169. Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia vs. Musk, AI, and the Battle for Truth

24:12And, you know, we all have experiences in life of someone we disagree with politically, but we still think is a great person. Like that's a normal kind of situation of like, you know, you know, that person's a bit a bit too left wing for me, a bit too right wing for me. But that's all right. You know, we have a good banter and we have dinner together and it's all good. So that, you know, like we get it on a day to day basis, you know, that people are basically decent. And then you go online and I mean, just post anything you want on Twitter and just see what kind of screaming lunatic comes at you.

24:45And you're just like, wow, people are horrible, but they aren't. They really aren't and that's important to remind ourselves.

24:51Rory Stewart:Jim, can I answer? I'm just looking at the Wikipedia page on Donald Trump because I think this is a good route through because he is literally the most famous and contentious human being in the world right now. It's quite interesting. It begins quite bad. It's a paragraph saying, born to a wealthy family in New York City. Then it begins to mention that he's filed for six bankruptcies. And then it gets on to defamations and sexual harassment suits filed against him. And then it finishes the introduction with historians have listed him as the worst president in US history with footnotes. And then you get on to early life, whatever it is, right?

25:30Rory Stewart:Take us a little bit into what's happening there. Give us a bit of a sense of what's hidden behind this and how one ends up in a place. And is that a sort of settled place or is something like the Donald Trump Wikipedia page something that sort of tidal waves back and forth? And so that there are some warriors out there that are going to be trying to remove the line about him being the worst president in U.S. history. And if you go back there in a week's time, it won't be there and then I'll be back again. I mean, it's a great question. I would say for a major page like that, that's watched by hundreds of people and there's a lot of discussion about it, it's probably reasonably stable.

26:08I mean, those things can shift over time. But that will be exactly the sort of thing that people debate. And even, you know, good Wikipedians who don't like Donald Trump will question things like undue weight. It's like, yeah, this negative thing is true, but does it belong in that first sort of the lead there? And that's the kind of debate we would have. And so that something like that probably could come and go and drift over time.

26:33Rory Stewart:And who who resolves this, Jimmy? Who arbitrates? How does it work? between the different voices. Let's say somebody's saying, no, no, no, we shouldn't put this poll saying he's the worst president in history in paragraph three, and other people saying we should. How does that get resolved? Yeah, I mean, it varies. I mean, sort of the last resort option, which is not considered great if we have to do it, is some sort of, we call it an RFC, a kind of a vote. It's not really a vote, but it's a straw poll in the community. and to sort of see, is there overwhelming support for this? Is it less support?

27:12You know, it's basically, it's always a discourse. It's always a dialogue. It's always open to change. And that's actually really, really important because clearly if you, anytime you have a situation where you've fossilized a page and there's a sense that it can't be changed, then as facts move, as history moves, as everything changes, you'll be off. You risk locking in something that later we think, oh, that probably was a bit much and probably shouldn't have had that.

27:47There are pages where it's harder and pages where it's easier. Donald Trump, in a way, isn't that hard.

27:54Rory Stewart:What have you learned about pages? Are other things that you did in the early days of Wikipedia that you learned were a mistake and that you altered in the way the thing worked over time? You know, there were things like, one of the big changes was the introduction of what we call the BLP policy, biography of living persons. And the idea here is that anything negative in a biography should be removed immediately unless there's a good quality source. And before that, there was a kind of a tendency for people to say, oh, there's no source for this negative claim. Let's discuss a debate. Can anybody find a source?

28:37No, no, no. Take it out immediately and don't put it back in until you've got a good source. That sort of thing, as we became more and more popular and more and more impactful, became more important. But we always had the idea that Wikipedia should be neutral, that we should cite our sources, that we should use high quality sources. Like all of those values were there from the very early days. I think just over time, we probably codified it a lot more. You said that Donald Trump's quite a straightforward, easy page. What's a difficult page? So sometimes the debates are so obscure that like anybody outside would be like, are you really having a massive debate about the names of rivers in Poland?

29:21Like, really? But other times, you know, it is sort of obvious. I mean, wherever there are legitimate and very complicated questions in reality, like Israel, Gaza, that sort of thing, then it becomes hard and, you know, issues around war. So if you think about, how is Ukrainian Wikipedia and Russian Wikipedia dealing with that war? Quite well, I would argue, but it's emotionally difficult. I mean, we've had Wikipedians killed in Ukraine, and that's hard, and it makes a difference because at the end of the day, we're humans. And so even though we have this really profound and deep commitment to neutrality, it can be hard.

