Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network. So, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. You just came up here from the UN. And I have to ask, what were you doing at the UN? Well, this morning, I just popped by a session. It was a session of of women leaders. Sharee Blair gave a speech. It was a lot of, first ladies mainly from Africa. And you. Places. And, well, it was a large lecture hall. I sat in the back and tried to be inconspicuous and listen in. Why why did you go to that? Well, I just they they invited me, and it looked like an interesting, session. And, the the one in particular that I was interested in is, oh, dear. Some it's a bad plug for them, but I liked their project. No mothers die. I think that's what it's called. Nomothersdie.org. That's a that's a a worthy cause, it sounds like. So yeah. It's No one could disagree with that. Maternal mortality. Right? It's pretty universally most people, you may think, I had a friend of mine, a Saudi Arabian friend, she said, you know, maybe people think, well, we should have more children, less children, whatever. Pretty much nobody wants them to die in childbirth. So it's a very easy global issue that everybody can get behind. You you can't picture a Wikipedia style, argument of editors, you know, going way deep on on this issue. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Because, I mean, you can always for an issue, you can say, oh, it's a great issue, but, is it the one we should really be focusing on, and what's it gonna cost compared to other things that might be more economical and save even more lives? Whatever. I mean, there's always that type of argument. I have no idea what the facts are in this case. But Well, it seems like you do well, let's reel it back a little bit. Wikipedia and I even wanna reel back further than that. How did you I mean, you've created I don't know if it's the 5th largest site in the world, the 6th largest site. There's different numbers all over the place. Created one of the largest sites in the world, clearly one of the most used sites in the world. Where where do you come from? I I don't know if you like comic books, but I always enjoy knowing the secret origins of the superheroes. So where did you come from? I know you're from Alabama. Yeah. Yeah. And you you graduated high school early. Yeah. Yeah. From Alabama. Quite a geeky kid and, did graduate early. Although, I didn't skip grades. I just started early. Mhmm. My mother and grandmother ran a small private school, and I just went to work with my mom and then just started kindergarten, early and just kept going. And and that was that. But, yeah, it's actually interesting because I think a lot of my worldview, and personality, I can see now being shaped by various factors in my upbringing. So at that time, of course, in Huntsville, Alabama, where I was growing up, is where the Space and Rocket Center is. And after World War 2, they brought Wernher von Braun and all the rocket scientists over. And it was where the I didn't know that. They all lived in Alabama? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They brought them to Huntsville, to do the scientific development of the Saturn 5 rockets and and sort of the moon shots and all that. And so, because of that, the space program was like our hometown sports heroes, you know. And so growing up, I mean, where I grew up, sometimes the windows would rattle in the house when they were testing the Saturn 5 rockets, nearby because they're they're quite powerful, and we live close enough that it would rattle the windows. So, yeah, I have that kind of a memory, and so it led me towards a scientific and technological kind of upbringing. But then again, it is still Alabama. It's not, it's a it's an unusual place, Huntsville. It's kind of a an oasis because many, many people are there from other parts of the country. But still, it's very polite and nice, and I'm a nice person. And, you know, I think that personality, trait does come from sort of a very southern hospitality kind of perspective. So yeah. So do you think that I mean, so you refer to yourself as a nice person, and Wikipedia almost feels like a different sort of well, there's there's an obvious way it's a different sort of site in that you're not having a $200,000,000,000 IPO. So that's that's been brought up infinite times with you in interviews. We don't have to go over it clearly. Wikipedia is a a a great and free thing, and it would ruin it if it somehow had ads on it like no one would use it. But where do you think, you know obviously, at some point, you wanted to make money and then you that this switched. And and I'd like to think, and you could correct me if I'm wrong, that it came from just the the beauty of seeing something you create grow so organically, I think that provides much more pleasure in some ways than just seeing a bank account grow. And I may be wrong or right. I don't know. I don't know. That's that's that's pretty good, actually. I mean, the thing is, there is no sense in which I am opposed to making money. I think it's you know, they're well, there are dishonorable ways of making money, so it's never should be the most important thing. But I think an honorable way of making money is a great thing. But for Wikipedia, it really is almost like, an artistic statement. I mean, it's something, I think, culturally is very special. It says something upbeat about human beings that people will devote a huge amount of time, and passion trying to get it right and make it better and share with other people. And I don't mean to be too utopian about it. We have our internal quarrels and squabbles for human beings. There's definitely internal dystopias with the Wikipedia. Yeah. Exactly. But, but actually, what's interesting about those when when they're going well, you can have quite a heated debate, but with a real sense of respect and also that, hey. We're all working together trying to make Wikipedia better. So at the end of the day, let's honor that. It doesn't always go well, obviously. Sometimes people just get nasty and and it's ugly. And hopefully, they kiss and make up a few days later. But Which which sometimes doesn't happen, but I think that's interesting too. Like, when the fights by their nature are also interesting. Because if you view history as written by the winners, Wikipedia is different from that. In that winners and losers, if you wanna call them that, are both there equally Yeah. Sharing their opinion and information. Yeah. I mean, the yeah. That's that's you know, history written by the winners, you know, tends to talk tends to be a statement about economic and, more importantly, governmental control of the history curriculum and so forth. Whereas now it's written by everyone. History is written by the Wikipedia. Because of Wikipedia. