Full transcript: Larry Sanger on London Real
2:43 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Larry Sanger, the philosopher, internet pioneer, and co-founder of Wikipedia. You helped build one of the most influential knowledge platforms in human history, shaping how billions of people access information every day. But you also became one of the earliest and most outspoken critics, warning that neutrality, truth, and open inquiry were being replaced by ideology, narrative enforcement, and institutional capture.
3:11 Since leaving Wikipedia, you have focused on philosophy, free speech, decentralized knowledge systems, and the deeper question of whether truth itself can survive in a digital world dominated by power incentives and artificial intelligence. Today, I want to explore how knowledge became politicized, why trust in institutions collapsed, how AI is accelerating epistemic failure, and what must be built next if society wants reliable information again. Larry, welcome to London Real.
3:44 Larry Sanger: Thanks for having me. Let’s get into it. This sounds fun.
3:46 Brian Rose: Yeah, let’s jump into this. So, you know, in 2011, I walked away from my job as a banker in London. And based on my inspiration of Joe Rogan, who at the time wasn’t even on YouTube. I mean, very few people knew about Joe, I was into my fighting and mixed martial arts. I knew him as the commentator of the UFC.
4:08 But I was watching his podcast when he was literally on a sofa with his friends on Ustream. It was so low tech it wasn’t even funny, Larry. And I decided to start my own Joe Rogan in London and we called it London Real. Uh, ’cause I always thought London was a tremendous brand name and I thought I would just grab it. And you know, this was in ’11 and I still remember getting our first Twitter account and again, you know, social media is still newish.
4:33 You know, Instagram didn’t exist back then. Facebook, it didn’t even have like a business page. You had to kind of co-opt a personal page and, you know, it was still the early days and, you know, it was something we kind of grew up with the internet. Kind of grew up with this publishing. And I remember in the early days, you know, just being recognized by something like Wikipedia would have been just a tremendous honor and [clears throat] a sign that we were now relevant, you know, as a show.
5:04 And of course being recognized by mainstream media was something we kind of always wanted as well. And so fast forward to 2014, 2017, 2020 when COVID happened and lockdown happened, we were one of the few channels that started asking hard questions and having guests on that started going against the mainstream narrative. And famously on April 6, 2020, we had the second largest YouTube live stream in the world, second only to Trump’s coronavirus briefing that day from DC.
5:37 And that episode was banned and deleted 10 minutes after we finished it. Now, I had gone nine years, Larry, and never had a single episode taken down from YouTube. We were in their partner program. I would go down to the studio, they would take us to lunch, and we started an all-out war. And it wasn’t just YouTube.
5:55 It was systematically Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, everybody was taking us down. And then soon I realized that we were being ripped apart on Wikipedia. And I just couldn’t believe it because I think we all just assumed it was this transparent, trusted source of information equal to the truth, you know. And I started finding out firsthand how it wasn’t. And Larry, I would tell people how it wasn’t and they thought I was crazy, you know.
6:22 They’re like, “Oh, you’re just a conspiracy theorist.” I like, “No, no, no. There’s people on there that have it out for me that are that won’t allow me to change things or even update what I think are facts.” And so I’m really curious what you make of our experience there. Just feeling that and it started right around 2020.
6:42 I will say that I may or may not confirm that I ended up having to pay someone just to hold my wiki status quo, Larry. So to be as less libelous and slanderous as possible, we couldn’t change it, but this guy was a vigilant there just to make sure it couldn’t get worse. And I’ve had to live with that for the last few years. So that’s been my experience. I’m curious, what’s your take on that and many other stories like it?
7:14 Larry Sanger: Well, your story is fairly typical. I’ve heard a lot of such stories. Peter Schiff actually reached out a couple of months ago and said that his story of being investigated by the government and then entirely exonerated was not properly told by Wikipedia. The fact that you’re badmouthed and, well, I’m not really sure how you are badmouthed exactly by Wikipedia is certainly par for the course if you challenge the narrative generally speaking. In fact there [clears throat] are podcasts I suppose that can be used as sources on Wikipedia, not very many of them.
8:07 I’m sure that London Real is not one of them. If it’s even on the perennial sources page, that would actually be a win for you if you could actually be cited as a source. And you know, that would be something to have your guy look at. It is absolutely true that people who can afford it will pay and have maintained their pages, but you know, PR firms that specialize in working on Wikipedia, and it’s required essentially, otherwise they will absolutely take you apart and libel you mercilessly with no recourse.
8:57 Part of the problem here is that you’re dealing with anonymous [clears throat] people. You can’t sue them because you don’t know who they are and you can’t sue the Wikipedia Foundation, which is the owner of the platform, because of Section 230 protections. So, yes, I’ll tell you what I’ve told many people before. I’m personally sorry for what you’ve gone through. I’m sorry to have sort of unleashed this on the world.
9:30 I did not intend for this to be an engine of libel as it has become. It’s a real shame.
9:38 Brian Rose: I think you now you’ve been quoted as saying that you know when you started Wikipedia you also like to remind people that the media landscape was also very different then when a lot of people today would openly say I can’t even believe the New York Times. Nobody was really saying that in 2010, were they? And that changed.
10:09 I think you said to Tucker Carlson that kind of changed overnight at some point and then you saw Wiki kind of change with it. I wonder if you could speak on that because you know it’s not entirely your fault, I would say.
10:22 Larry Sanger: Definitely not. Well, actually, I think that the history of the media landscape is really fascinating. And this is the sort of thing where we can, if you’re old enough, you can just think back about how it has changed. If you’ve been reading enough news since or watching news since the 1980s or ’90s, then you’ve actually seen it unfold. So in the 1980s, in the early ’80s in the United States, it was that the news was entirely dominated by the Big Three plus PBS and NPR, and that was where you got your news from.
11:05 They presented a unified front. It was like a media monoculture. And then along came Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, which upset a lot of people. Of course. And then soon after that with the internet, when the internet became well, widely used enough, it actually started making a difference to the media landscape.
11:35 So that in the 2000s you started to see things like WorldNetDaily and [snorts] well, any number of other news sources. Epoch Times got a start around then I suppose, and of course Joe Rogan and others, and then they just kept building and building. Now, as we know, MSNBC, fairly early on, I don’t even know if it was launched as a sort of opinion news. I don’t think it was in the earliest days. I think it pivoted to something more like the Fox News model, and for a good decade or more it was just Fox News and MSNBC that were essentially purveyors of opinion masquerading as news.
12:34 And then about 2013, 2014 there were a number of high-profile panels at the UN and other international organizations that began loudly decrying the rise of misinformation. And this made a big difference. People I think don’t realize just how enormous that was as a sort of watershed moment of how our society really changed because after that it became like overnight okay to attack free speech as such. You know, I remember just being shocked at my URSTW liberal friends mocking free speech as “freeze peach,” right?
13:31 Back 10 years ago or so. And again overnight, basically in the days of Brexit and Trump’s first election, all of the media began to be just as opinionated as Fox News and MSNBC. It was really shocking to a lot of us of course, and I suppose the youngest adults out there today don’t even remember a time when most of the media was actually making an attempt to be more traditionally unbiased I guess, even if they weren’t succeeding very well. And so now we get to the point in 2017 I believe it was, maybe 2018, on Wikipedia a page was started called the perennial sources page and it was a list of various media sources of various kinds.