30:12Like if your country is being attacked and there's bombs going off outside your house, you're not going to be the one who raises your hand to say, gee, it seems a little unfair to Putin to have this negative thing right in the lead. Right. It's it's it's harder in those cases. The other areas where it can be quite hard to be as neutral as we would like is cases where we all as a human species maybe have some blind spots and then things are changing and we haven't really realized it yet. And so then you realize like, oh, actually, you know, this is problematic. I'll give an example that is a silly, simple example.

30:48But if you ask almost any English speaking native English speaking person who invented the airplane, they're going to say the Wright brothers. It's a simple fact. You learned it when you were six years old. And that's like that. Apparently, if you ask French people, you get a completely different answer. And the reality is both parties had a significant role to play. And the story we were told when we were six. Who was it? Blero? It was some Brazilian guy who was living in France, if I remember correctly. And oh, but by the way, the interesting thing, as I understand it, is like the Wright brothers were the first to fly further with an engine than they would have with a glider.

31:28But they didn't figure out how to go up, which is an important part. The Brazilian guy figured out how to go up. And so, you know, it's like, yeah, great. An extended range glider might not be a full airplane. So anyway, hopefully when this was first noticed, somebody noticed it in the early days of Wikipedia is like, hey, there's completely different stories. Then, the pages got more sophisticated and people are like, oh, actually, this is a more interesting story and we're not six years old anymore, so maybe we should improve that.

31:55Rory Stewart:I was just looking at your Gaza page and that too is an extraordinary way for people who are interested because what you see is clearly people saying, we're going to locate the October 7th attack in history. You'll see people talking about Israeli attacks before October the 7th, to put the context, And then you'll clearly see people more on the sympathetic Israeli cause, emphasizing the horror of what happened on the day of the attack. Then you'll see people putting forward the Palestinian voice. And if you trace it through, they're different voices. They're different people filling in different parts of the picture.

32:31Rory Stewart:But I think quite an interesting way of thinking about truth, because it's quite unlike the way a normal newspaper article would be written. What it actually seems to be is dozens, maybe hundreds of different voices on slightly different sides putting in their own sentence with their own thing. And it ends up as a sort of balance. You do begin to get a richer picture of things, but it's a very unusual way, crowdsourcing of writing an article. I'm going to come back to Alistair on this again. I mean, presumably, it's very, very unlike the way you normally think about journalism or telling a story to have 100 different people writing different sentences from different backgrounds with different footnotes.

33:13Yeah, absolutely. Well, the nearest you ever get to it is occasionally you'll see something where there'll be one byline and at the bottom it'll say additional reporting and it'll have sort of 10 different people in different places. You sometimes get that. But I think there'll be one, you always talk about who's holding the pen. What's interesting about Wikipedia is you're never quite sure who's holding the pen because anybody can grab it at any time and sometimes different people are grabbing it at the same time. Yeah. Which it is. But Jim, just on that, do you think, would you say that, I mean, I spend a lot of time criticizing modern journalism, particularly in the UK.

33:48Would you say that Wikipedia as a form of journalism is more accurate and more grounded and thought through than most of the stuff that we define as journalism? Well, so I don't know. That's a tough, challenging question. I mean, so the first thing I would say is we are definitely not journalists, and I think that's really important. We are synthesizing sources, but we really depend on that first line reporting, that first draft of history, that writing. I think when we're doing a really good job, and there are cases I can point to that I'm quite proud of, I would say the page about Charlie Kirk in the aftermath of his assassination I thought was really good.

34:35And it's it really balanced and really even though, you know, I would say the vast majority of Wikipedia volunteers would have many deep disagreements with Charlie Kirk and his ideas. But there was a real effort to be thoughtful to be to present, you know, the different views in a fair way and so on and so forth. It doesn't always work that well. For sure. Would you have had that balance about Charlie Kirk before his death? Probably. Yeah, probably pretty good. Although, again, the more prominent a page is, and if it's attracted the attention of like the best Wikipedians, then you get a better outcome, generally speaking.

35:14And so I think that that does help. Yeah, it would be actually I think it's the sort of thing that I would love to encourage. Like I'm leading a neutral point of view working group in the foundation. And one of the things that we're looking at is recommendations for researchers, because we would really love to see more serious, thoughtful research on these kinds of questions. Like there's a great question. Take a sample of pages like Charlie Kirk before and after a major news event, an assassination or something like this. how do the pages change? Like what happens and do they become more neutral?

35:48Do they become less neutral? Maybe there's no simple pattern to it, but I think it's super interesting.

35:53Rory Stewart:Okay, Jimmy, Alistair, quick break and then back for more.