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, you get really interesting people from all sides of a question. Hopefully, we get nice people from all sides of question so that we have a civilized, discussion and not just screaming at each other. But, you know, some issues are quite emotional, and and it's hard for people. Yeah. And, you know, emotional doesn't seem as bad as when it's, malevolent. You know? So when people are, like, just trashing people's pages for spiteful reasons. Yeah. But if it's an actual fight over opinions or or whatever, that could really again, the fight itself is history. Yeah. I I remember a few many years ago now, I remember a a really prominent early contributor who would do fantastic work in, as I would assume, they would call biology or something like this. You know? And he was great, very friendly, very nice contributor. But if he got anywhere near Israel Palestine oracle, he just couldn't behave himself. He just was he was too emotional about it. And in a not in a negative way. It just the issue meant a lot to him, and it was very hard for him to not get exasperated with people and so forth. Yeah. There's probably I you know, I was talking to one person about this. There's probably a couple dozen issues where you have to be on one side or the other. You can't even, you can't even say a balanced point of view because both sides then will hate you. Yeah. That's true. There's a there's a few. But, I mean, you know, in general, like, what one of the things we have a lot of success with is what I call going meta. So you can imagine a a very kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a very kind and thoughtful planned parenthood activist, and they're never gonna agree on Right. The issue of abortion. But they're able to step back from it and say, okay. Look. I understand Wikipedia can't advocate for my position, but we can accurately describe. So we can say we don't say abortion is a sin. We say, according to the Catholic church, the following position, and the pope has written this, and critics have responded thusly. And, actually, kind people can do that. And at the end of the day, what's interesting about it is sometimes the the most ideological people are the most comfortable with that because they just think, look, if you had a neutral explanation of the topic, obviously, you would read it through and you would agree with me. Mhmm. And it's people who are less certain of their own beliefs. They're actually fearful that they might be wrong are the ones who get nervous about even hearing or allowing the other side to speak, because I think they're afraid they'll hear something that causes cognitive dissonance. That that's interesting because both both issues that you just brought up, one was the Israel Palestine issue. The other is, you know, basically pro life versus pro choice. Both those issues involve somebody thinks somebody is killing somebody incorrectly. So you would think that those would be violent issues, violently discussed. And I guess in some cases, they are, but you're saying and sometimes Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're alright, you know. And and part of that has to do with, having enough people in the community who care more about the idea of Wikipedia and, the idea of trying to be a neutral place than they care about any specific issue. Well, let's talk about the idea of Wikipedia because, obviously, when you started it, it was just a site with a few articles by definition. So how did you get that I mean, you you you created the dream of what every site builder in in the universe wants to create. You you created this enormous viral community, and now you're in the top 10 websites in the world. So what what kind of do you think contributed to that initial viralness? What what recommendation would you have if somebody wanted to have a a site equally viral? Yeah. I mean, well, there's a few things. So, one of the interesting things about an encyclopedia is that one article, just a stand alone article, I if you write a good decent article about, I don't know, polar bears, It's actually useful. It's useful even if the rest of these encyclopedia isn't even written yet. It's just a good article about polar bears, and people will find it in a search engine and so forth. So that was one key is that the site became useful for people who stumbled upon it before it was comprehensive. We've had a dictionary site, and, actually, a dictionary is actually not that useful until it becomes comprehensive because, you know, you you go to a dictionary, you look up a word, and if you've only got a 100 words in there, it doesn't really help you that much. So, I think that, you know, that ability to be useful from day 1 is really important. And I think, you know, so we think about a viral community like Facebook. People always talk about network effects. It's more valuable the more people are on it. And that's true for sure. But with Facebook, it's act it's only true for, like, for me, it's about 500 people. Right? It's not it the the Facebook must have added, I don't know, let's just make up a number, 10,000,000 people in the last month. Has no impact on me because I don't even know those people. Right? It's that smaller group. So Facebook was able to be