14:43 So, not just broadcast news and newspapers, but all kinds of blogs and nonprofit organizations and think tanks and whatnot. They were all listed there as major sources and they were color-coded. The ones that were color-coded green could be used without attribution except in footnotes. So the things that they said could be repeated in Wikipedia’s own voice even if they were quite biased, right? Things that were in yellow generally were discouraged.
15:22 It’s like yellow means caution and basically those things you certainly had to attribute any alleged facts to those sources. And then there were two other, two or three other gradations of credibility on the perennial sources page. There was red and gray. And if something is red, basically it’s a no-go. You’re not allowed to use those sources except perhaps to characterize what the source information about the source itself.
16:03 So you could use the source as a source of information about itself. And then the gray sources that would include things like Breitbart and any number of others. This is not to slam Breitbart. They couldn’t be used even as a source for themselves. They were in the software.
16:31 It’s impossible to link, that the software will stop you from linking to those sources. So, what happened as a result of this effort to organize the Wikipedians’ opinions about how different sources could be used. It quickly became obvious that the liberal, center-left sources could be used, or progressive sources generally speaking, unless they were extremely radical and anti-establishment, and basically all conservative sources between, again, 2017 or so and I don’t know, maybe 2021, one, they were all essentially blocked from being used.
17:27 And the only ones that are called conservative are ones that are very much establishment conservative. So, we’re talking about the Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph and beyond that very little. And that’s essentially what has happened. Basically, Wikipedia went from being an attempt to represent the broad landscape of opinion on every subject to being a mouthpiece for the establishment.
18:08 Brian Rose: Yeah. All the while without people realizing [clears throat] it was happening and all the while being pretty much the number one search rank on Google and arguably 10 times, I don’t know, maybe more. I’m curious what you think the number is, more relevant, more important, more effective at changing public opinion than any other news organization in the world.
18:32 Larry Sanger: Yes, I certainly gets a lot more traffic than any other newspaper and people do spend quite a bit of time.
18:39 I think people get more into the weeds reading articles for you know the New York Times or whatever perhaps. But no, people do the same on Wikipedia as well. I’m not aware of any studies of impact or anything like that, but I think it is safe to say that Wikipedia is considerably more influential than any other single media source, more influential than the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Times, the BBC, you know, and so forth.
19:18 Brian Rose: Yeah. I mean, I remember obviously Google when if you ever put your name, your organization in Wikipedia would almost always be in the top three. And then recently, maybe a few years ago, before the AI came in, Google would usually do a quick summary in that right upper right hand column, and that was almost always best based on Wikipedia. And then, of course, now we’ve got the LLM models, and their first go-to or the go-to that’s been around the longest is again that Wikipedia.
19:50 Larry, I remember I was on a call with like about a hundred really high-level influencers and ultra wealthy people and Alex Jones came up because he had just interviewed me and one of the guys said oh Alex Jones I just ChatGPT him and this is what they said. Dubai real estate is exploding and starts today. And I looked at him in front of all these people and I said, “Are you serious? Are you literally just going to trust what ChatGPT tells you? That’s what you think about the world?
21:08 You don’t realize there’s so much more going on?” These were supposedly intelligent people, wealthy people that that’s where they were getting their information from, Larry, from you know the ChatGPT, maybe the Gemini, which is probably taking a chunk of it from the wiki, which again was co-opted. And so I was just surprised that people didn’t know what they didn’t know.
21:31 Larry Sanger: Right. I mean we have to practice digital hygiene. I mean this is something that we should be teaching to our children routinely. And perhaps there’s a slightly older generation that developed their instincts about how to consume media back in the days of the Big Three and just expecting there to be some source that they can consume, learn what the truth is, and then just believe it. And unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way anymore.
22:08 We actually have to consume, we have to consume more sources of a wider variety I think if we want to be reasonably confident of any conclusion. And when it comes to you know our opinions of the sources themselves like Alex Jones, then of course yes we should consume them a little bit and form our own opinions. Yeah, I was interviewed by Alex Jones a couple of months ago and I was surprised that he was first of all a good interviewer and second of all he, apart from a few obligatory nods to the conspiracy outlook.
23:02 And nevertheless, it was I think an informative, interesting interview. So yeah.
23:12 Brian Rose: Yeah. It’s and look, I know I’m biased. Every human is biased, but then I also know when I try to look at something objectively, I’m like, look, Alex is a lot of things. He’s got some crazy ideas, but also if you look at his track record, he’s also got a quite a pretty good record of predicting things that, you know, would happen many years before or calling things out before they ever happened. And I just don’t think he ever gets a fair shake on those kind of woke or left-leaning places like Wiki and some of the others.
23:45 So, yeah, I’m kind of look at fairness. You know, look, I know you have some thoughts on how we can turn Wikipedia around, and I really want to get into that, but I was literally yesterday, Larry, talking with my 22-year-old daughter who’s going to school in Boston, and she was over here visiting me, and Wikipedia came up. I’m not exactly sure how, and I brought up the Grokipedia. Now, of course, I’m a little biased, okay, because I’ve been censored and I guess I am probably right leaning and I’m definitely freedom of speech leaning.
24:19 And I’m suspicious of kind of a lot of the things that happened, especially the censorship on the internet, etc. And so I said, well, Grokipedia, it’s AI based, you know, it’s clearly neutral, which I know objectively that’s not true either. And my daughter who’s, you know, look, she goes to a an institution of higher learning in America. So, you know, it’s filled with probably left-leaning views. You know, she went off on Elon Musk on one.
24:47 And I’m just trying to listen a little bit more than anything. And so, I’m curious, what do you think of Grokipedia? And I think you put out an article on that, which I kind of read through. And then what do you think of also the concept of that where people are kind of trusting an AI to tell them the truth? This kind of goes back to my opening.
25:07 You know, is truth possible in a digital information age?
25:13 Larry Sanger: So I’m kind of impressed by Grokipedia. Wikipedia should watch out. It’s still early days. We don’t know what LLMs can do ultimately through iteration, and just iteration of the current crop of LLM technology might be enough to make an encyclopedia that is better than Wikipedia. But let me get into some of the details.
25:48 So when I looked at the article about myself, a subject that I know quite a bit about, more than Grokipedia or Wikipedia, I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of facts that were [clears throat] not even in Wikipedia that had been essentially left out. So Grokipedia is not just a copy of Wikipedia. They may follow the structure of articles. That’s something that a lot of people have observed. But the fact that they are open to using a wider variety of sources makes a big difference.
26:31 On the other hand, being an LLM, Grokipedia draws inferences which it really shouldn’t. So because there is in an LLM, you know, artificial intelligence mind, a connection between science and religious unbelief. Apparently the fact that my father was a marine biologist was taken as the explanation of why I ended up being an agnostic for most of my life. Well, it’s true that I ended up an agnostic for most of my life. And it’s also true that my father is a marine biologist, but Grokipedia or the engine that generated the article falsely, wrongly inferred that the one thing caused the other when they really had nothing to do with each other.