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37:50Rory Stewart:Jimmy, before we move on from Wikipedia into sort of bigger subjects, your book, you, etc., just give us a sense of some of the statistics, some of the scale of this thing. so that people listening get a sense of what this beast Wikipedia is? Well, we're in over 300 languages, and that's a little bit of an overstatement because some of those languages are quite small, but we're in many, many, many languages. And we have tens of billions of page views a month in English alone and as much elsewhere. I'd say one of the interesting facts about Wikipedia is that under 10 % of the content is in English, And so we think of it as as English because we're English speakers.

38:32But actually, it's it's quite big in all around the world. And, you know, we're seen by two billion ish devices every month. That doesn't necessarily mean two billion people, because probably you see it on your phone and your laptop or whatever. But it's a lot. It's a lot. And so it's really kind of phenomenal to think about. And, you know, I just I work in my basement. You know, I'm a geek typing away in my basement. And it's like, oh, wow, like all these people are out there. How many times a day do you look at Wikipedia? Oh, I don't know. You know, in my book, I quote Diane von Furstenberg, who says, we all use Wikipedia more often than we pee, which I thought was a great line.

39:15Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the rest. Let's just, you know, some of these key, some of them we've mentioned already, but Elon Musk in particular, he seems to have a real thing about you and about Wikipedia. And I just wondered, do you know him? How well do you know him? What do you make of him? What should we make of him? Those of us who don't know him. And if I can put it in a very non-Wikipedia world, is he a threat to democracy? Right. Well, so I've known Elon for for years, many years. I'm not sure when I first met him, but a long time ago. I've seen it reported that we used to be friends. That's overstating it.

40:00I've known him. I've known a lot of people from the industry and so forth. I would say one thing to know about him is he's much calmer and quieter and more polite in person, or he always has been with me. He's got a public persona. And I think a lot of what we see, we should kind of think in our minds like, okay, this is his public act. And I think a lot of politicians are like that and so forth and sort of privately less flamboyant maybe. And so there's that. He, you know, with Grokipedia, he's sort of, he has had a thing about Wikipedia for quite some time.

40:36Rory Stewart:And he, am I right, Jimmy, that he said that he was going to give a billion dollars if you would change your name to Dickopedia. Is that right? Yeah, he did say that. And I sort of worked for a day on a response and just decided that just let it hang there. He said it. There's really no response. Like, okay, Elon, like when you're no longer 13 years old, let's have a conversation, you know, like actually. Yeah, once actually my most successful tweet ever, somebody, he was complaining about Wikipedia on Twitter. It might have still been Twitter at that time. No, maybe it just bought X, but anyway.

41:15And a journalist tweeted at him, you should just buy Wikipedia. And I just said, not for sale. That went super viral. It was very, very successful. But ultimately, so with Grokipedia, he claims Wikipedia is biased and it's gone super left wing and woke. And I don't think that's true. Although I think we always should grapple with questions of bias and say, okay, hold on, which by the way, I think the BBC needs to take a serious look at themselves on this front, even if the natural reaction is this is all overblown and so on. Sure. But you're the BBC. You've got to take it seriously. You've got to grapple with it.

41:53You've got to really think about your processes and procedures. Where have you fallen down? Where could you do better? All of that. So I think we should do that. But also, you know, it's like he claims that Grokipedia is more neutral than Wikipedia, even though it seems to have quite a lot of agreement with some of his more unusual political views. And I think that isn't my idea of what neutrality means. Certainly, when you ask me about various pages on Wikipedia, their pages will all say, I think that page is terrible. I think it's not neutral. I think it's got a lot of problems. And I think that's okay, as long as the process is working, as long as we're moving in the right direction over the long haul, then figuring out, grappling with these deep issues in society and so on.

42:38It's just, that's what our job is. That's the core of the work. And so I think he fails to get how hard it is. And also large language models are really, really not good enough to write Wikipedia articles or Grokipedia articles. One of my favorite, I always test new large language models and I use a lot of different, I'm fascinated by the technology. One of my great tests is I always ask, who is Kate Garvey, my wife, who is not a famous person, but she's a known person. She worked in the Blair administration and is in a lot of the books about Tony and the Blair years. She's done stuff promoting the global goals, sustainable development goals.

43:18She's gotten some interesting profiles and things like that. But she's kind of perfect for the large language models because they sort of kind of know who she is and they just love making stuff up. So one of my favorites, it said that she set up a nonprofit to promote women's empowerment in the workplace. So if you know Kate, that sounds plausible. That sounds like Kate, but she didn't actually do that. That she did this with Miriam Gonzalez, which is Nick Clegg's wife. Again, never happened. But of course, I know Nick from his work at Meta. We know them socially. Our kids go to the same school because London is London, you know, it's like, and I showed Kate and she was like, wow, like that could have happened.

