? Yes. And for me, that is great advice to young people is what can you do that is work and play? Yeah. Because that's where you want to be. That's the fun side. Has it been successful? Have you done some Greek publications? No, no. We just started two weeks ago. so we're just pitching now and all of that but no so far not yet but um it hasn't been unsuccessful yet so we're just playing around and seeing yeah well jimmy thanks very much coming on jimmy's job as a feature it's been brilliant fantastic enjoyed it