BIG INTV: Wikipedia's Founder on Holding the Line in a Post Fact World

27:11Now, I want to ask you a little bit about bias. In the book, The Seven Rules of Trust, you talk about the importance of sticking to the facts, and that comes up over and over. It's a very, very much a core principle that informs how Wikipedia is run, how it's edited, what ends up sort of sticking to the page and what doesn't. And you sort of say whether it's Wikipedia or a newspaper, there is a really important element of trust to sort of non-biased publication of information, right? Share this point of view, share that point of view, but don't, as Wikipedia, take a point of view. And there has been and continues to be, especially in media, a very heated debate about the idea of objectivity, about the idea of unbiased publishing and whether that's even possible.

27:56It sounds like you certainly think that it is. And I'm curious for you to share, how does that actually work for someone to sit down? They're going to edit a Wikipedia entry. Maybe they themselves have very strong feelings about Ukraine, about abortion, about whatever the subject is. But the need to sort of set that aside, how does that actually work in practice? Yeah, I mean, so one of the things I always say to people, if, you know, if somebody says to me, I don't think neutrality is even possible. I don't think there's such a thing. I said, but wait, do you think there's such a thing as bias?

28:27Like, would you agree that, and then choose your poison, you know, do you agree that Fox News is biased? Oh, yes, yes, they're definitely biased. Well, could they be less biased? Yes. Okay, well, that's what I'm talking about. Be less biased, be more neutral. So we don't have to have a magical, perfect ideal of neutrality to say, like, actually, there are ways to get it wrong. Let's try to avoid that. And I think a big part of it, I think for a lot of people, one of the things that I would recommend is if you really feel super emotional about a particular topic, you know, it's going to be hard to be a good Wikipedian on that topic.

29:00You should probably just avoid it. This is what I do. I wouldn't edit about Donald Trump because the man makes me insane. Like, I just can't. I just, I'm just not, it's past my limits and I'm a pretty calm guy, you know, generally speaking. And I just think, I would find it hard in some cases to write in a dispassionate manner. But at the same time, I do think it's possible, and I think a lot of people come to Wikipedia with a spirit of goodwill and collaboration. The classic example I give is a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist, and they're going to work together about writing about abortion.

29:37And you can see how that can work. Like, they both understand Wikipedia's cantic aside. It can't say abortion is a sin. It can say the Catholic Church position on abortion is such and such, and critics have said this. and the popers responded to that and so on and so forth. Like, it's possible to do. And actually, I find that in many cases, so there's sort of two elements here. One is how emotional you are about it, and that can be a problem if you just can't sort of calm yourself down enough. But in other cases, it's like how ideologically you are might not inhibit you from writing in a fair way.

30:11I mean, that Catholic priest and that Planned Parenthood, they may never agree, and they're not about to budge in their views, but they both probably believe like if you understood the issue as well as they do you would probably agree with them so they don't feel that emotional fear of maybe i'm wrong secretly you know that can cause people to become more emotional that can cause them to not want to so i think you see this a lot in in social media debates it's like the person who's getting really angry and flaming everybody who disagrees with them i always look at it and i think i think you're just not that confident in your ideas because if you were that confident like if somebody said to you two plus two equals five you wouldn't go fly off the handle and go insane at them because you would be like oh that's a very odd thing to say like why don't you believe that and certainly if that were true planes would crash like none of science would work and nothing would like that's a completely bonkers thing to say we don't get mad about it we just go like hold on Like, we, again, I don't think many people are very angry at people who think the earth is flat.

31:16You just think, what? How could you, like, tell me more, because I'm really interested. Where in the world could you come up with such an idea? Whereas if it's something that we're less confident about, that's where we can get emotional and so forth. So it isn't just about being, you know, sort of very ideological. It's also that internal fear that you might be wrong that causes more conflict than necessary. One of the criticisms leveled at Wikipedia in recent times has been that Wikipedia relies a lot on the press, right? You rely on the New York Times, on Wired, on a variety of different sources to inform your entries.

31:55if an individual thinks, well, all of those sources are leftist, they are biased, therefore Wikipedia has an inherent problem with bias because of what it relies on. How do you see the media in this moment? What would you like to see, if anything, maybe change about how journalists, including Wired, approach politics, approach abortion, approach all of these subjects that are so fraught and that are really, you know, in many ways tied up in this conversation about trust that is so fundamental? all. Yeah, I mean, I think this is great. I mean, so there's so many elements to pick apart. We probably have a four-hour conversation about just this, but the accusation that the media is vaguely liberal is probably not entirely untrue.