very useful, say, at the Harvard campus from day 1 because suddenly well, yeah. I don't care if the University of Alabama is not on here yet. I don't even know anybody there. So that's a part of it is being useful very early on. I mean, another thing that I think is a real factor with Wikipedia is that people, they feel that it's a valid use of their time. And they think, gee, I'm spending time here. Should I be wasting so much time on this? And they think, well, yeah, I'm making the world a better place. It's a good thing to do. I could have spent the last 4 hours playing World of Warcraft, but instead, I sort of tried to fix all the, you know, incorrectly placed commas across a bunch of articles or something like that. I guess so. So you're saying somehow word got out that here's something useful you can do with your time and kind of geek out on it as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And then also, you know, things like, it was much more of a prominent and interesting phenomenon in the early days is that if we if if somebody makes a link to something, but we don't have it, it's a red link. And so you would in the early days, you would see lots of red links and some blue ones. And quickly by clicking, you say, blue. That means it's there. Red means we don't have anything yet. So then when you're reading, you suddenly go, coffee. Oh, wait. I know about coffee. No one's written about coffee. Coffee is a beverage. Save. You know? And it was fun. And there was that kind of So some gamification. Yeah. Except this is before anybody invented the term gamification. You know? And I I actually have a lot of beef with a lot of what goes on under the title of gamification. Why is that? Even though it's like a natural status hierarchy sort of thing. I I just think in I mean so I always concede it just doesn't work very well on me. So I get it if other people enjoy it. But for me, if you go on, I don't know, let's say Foursquare, I think they have points so you can become the mayor. I actually kinda like becoming the mayor. That's kinda cool. I've never done it anywhere. But, you know, but badges and, you know, congratulations. You just got 90 points. Like, what the f**k do I need 90 points for? I mean, there's no meaning to me whatsoever. Oh, you've moved up the leaderboard. Of what? I it doesn't because it a lot of the gamification doesn't connect to anything real. It only connects to the biology in your brain. Like, so where as mammals, we wanna climb up. You know, chimpanzees, you're at one status or you're at another status. So there's any hierarchy you're in, you wanna climb up or down. Yeah. But if you if you think about suppose you had a a job in an organization, and every day, you had to wear a badge that had a number on it that tells how much people like you or not. That sounds like a pretty hellish place to work. That is that's work in general, though, your your job title. Yeah. But without the badge, right, then you you can say, you know, it it becomes more human. I think a lot of gamification involves putting numbers on things that are you can't sum up in one number. You know? You can say, you know, this person, you know, they're they're maybe not the most brilliant person, but they really work hard, and they're very nice, and they're a good team player. And I like that about them. Or you can say, this guy is brilliant, but he's kind of an a*****e. And that's a problem because we've got work to do, and we kinda have to put up with his a*****eness to get his brilliance. I said so you get these complicated human judgments that are very hard to sum up in, you know, 4 stars on a gamification bad Right. But it but it seems like it it come to think of it, you've spent your life avoiding gamification. Like, you've gone from I don't think you've ever had, like, a quote unquote regular job. I mean, you were an options trader for a while. Yeah. Yeah. That was kind of a regular job. Right. But still your work. Your your ups and downs weren't based on your job titles based on, you know, how your trading was doing. Yeah. Yeah. No. That's true. That's true. And, yeah, I always say, you know, I'm very fortunate in my life to have become somehow successful because I'm really quite a bad employee. You know? I just I get up every day and I do the most interesting thing. And that's a problem in life, but it can be also an amazing thing in life. And, so, you know, it it leads to, issues like, you know, not really having the right constitution for climbing up a ladder per se because you've gotta do this and that and and tick all the boxes and so on. And I'd just rather do something interesting. So So so, you know, when when it was clear that Wikipedia, it was a bad idea to turn it into for profit, you did start Wikia, which, is a for profit company, which many companies use to create their own Wikis and so on. How's that going? I mean, Wikia's doing fantastically well. And, it's I mean, that's a bit of a misdescription, actually. So Wikia is is not generally companies starting their own Wikis and and things like that. It's more communities of fans. So Like Wikipedia for Star Wars? Wikipedia. Fantastic. And, I mean, it's one of the most brilliant names My favorite. That they ever came up with. But, you know, we've got, like, the Game of Thrones Wiki and and all those. And for video games, obviously, we've got a huge, swath of those. And it's any communities of fans who wanna document something in excruciating detail, And it's doing very well. We're according to CoinCast, we're ranked about number 20. Uh-huh. Pretty popular. Well, have you ever is there any kind of a search engine that switches across all the Wikis out there that are public? Because that would be that would that would be pretty good, I think. That would be interesting. No. I mean, I think you could probably at Google, you could probably type your search term and then site colon wikipedia.org, site colon wiki.com. That would get most not all of them, though. Yeah. I don't know. It's a good idea. And what what's your plans with