27:29 And [snorts] so it’s interesting, a really interesting problem to figure out how to get rid of such bad inferences. There’s a lot of problems right now. It is still early days. They didn’t even go through the article enough times to catch all of the repetition. There’s like three different introductions to my PhD dissertation in the article just for example.
28:02 So I’ve looked at a number of other articles and that seems to be par for the course. The articles on Grokipedia are as well written as could be expected from an LLM. So, they have a slightly predictable, slightly turgid, long-winded style. It’s readable enough, but you wouldn’t want to read through the whole thing. It would be quite a chore.
28:36 But then that’s also true of Wikipedia. So, it’s not really doing worse than Wikipedia in that respect. But I will say this, you know, they’ve grown already by their own account, I don’t know if it’s really true, from 800,000 articles to 1.8 million articles, which I can tell you is quite an achievement. Obviously, they’ve put some very talented people to work on the project. So you know, given Elon Musk’s track record, it’s not surprising at all.
29:16 There’s one other thing that I wanted to say about Grokipedia. And that is that, I took the introductory sections of articles on 10 different topics. And I on from Wikipedia and Grokipedia, and I fed them both to ChatGPT, a neutral third party, and I had ChatGPT rate the bias of the two different articles, not telling the I did some massage to make sure that it couldn’t say which was which. In fact, I didn’t even say that it was from Grokipedia and Wikipedia.
30:01 Okay. On average, the bottom line is the Grokipedia articles were considerably more neutral than the Wikipedia articles. Now, these are political hot button topics where the Wikipedia articles are all very much biased. And Grokipedia in a couple of cases took the opposite tack essentially and was biased in the opposite direction, but for the most part it was simply less biased. And we perhaps we should talk a little bit about the very idea of neutrality versus objectivity.
30:45 That’s something that’s a hobby horse of mine that I like to talk about, is actually relevant today, I think.
30:52 Brian Rose: Yeah, let’s talk about that. Just to finish off with the X platform, I was really curious what you thought, Larry, of the Community Notes on X, you know, and this is something that Elon believed I thought was maybe the solution to moderation, which I think obviously is one of the biggest problems on Wikipedia and many other places. You could argue, you know, the editors of the New York Times have the same problems. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the theory of Community Notes is that you allow the opposition to your point of view to correct errors on both sides.
31:28 I don’t even know exactly how that’s done, but I believe it’s done that way as a way to show how neutral that is. I’m curious what you think of it and what you know about it and if you’ve actually seen that proof. And then I’d love to hear your thoughts on neutrality. [snorts]
31:45 Larry Sanger: I can’t prove that it’s successful. I can give you my opinion that it is pretty successful. So the way it works, my understanding is anyway, that when somebody submits a Community Note for evaluation then if the opinion is divided generally speaking on partisan lines then it’s just ignored. But if people who have traditionally voted against each other in similar disputes, I don’t know how that’s ascertained. Then, but they agree on this case then it’s promoted and shown to the general public.
32:37 So I actually am in the Community Notes program. So, I have some insight into how it’s working on the back end and people submit a lot of different competing Community Notes on hot button topics. And you know it’s to my mind it works well simply because a lot of times there is an objective fact that has been left out of somebody’s expost tweet. And it’s possible for large numbers of people to acknowledge that yes indeed you know there is this study or there is this news report or there is this statement by the person concerned that throws light on the situation.
33:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s helpful. It is very
33:35 Sometimes almost like a blatant piece of misinformation that might go by in kind of the maelstrom of posts. All of a sudden it’s like no, that video was not a drone attack on children. That was from a science fiction movie. Or you know it’ll just come out and say no actually that footage is of Maduro 12 months ago, not 12 minutes ago. And then it’s just a nice piece sometimes where you’re like, “Oh, oh, oh.”
34:00 And in that sense, I think it’s quite helpful. I guess maybe that ultimately could be gamed too. Because I know when you set up Wikipedia, you know, this concept of, you know, moderators, you know, it’s a bit like communism. It works great in theory. But in practice, it always doesn’t work.
34:19 So it just real quickly before you go to neutrality you mentioned various actors and I was wondering if you could talk about you know your thoughts that there are many many actors on Wikipedia from intelligence agencies globally to PR firms to all sorts of other people with agendas that spend a large portion of their time editing posts on Wikipedia, which I would argue, Larry, your average American would not ever believe that’s happening?
34:52 Larry Sanger: Perhaps not. But we are told, right? And we have some evidence of this happening, right? And so I don’t claim that Wikipedia is controlled by the CIA. No, I don’t claim that.
35:07 I’ve never claimed that. I don’t know to what extent it might be true. All I’m saying is we are told that spycraft has changed in the last generation, that previously it involved collecting information about the enemy and perhaps a little bit of propaganda on the edges through things like I don’t know Voice of America or whatever. But now we are told that spycraft to a very great extent means using whatever tools are at our disposal to affect public opinion in the interests of national the national interest, right?
36:02 And that means then that it and it has been established historically that spy agencies, and I don’t just mean American ones either, are very much engaged in the business of shaping public opinion in one way or another. Right? If that’s the case, why wouldn’t they be spending time on Wikipedia? Why wouldn’t they cultivate relationships with the most effective players, even hire them? Now, [clears throat] so I think some of that has to be happening.
36:46 And in fact, one of the former CEOs of Wikipedia is on the record essentially saying that she has engaged in conversations with government agents and [clears throat] surrounding the COVID stuff basically. So they tried to coordinate. She admitted what sort of information would be shared on Wikipedia so that it was in line, the implication was, so that it would be in line with government dictates. And that’s very disturbing to me as a libertarian free speech [snorts] kind of person when the government gets in the business of massaging what the people shall believe.
37:47 That is a problem. The
37:50 The extent to which it is actually going on on Wikipedia, we don’t know. We do know that it’s a fairly big business that you know PR firms are doing like what you have done, paying people to massage your reputation on Wikipedia. You wish you didn’t have to do so. But the fact that apparently if you can afford it, you do have to do so in lieu of being able to sue someone, which you ought to be able to do but can’t. Well that means that other entities including government and corporate entities can use the same sort of PR tactics and again surely do.
38:41 They wouldn’t be doing their job as PR people, would they? Of course not.
38:46 Brian Rose: Yeah, and it’s it’s probably great ROI whether you’re a PR person or whether you’re an intelligence agency you know. Why send 100 agents in the field when you can get 10 people online changing narratives? It just makes sense. And yeah, look, just to kind of finish out what happened to us in 2020, you know, obviously Elon famously bought Twitter and I remember one of my favorite quotes. He said, I didn’t buy a company, I bought a crime scene.
39:13 And then, you know, he put out, you know, the Twitter Files, which were pretty much ignored completely by mainstream media. And a lot of people actually never even read that stuff. But of course we were up on it because we had felt you know that censorship and it was pretty shocking what they found you know, direct requests from actually many many levels of government. I don’t even know how they could keep their heads together there in San Francisco when you’ve got you know multiple different parts of the government asking you to take this down, to quiet this person, to do this, to do that.