32:46I mean, I think most people, you do surveys of journalists and newspapers and how they vote and things, that's probably true. That does mean if you're trying to be neutral, that you have to take extra care to sort of pick through that a little bit. Hopefully, in my view, at really good publications, which is a lot of really good publications, the journalists may vote a certain way, but they take the time to be good Wikipedians themselves and to report in a neutral way. I think you can do that, but you have to watch yourself. You always have to be careful about that. And then, you know, there was some claim that was out that now Wikipedia has banned all but left-leaning sources.

33:25And I'm like, well, if you think the Wall Street Journal is a communist rag, then maybe that's true, but that actually isn't true. And I would say one of the things that I would love to see, I mean, I think there has been clearly a rise in low-quality populist right-wing media, and we could probably name a few of the famous names. And that's a fact. That's just something that's out there. And what I would say is, you know, if there's any right-leaning billionaires who are worried about the media, I would say, why don't you fund not some populist media that's sort of campaigning, why don't you fund some really good quality conservative journalism?

34:02I think that's a fine thing to have, just as we have really good quality. You know, if you think the New York Times is sort of vaguely liberal, well, have another newspaper that's sort of vaguely conservative. And there are a few things out there that are maybe gaining some steam like that, but that might help, you know, to say, okay, like, and then for Wikipedia, what I always say is, look, we have to grapple with this always. We have to always be ready. If somebody gives us a criticism, we have to say, okay, right. Like, okay, if we've not got it right, what do we do to improve? How do we get it wrong?

34:33What are our processes that aren't working well? Or, you know, maybe sometimes we look into them and we're like, actually, everything's fine. You know, I'm sorry, we're not going to treat the sort of comments of social media influencer on vaccines the same as the New England Journal of Medicine. That's just, you know, sorry, that's not going to happen. At the same time, you know, it's like, okay, like, let's be careful that we aren't sort of jumping on a bandwagon and in a moment of emotion. And let's try to always be the place where we say, oh, well, you know, hold on, here's the parameters of the debate, rather than trying to take sides in that debate.

35:10I think one of the challenges that I have come up against in my job around sort of conversations around neutrality and bias was actually it came to mind because I was reading an interview you did with The New York Times a few months ago where you said, quote, in various places around the world, not speaking just of the U.S., facts are threatening. And if you and your policies are at odds with the facts, then you may find it very uncomfortable for people to simply explain the facts. And what that brought up for me is the fact that a lot of people in the United States, just speaking of my own experience here, they just reject factual information.

35:47They just reject it. So they might level a term like bias when in fact they're talking about something that is just like true. Like there is still true and false, you know what I mean? And but there is this perception that factual information is sort of inherently political and that it is liberal and that it is biased. I've resigned myself, I think, in some cases to just accepting that those people live in a different version of reality than I do. And it is a reality informed by certain fictions. Yeah. How do you think about that? And how do you think about reaching those people? Because so much of the book is about trying to reach more people with this shared framework of trust and sort of trying to rebuild trust in society.

36:31But how do you reach people who won't even engage with facts as facts? Well, it is hard. Like, that is definitely hard. But I actually think there are fewer people who are really hardcore about that. and you know i think most people on all political spectrums will say i i want to be told the truth i want to make decisions based on facts i don't want to live in a delusion and they may be rejecting elements of the media or you know this that and the other sometimes for bad reasons sometimes for good reasons sometimes because they have lost trust and so now they don't trust anything i mean I tell the story, an old friend from a million years ago said something on Facebook, and I was like, hold on, I don't think that's right.

37:18And I just Googled quickly, and I found a debunking. He said, I can't believe you would send me a link to the New York Times. Oh. I'm like, what? Like, they just make stuff up. You know, and I was like, I don't know what to do here. In this case, I didn't know what to do. but usually you know the response might have been and then we could grapple with it the response is well you do know of course the New York Times is left-leaning and they have basically overlooked certain facts that might be uncomfortable for their position I think you should read this and we should grapple oh okay yeah now there's a conversation like that's something we can work on but just rejecting wholesale as if you know sort of the mainstream media is propaganda it's a huge problem and I think One of the things that we have going on is there are people in our society, I think Elon Musk has talked about Wikipedia's Echo's mainstream propaganda.