that? Like, are you gonna eventually are you just gonna keep growing that? Are you still heavily involved with the company? Yeah. I'm I'm somewhat involved, but I'm not, so we've got a CEO who's in California and staff, and I'm I'm I'm involved mainly in helping promote it and things like that. Mhmm. I'm a member of the board, but I don't have any day to day management responsibilities. Actually, I don't have any day to day responsibilities at all. So, you know, I'm it's pretty independent of me at this point. So I just sort of go to the board meetings and cheer everyone on. They're doing great work. And, Yeah. I so current plan, just keep growing. We just raised a bunch of money, doing joint venture in Japan to try to grow the Japanese site, things like that. And you're you're also very active on Quora, which in some ways also reminds me of a I don't wanna say it's like a for profit Wikipedia because it's not as comprehensive. It's not an encyclopedia, but it's a way for anybody to log on to a site and contribute and provide answers and help people. And the accuracy is unclear, but as more and more people get involved, the accuracy gets better and better. And it's a for profit company, but it acts like a not for profit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, essentially, because one of the things I think Quora has done a good job of is that they have a general tone and attitude in the community that's pretty nice. So it's there's I mean, people get in fights everywhere. They're human beings. But generally speaking, you'll see people you know, somebody asks a question, somebody answers, and and then somebody comments on it. And usually, the comment is not, you're a f**king idiot. You know? And usually, his comment is like, oh, you may have overlooked this or also to consider that. And it is interesting because at some probably people say, oh, does it compete with VP? Not really. It's a question and answer site. Most of it's about, evaluations of opinion, which are perfectly valid. I don't mean mere opinion, but, you know, things like I mean, I just answered a question recently, something like, you know, if I had $50,000 to spend on a car, why would I buy a Hyundai? And I said, well, I own a Hyundai. So, I and I said, and a lot of the first answers were sort of why you wouldn't buy a Hyundai. And I said, no. They asked why you would. So let's give all the positive bits of that. And, you know, it's just fun because then people responded, and it was just a nice conversation. And it it's kind of a there's so many nasty places online, that it's nice they've been able to to manage that. But that is a good example of a site where there is a lot of gamification, which I basically just ignore. So you get credits for people uploading their answers, and and you collect the credits. And, interestingly, I don't think they have a leaderboard. So I don't think you can No. They don't, specifically. Sometimes people ask the question, who has the most credits? And then somebody wrote a script to sort of hunt through the site for high ranking people or whatever. So, you know, as you say, humans like to do that sort of thing. But for me, it's a good example of, like, okay. Well, there is this point getting thing, but I don't really care. And and you can set your price to answer. So if I wanted to get credits, I would just boost my price up. But, actually, I usually keep it set to 0 unless I'm really busy. I do as well. Yeah. Because I just think if I don't like your question, I wanna answer it. And if it's an interesting question or fun, I wanna answer it. I don't care if I get any credits for it or not. Like, what's the point? I don't even know what the credits are for. So, so yeah. And and I like it. I I like that you never know who's gonna pop up and ask you a kind of a funny Yeah. There's a lot of fascinating people on on Quora who have signed up. Now on on Wikipedia, what would you say have been, the most intense battles? Like, have you had to get involved in kind of, disputes on Wikipedia? Yeah. I mean, I'm always involved, in policy and, sort of trying to help with disputes and things like that. But, I mean, in the in the categories themselves or in the topics themselves. Yeah. I mean, really, really tough ones, have are are usually about things that are a bit possibly surprising to outsiders. So people assume we're gonna have a big fight about George W Bush or something like that, but, you know, that's actually pretty straightforward. You know? You've we know what it means to be neutral. You're gonna have to say some of the criticism, say some of the praise, make sure you've got everybody covered. It's not that hard. The hard things are really, like, editorial matters, sort of matters of editorial style. So, you know, debates about oh, there was a big big argument about the m dash versus dash, which is a there's 2 different kinds of dash characters. And if you're a real, like, you know, font geek, it really upsets you if you use the wrong one. That's funny. And then, you know, there was a whole sort of brawl about that. There's, you know, arguments about, you know, fairly arcane matters. Like, what do you call well, this is one of the classic ones is, what do you call the rivers in Poland? Most of the rivers in Poland are known in English by their German names for historical reasons. This is very upsetting to some Polish people. And and there's some evidence that that's changing, that the mainstream sources are beginning to sort of refer to the rivers in Poland by their Polish names. And so when do we change, or how do we do that? How do we refer to that? What's the right style? Could there ever be, like, a vicious cycle, though, where editors are just constantly deleting each other's stuff and then it goes on forever? Yeah. I mean, so one of the things that that is British versus American English. Mhmm. And they're, you know, I say our our basic rule always say is please relax. But there's more details to it. Like, don't just I mean, 1st and foremost, don't just go around changing