43:58Like it could have easily happened. We were at a dinner party and we sat together And before she started Project Everyone, she could have done that. And it just didn't happen. But then my favorite is I ask, and who did she marry? And this is absolutely golden. It's often very plausible. So it's people in the UK, political scene. I don't think it's ever been either of you, but you would be suspects for sure. Too old. It was definitely James Fennell once. That was good. Oh. But my favorite.

44:28Rory Stewart:James Fennell. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, Alexis is my publisher in the UK, James's wife. And so that was quite amusing. She got a laugh out of that. But my favorite, my favorite, and this is a little bit on the less plausible side, is it recently said Peter Mandelson, which I said, oh, isn't Peter quite famously gay? And then it got very woke with me and said, it's not appropriate to speculate about people's personal sex lives. And gay marriage is legal in the UK. Okay. So anyway, it's not good enough to write a Wikipedia entry about Kate. It will just get things completely wrong, but plausible in most cases.

45:05Rory Stewart:Well, Jimmy, let's maybe use this to transition to something I'm fascinated in, which is that the dozen people at the heart of this AI revolution have a great deal in common. I mean, many of them are very bright like you. Many of them were early movers in the space of the internet. Many of them were on record back in 2016 saying that there are many problems with AI and they were worried about AGI and it needed to be regulated. And then almost all of them, having initially expressed caution, have now joined the camp of let's put the foot down on the accelerator, build these models as quickly as possible, generally in order to stop some other one of this group building one.

45:47Rory Stewart:So, you know, if you're Zuckerberg, you're building it to stop Sam Altman. If you're Sam Altman to stop Musk, etc. I mean, the whole thing is like an extraordinary, and they're all doing it to stop China. Now, what I wanted to know is your sense of the mindset here. Are we right to be a little bit concerned about very bright, powerful people with an enormous amount of money, and very few of them pushing ahead, building these enormous models in this way? Yeah, although I'm in the camp having sort of used them quite deeply to say, You know, there's a great, Gary Marcus is a great AI researcher who's become quite known for his skepticism.

46:25He's not anti-AI, but he just thinks large language models are a bit of a dead end. And we're not seeing the scaling lead to the same results that we did in the first few steps. So I think, although it's all very exciting and very scary and positive and negative and all of that, I think it's going to be longer than some people think. And so I think that this current competitive environment is really about, it is a very useful technology. And, you know, Google, you know, you've seen commentary in the press like, oh, maybe Google's over. Maybe everybody's going to start using ChatGPT instead of Google.

47:01So Google clearly has to respond to that. And clearly the AI summaries and the advances they're making are incredibly useful for their customers and, you know, their users. And so it's kind of natural that there's this amazing new technology and a lot of investment is flowing into it. So we can get a little worried in a science fiction-y way, right? Are we headlong, you know, creating a successor that's going to kill us all? But I'm kind of like, don't think so. So I'm, you know.

47:29Rory Stewart:But, Jimmy, let me push beyond the technology to the question of the people. Yeah. And this odd question. I mean, you're not worth$140 billion or$400 billion yet. you're a very wealthy man, but you're not quite this sort of weird group of people. Is there not something a bit strange, culturally, historically, about a group of people with that amount of wealth, with these particular ideas being in control of so much of the US stock market, so much of the development of future technology? Is there not an issue here to get into the psychology of these people and what they're up to. I mean, it's interesting.

48:08It's plausible. I'm not sure how much of an issue there really is. I mean, I do think it's, you know, when we think about the stock market, for example, and the question of, is it a bubble and so forth? Well, I've seen bubbles and lived through the dot-com crash, and this feels a lot different in a way. You know, when people get sort of agonized about it, I'm like, well, at least, you know, NVIDIA is making computer chips and making profits and it's selling to customers who are becoming more profitable. So that doesn't look like it's going to collapse anytime soon. But, you know, broadly having a handful of people making very important decisions for society, that's not unusual in history and it doesn't always end well and it doesn't always end badly.

48:52So I just I don't know. I think I'm with you and asking the question and I don't I don't have a very strong view. I mean, certainly, you know, certain people like Demis Hassabis is so thoughtful and so kind. And when you talk to him about these kinds of issues, he's very nuanced and very interesting. And you think, okay, I think we're all right, as long as Demis is in charge of things. Other people who are a little more chaotic and wild, like Eli, and you're like, I'm not so sure that this is going to be a great outcome, depending depending on what you mean by outcome, you know? Jimmy, just to go back to your book, it's about trust.

