Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #266 - James O'Keefe BANNED On Twitter, Will SUE w/Wikipedia Ex-Founder Larry Sanger

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Tim, Ian, and Lydia host former founder of Wikipedia to discuss the suspension of James O'Keefe from Twitter, Wikipedia's practices surrounding information relegation, ultra-woke tribalists and their roles in editing Wikipedia, Conservapedia's unique form of its own bias, and Pfizer's new instruction for people to receive a third vaccination, even after the completion of the first set of shots. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They finally got him. James O'Keefe, they got him. He's banned off Twitter. He's still on Instagram. But Twitter has permanently banned James O'Keefe. They recently permanently banned Project Veritas. And now they've come for James himself. And this is where it gets interesting. I think James is doing the right thing here. He's announced he's going to be suing Twitter for defamation. Why? Twitter claims the reason he got banned was for operating multiple fake accounts or something to that effect. And James says, I didn't do that. That's a false statement of fact. And now he's suing. And I wonder why no one's done this before. And it made me question some of these other individuals. There have been people very prominent who have

been banned from Twitter. And then Twitter says they run fake accounts. And then I'm like, OK, sue them because they're clearly lying. Right? And then these individuals are like, oh, well, you know, I'm not going to sue. So it makes me wonder. This time, James is like, no, I'm suing. So I believe that James is telling the truth. This is a ridiculous ban. I don't think he was doing anything untoward on Twitter, but they banned him. So here we go. Interestingly, we have more James O'Keefe news because he announced he's going to be suing CNN as well. So the dude is, look, Veritas is going above and beyond their scope of work and it's good. They're literally fighting the good fight. They are not only exposing the media for their lies, they're actually taking the fight to the courts. And in one of their recent

legal victories, the New York Times, the judge ruled that if the New York Times wants to claim they're writing fact based news, but then they inject opinion stands to reason they should be informing their readers. And thus Veritas won, defeating a motion to dismiss. I got to say, watching all this stuff, James O'Keefe might be like one of the only prominent leaders, in my opinion, when it comes to conservatism, actually doing something, winning battles and challenging the system. So my respect. We're going to talk about all this, but we actually have interestingly perfect timing. It's just so weird. This happens all the time.

Synchronicity. We try to book guests and we'll be like, what's a good date? And so we have the ex-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger. Would you like to just give yourself a quick introduction, Larry? Sure. Well, what should I say? I grew up in Alaska. All three of my degrees are in philosophy. My claim to fame or infamy is starting Wikipedia. I've worked on a long series of nonprofit and educational projects, and now I am the president of the Knowledge Standards Foundation. We'll talk about that, I guess. Ex-founder of Wikipedia.

So suffice to say you're not happy with the way things went with Wikipedia. Yeah. No, I'm also one of Wikipedia's leading critics now. I'm not happy with how it's gone. The reason I say it's interesting timing is that there's an overlap in the space of how Wikipedia operates, how fake news manipulates information, how big tech companies are banning people. So we'll get into all that. Larry, thanks for hanging out.

We got Ian. He's chilling. You do have Ian Crossland. And welcome to my psychoactive experience, otherwise known as TimCast IRL. Magnets. And I want to tell you about the magnetic monopole. If you're not familiar, it's a theoretical or hypothetical magnet that's not found in nature, but it only has one pole.

And so it has the magnetism facing in one direction. I think if we can master the magnetic monopole, we'll have levitation. Now, Ian is a co-founder of Minds.com as well. Yes. So this should be good. We'll talk a lot about the censorship and the fake news. And of course, we got Lydia. She's chilling.