from one to the other because it's just annoying to everybody. Like, if that's your life's mission to fix Americans' bad way of writing, just don't do that or vice versa. And if an article has been started using one language version, unless you've got a good reason, just leave it that way. But then there's things like topics that are quite specific to that country. So if, you know, if you're writing about, the British labor unions in the 19 fifties, probably you just wanna have British spelling in that article. Why not? It's a mainly British topic, and most of the people are gonna be expert on it speaking British English. So we have a diversity there. And it usually doesn't erupt into too big of a quarrel, but sometimes you get, you know, sad little fights about stupid things. Now it it seems like, you know, Google is really, in many cases, just the middleman between the human and the information they wanna get, which is on Wikipedia. So if I wanna know about Jimmy Wales, I typed Jimmy Wales into Google, but really, I'm I'm going to Wikipedia to read about Jimmy Wales. And, I mean, you're the you're the number one search result, I think, in about 60% of Yeah. Search terms, and then you're number 2 or 3 probably in the in the rest. So so kind of a criticism of of Google is that Wikipedia is the real search engine in most cases. And, it seems like given that's the case and given that there are so many businesses built on top of helping people optimize their sites for Google, I'm surprised there's not more businesses built on top of the idea of, helping people optimize their sites for Wikipedia. So for instance, and I've seen some marketing companies do this to optimize their clients for their Wikipedia pages, make sure they're mentioned on a lot of other Wikipedia pages. So there are some business models there. I also think there's an education business model. Like, if I could tell my kids, don't go to school. Just read 10 Wikipedia pages a day, and I want you to edit 1 Wikipedia page a week. That's enough school you have to do. I think they would get a better education. That might be. I don't know. Well, on that first point, it's something that we do we struggle with a lot because there's a lot of that kind of behavior goes on that's really quite unethical. And, including a lot of lying, pretending to be someone you're not, etcetera. Yeah. Because there's a there's a trick of, if I mention something on, let's say, Huffington Post, now I have a citation, which I can use on a Wikipedia page. Like, that's the kind of classic manipulation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that it's yeah. It's interesting. I mean, depends on what where it is on Huffington Post. If it's just your personal blog on Huffington Post, that probably wouldn't be much accepted as a story. Right. But yeah. I mean, really, if if people wanna influence Wikipedia, their their best bet is to try and influence the news. And the best way to influence the news is don't do bad things that get reported on. But, yeah. But, I mean, I do think that there is room for companies to do things that don't happen nearly enough, to enhance, their Wikipedia presence, without being unethical. I mean, one of the one of the classic things to do is, you know, get some really good photos of your CEO and release them on your website under a free license. And then just ping the Wikipedia community saying, hey. You don't have a photo of my guy. This one's under a free license. Do you want it? And then people go, yeah. Sure. Great. So now, oh, you've got a nice photo there. And, you know, so there are a lot of things like that. Certainly, you know, people who are, have some kind of assets, pictures, photos, product photos, that sort of thing, just release them under free license. And we might not use them, but we might. And in the meantime, if we do, then, you know, it makes a nicer presentation. So there's that kind of thing that people can do. But a lot of the a lot of the people who are in that business of trying to help people with Wikipedia are really selling snake oil in the sense that, basically, all that somebody should have done is just emailed Wikipedia and said, hey. There's something wrong with my entry. Okay. We'll look at it, and we'll fix it. You know? It's very simple. Instead of having to pay someone to create, you know, 30 fake accounts and pretend to be who you're not, just don't go there. It's, like, really bad place to be. What what about the idea of making a curriculum, like a MOOC around, Wikipedia content? Because, obviously, you have probably better better or more up to date information than many colleges and high schools. Well, I mean, I I think there's some some really interesting things to be done there. So, you know, if you if you think of a topic, that you would like to know more about I mean, for many of us, know, Wikipedia is the first port of call. So lately, I've been slightly obsessed with Ebola as it's been erupting and so forth. So I ended up reading not just, you know, we have an article about the 2014 epidemic, but we have the article about Ebola virus itself. But I what I I didn't go any deeper than that because I wasn't sure where I wanted to go or whatever. And if there were a MOOC where somebody, you know, is sort of a 5 hour lesson, an hour you know, 5, 1 hour sessions where before each session, the, you know, the biology professor who's presenting it says, here's your prerequisites. You gotta go read these 4 Wikipedia entries, and this, article or whatever, a couple of other things. Great. And then I go and I watch the video, which is them sort of explaining something, but I've got enough background. And they said, okay. Now I brought you up to the point where, you know, you know, it's a hemorrhagic fever. I need you to go read the article on hemorrhagic fevers, and we'll talk tomorrow about that. Everybody's worried about, is it going airborne or not? Okay. Well, here's 5 entries about methods of transmission of viruses. Go and read that, and then we'll have a discussion about that. That