39:48 And I always used to joke, I can’t wait for the YouTube files because we were actually deplatformed from YouTube in ’23. After having a lot of open arguments with them in 2020, funny enough, it was actually the BBC that put pressure on YouTube to take our videos down. And so there’s all sorts of weird actors. And then we systematically were taken down, Larry. Like I said, it was Dropbox, PayPal, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube pretty much in the same week.
41:35 And honestly, I wouldn’t allow myself to think that there could ever be a single actor because I’m not some crazy conspiracy guy. That’s Alex Jones, right? So, I honestly wouldn’t even allow myself to think that. And I was angry. I was pointing fingers at the platforms themselves.
41:53 But now when we go look back, we realize that they were getting those directives from government. And now Facebook said that. Google’s now said that. YouTube settled with Trump. And we got replatformed almost 3 months ago.
42:07 And we had 2.2 million subscribers, half a billion views, a 14-year history, 14,000 videos. We were not small potatoes, and now we’re back. And now, Larry, I posted every single piece of content that in 2020 and 2021 got removed, got me strikes. I even made a movie called We Will Not Be Silenced about what YouTube did to us. That is now on YouTube and they haven’t said anything.
42:36 And so it’s just incredible for me to watch what can happen also from one regime to another. And the truth is I’ve said this to people that are on the left and I said look if Trump wasn’t elected we wouldn’t have our channel back and a lot of these things wouldn’t be happening. And I guess that also goes to show us I had someone on the left say, “Well, that goes to show you that we have to make sure these tech companies aren’t monopolies.” And I was like, “Well, that’s another way of looking at it, too.”
43:05 So, anyways, just interesting to see what happened there. I guess we’ll never know how much they pressuring Wikipedia, but also then since there’s the moderators in there, you’ll never know what was also going on on that level.
43:22 Larry Sanger: Yeah. I remember those days and being shocked at yes, there’s the full-court press against various players, you know. Yes, it was shocking. We didn’t think in 2013 and all the years before that that there ever could be such a thing happening in the United States of America. The idea that there would be a censorship regime and that we would actually have to learn the concept of censorship, of course it’s not going to be called itself it’s not going to call itself that, [clears throat] is truly shocking and Wikipedia was definitely part of that so we have evidence of that, the extent to which it’s happening behind the scenes.
44:20 The most influential people on Wikipedia seem to be pretty disciplined about keeping their mouths shut about what is going on. And I think there has to be quite a bit of quite a few paid players. There’s a lot of paid editing going on. There’s a fair number of accounts in the hundreds, not the thousands, that appear to be working full-time on Wikipedia.
44:55 Brian Rose: Must be a lot of money to be made there.
44:58 Larry Sanger: Exactly. Exactly. And then of course we don’t know who those people are and all the more we don’t know who is paying them.
45:09 Brian Rose: Right. Right. Larry, just quick as a quick aside, how do you feel about being the guy that created, you know, this incredible platform that for a while was lauded as just amazing resource and it truly was an incredible resource that just didn’t exist at the time. You couldn’t find these answers on Google. You couldn’t find these answers on YouTube.
45:32 And yet, Wikipedia could tell you so much. And then to watch it kind of get co-opted into something is probably the opposite of what you wanted. And then also have people reach out to you and blame you for that and then maybe hopefully you’ve come full circle and resolved yourself. I’m just curious what that emotional journey was like for you.
45:52 Larry Sanger: I’ve been pretty philosophical about the whole thing. I have been bothered, almost distraught I suppose, on behalf of people whose reputations even whose income has been taken a hit of course for things that happened long after I left. But I try to do what I can I suppose to help. But realistically there hasn’t been a lot, but one of the main reasons why I started the Nine Theses reform project was to again try to make a difference, to make the world a little bit better.
46:43 I think that Wikipedia, if it is improved in the ways that I’ve listed in the Nine Theses, well could make a difference to the world. Perhaps there would be fewer people lie. Perhaps the information would be fairer. And so, yeah, I think it’s important that we try to fix it if at all we can.
47:07 Brian Rose: Can you give me the dates when you were actually involved and then I’d love to get the Nine Theses or a summary of those because it seems like your theses don’t just apply to Wikipedia, right?
47:23 They apply to all information in the future.
47:26 Larry Sanger: Yeah. Basically January 2000 to March 2002. So very early days. The prior project to Wikipedia and then the first 14 months of Wikipedia itself. My involvement was absolutely key.
47:51 Not only did I bring the idea of a wiki encyclopedia to the table, I also set up the most important defining policies of the early days. So, the neutrality policy, the fact that we’re focused on an encyclopedia as opposed to many other [clears throat] things that you can use a wiki to produce, and seeking sources for information, and a lot of other rules. So in the end though a lot of the biggest changes that were made, they all happened after I left. So I can’t really take the blame for the ways in which it was co-opted from an operational standpoint.
48:57 Brian Rose: So how do we change it?
49:00 Larry Sanger: Right. Well
49:01 Brian Rose: You think it’ll be relevant in three years if things like Grokipedia catch up and LLMs come in. Do you think it still will be?
49:11 Larry Sanger: The jury is out actually at this point. It’s possible. I don’t think it’s very likely, but I think it’s possible that Grokipedia in three years will be not only larger than Wikipedia, but more provably more reliable, will have a better track record measured against the research by fact checkers etc. So, we’ll see though, right? There’s a lot that is up in the air at this point as far as I’m concerned.
49:52 So, it’s still worthwhile. I don’t think Wikipedia is going anywhere anytime soon. And it is worthwhile to spend time. In fact, I’m going to be spending time on Wikipedia this year. Actually getting my hands dirty making edits on Wikipedia.
50:13 So, just to go through the list, you can find this list on larrysanger.org. The first link to the Nine Theses. You can just find it. You can click through not just to the paragraph-long elaborations of the theses, but also to essays supporting each one. So the theses themselves have basically two parts.
50:40 There’s a problem and a solution essentially. The I’ll just go through them very quickly, maybe not even all of them. Number two is that we should enable competing articles. So on Wikipedia there are, there would be in fact many thousands of active users. Now the number of really active contributors to Wikipedia any given month is more along the lines of hundreds, not thousands.
51:19 There would be thousands of people if you enabled them to write competing articles, you know, so that if you don’t like the article about Venezuela or about Donald Trump or about gold or whatever, then you could write another one that would draw on a different framework. As I say, I won’t get into the details, but Wikipedia right now definitely uses what I call a GASP framework, which means globalist, academic, secular, and progressive. GASP, right?
52:05 Brian Rose: It’s quite a list.
52:06 Yeah. And so, it’s interesting because when you go search on Google Trump, you’re going to get articles from Epoch News. Maybe you’ll get articles from New York Times. You’ll see a bunch of different opinions and as long as you don’t trust the AI to just spit out what the truth is then that’s then you get to see different points of view and you’re saying why not have that on Wikipedia itself.