49:30And the context, in a way, is the falling trust of a lot of the institutions that used to have high levels of trust. So, for example, you call it the US federal government, 50 % trusted it in 2001, 16 % by 2023. Trust in the mainstream news media, 53 % in 2001, 32 % in 2023. Worst of all, I thought, was this one. The percentage of Americans who believe most people can be trusted fell from 35 % in 2000 to 25 % in 2022. So what's your analysis as to why? I think we all three would agree that those trust levels have fallen right around the democratic world. What's your analysis as to why? Is it politics?

50:16Is it media? Is it a mix of both? Is it technology? Is it the pace of life? What is it? I mean, I think it's a confluence of those things. And I think it's quite hard to isolate the exact cause as a simple story. Certainly, you know, when we saw the demise, and I think that's not too strong a word of local journalism. So all around the democratic world, all around the world, really, local journalism has very much collapsed. My hometown, you remember, I talked about throwing that newspaper. Well, my hometown, we had two newspapers when I was young. There was a morning paper, an afternoon paper.

50:55The morning paper died years ago. The afternoon paper is now published three times a week and it's published out of a city 100 miles away. The number of active journalists working in Huntsville, Alabama is dramatically less than it was. And that kind of personal journalism where it's things are being reported on that are part of your day-to-day life was part of that building the trust relationship in media. Now, most news and most journalism is about far off characters who don't seem to know anything about who you are and what your life is like. I mean, certainly in the UK - That's technology.

51:31That's media and technology. It is in part a technology, right? Because suddenly the shift from print to digital meant things like classified ads didn't make sense anymore. Display ads still made sense, but just subscriptions kind of went by the wayside and so forth. And so that business model for local journalism has been destroyed. And that caused a lot of lack of trust. And it also means, I always joke, it's probably a great time to be the brother-in-law of a mayor in a small town in America and own a construction company, because nobody's scrutinizing those contracts, you know, like the new building contract.

52:13Like, who's looking at that? Who's complaining about the nepotism and so forth? It's just fallen apart. And that does have a corrosive effect on society that we don't feel like anybody's watching. And now suddenly, you know, you can get to a point in a culture where, OK, you're a person who believes in following the rules. You're kind of a sucker because, you know, the only way to get ahead is to cheat. And the only way to get by is to cheat in some places. And that's super toxic. And it's not good for prosperity in the long run, but it's an equilibrium you can get into. So there's the technology piece.

52:47I think some of the responses. So the media, I feel like, has often become click following. And that clickbait headline and the sort of seeking outrage and becoming more partisan is problematic. And I always say this, like, I love electric cars. I'm fascinated by the technology. I think it's a great thing. I own an electric car, not a Tesla. And you can take, for the last week, go and grab every headline from The Telegraph and The Guardian to quality newspapers in London. And I can tell you, I'd say with 90 plus percent accuracy, which headline came from which paper, because The Telegraph hates electric cars and The Guardian loves electric cars.

53:31And sometimes they're reporting on the same research that came out. And you can just go, well, like, here's the negative view and here's the positive of that. I don't think that's healthy in the long run. And I understand the pressures that have led people there. But I also feel like, you know what, actually, what I want as someone who I would tend to probably prefer that Guardian story because it flatters my own view of the world. I also I want to hear about, oh, oh, they're heavier. and therefore the tires wear out sooner and there's more tire particles around. I want to know about that. That sounds interesting.

54:05That sounds problematic. It doesn't mean the end of my love of electric cars, but like, oh, what can be done about that? How big is that problem? I don't know. And who do I trust? I don't necessarily trust The Guardian or The Telegraph alone. I have to read both and kind of triangulate. And that's not great for a sense of trusting the media. And on politics, how does global trust get impacted by the presence of Donald Trump as the most high profile politician in the world? I think it's really important and really core. We can't lay it all at Trump's feet. So I sort of started with, is this model in journalism and things like this?

54:43And is it a cause or is it an effect? It's both. And certainly when you have someone who is really aggressively, actively undermining people's trust in some basic facts, that's really problematic. And, you know, can you imagine how stunned we would all be if Trump came out tomorrow and said, actually, I feel like what we really need is to have a deeper understanding of immigration. Like, what is actually going on? Who is coming in? What are some of the solutions to the problems that we know? He doesn't do anything like that. He just rants and attacks anybody who disagrees with his preferred solutions, whatever they may be.

55:27And that's deeply problematic. And he's not the only one. We see this around the world. I mean, I would argue there was a clear, in my view, this is an amateurish watcher of the news, but I feel like Bibi, Benjamin Netanyahu, also adopted a kind of Trumpish kind of style when he saw how successful it was for Trump. And he sort of moved from being a politician I have many disagreements with to somebody who's a bit bombastic and a bit like this and that. And that isn't great. And we see that in lots of different places where we see the rise of characters who are charismatic and populist, but not so grounded in the real complicated nuances of policy, which is really where that work has to take place.