sounds really cool. I mean, I would do that. I would spend 5 hours doing that, plus the extra several hours reading the Wikipedia entries. And it would be great to have that kind of guided tour in a way. Yeah. And it seems like you could actually modify Wikipedia to add kinda like FAQ or prerequisites or I mean, a Wikipedia page could be written that way. There are some things. We we don't do a lot of that, but there are some interesting things, like, we will say, you know, this article is a part of a series on, the UK government. So if you go to the House of Lords page, there'll be a internal info box on the side. This is as part of the series, you know, the monarchy, the House of Commons, you know, the court Supreme Court of the UK, etcetera. And so we do kind of say, oh, here's a group of articles on a topic. If you're trying to learn about the UK government, here's a set of, I don't know, 15, 20 articles that you might wanna read. That's kinda nice. So so in some sense, Wikipedia is like open source, universal information. Where do you see this kind of going or just in general the the future of the Internet? And you've discussed this before, but, like, where do you see this all going? Like, what's what's the next steps? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think some of the next steps are going to be invisible to most people, because it's the growth of Wikipedia in the languages of the developing world. So you may never notice, you know, what's going on in Kazakh Wikipedia, but it's going on there. And that's You have more Wikipedia pages now in other languages than English, I think. English is still number 1. But, yeah, by far, there's about, I haven't looked recently, 4 and a half 1000000 English and 30,000,000 total. Yeah. And the percentage of Wikipedia that is English has pretty much always been in decline. You know, in the early days, it was 100% because I set it up in English first, and then it started declining. And then there was a point when it was no longer 50% and no longer 20% and so forth. And Because because of the rise of all the other languages. And so what else can we open source out there? You know, what can be the next kind of Wikipedia? You know, there's sort of like an open source for code. There's now there's open source for information. Do you ever see something like, an open source identity, you you know, sort of like how Facebook is a for profit company for identity connection. I wonder if there's a a not for profit way to open source that. I mean, people have tried. You know, there is the the OpenID stuff that people have been doing. It's successful as a standard, but it hasn't been successful in terms of there being some kind of distributed identity network that allows you to easily sign in and say, oh, this is who I am, simply because I think Facebook had the resources to get there first. So, you know, it's very common now if you go to, lots of blogs and you wanna leave a comment, you have to log in using Facebook. And they made it really easy. You just go click, and then I'm on, and then it's fine. And it it doesn't a 100% verify your real identity, but it's pretty good, and that's all you really need. And so that complex sort of idea of how would we do it in a distributed way or a nonprofit way never really got the chance to happen, because actually Facebook works pretty well for that sort of thing. I think that when when I think of that question, what are the next things that could be done in an open source way? One of the ones that I'm really interested in, and I've been talking about it for a long time and it hasn't happened, so maybe I'm wrong, but maybe it's just not time yet, is, production of video and, in particular, animation. And there's some rumblings of this online now. But the idea is let's say that I'm, I wanna create an animated film to compete with, you know, the best of Pixar, something like that. So maybe I've written a script, and I think it's pretty good. And some people read it, and they go, yeah. That's really good. Could I get together a community of people? Some are artists who can draw. Some have experience with rendering software. We can put together all the pieces. Somebody programs how the bird flaps and what are the open source. So there's Blender, which is open source software for doing this sort of thing. There's a Blender community. I think they're bubbling up and doing some interesting things, but so far, I haven't seen I mean, the Blender Foundation, which is the sort of nonprofit that manages the Blender software, they've done some really cool projects, but they were really done in a more or less traditional ish way. Got, like, you know, a 100 people working on it, lots of volunteers, lots of freelancers, but it's, you know, it's kind of a core group. And they're directing it from the top, and they got funding to do it so they can pay for certain elements of it and so on. And they've produced some very nice shorts, you know, 15 minute, movie that's every bit the quality of a Hollywood animated film. But we haven't seen sort of, like, 5 of those a week being created in the same way that we see Wiki pee Wikipedia entries being created or random, you know, funny meme pictures being created. It's always gonna be harder, but I just think there's a really interesting possibility of folk culture coming. And, you know, possibly rather than somebody writing a script and doing it, maybe just start out with a script that already exists. Let's do an animated version of, Hamlet, and just do a fantastically rendered, Hamlet. And it's something everybody can understand what it's supposed to look like, and somebody organizes it and and truly done in a community way with no money involved. And at the end, you sort of release to the world this, 3 hour masterpiece of the sort of the greatest animated ham, whatever. Seems like Wikia could could start to do stuff like that. Yeah. No. They do. I mean, I Or or Rap Genius also could start to get into that area. I mean, I think I think it's, to some extent, it's gotta it's gotta