52:29 Larry Sanger: Exactly. Why not? The third thesis is abolish source blacklists. So we discussed earlier about how Wikipedia basically blocks the use of certain conservative, especially conservative, sources and anything that is remotely anti-establishment is generally blocked. That should not be and I simply advocate that Wikipedia should go back to its former practices until about I don’t know maybe 2010, 2015, of allowing [clears throat] a wide variety of sources and attributing the claims made by them to those sources and allowing the people to make up their own minds.
53:24 Obviously which is a good way of describing the neutrality policy by the way. So the fourth thesis is to revive the original neutrality policy. And a good way to sum up what the original neutrality policy was all about is when there is a point of debate or dispute, Wikipedia doesn’t take a recognizable side, allowing the user to make up his own mind based on a fair representation of all the competing views. That’s what neutrality is supposed to be. It does not have to do with objectivity.
54:10 Neutrality is not objectivity. Objectivity is like scientific, logical, rational attempt to lend reality at the joints, to carve it at the joints, and so that we have only truth and no falsehood. That’s what objectivity is all about. Neutrality is the strategy of [clears throat] the media strategy of acknowledging that people are ultimately going to end up carving up reality for themselves in different ways and we ought not to impose our views on others and we should give them the tools that they need to make up their own minds.
54:56 That’s what neutrality is about. And I’m simply saying Wikipedia has abandoned that as a policy and they should take it up again. Let’s see. Skip another one. Number six is reveal who Wikipedia’s leaders are.
55:14 So if you look at the groups of Wikipedians that have access to tools that give them more authority on the platform. I’m talking about the Arbitration Committee, which is kind of like the Supreme Court of Wikipedia. The bureaucrats who have the ability to create new administrators, administrators who themselves have the ability to block accounts. Well if you take three of the highest powered groups of Wikipedians there’s, you count them up, there’s 62 such people or there were last summer and of those 62, 85% are anonymous.
56:04 We don’t know who they are. They don’t give sufficient information. A lot of times they don’t even say what their nationality is. They don’t give a first name. They don’t give us a picture.
56:15 Etc. And maybe they are known to each other to some extent. But the point is you would think that the most powerful people in this platform which is in some ways the most powerful information platform in the world, you would think that they would take personal responsibility for the decisions that they make but they don’t, right? So I think that the Wikipedia Foundation should indemnify them, should enter into a formal relationship with such people and require that they reveal their identities and of course if somebody doesn’t want their identity revealed then they can feel free to resign from the position.
57:11 So, I think that would be very reasonable, right? The problem is there is simply no one that can be sued on Wikipedia for the abundant libel that happens on Wikipedia. So and ultimately the Wikipedia editorial staff, volunteer though it is, has to sort of grow up and own up to the influence that they have.
57:46 Brian Rose: You mentioned I know you’ve been said in the past that it’s basically become a commercial entity and it’ll probably take in $184 million in donations. Last year would be estimating that the servers are going to cost less than 5 million. I’m first of all curious. First of all, as a or does it have even more legal protections than a corp? And then second of all, yeah, what kind of questions does that bring up when it’s bringing up that much money?
58:12 Not to mention the side hustles some of the moderators might have that might eclipse the 184 million.
58:19 Larry Sanger: I think it probably does. In fact, again considering the number of PR firms that specialize in Wikipedia, the fact that such organizations are apparently pretty wealthy with offices in New York City and so forth, you would think that there are some very well-paid people who are not admitting that they’re paid at all working on Wikipedia or simply making strategy decisions behind the scenes and instructing the people who are actually in control of the accounts what to do with the accounts essentially. You know that sort of thing can actually make a big difference.
59:05 In other words, strategizing about how to deal with problems on Wikipedia can make a big difference in the outcome of disputes that are going on on Wikipedia. So, does that answer the question or?
59:26 Brian Rose: Yeah, it did. And had you finished with the main thesis that you wanted to cover or there
59:33 Larry Sanger: Just a couple more real quick.
59:36 So the general public has no way to rate or give feedback on Wikipedia articles. Why not? I mean all the other big platforms do. You can’t rate Wikipedia articles. Why not?
59:53 You would think that there would be a big system for peer review on Wikipedia outside peer review. There isn’t one. Why not? Okay. And then
1:00:05 Brian Rose: So it’s so unique because it’s so old, Larry. It’s because started it back in 2000 that before any of that stuff happened and since it became so relevant and so important,
1:00:16 It’s almost like it it got grandfathered in, you know, to where it didn’t have to do those things and now it doesn’t need to. So, it doesn’t. But you’re right, it’s extremely archaic in internet norms.
1:00:30 Larry Sanger: Right. Right. Right. And even by 2002 when I was like after I left as the chief organizer of Wikipedia, I still made a proposal back then to basically make a review role for experts and it was thrown back in my face. So, Wikipedia even at that early date had become very insular.
1:01:32 To see what others never will.
1:01:38 So, and then finally, I would say that to adopt a lot of these sorts of changes, it might ultimately be necessary for Wikipedia to adopt a legislative process, which they have never had. There is no editorial board. There’s no editor-in-chief. There’s no one at the controls, so to speak, of Wikipedia. And you can say they like it that way and that’s how it’s supposed to be.
1:02:05 But the fact of the matter is when it comes to making significant changes, needed changes to the way that Wikipedia is run, it really can’t be done institutionally. You have to follow this very arcane, disintegrated process which ultimately doesn’t have the authority to make big changes like allowing competing articles. Like how is that gonna really ultimately be made official even if a bunch of people on the platform want it? Ultimately, I think perhaps it would have to be the board of trustees of the Wikipedia Foundation.
1:02:58 But there isn’t even any established process for those people to make editorial changes. So all I’m proposing is that there be an editorial assembly so-called that would actually have the authority, the institutional authority to make needed changes to Wikipedia. So why not
1:03:28 Brian Rose: Who could push something like this through? I mean I’m thinking of Google. I mean what is their relationship with Wikipedia? Could they come out and say, “Look, you know, we’ve made changes in our YouTube. We’ve made changes in this.
1:03:40 We’ve made changes. We’ve addressed the errors that Gemini made when they depicted the founding fathers as African-Americans, and now we want to address what everyone says about Wikipedia. Lord knows we support them with our search.” Is that the For me, that seems like the only type of entity that could push something like that through unless it was legislative from DC. Curious for your thoughts on that and what their relationship is.
1:04:08 Larry Sanger: It is rumored that they have a very close relationship but probably the basis of such rumors is just the fact that Google has given to Wikipedia quite a few million dollars. I don’t know what the total sum is over the years. Right, I don’t think it would be Google that would make the you know they might propose a change, get behind it. I think legislature, legislatures of various countries might actually propose and get some you know whip up public support.
1:04:50 I think a lot of you know grassroots public support of the idea might make Wikipedians rethink the idea but ultimately the entity that would adopt such a thing would be the Wikipedia Foundation. They own the platform and they are ultimately responsible for the rules that the platform operates under whether they like it or not. [clears throat] Whether I mean the Wikipedians like it or not, they don’t in fact like the very suggestion that the board of trustees would actually impose something from above on them.
1:05:39 They rebel strenuously against any such thing. Of course, I think a lot of that is kayfabe, a fair bit of that going on. Nevertheless, yes, I do think that the board of trustees ultimately would have to get behind this and the board of trustees in turn could be influenced by various players, governments, whatnot. So I don’t really know what the way forward is. I can say this.