38:11And I'm like, just the words mainstream and propaganda are quite an amusing combination. They are. It's a really odd thing to say. but also you know it's sort of like if you just want to give a caution to say like we know that human beings can get into a group thing and there's a sort of a certain received wisdom and if something new comes up it may take a while for people to accept it and you may on that's all great like that's absolutely right and we should grapple with it but we shouldn't just say yeah you know what the bbc obviously they just make stuff up although they obviously don't just make stuff up are they sometimes biased do they sometimes get it wrong a hundred percent of course you know so this is that rebuilding of trust so you know for the media i think it's really important to really be aware that those people exist but that and a few of them are just not reachable and there's nothing we can i assume that's been true throughout all human history people who are like you know facts you can prove anything with facts i don't care about that But there are a lot of people who are like, no, actually, I'm not listening because you've made these mistakes in the past and didn't correct it or you come at this story.

39:23You know, I live in the UK, and one of the big political things that we've been through was Brexit. And, you know, if you go back and you look at the rhetoric around Brexit, and by the way, the mainstream sort of all the major political parties, certainly all the journalistic sources, for the most part, even some of the more right-leaning sources, were against Brexit. And there was a real tone that the people who were for Brexit are just racist. And, you know, the people who were for Brexit were not persuaded by that because calling people racist doesn't usually change their minds about anything.

39:57They were like, hold on, you're not listening. And in fact, I think probably people weren't listening. And, you know, that led to a protest vote that actually has had, you know, dire consequences. I was going to say, yeah, look at you now. Yeah, that went really well. I mean, yeah. And, you know, it's sort of like the public polling suggests that, yeah, people pretty much agree that that wasn't a good idea. At the same time, you know, these things happen. And what we really have to do is to say, OK, like, how do we get back? How do we get back to one of the symptoms of all this that I have been pointing out recently is the U.S.

40:36just went through the longest in history government shutdown because Congress is so filled with partisan hacks and the inability to trust each other enough to find some bipartisan solutions and compromise. Okay, we'll give you this and that. No, it's just like absolute shutdown on both sides. And that's not even, that's like really bad governance. Like there's no sense in which that is ever going to be the right way to govern a country, as opposed to saying, oh, we didn't get everything we wanted, but in order to get those seven votes, we had to give this, you know, a little bit of horse trading and all that just to get muddled through somehow.

41:16And I think the decline in trust is a big piece of that, you know, and the corresponding sort of view that the people on the other side are completely like insane people. And so what can you do about it?

41:34How do we maintain a strong defense in a world that's rapidly changing? Join us on Strength in Numbers, a podcast from UVA's National Security Data and Policy Institute. I'm your host, Jennifer Strong. In each episode, we'll take a look at the materials powering today's most advanced technology, how it's being used on the battlefield, and ask how the United States can stay competitive against potential adversaries. Voters should be concerned about all this. We want America to be strong, but we've got to be strong and smart. That's all coming up this season of Strength in Numbers. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

42:16You mentioned Elon Musk a few minutes ago, and I'm curious, you know, this is someone who has built Grokipedia, sort of like an alternate reality version of Wikipedia. What's his deal with Wikipedia? Do you know why he is so opposed to Wikipedia's continued existence? um well i mean i think it's a few things i mean i only know things he said uh yeah so he thinks wikipedia is wokeopedia and sure you know i think that's clearly wrong although again i always say if we get a criticism we need to grapple with it we need to say okay like let's what do you mean in particular you know i mean somebody a while back on it might have even been twitter at the time but x said uh came at me with this sort of gotcha question what is a woman this is my side I don't talk about trans issues anymore.

43:08It's just too toxic. And I was like, okay, the answer is in, because there was a right-wing film called What is a Woman? And the sort of answer is, supposedly you're not able to say adult human female. And I just said, oh, well, here's what Wikipedia says, adult human female. Like, it's really not that woke. By the way, the Wikipedia article starts with that. And then further down, it does talk about gender. It talks about trans issues. But it's like, it's pretty not, woke, you know, it's just like explaining the whole situation and what is the cultural debate. And, you know, I think that's where we should be.

43:43So Elon, I don't know, Elon, Elon's Elon, he's going to do what he's going to do. He's going to do it. But when you think about sort of Wikipedia is, it feels threatened in so many different ways, right? There's the Elon Musk of it all. There's the AI scraping. There are, you know, along with Musk, sort of the finger pointing from, you know, I would say like right wing pundits and so forth. How precarious do things feel for Wikipedia right now? And what feels like the most pressing threat to you? Like, are you waking up at three in the morning because of Grokipedia? Are you waking up at three in the morning because of AI?