I am in the corner. I'll just be nodding along tonight because this is way out of my wheelhouse, but I'm really excited to learn about all this stuff. My friends, before we get started, head over to TimCast.com and become a member to get access to exclusive members-only segments of the show. Yesterday was a hoot. We had Jack Murphy and Seamus Coughlin from Freedom Tunes, and at one point, Jack Murphy said he loved Ian. Oh, thank you, Jack. Now, if you want to see that, you've got to go to TimCast.com sign up and uh which we're working on the site we're making it better you can see now

right at the top there's a members area you can just click it we made it easier for everybody to find and we're building things out because we're gonna be rolling out a rolling out a bunch of new content we're bringing a news editor a paranormal subjects matter editor it's gonna be a lot of fun content new shows we got a vlog already produced we're gonna upload it make the new channel it's gonna be fun with your support it'll get even better. So do that. But don't forget to like, share, subscribe. And if you're listening on iTunes or Spotify, leave us a good review. Leave us five stars. It really does help. And tell all your friends how awesome this show is. And thanks for being here. We broke a million subs last night. And everybody, you guys rock.

Let's jump into this first story. So definitely we're going to get to, I want to get into the nitty gritty of Wikipedia because I have ragged. I was basically ragging on Wikipedia and then you tweeted at me and then I was like, yes, let's talk about Wikipedia. But we do have some breaking news that I want to get into first. From the wrap, Twitter permanently suspends Project Veritas' James O'Keefe. O'Keefe says he plans to sue the platform for defamation following the suspension.

Twitter permanently banned James O'Keefe Thursday. The Project Veritas founder spent the preceding days posting videos taken of a CNN employee without that employee's knowledge, in keeping with his organization's practice of covertly recorded content, but in violation of Twitter's policy. O'Keefe, who had over 900,000 followers at the time of his suspension, told The Wrap that he plans to sue the social media platform.

Quote, The account you referenced, James O'Keefe III, was permanently suspended for violating the Twitter rules on platform manipulation and spam, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed. As outlined in our policy on platform manipulation and spam,

you can't mislead others on Twitter by operating fake accounts, and you can't artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts. That's an interesting statement to make because now James could sue for defamation, assuming it's not true. The rep declined to elaborate on the claim that O'Keefe was running multiple fake accounts, including how many he was running or how they were used in a statement.

O'Keefe said, I am suing Twitter for defamation because they said, I, James O'Keefe, operated fake accounts. This is false. This is defamatory and they will pay.

Section 230 may have protected them before, but it will not protect them from me. The complaint will be filed Monday. That reminds me of Watchmen. Have you ever seen the movie Watchmen? Yeahmen yeah i have or read the comic at all uh i think i did once a little bit of it anyway it just reminds me of when rorschach is in prison and he's like i'm not trapped in here with you you're trapped in here with me and it's not a good one-for-one analogy

but basically they started a fight with somebody who was looking for a well i shouldn't say james was looking for a fight but ready to win a war yeah he only goes to war when he's gonna win that's what i've learned about james o'keefe he's been going to war he's been going to battle i should say to win this war so you may have heard he sued the new york times oh yeah now now he's also going to sue cnn so here's the next bit of this story which will get us into the talk of censorship and fake news and things like that. James is, according to Newsweek, James O'Keefe to expand his war on CNN with lawsuits, more video, controversial undercover journalist and scourge of the left. So sayeth Newsweek.

James O'Keefe appears to be waging a full scale war on CNN that includes not only the undercover videos he's known for, but also a series of planned lawsuits against the news network and its anchors over issues that may not even involve him or his nonprofit organization. O'Keefe told Newsweek he will soon sue CNN and two of its journalists, Brian Stelter and Ana Cabrera, for defamation in a report about Twitter permanently banning Project Veritas. The February segment featured Cabrera accusing Veritas of promoting misinformation and calling a group of conservative actionists activists, none of which O'Keefe says is true. Twitter reportedly banned Project Veritas over an anti-doxing policy after the group confronted a Facebook executive outside of his home.

In the same February segment, Stelter claimed Project Veritas violated multiple rules. Meanwhile, O'Keefe posted video of CNN. So this I think most people are familiar with. Here's a statement from James. He said, we are suing CNN, Brian Stelter and Anna Cabrera, and we are going to represent others in defamation suits against CNN. We are going to launch a division for lawsuits, O'Keefe told Newsweek. I wonder where he got that idea.