56:12When you said it's problematic, where in your assessment could it lead? Where's this kind of heading? Because it feels to me that term two is so much more problematic than term one. And he's only he's not even a year in it yet. Yeah. I'm just kind of trying to work out where could this go? Well, this is where I, you know, I recently was on a similar show and I talked about how I'm a great optimist. And then I answered this question and the other person said, you're not sounding like much of an optimist, Jimmy. Like, I thought you were going to cheer me up. And so I just sort of came to I don't think he's going to get away with a coup.

56:53But, you know, if you look at a lot of the different things, like, you know, firing a lot of generals, you know, undermining the courts, undermining the Justice Department, politicizing, sort of saying really blatantly two weeks ago that a group of senators who said, actually, it's an established principle of American law that soldiers can and should refuse illegal orders. and him saying that's sedition and they should be arrested. Wow, like that's not even like legally, there is no controversy in saying that like illegal orders should not be followed. That's a bedrock principle of American law and military law.

57:37And there we are. And so when you see all those kinds of things and you think, well, like what is he trying to accomplish if he's trying to bully soldiers into thinking they need to follow orders no matter what, whether it's illegal or not? Maybe it's just about, He really thinks it's important to kill every last person on a Venezuelan boat. Or maybe it's about softening things up for other things. Like we were talking about sending military into cities, which is just not a thing that's okay. And sort of doing all the legal work. Like, what are you laying the groundwork for? And the answer may be nothing.

58:10It may be just he's aggressively pursuing his policies and he feels like a deep state is blocked getting things done and so on. or, you know, but there are things like things that people who don't really know that much about the American system do need to be aware of is it's not within the power of the president to cancel elections because they are run by the states and the states are completely independent and they're going to run the elections to stop the states from running elections would be open civil war. Like that's not easy to do. It's not like in the UK, you could probably, a bad prime minister could probably say, we're going to postpone elections three years longer than it's supposed to be.

58:51What's the only thing that's going to stop them if they've got the majority in parliament? What, the king, maybe? We hope. But broadly, in the US, the decentralization of the system, which is, you know, makes lots of things hard to do and so forth, does mean you can't just run roughshod over the entirety of the law. I hope. He's running roughshod over a hell of a lot of it already.

59:14Rory Stewart:I know. And I also think, Jimmy, there's a bit of a risk with, I don't think he's going to cancel elections, but none of these guys cancel elections. Putin still has elections. Maduro still has elections. But I think we often end up setting weird bars for Trump and saying, oh, well, he's not going to cancel elections. So he can't be that bad. That's fair. That's a fair point. Jimmy, let's get, as I come towards the end, final question for me. You've written a very, very interesting book. I'd like you just to take us through some of what you think the principles are for rebuilding trust, right?

59:43Rory Stewart:So a lot of this conversation has been about trust and an age without trust. Talk us through your recipe for trust and the kind of things we need to do. And maybe out of your list, because it's a comprehensive list, what are one or two unusual and unexpected items on your list that you think people might think about more? Number five. I'm going for number five, Jimmy. Okay. Well, I haven't learned them in order, so you'll have to remind me which one. Of course, you've only got seven. Number five is Your Mother Was Right. Oh, Your Mother Was Right. Civility. Yeah, civility. So we've talked, because the rest is politics, we've talked a lot about the broader political context and trust and so on and so forth.

1:00:25But the book is about that, but it's also much more about building trust in business and organizations, in your personal life and so forth. And so, yeah, a couple of them. One I already talked about that I do think is very important is purpose. So I think having a clear purpose is really important at building trust. I mean, one of the things I would say, and this also applies in a political context, is, you know, if you have an understanding of the vision of where you're going and you know, you know, sort of and you are predictable on that basis, it helps people trust you. You sort of know where you're going to come down.

1:01:05You know, you know, where you're going to not a lot of surprises. And you can say, OK, I can I can trust this politician, even if, by the way, I have some kind of a disagreement on some political issue. I always talk about Obama versus McCain, I thought was a very proud moment for me as an American because I thought, oh, I have political agreements or disagreements with each of them, but I know who they are. I know where they're coming from. They're proper people. We're going to be fine. You know, I might not agree with the policy of John McCain, but I admire John McCain. I think he's a good person and I think he's OK.