come from that community, and it will bubble up from that community eventually. You know? Group of people get together. And I mean, part of that has to do with things like, the the the speed of computers and rendering software. Do you need a a render farm of 100 of computers? Well, actually, these days, you could just go to Amazon. Yeah. You know, e c 2. I mean, it's gonna cost you a little bit of money, but not that much to get a 100 computers for a couple weeks. Everybody could chip in a bit of money to to do the rendering piece, or, as computers get faster, you just you do it at lower quality. And, you know, there's just lots of things that it the pieces are starting to fall into shape. Even, like, you know, sharing. Okay. Yeah. So we've got a rough cut of the phone. Everybody go download it. It's, you know, 4 gigabytes. Well, in the old days, that was, like, a really kind of pretty heavy thing to do, but so was downloading a movie from Itunes, and now that's quite routine. So the more people who have fast enough bandwidth to upload and download you know, if I if I take a picture and I wanna send you a picture, I just I send, you know, here. Here's a here's a picture. If I've got, like, an hour and a half long movie, I don't just go, hey. I've just emailed you a movie, you know. Just, you know, click on it and watch it. No. It's a big process still. That stuff is gonna you know, it's faster and faster bandwidth. It just starts to go away. I'm I'm always trying to think of, like, business models. Given that, so this is one type of model. Given that Wikipedia has gotten so huge, you're suggesting maybe some ways of having multimedia parts of Wikipedia where you can upload, like, a script and then people can do different things or even rewrite or Yeah. You know? I mean, I think for Wikipedia, Wikipedia, some of this is fairly limited. I mean, I I think making animated films is, mostly about fiction and so forth. But I just But, you know, there's, like, fanfiction.net, which which has, like, a Wikipedia like feel to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the I think I just think we're not done yet. I think I think right now, things are bubbling up that so, I mean, this is encouraging people to think about this, particularly young entrepreneurs who are, you know, may feel like, oh, god. Everything's been invented already on the Internet. Is to think about this. You know, I just went on sort of a random chat about animated this and that and the other. So all everything you needed, all of the technology to create Wikipedia existed in 1995. And Twitter. And Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Twitter is another All all the biggest sites. Yahoo. Everything. Yeah. And what we didn't have is the but but I wanna focus actually, Twitter's in it. I've never made this analogy with Twitter, but I'll have to think it through. But with Wikipedia, you know, the Wiki existed. The software already existed, you know, in a basic form, but it was there. Databases, web you know, everything. But it took 6 years for the social construct to be invented, really. Like, how do you organize people? How can people organize themselves? What are the conventions you need to be able to make an encyclopedia in this way? So, similarly, I think all the pieces of the puzzle are there for doing a collaborative Pixar movie, but nobody's managed to get the social bit. Nobody's managed to organize a group and figure out how do you do that. And, I mean, I do think a big part of it is, the free licensing, because, you know, nobody you know, if I say, hey, everybody. I'm gonna make this fantastic movie. Who wants to volunteer their time? And And then at the end, you think, and then I'm gonna sell it to the you know, I'm gonna make a $1,000,000,000 off a Pixar movie and not share the proceeds back. That's making people upset. And even in fact, if there are gonna be proceeds, it's hard to, like, how do you come up with a formula for contributions and who how are you gonna share it? It just it drives you in the direction of the firm, you know, of of starting a company and hiring people. Right. It's a valid way of doing it. But instead with free licensing, you just go to write. It's completely up source. Anybody can copy it, redistribute it, modify it. We're gonna create all the assets. We're gonna create the characters. We're gonna make sure that the character, you know, the the modern day Winnie the Pooh is not owned by the person who created it. I mean, there's an interesting thing. There's a have you heard of this, Slenderman? No. So this is, it it bubbled up from, I think, from Reddit or maybe from another one of the image. Anyway, I think it's from Reddit. So it's a it's a folk legend by a group of people who set out to create a new folk legend. And a lot of it has to do with editing old photos and and to bring this kind of frightening looking guy. He's about 8 feet tall, always in a dark suit, dark glasses, normally near children, and it's all kind of creepy. And he's way off in the background, and the pictures are actually kinda cool. And their stories, you know, child goes missing, and and everyone reported that they just saw Slenderman in the background. How do you spell Slenderman? S is like Slenderman. Okay. Because he's tall and slender. And it's actually as I understand it, it's a play on Enderman, which is, one of the monsters in Minecraft. I don't really know why why that started, but it oh, no. Maybe the Enderman is named after Slenderman. I think that's what it is anyway. Something like that. I'm not an expert in this area. But what's interesting is it became it's become quite popular as a meme online, and there's a lot of fan fiction and stories. And now, apparently, Hollywood's gotten interested, and somebody wants to make a Slenderman movie. And the question is, who owns the rights to this? And because that community was very casual about it, it's just a bunch of people goofing around online. It turns out, I think the guy who initially created the character on the word is claiming ownership