1:06:21 I have heard from a number of different you know famous people who have said that they would sign on to a letter of protest against Wikipedia to the effect that they take issue with the way that they have been treated by the platform and how the platform is run. And I think that if [clears throat] copies of that were sent to the board of trustees and Congress and other entities, a high-level public discussion could begin. And it doesn’t just have to take place among the lower rank and file on the Wikipedia platform because Wikipedia is really that influential.
1:07:24 It’s actually the sort of thing that kind of demands a diplomatic international solution. I almost hate to say that. I shouldn’t put it that way. It doesn’t demand such a solution. And it would be better if it didn’t have to be subjected to it.
1:07:42 I’m just saying that if the problem cannot be solved in any other way then perhaps some pressure will eventually have to be imposed by governments. And again I am about as strong a free speech kind of guy as you can imagine. So I don’t like the idea of the government stepping in and saying you shall adopt the following policies. But one thing that is very possible is, and that is to make a legislative carve-out out of Section 230 for the Wikipedia Foundation.
1:08:29 So, the Wikipedia Foundation has basically been relying on Section 230 to allow Wikipedia to be an engine of defamation. They apparently like it that way. And that ultimately is a creation of the government, right? The fact that the Wikipedia Foundation cannot be sued for the libel that occurs on the platform that they own is something for which Congress is responsible.
1:09:09 Brian Rose: Yeah, very much so. You know what would do it quickly, Larry, is if Trump sued them, then it would probably change things quickly. I mean, again, he did it to YouTube, he did it to Facebook. They quickly change policies. And sometimes it’s the catalyst that gets them to update their system to something a bit more current.
1:09:33 Because if you wait for Congress to make the change to 230, that could be decades, it seems.
1:09:39 Larry Sanger: Right. Right.
1:09:40 Brian Rose: Larry, you mentioned decentralization in the past. We spent the last four years pretty deep into the blockchain community. We’ve invested about $25 million into various startups. I’ve had the big players on like Michael Saylor and the rest and of course blockchain talks about how decentralization is the future. And again they’ve even tried to start social media platforms recognizing the problems that we face with what they call these Web2 institutions like YouTube and censorship is one of the perfect examples.
1:10:14 Of course, you know, blockchain has struggled to gain as much momentum as we had wanted. And sometimes the decentralization without a clear leader stops progress if I’m honest. And this concept of a DAO or a decentralized autonomous organization, again a bit like socialism, in theory sounds good, but sometimes you need a Steve Jobs at the front cracking the whip to get things done. And I’m just curious if when you thought think about decentralization, have you looked to some of the things happening in blockchain and what might you have in mind?
1:10:48 Larry Sanger: I actually worked for Everipedia back when it was called Everipedia for a couple of years and helped them get an encyclopedia. Well, it’s actually after it was started, but to work on some of the policy and to promote it. The idea of a blockchain encyclopedia is interesting. But there [clears throat] are issues with it. We don’t need to go into the details there.
1:11:23 I do have something that I think is quite relevant here. The idea of decentralization is great because it implies freedom if the decision-making authority to you know set policy and decide which content is going to be published is spread out. Then everyone has a a role to play. And that is empowering to people. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
1:12:02 But most blockchain companies are in fact not decentralized in any meaningful way. As a matter of fact, they like to talk about having a decentralized network, but most of the actual activity is going on on their servers and nobody else has made a copy or very few others have made a copy of their data or anything like that and they ultimately have control. You know, we were talking about decentralization long before crypto was a thing at all and crypto simply co-opted that.
1:12:46 In fact, Wikipedia itself, I remember I used the word decentralized applied it to Wikipedia itself on the theory that it really mattered that people could work on Wikipedia as and when they wanted to without taking orders from any one entity. Right? So, it’s decentralized in that sense. I actually think that true decentralization really is empowering. It’s just that there’s not a lot of money in it, right?
1:13:23 If you want to make a lot of money, generally speaking, it’s hard to know how to do it short of Bitcoin. And something that has an objective, provably objective value. And you know that really never was the point of decentralization. You know, back in the 1980s, ’80s and ’90s and the original web the internet itself is decentralized and that was the reason why internet libertarianism was so big, especially in the 1990s was that the internet was radically decentralized.
1:14:14 Anybody could register a domain name and you couldn’t tell people what they were going to put up there if it was unless it was illegal and then maybe they would be investigated by the FBI or whatever. But yeah and so what I think needs to exist as far as a free decentralized encyclopedia is a network of all of the encyclopedias. And I actually have started such a thing. I call it the Encyclosphere. Take off of the blogosphere, right?
1:14:51 And the idea is we we make copies of all the free encyclopedias. There are more than just Wikipedia. And we put them in the ZWI file format. ZWI means zipped wiki. It’s like a zip file, but it’s for wiki content.
1:15:12 Collect it all in one place but then allow anyone to make a copy of that. And we’ve actually proven that you can have ZWI files shared with each other and different selections of encyclopedias held by different servers. So about a half a dozen people have done that. That would be a truly decentralized encyclopedia network. And again, people aren’t going to get rich from that probably.
1:15:46 Maybe somebody will find a way. But it’s the public commons. See, that’s the thing what we have forgotten, I think, is that true decentralization is simply the public commons. That’s what it is. And well, if you think to your basic economics, the commons is not a thing that people ought to be able to especially profit from, right?
1:16:17 If you are, then you’re ruining it. That’s the tragedy of the commons.
1:16:21 Brian Rose: I think that we’re very early still in blockchain and you know I know some of the players that are out there building you know education and the one thing about the blockchain that’s beautiful is its immutability and you know for example Satoshi Nakamoto inscribed you know on some of those first blocks back then I think it was the front page of the FT when there was the financial crisis and you know that can never be taken away if someone in North Korea describes can actually validate a block on Bitcoin they could actually inscribed something in there that can never be taken away.
1:16:54 We know the Wayback Machine on the internet can be tampered with. At least that’s the rumor. So, you know, that in itself, in addition to what you’re talking about with the decentralization, could prove extremely valuable in the future when it’s in certain powerful interests to literally erase history. And look, I know a lot of the players and there’s been ups and downs and it’s a very volatile volatile industry by nature of it and the price, but I would see something 10, 20, 30 years from now definitely being decentralized with a blockchain component that would be information based.
1:17:30 Larry Sanger: I’m sure it will h it’s I’m not ruling it out. I’ve never said that it’s impossible. It’s just that I think what the whole blockchain community is fighting now is the bad reputation of all the shitcoins,
1:17:50 Right? So, yeah, and that’s really hard to it’s hard to persuade responsible investors to part with their money after being so many people being burned.
1:18:07 Brian Rose: Yeah, so it’s interesting. I’m reading a book right now called 1929 that’s unfortunately written by the very leftist Andrew Sorkin. But it’s an interesting tale of what would happened a hundred years ago and it’s fascinating to hear about all these bank failures that happened and all these local banks that weren’t very well capitalized and people lost all their money and you know things we would never conceive of, Larry, where in the beginning of the banking world that was something that was much more common and so yeah look it’s been an ugly few years in blockchain and it’s a shame because it’s such a beautiful empowering technology but it’s had its ugly years like I think a lot of things do in the early days.