I like that idea. I believe we brainchilded that here on the show. Well, his is a little different, but when he was on the show, we talked about the People's Defamation Defense Fund or something to that effect. So when these news outlets start writing fake stories, there is an advocate to protect you from the media, the smears. As we get into this space where everyone's a public figure, it becomes harder and harder to sue. For instance, Nicholas Sandman in the Covington Catholic case, they argued he was an involuntary public figure because someone filmed him standing on stairs and now he was in the public spotlight. It's insane.

We've come to that point where basically no one is protected anymore. So if Project Veritas is doing it, I'm stoked. This guy's winning some battles. There's a huge need for it. And I can only say that they eventually helped give the same treatment to Wikipedia. Frankly, there's been so many people who have been defamed by Wikipedia. And there hasn't been any recourse. I remember back in 2006, I think it was, or 2007, something like that, John Siegenthaler Sr., the father of John Siegenthaler Jr.

I believe he's a co-founder of USA Today or something like that. And the Tennessean, he was the publisher or the editor. Anyway, very distinguished gentleman, elderly, retired. And, you know, they had essentially defamed him by saying that he had, you know, gone to live in the Soviet Union back in the day or something like that. And it was bad and it was totally false. And he basically criticized me over the phone back then. And I felt bad. I really did. It's like I took personal responsibility, and that's one of the things that made me realize that, you know, real people are harmed by this sort of thing.

When did you – so, look, you know, I guess in the context of James and all this. Yeah. So look, I guess in the context of James and all this, I think he's someone who has seen the lies and the smears firsthand for a very long time. Sure. I mean, so I went to Wikipedia and I looked up Project Veritas, and it says definitively they produce deceptively edited videos. And I'm like, what's the source for this? And I click it. It actually links to like 24 different articles. The problem is the word deceptive is an opinion not a statement of fact but wikipedia is an encyclopedia supposedly showing you the facts so i i think for james he's he just finally was sick of it and said let's go to war and start

fighting back which he is i'm curious i mean that that story about this guy from yesterday that was that was the first moment you realized that, you know, defamation was occurring? Of course, I knew that there was defamation going on before that. But he really brought it home to me because he was actually a victim. And he was a distinguished old Southern gentleman. And he was criticizing me personally. So that's what really made it hit home. It didn't matter at the time

that I was actually starting a competing website. I still took responsibility for Wikipedia. So I don't understand why James hasn't launched a nuke against Wikipedia right now. It says on Wikipedia, Project Veritas, Purpose, Disinformation. Wow.

Outright. Yeah, there's a far right activist group. The group produces deceptively edited videos. Yeah. So I think this is 24. It really damages his reputation. And the thing is, Wikipedia does that to a lot of people now, right?

And they're hiding behind Section 230. They're hiding behind that protection. There is absolutely no recourse that anybody has due to the legal framework in which Wikipedia operates. I've known about this for a long time, you know, and I just, I have wondered, you know, how, what's going to actually, what's it going to take to change? And maybe it's somebody with relatively deep pockets and lots of rich friends actually going after them in a big way.

And you don't seem particularly, well, I haven't known you that long, but you don't seem particularly biased, right? I think you tweeted in defense of James O'Keefe about him getting suspended. Sure. Well, in defense of him being suspended. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. In defense of him in relation to the suspension saying James should not have been suspended. Well, absolutely. Yeah.

I think he shouldn't have been suspended. Just recently on Twitter. But I mean, I wouldn't agree that I'm, that I'm unbiased. Well, what I mean to say is we all have our biases. Yeah. But you're not, you don't appear to be a tribalist, like staunchly defending the conservatives for any reason. No, absolutely not. So that's why I think it's important to make the distinction we're talking about what Wikipedia was supposed to be.

I can only imagine what your original vision for it was and how it strayed from that. At least that's my opinion of – Can you tell us about it? Like when did you start it? How many of you were there and what was the vision? Right. Well, I don't know. How long do you want me to go into this?

Because it's a long story. We have a two-hour show. We need 10 minutes. I'm thinking about it when you're 17. Like, where did it come from? Okay. Well, I won't go into too much detail, but I'll give you, because this is a big enough platform, probably a lot of people who are listening to this have not heard the story. So I'll just tell it again.