of it and actually has done some legal work or something. I don't know all the details. But the point is that it's causing a lot of angst in that community. That's something they thought was ours commonly, that we're all playing around with this idea and it's folk culture. Turns out somebody owns it, and that feels weird. So, I mean, I think the next iteration on that, people say, actually, let's be really careful to make sure that when we start doing this as a collective project for fun, we're gonna make sure everything's under a Creative Commons license, that the basic framework, legal framework is there so that we can keep it as folk culture. So so so let me ask you. So you've you just came from the UN. Obviously, you're not it doesn't seem like you're totally hands on in any one project. There's Wikipedia. There's Wikia. There's your charity projects. What do you do all day long? Every day is kind of different. I Yeah. You travel a lot. Right? I travel a lot. When I'm in, London, I there's a certain type of day I have, which is I go in and I work with my assistant for a couple hours going through emails and, like, things and planning. And then I send her away, and then I get I do work online with the Wikipedia community mainly. That's what those days are like. So so sorting out issues, at the high level of Wikipedia? Yeah. Just, you know, talking to people about ideas and and quarrels. I'm I do a lot I do a lot of different things. So every day is different from my other day, which I which I really like. And, well, not every day, but many days, I see a post from you, and I'm a massive fan. Oh, good. And there's always a dramatic look at the beginning, and I'm like, oh, this is gonna be good. And I set aside some time, and I read sort of your latest thing. And I really like it. And I think, I see my assistant, the one I normally send away after 2 hours, waving at me that I have to leave in 5 minutes. So I wanted to take a minute to tell your fans a bit about what I see before me. So he's got, like, a notepad, like, anybody would A waiter's pad. But it's a waiter's pad. It's literally a waiter's pad. Tax total. Thank you. Please come again. He's got questions written. And I think I saw you say the other day, you keep a waiter's pad. Yeah. Because because I I didn't I wasn't thinking of that with the text and tip. I just thought I thought it was just a white No. Because think about it. You can't write a whole novel on this. Right? So if you're if you're if you're taking notes, you could only write bullet points. Yeah. There's, There's lines. There's a tables at the top. Yeah. So if I'm sitting in a conference room, I can kind of write the names of the people around the tables. Wow. And, it keeps me focused on on what I'm thinking. And if it's only 10¢ a pad, it fits in my pocket. Amazing. So it works. It's a good it's a good little life hack. It should be like a life hack pedia. There could be, actually. I'm I there might be something like that at Wiki. I don't know. It's a good idea. Well, what's the I actually used to have this idea for a Wiki, and I've never managed to actually pull myself together and try to start it. Thought it'd be cool to have a site. I think I actually owned the domain name for a while. I don't I don't think I have any more. Spy skills.com. It's not about murdering people and poison. It's just, like, cool stuff, right, that James Bond would know how to do. So so suppose you're suddenly you're you're you're seated in a helicopter and you gotta fly. What basically do you need to know? I just think it's cool. I could have used that when I was getting divorced too. Exactly. Well, what's what's your biggest thing? What would you like to promote? You guys do you want people to use Wikia or keep on using Wikipedia? I'm I'm I'm working on the phone company now, the people's operator, but we're only in the UK, so it's a bit early to promote to everybody. But 10% of your bill goes to the cause of your choice. 25% of the company's profits go to charity. And the only way we can afford to do that is by cutting out the marketing spend. So we say to you, look, you can sign up with, Virgin, and they'll spend a huge chunk of your money on TV ads and billboards, or you can sign up with us, and we'll send that same amount of money to the Red Cross or whatever charity you care about. And then in return, what we want you to do is sign up your friends and family. So it it it's doing very well in in in the UK, and we're planning to expand globally, but we're not there yet. So I'd also to promote it really. I'd also encourage people to think of how to use Wikipedia in education. Because it seems like we were talking about developed countries. It seems like a lot of places where there aren't schools, there's still Wikipedia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So That's true. That's true. So this is a school unto itself. Yeah. No. It really is. It really is. And, once I was in India, and I was in Sangam Bihar, which is a squatter, area in Delhi. So the people living there, it's it it's on its way to being normalized now. But at that time, they were just squatters, and they were there. But they've been there for decades, so nobody's about to kick them out or anything. But there were no schools. And there were the the parents create local private schools. So, anyway, I met this young man in the street whose father owned the private school there, and the dad was there and so forth. And he said, oh, Wikipedia. Amazing. You know? He's like, I used it to pass my, my 11th form exams, and I also use it to find pickup lines for girls. Yeah. There's a lot of uses of Wikipedia that you discover. Education. That's the beauty of an organic community. So, well, thanks very much, Jimmy, for for joining us. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Right. Super. Oh. For more from James, check out the James Altucher show on the Stansbury Radio Network at stansburyradio.com, and get yourself on the free insider's list today.
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