1:18:48 So yeah, I’m optimistic. Look, I wanted to close on learning a little bit more about your spiritual journey. You know, you don’t hear a lot of philosophers that end up, you know, becoming spiritual. I don’t think either one of us are spring chickens. And I’m finding in my later years, I’m much more open-minded to the concepts of religion than I was when I was 12 years old and my mom dragged me to Sunday school.
1:19:15 I even owe grace sometimes at the table and my kids are looking at me like who is this guy? Just kind of curious if you could tell us about your journey and you’ve been public about it and I’ve also noticed there’s a real emergence of that in America from Tucker Carlson to you know Donald Trump of all people who would probably tell you he was the last guy that was religious. Maybe being shot at helps but I don’t think it’s just that either. And there seems to be a real resurgence of that, maybe even globally.
1:19:45 Dubai’s ultra luxury property deals surged tenfold in 5 years. That’s a 25% there and keep watching the world go by.
1:20:19 Larry Sanger: I think you’re right. When I was in the process of conversion I was noticing this already on X that already there were a number of people not just high-profile people but people who were announcing that they were turning to Christ. So I was an agnostic for three and a half decades basically from about the age of 14 or 15 and until well, 2020.
1:21:57 And I’ve always regarded myself as first and foremost a philosopher. All three of my degrees are in philosophy. And very early on in my life, I made it my life’s goal to seek the truth essentially. And I thought there was nothing more important that people waste their lives away and destroy their lives because they believe false things ultimately. And for that reason I thought it’s extremely important to make sure that we know what we believe, why we believe it, and that our reasons for our beliefs are correct.
1:22:52 But as a result I became a skeptic, methodological skeptic. In other words, I as a point of methodology, I simply was agnostic about everything and that of course included God. I thought that the arguments for the existence of God were not very good. I still think that the arguments for the existence of God individually are not very good. But taken together actually they are remarkably good, which perhaps I can explain.
1:23:25 But let’s just to make a very long story short and people can read this on my blog on larrysanger.org. How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian. I think that’s what it’s called. It’s about 45 pages, so long form short book. But it’s free.
1:23:51 And I got married and I noticed that I would be willing to die for this woman. And I had a couple of boys and I noticed that I’d be willing to die for them. Now, when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I fancied myself something of a follower of Ayn Rand. Not not too much. I wasn’t, I was a skeptic after all.
1:24:18 So I didn’t really go in for everything that she said. But it was interesting because I did tend to think that ethical egoism was [clears throat] correct. Ethical egoism is the view that if you want to understand why we should do what we should then ultimately the only explanation is in terms of our own rational self-interest. Right. And it seemed to me it was not in my rational self-interest to sacrifice myself for my boys.
1:24:52 I will have no interests if I’m dead. Right. And yet it’s the right thing to do. Well, that means then that I’m acting in their interest and they actually have a value independent of me. That’s very important.
1:25:11 And so because Ayn Rand, as influential as she is, a lot of people I think, a lot of libertarian types became well unbelievers whether that you know agnostic or atheist due to her influence. But here I was, I was like rebelling against Ayn Rand’s influence there. I said well what else was she wrong about? Similarly I thought I had no concept of God at all. Like what was the idea of a creator who with a thought brings something into existence from nothing?
1:26:00 I have no concept of such a mind because my mind can’t do that. All my mind can do is like, you know, grab something and pick it up. And that’s what my mind does. It sends a signal to my hand and, but that’s not creating something out of nothing. So I have no concept of what God is in his most essential activity of creation.
1:26:27 And then we started thinking about the whole idea of a you know virtual reality of a ring world type scenarios where technology after this singularity has developed for a billion years or something like that. What really would be possible with mental prosthetics, brain prosthetics, then with a thought perhaps you could make a planet pop into existence. And then I said, well, if I can conceive of that, am I not conceiving of God? So basically, one by one, the various reasons to disbelieve fell by the wayside.
1:27:11 And then the straw that really broke the camel’s back as far as my resistance was concerned was the Epstein stuff which I was apprised of in 2019. I didn’t realize, I mean it’s absolutely news to me that there were any number of high-profile pedophile rings. It’s not just some and you can learn about these in the mainstream media. And they aren’t talked about as much as they should be to my way of thinking. It’s you know human trafficking including the trafficking of children for sex is a thing and the people who are involved in it, I as a friend of mine impressed on me, have let’s just say a strange sort of religion and at least some of them, some of them I’m sure are merely you know creeps, and he was pushing these various occult books on me and saying if you really want to understand how they think then you need to read these things and I said well being a skeptic I think such things could be true and I didn’t believe any of them because again I’m a skeptic but I left open the possibility that there might be a spirit world for example and I said well if I’m going to read these I’m going to take them at all seriously, then I’m conceiving of the possibility of a world in which there really are demons and whatnot.
1:29:02 And in which case I want to keep any such spiritual doors firmly shut and I know that I would be on the side of the angels in that case. That’s for sure. So I said, I finally concluded that if I were going to read anything along those lines, it would be the Bible itself because the occult is an inversion of, a twisting of a reaction to the Bible and to Christianity and traditional Judaism. So a few months passed by and December 2019 I decided just as bedtime reading not actually related to anything any of that directly I decided to pick up the Bible and I at first I thought I was just going to read a little bit here and then but I now and then I got really fascinated it just in a few days and after a few weeks I was had adopted a 100 day reading plan or 90-day reading plan.
1:30:18 Took me a 100 days. And by the time I had gotten through it by spring of 2020 I believed that God exists. I rethought all of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. So I have a PhD in philosophy. I used to teach philosophy of religion and I was entirely aware or familiar with the main traditional arguments for the existence of God.
1:30:48 But the following thought basically occurred to me. There’s a lot of thoughts that have occurred to me on this that really made a difference, but the one that made the biggest difference is the best argument to draw from something like the first cause argument that the universe could not have just sprung into existence all by itself. It doesn’t make any sense. Had to have some sort of cause. Isn’t that God exists, which is the cause?
1:31:19 Because that just doesn’t follow like what’s God? All right. It’s all that follows from that is something that is independent of the universe of what we call creation would have [clears throat] to have some sort of explanatory relation to the universe, right? And it would have to exist necessarily. But the thing is this is the thought.
1:31:49 If you combine that conclusion that there is a necessary being that its activity whatever it was created the world. If you combine that conclusion with the conclusion of many other of the traditional arguments for the existence of God the whole can serve as what philosophers call an argument to the best explanation. So the idea is there is an explanation [clears throat] of all of the data which when people are thinking about religion they sooner or later acquaint themselves with right, and that is that not just God but the God of Christianity exists.
1:32:37 I’m now writing a book. I’m like 650 pages into it called God Exists. And I don’t have a publisher yet. I’ve actually had offers to publish it, but it’s too long. And I’m not going to make it shorter.