44:20Or are you sleeping through the night? Like, how are you thinking about Wikipedia's place in the world right now? So, you know, I don't worry about Wikipedia, I only ever think about it. It doesn't even come across my mind most days. And then a journalist asks me, I'm like, oh, yeah. I just used it for the first time yesterday. You know, it looks a lot like Wikipedia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, that's the thing about AI. It can do a passable impression of a human being until you look a little closer. There you go. Yeah. I'm worried about community health. And actually, it's one of the things that I say in the book, but I've also just said to Elon, is like putting it up this idea that Wikipedia has been taken over by far-left activists, it has two harmful consequences.

45:05One, you're telling those kind and thoughtful conservatives who might help with whatever bias you see that Wikipedia is going to be a hostile place for them. And you're telling those crazy woke activists that Wikipedia is their new home, and then we have to deal with them. It's not good. And so for me, the thing I worry about is community health. Are we bringing in a diversity and the intellectual diversity of new people? Are we treating people well when they come in? Is there a sort of, in this era of hostility and the sort of culture wars, are we at risk of letting those cultural wars infect our culture of neutrality and being thoughtful and being kind?

45:48Like, oh, let's just work through this. And I may not agree with you, but I think we can find some common ground to talk about this issue. That's what we have to preserve. Because as long as we do that, As long as we are ready to say, look, let's be as neutral as we can. Let's not take sides in disputes. Then, you know, we'll continue to thrive. We'll continue to be fine. You know, the other thing that's a funny thing about Wikipedia, because we are a charity, so we're a nonprofit organization, but we're even more than that, we're a community. So we're just a bunch of geeks who like writing in a second media as a hobby.

46:21and as such, you know, when we think about the competitive landscape in kind of a dot-com way, ooh, what if Grok takes 30 % of your traffic? What's that going to do? Well, I'm sure it'll hurt the foundation's revenue, you know, if we have less traffic and so on, but is it going to change anything about the community? Not really, because we write Wikipedia because we enjoy it and we're really happy that other people like it. And so we'll carry on, you know, even if at a different scale. But also, I think as long as we keep our spirit, I think people will always really want that sort of information that's not just written by a human, but that's actually been chewed on and thought about and debated and sort of worked out by humans to sort of say, how can we make it as good as we possibly can?

47:06What would you tell someone listening who loves Wikipedia, who uses it all the time, besides donating, what can they do to make sure that Wikipedia is around and thriving in 10 years. I mean, I always encourage people, if you like the spirit of Wikipedia, just make a little edit now and then, and you might find that you enjoy it. And you might come and join us. Do people ever tell you that the idea of becoming an editor on Wikipedia is intimidating? Yeah, sometimes, but it shouldn't be. It feels a little bit too powerful. Yeah, it shouldn't be. You know, just pick something obscure and make a little edit.

47:40You know, if you've read a book and you're like, oh, actually, there's not that much about this book. Let me add a little bit and just add a little something and hopefully you'll enjoy that experience. And I think that's that's part of it is like we try to be this friendly bunch of nerds and we're always looking for friends. I think it's been interesting. You know, I was thinking about this knowing I was talking to you today and watching everything coming out of Venezuela the last few days and seeing sort of how much AI generated imagery was, you know, allegedly emerging from what was happening that turned out, you know, after the fact to be not actual imagery.

48:17Right. It was it was generated using artificial intelligence tools. You know, Wikipedia, in many ways, I remember, like, writing high school papers and being told, like, you may not, you cannot use Wikipedia as a source. Whereas now, Wikipedia feels much more rigorous and accurate than so much of what we are seeing online. Where do you see our digital experience going from here? And how do you see Wikipedia's place in that? I mean, do you worry about sort of, I know AI slop was like the word of 2025. It's 2026 now. But how do you think about sort of that slopification and sort of more inauthentic material circulating as opposed to less?

48:58Yeah, I mean, I think we all have to worry about it, not just in the context of Wikipedia, but just more broadly. And it sort of is, it goes into a mix that already included things like the decline of local newspapers, you know, which I was just playing around and thinking about an idea the other day. like because i like to be optimistic and so forth so i was thinking oh you know are there ways that ai could somehow support local journalism and that's a really fraught topic because like the easiest way is by the lazy way which is just turning ai loose starting to write a bunch of nonsense and it's just going to be slop at the same time you know i think about things like I live in a small village here just outside of London, and they tore down some houses and they built new ones there.