1:01:38Okay. The other one, yeah. So yeah, civility, your mother was right, is basically talking about the practicality in most circumstances of being kind and thoughtful and sort of neutral is a big piece of that in a lot of ways. It's like saying, you know, think before you act and judge. And I do think civility obviously is one of the big casualties in social media, particularly in the political social media, where just the level of toxicity is just appalling. And it's not conducive to being a thoughtful town square where, well, people have different ideas can come together and we've got a respect for free expression so we can have hard discussions, but we'll do it in a productive way.

1:02:26let's take a really tough and complicated issue like the trans issue and let's even go narrower trans issue around sports well okay that's to me that's a hard problem and an interesting problem where gosh you know i actually do think people should have a right to participate in sport but also i'm not that comfortable when i see this person who recently transitioned beating all the women in swimming in the u.s i don't know where to put that i would like to think about it more i'd like to be able to talk about it openly. I'm feeling a bit nervous even saying this on the podcast because it's so toxic.

1:03:01What will I be accused of? And that's not helpful to advocates on either side, to be honest, that we can't have like, oh, let's chew on this issue. Let's try to make things better for everybody. And we're going to have to give a little hair and take a little there. And we're going to find some way through as the way we do things as a muddle, but it's okay. Okay. And civility goes a long way towards that to saying, okay, like, oh, I disagree with you, but I think you're a human being. And, you know, some of the stories that I love about Wikipedia in this context, I met this young guy in Taiwan.

1:03:36He was driving me around, a young Wikipedia volunteer. I was there doing a little of a press tour and a Wikipedia conference and so on. And I got to know him over the day and he said, yeah, I was raised in a very nationalist Taiwanese household. And I grew up believing that mainland Chinese people were all brainwashed like robots. And they didn't know anything about history. They didn't know anything about the world. They've been subject to propaganda, didn't understand a thing. Then I started working with Wikipedia and I met a lot of mainland Chinese people. And he said, they're still wrong about a lot of things, but in some things I can see where they're coming from, or they've got a point.

1:04:12And so for the first time in his life, he thought of the people he had disagreements with as human beings, and he could sort of put himself in their shoes a little bit and have a dialogue about it. And I was like, that's fantastic. Like, that's exactly what we need to have peace, to have prosperity, to get forward in the world. And it does start with saying like, oh, actually, this is another person just like you. Let's have a conversation. Let's remember, you know they probably their mother told them to be nice as well my final question jimmy is whether is in your kind of sense of identity now how british do you feel i mean fairly british i would have to say but uh it's hard to say i mean it's been a long time since anybody yelled at me on i i once commented about something uh about british politics and i wasn't yet a citizen in the UK and somebody yelled at me because it was Twitter, you know, and said, you know, shut up.

1:05:11What do you know? Like, you don't even live here. I'm like, actually, I live in London. Like, I think I can comment on politics. So yeah, yeah. Quite, quite British, I suppose. But I, yeah, I'm a Londoner. I would say definitely. Very good. Listen, thanks for your time. Thanks for Wikipedia.

1:05:30Rory's got a bit chat GPT these days. I've got to tell you, Jimmy, he's kind of, he's sort of, he's definitely moving on to the LLM stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Just be careful. I stick with you for a lot of my basic research. I still go Wikipedia.

1:05:46Rory Stewart:Brilliant. Thank you, Jimmy. Lovely to see you. Bye-bye. Yeah. Thank you. Take care. Bye.

1:05:54Okay, Rory. So not as tough with Jimmy as you were with Zach Polanski.

1:05:59Rory Stewart:I mean, to be fair, Jimmy is not actually running to be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. As you pointed out, he is a British citizen. But I think there are things that are fair to do, and grilling elected politicians who are standing for office is a little bit different to grilling somebody who's set up a global non-profit. But listen, here are some things that we could have pointed out if you wanted to. One of them is, of course, that it is true, of course, that it's quite liberal leaning if you come from the far right, if you read Wikipedia, and that's partly because of the sources.

1:06:38Rory Stewart:If you have to source everything, a lot of the mainstream media, the New York Times, the kind of things that cite sources, will back up a particular worldview, which is not the view of Elon Musk or Trump. It's also quite male-leading. The majority of people contributing Wikipedia entries are men, and there are more articles about men, by men, than there are about women and by women. So there are points that you can make about Wikipedia as a cultural icon. Nevertheless, I think in a world of contested horror, it's quite a good thing. What do you think, Alice? Yeah, I know Jimmy very, very well, not least because of his wife, Kate, who worked with me for years and years and years and years.