1:32:57 So I’m finishing writing this and then maybe I’ll write a popularization. But I’m just basically recording the sort of philosophical grounds on which I have changed my mind about God. But since then, took me 5 years to pick a church. But I’m now in the conservative or traditional branch of the Anglican church. In the United States it’s called the Anglican Church in North America.
1:33:31 And I go to church every Sunday now and I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord and that he died for my sins and that that’s one of the most important and worthwhile ways that we can spend our time is to read the Bible, to study it, understand God’s word to us.
1:33:55 Brian Rose: That’s incredible. My daughter’s actually a philosophy major, so I’m sure she’s going to enjoy listening to this. They say a sign of a man’s intelligence is how often he can change his mind. So yeah, my congratulations because very few people would be able to do that and it gets harder for most people the older they get, you know. I think it’s a really healthy sign.
1:34:18 It’s one of the core principles here at London Real. I’ve had so many people come on my show that I fundamentally disagreed with, Larry, that my skin would bristle when they would go on their diet tribes, but I always tried to get myself to shut my mouth and listen to their point of view. And I almost always would find myself changing my mind months, years to go past to consider these opinions. And that’s why we’ve always had conversations with different people.
1:34:50 And that’s why I was always shocked when people tried to silence us because I thought you really do want to listen to as many points of view as possible. Again, the solution to what people call bad information is always more information, never less information. So yeah, great to hear you say that. Yeah, I remember when Dr. Jordan Peterson came on my show in 19 and I look I was a student at MIT and you know there’s a lot of religion going on at a place like that and I was always very scientific.
1:35:20 Okay. Maybe I was too co-opted into science at some point. But throughout this show I’ve had some great experiences with people like Dr. Jordan Peterson who at one point he said Brian he’s like the stories of the Bible are in our DNA. He said something to me like that and it just really took me back and I thought wow these are it’s almost like human technology.
1:35:41 These are lessons that are built into who we are as people and you know they’re kind of reflecting back to us who we really are and so I’m still on my journey obviously but it’s constantly changing and it’s quite fascinating and I think it’s really good for people to hear people like you talk about that. So yeah thank you for that. I love the title. Nice and simple. And I like the fact you’re not going to make it any shorter.
1:36:07 Larry Sanger: That makes me happy, too. My mother read it. I was shocked. I mean, she never reads anything that I write and especially if it’s like philosophical. And she said she read the whole thing.
1:36:22 So, yes. I was amazed at how viral it was. You can never tell what you’re right is going to go viral and I definitely did not expect this to but it did.
1:36:38 Brian Rose: You know it’s an interesting time, Larry. You know, some would argue that we stopped, you know, we stopped, you know, worshiping deities and we started worshiping, you know, concepts and, you know, we replaced, you know, following religions with following, you know, other forms of thought, right? Feminism, different parts of science, etc. And maybe deep down on an unconscious level, collectively, we’re all realizing that maybe that’s not right. Maybe we’re not finding what we’re looking for and maybe we need to revert back with something that kind of been fulfilling people over thousands of years and we’re created, you know, to fill this need.
1:37:21 So, it’s an interesting time and we’re seeing it now play out on social media and the more people talk about it, it seems like there’s more people listening. So, yeah, very interesting times.
1:37:33 Larry Sanger: Yep. I think that there’s been a backlash against socialism in the last generation and especially in the last 10 years since Obama made it socially acceptable on the left to you know advocate for socialist policies. You know one of the basic things that has been said about socialism generally is that it makes a god of the government or of society. And some of the backlash that you describe could be a backlash against that. Our notion that you know the sort of rituals and core values and credos that we accept are determined by some anointed class of social organizers.
1:38:46 Essentially a new kind of priestly class of socialists. You know, that can appeal to perhaps some some young people and to collectivists generally. But for those of us who have actually paid attention and reacted as they should in my opinion to things like the COVID nonsense. That really helps us to you know reorient ourselves like the idea of a government or media or some professional anointed expert class as it were lording it over us is simply wrong. Right?
1:39:42 And if we’re throwing that away, if we’re rebelling against that way of organizing society, then there is a god-shaped hole in our souls and in the way that we interact with each other. I think the Charlie Kirk assassination and the reaction to it sort of
1:40:16 Brian Rose: Yeah. No, it’s I was just thinking of Turning Point when I was just talking about this resurgence and I mean 10 years ago, you couldn’t conceive of something like that happening of young people especially rallying around the conservatism and the religious aspect and people outpouring like that and it’s a beautiful thing and I’ve had many many different discussions you know over the years about this and it’s always illuminated me each one more and more and more.
1:41:17 I mean, some argue that the basic tenets of the United States of America, you know, only only apply if it’s based on a layer of religion. And without that, you know, none of that stuff applies. You know, it applies on the assumption that we’re going to behave in this Christian manner. And without it, you know, that the principles kind of fall out the window. And other concepts that I had never really considered or pondered because they didn’t come up in my history books at school.
1:41:47 So, yeah, I think whatever you do, Larry, you’re going to have to do a podcast series alongside the book. Is that a deal?
1:41:54 Larry Sanger: Well, I appreciate that. I’m actually this year going to ramp up my blog at least. I have never actually monetized my videos, my blog, or my X posts, and I’m finally doing that. And so, you’ll probably see me do some more podcasting eventually. I don’t know if I’d be very good at I don’t really have the face, you know, for it.
1:42:21 Brian Rose: I think there’s a lot of examples of people without the face that are doing great. So,
1:42:25 All right.
1:42:26 But yeah. All right. So, if people want to obviously read your blog posts and your extended ones, it’s larrysanger.org. Other ways for them to follow you or stay in touch with you
1:42:38 Larry Sanger: On X, L Sanger. But beyond that, well, yes, there’s the Knowledge Standards Foundation. If they want to put their name on the mailing list, we don’t we don’t spam you, that’s for sure. That’s at Encyclosphere, just like it sounds like encyclopedia but it’s encyclosphere.org and if you’re a developer we might be starting some new projects or you might pick up where we have left off on our Mattermost forum and you can find a link to that on encyclosphere.org or but that’s where any sort of activity for the Knowledge Standards Foundation is taking place on the Mattermost forum.
1:43:33 Brian Rose: All right, fantastic. Larry, thank you so much for your creations and also your objectivity about your creations and then these ideas and your theses on how we can turn it all around. Such an important time right now, especially as we start leaning more and more on these kind of one-stop shop, one answer LLM. We need to really maybe condition ourselves to like you said look for the three different articles on the new generation of Wikipedia or ask the LLMs their sources, not just to worry about the hallucination factor but also making sure that we really get the truth in a world that’s getting more and more digitized.
1:44:12 And sometimes I laugh to myself I mean Alex Jones calls his show InfoWars, the future will be an information war and that’s pretty much all it will. So, your ability to discern the truth, your truth is probably going to be the single most important thing. And, I think your thoughts on it are excellent. So, thank you so much, Larry. Appreciate this.
1:44:32 And, all the best with the new book.
1:44:35 Larry Sanger: All right. Thank you. I appreciate it.
1:44:36 Brian Rose: Excellent. Take care, everybody. We’ll see you next time on London Real. Bye.