49:50And it's like a council of flats and so on. And I just was curious about it. And I'm like, there's been no news stories because there wouldn't be. It's just a small. But like if there were a local paper that covered sort of 10 villages around, they would have a story about, oh, they're tearing down this thing and they're going to put these new buildings up and so on and so forth. maybe you could like do something with the planning permission documents and things there's a lot of public data that is too hard to get at i don't know but you know i think the bigger risk though is that we're just getting a lot of very weak nonsense and and the financial model for journalism has been under pressure for so long and you know already there are good uses the classic simple example of a machine written story is an earnings report, you know?

50:39Right, of course, yeah. And you can even imagine, like, I don't know if anybody's doing this, but like a baseball box score and the story around it, just the basics, you know, like who teams played, what happened in the third inning, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, let reporters go do the reporting, you know? Yeah, and then let humans do the more interesting bets, you know? And I think that kind of thing can be a positive for the broader business model of journalism, which could help with this. But at the same time, you know, you'll have unscrupulous operators. You know, I mean, you just think about, I haven't watched BuzzFeed lately, but BuzzFeed was always amazing to me because they got popular and they got really famous doing a bunch of listicles and kind of clickbaity headlines.

51:23And then they also did really great journalism. I was like, they did phenomenal journalism. Like, that's great. Like, I don't know why they're doing this journalism because I'm sure it's costing money and it's probably not getting as much traffic as the nonsense, but I think just some people there believed in it and good for them. But you can kind of say that, you know, like actually some people are just going to use maybe to kill, you know, one example of something that I think might get killed in a good way is really bad cooking blogs where people go on and on and on about their family before they get to the recipe.

51:56Oh, because you need to scroll through all the ads. Excruciating. It's excruciating. Yes. I hate them. But now I'm like, that's people, I mean, you know, more power to them. They were making a living of some sort or anyway, a small little extra income getting their, you know. Now that somebody's just going to make 10 million of those using AI, it's going to take all the profit out of it. It's going to be worth nothing. So maybe people will stop doing it and actually maybe start doing something more interesting. Your optimistic spin on AI, we can get rid of all those crappy cooking blogs. Crappy cooking blogs, yeah.

52:30Yeah, exactly. Just give me the recipe. I had sort of one more question, and then we're going to end with a little game, if you would indulge me. The Guardian recently published a story about you in an interview with you, and the headline stood out to me. They asked whether you were, quote, the last decent tech baron, which is a very flattering way to be described. When I think about a tech baron, I think about, like, Mark Zuckerberg feeding his cows macadamia nuts on his compound in Hawaii. You know, I wouldn't I don't know that I would necessarily think of you as a baron. I'm curious about how you think about yourself relative to the Mark Zuckerberg's and Jeff Bezos's and Sam Altman's of the world that you are, I think, so often lumped in with.

53:14Do you feel like you are part of that cohort? I mean, I am and I'm not. I mean, certainly I know them all. And, you know, over the years, know some of them better than others and so on and so forth. But I'm also, I'm definitely not. You know, the way I live my life is quite different. I'm a geek and I love, my office is in my basement. I mean, I'm literally a basement dweller in my office typing on my computer. And I love that. At the same time, you know, and this is where I can be a little bit grandiose about Wikipedia. You know, in 500 years, people are going to look back at Wikipedia and go, you know what?

53:49That was one of the good things. Like, that was a really difficult time in human history, and it was a lot of crap. But a bunch of really nice people got together to gather knowledge and share it with the world. Those are great people. And I'm, you know, I'm really happy and proud to be a part of that. Well, what advice would you give the tech barons of the world about how they can participate in rebuilding trust in that exercise? Because I would say that, you know, especially as a journalist covering this stuff all the time, so many people don't trust what those barons, if I can use that term, have built, right?

54:23They don't trust Meta. They don't look at Facebook and think that that is a place to find trustworthy information, a place to have, you know, trusted conversations. They don't look to the AI industry and feel a sense of trust in those leaders. what would you tell all of them about sort of how they can contribute to to the rebuilding of of societal trust yeah i mean i think a big part of it you know talked about this quite a lot in the book is the algorithms that are optimized for short-term engagement have such clear negatives associated with them that you should really rethink that as a business strategy because you know i've said this to people at facebook is like if people become convinced that you are part of the destruction of civilization, that's not good for business in the long run.