1:07:19In fact, I played the backpipes at their wedding, Rory. Brilliant. So I think, and I do think Wikipedia is an extraordinary modern phenomenon. And it's part of the theme that you were pushing at is it is positive and is optimistic. And of course, there are things you can pick about it and you can, as Musk and Trump have done at various points, you can sort of attack it for this, that and the other. But I think in terms of what it set out to do, the creation of an online encyclopedia, it has done that and it's become such a useful resource to so many people for so many things. So, no, and I think he's got a, I think Jimmy's got a kind of nice, charming modesty about himself.

1:08:03I've talked to him about this before. I think for a lot of people, someone I talk to footballers who were sort of big stars in the 70s and 80s, and okay, they made a reasonable living. Okay, but compared to, you know, an amazing world-beating footballer in the 70s will have earned in his lifetime less than a kind of average championship player makes in a year. And sometimes you'll get footballers who will be honest and they'll say, yeah, it really pisses me off. But most of them don't. I get the sense with Jimmy, one of the questions he gets most irritated by is, you know, you didn't become a billionaire, you know, all these other tech guys did.

1:08:44And I genuinely don't think it bothers him. I think he actually feels that he's created something incredibly powerful and positive. And that means as much to him as money does.

1:08:54Rory Stewart:Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I know him a little bit and I wonder what it feels like when he goes to see all these other guys that he knows so well and have known him forever. Because it's very important to them how wealthy they are. You know, they watch each other's wealth all the time. It's a huge status symbol. It's actually not really about spending. They can't begin to spend one ten-thousandth of the amount of money they have. It's competition. And I wonder whether he doesn't sometimes get a bit irritated. I also struck by the fact that a little bit like some of the other really big global American figures we've interviewed, Bill Gates would be an example, maybe Anna Wintour would be another.

1:09:37Rory Stewart:He doesn't quite see the world in the way that I would. I mean, he doesn't sort of see these billionaires as a sort of group, he's reluctant to kind of generalize about money and power. I'd be tempted to say that there's actually something inherently problematic about middle-aged men worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars controlling the fate of the world. He tends to be on these things a little bit more nuanced. I don't know why that is. Is that that's just his personality? Is it actually a bit like Bill Gates, he's doing business for these people, he's having to work with them and operate with them and he can't really afford to slag them off.

1:10:17Yeah, but he did nonetheless, well, he slugged off Musk a bit. He did nonetheless kind of buy into the notion, I think, that one of the reasons why Wikipedia has maintained a sense of integrity is because nobody looks at it and thinks somebody's getting really, really rich out of this. So I I think that is a powerful fact. I think Jimmy's a kind of modern day hero in a way. He's created something and he has a very nice life and he swans around the world making speeches and runs his own businesses and what have you. But I think Wikipedia is a gift to the world.

1:10:54Rory Stewart:Oh, it's unbelievable. Yeah, let's finish on an idealistic, optimistic note. I'll reinforce you on this and hand back to you. I think it is one of the most extraordinary things to have done with one's life to contribute something like that to the world is unbelievable. It really is. It's something that very few human beings will be able to do in their lives. It's like being a really extraordinary Nobel Prize winning scientist or a really consequential politician. I mean, that is to create an institution of truth that is central to our lives. It's got to be something that very few people could say they can put on their tombstone.

1:11:29Yeah, I've still got on my bookshelf at home the Encyclopedia Britannica that my parents sort of bought in the very old fashioned way. They just sort of, you know, you get it bit by bit. And it is amazing when you think about the other world has changed. The Encyclopedia Britannica. I mean, it used to be a joke, didn't it, about, you know, what you do, I'm a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. But that was like a thing. That was how the then equivalent of Wikipedia was born. It He was like, you know, here's a great idea. Get some, you know, and I can remember to this day some of the kind of, you know, the way that bold was used and the way that italics were used.

1:12:08And I used to, I actually did. And Jimmy, apparently, age three, his mum bought him an encyclopedia. And that's maybe where the thought was sort of. But that sense of, you know, and he said it's Encyclopedia Britannica, which is kind of like that. And they have produced the English Wikipedia alone, which I think he did. He said it was 20 % English language or 10%. Well, he said English Wikipedia alone is 93 times bigger than the whole of the Encyclopedia Janica.

1:12:39Rory Stewart:So you added in all the other languages that it's in. You wouldn't be able to fit that even on that large set of bookshelves that I see behind you in your French house there. It would be many, many rooms worth of bookshelves to get all that in. next to the picture of me and Diego Maradona. Yes, I did see that. I actually guessed that was what it was, to be honest. It seemed to me clear that that must have been the nature of the picture. Anyway, finishing with two of your heroes, Diego Maradona and Jimmy Wells. Thank you very much, Alison. See you soon. Bye-bye. See you soon.

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