55:08Optimizing for next quarter, sure, you could probably goose your revenues a bit, but it isn't really the right answer. I thought you were gonna ask me my advice for Elon. My advice for Elon is always the same. It's like, hey, Elon, remember the electric car idea? That was good. Just go back and work on those electric car, man. Go back to trying to save humanity. Yeah, that was a good idea. Like, yeah, yeah, some good electric cars. Yeah, just stop posting on Twitter. don't waste your time there's more important things that you could do and as a serial optimist i mean you wrote the book so you must think this but i have to ask i mean do you think we are too far gone or do you think that that there is a better more trusted more collaborative society on the other side of of something on the other side of the ai of the algorithms of the polarization of all of it.

56:01Is it possible? Yeah. And I think my best evidence for that is to sort of step back and don't think about social media for a minute and just think about people you know in your personal life and the way we treat each other normally. People get all this stuff. People are very nice. When you step into an elevator, you don't immediately think, okay, which one of these people is going to try to slit my throat? You think, oh, you know, the elevator gets stuck halfway through the floors. What do you do? You sort of nervously chuckle and you kind of chat a bit and you laugh together. You're not afraid of them.

56:36They're just people in an elevator just like you and they're probably nice people. And that's how we live. And we, and we believe in that. And it's like, good bet. Like most people, you know, assume good faith. And so we see that and, you know, we trust people all the time in all kinds of ways. And I think we can just say like, actually politics has gotten super broken. Things have well, social media are super broken, but people are still the same. And people really do crave and desire to be trusted and to have trustworthy people in their lives. So I think those are the building blocks that we can say, look, we all know these things.

57:10I mean, you know, if I had a criticism of the book, it's like the set rules of trust are all pretty obvious, but aren't those the ones that you have to repeat? Yeah. I mean, we're not, we're not talking about them. Yeah. Probably as much as I should. probably time to have a conversation and to really think about it. And, you know, things like, you know, I think as voters, one of the issues in the sort of global decline in trust is that when people find out that the politician they like is a liar, if they believe, well, all politicians are liars, all politicians are corrupt, then they think, well, my guy's no worse than the others.

57:47But it's like, well, hold on a second. They aren't all corrupt. They aren't all liars. they are all politicians so they've got their problems of course right but broadly you should say actually you're going to lose my vote if you can't be honest and and that's really meaningful there are there are worse things than having your opponent elected if you are lying to me and i think that's a piece of it is to say elevate you know because it used to be the case we've always had scandal in politics but it used to be the case there were certain things that would be resigning. You know, something comes out and someone would feel forced to resign.

58:23Well, they don't resign anymore. They just front their way through it. And it's like, yeah, that's just not OK. I'm very curious to hear how you will answer this very short game I would love to play to wrap up. It's called Control-Alt-Delete. We came up with it.

58:42What piece of technology would you love to control? What would you love to alt, so alter or change, and what would you love to delete? What would you vanquish from the earth if given the opportunity? Okay, so I'll do control. I would love to be able to control my home Wi-Fi network, which has been driving me crazy all morning. Join the club. Some of the most basic technology is just about functional, but not quite. So that's a silly answer, but that's my answer. Control, alt, alter. Broadly, I would say the algorithms of social media, I'd like to see them become more responsive to genuine quality as opposed to just engagement.

59:21You know, I've said for a long time, if I went on Facebook one morning and they gave me an option to say, we'd like to show you things that we think you're going to be less interested in, but that we think are high quality. You may not agree with them, but we think they're high quality because we've got these signals. Do you want to see more like that? I would be, yes, I would like to see more like that. That sounds interesting to me. But what would it do to their ad business? Well, maybe in the long run, I would revert a long trend, which is I hardly ever go on Facebook anymore. There you go.

59:51You know? Yep. And then delete, I think, just X, Twitter. Just delete it. The whole thing's dead. Goodbye. Yeah. It's too late to reboot it. I think I deleted my account maybe two years ago. I don't, it's, I can't even think about it. I cannot disagree with you there. Yeah, I'm in the category. I haven't deleted my account, but I just go on less and less. I feel like and I think a lot of people a lot of journalists feel this way of like you know I need it professionally because you can post stuff there and people will see it and I do have some friends on there who I know but broadly actually one of my good friends on there quit and I was like well okay there's one more reason to just not bother one more reason to give it up so I think they should just delete it and start over great answer but maybe start maybe start over with a different owner just a thought that would be a good start yeah Jimmy thank you so much this was fascinating it's a great book very clear Very articulate.

1:00:44Really appreciate your time. It's all good.

1:00:54This show is produced by Jessica Alpert with help from Adriana Tapia and Sam Egan. Sound design, mix, and original music by Pran Bandy. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. And I am, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director.

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