Basically, I got to know Jimmy Wills in the mid-1990s. He ran a discussion group for fans of Ayn Rand. Really? Oh, yeah. Wow. And well, he used to be a hardcore objectivist slash libertarian. And well, we can talk about that later, whatever. And I actually, I got to know him a little bit. I wouldn't say that we ever became friends, but we were good acquaintances and we were friendly. And I actually met him in person a couple of times back in the mid-1990s. And then about, I guess, at the end of 1999, early 2000,

I was deciding what I was going to do with this website that I had called Sanger's Review of Y2K News Reports. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I made some proposals and sent it out to different acquaintances. He was one. And he said, why don't you come to work for me? I want to start this free public contributed encyclopedia built on the model of like Linux. So open source, except it's not open source, it's open content. And he gave me stuff to read. And I said, yes,

I mean, this is like, I actually have to answer your question dreamed about things that I could do with a philosophy degree if I didn't want to become a professor, which eventually I decided not to do back in like 1996. So, and one of them was an encyclopedia editor. And here somebody is offering me the opportunity to start my own encyclopedia. Yeah, it was really cool. So that was my job, basically, to start something. He had the domain name. It was called Newpedia, and I organized a group of hundreds of PhDs.

It was almost like organizing a whole college, really, because there were different departments and there were quite a few different people in the different departments and so forth. But I sort of worked with these people. And being academics, they like things being very regimented and top down. And that's the system that we ended up with. Negotiating with them, we ended up with a system that had seven steps and it was a lot of work to get an article through that system. So in the end, we realized,

actually I shouldn't say in the end, close to the beginning actually, we realized we were well agreed that there needed something. We needed something to make it a lot easier for people to contribute. Just the average person. So I cast around for different ways of allowing other people to contribute. And I eventually, a friend of mine, and this was January 2nd of 2001, he told me about

WikiWiki software, the WikiWiki web. That's the original Wiki, Portland Pattern Repository. It's a repository of software programming patterns. And then that same concept of a sort of like a public bulletin board, anybody could write anything they want and edit anything, and yet somehow magically it works. Okay. And he explained how and why it could work. And I said, wow, this actually might be a way. We should try this out because the software was free. So that same evening, I went back,

and I think Ben Kovitz is the name of my friend. We had a Mexican dinner in which he explained all of this to me. I went back to my apartment and wrote out a one-page proposal to Jimmy Wales and said, can you guys install this software for me to use? And so a couple of days later, that was done. And so I just went to work like describing what a wiki encyclopedia would be like. And it changed the culture. Wiki wikis had been around for six years before that. So there was already a sort of Internet culture surrounding wikis. So we had to sort of change that and reappropriate not just

the software, but also the culture for the purpose of creating an encyclopedia. And I was just amazed that like after the first month, despite a lot of people being very skeptical about it possibly working, especially the relatively straight-laced PhD editors of Newpedia, they didn't like the idea at all. And sort of Jimmy Wales himself was kind of in their corner in the beginning.

And I said, well, okay, we're going to have to relaunch this. Because originally it was going to be the Newpedia Wiki, right? It was a different course or source of content for Newpedia. That's what it was supposed to be. And I said, okay, well, if you guys don't want it associated with the Newpedia brand, then we'll just relaunch it under its own domain name. And I came up with Wikipedia. We registered that. Originally, it was Wikipedia.com because the whole enterprise was started by Bomis.

Bomis Inc. doesn't exist any longer. And they were a startup of the old dot-com boom, the late 1990s. And they were well-funded through ads. And then basically the funding disappeared, even as Wikipedia was taking off, even in that first year. So basically in that first year, everyone was amazed at how well it was working, even just like a month into it, people were just excited to participate. And we observed after a few months how Google would spider all the articles, the new articles in Wikipedia. And there was a sort of like a stair graph of the growth of Wikipedia. After the Google spider hit the site,

there would be a bump in both activity on the site and, and just new people working on the site. And so it, it looked like a positive feedback loop and i thought that that's just this can't be true it's like too good to be true but it was a it was truly a viral phenomenon um makes sense yeah the more articles that get written people search for things there's a one-stop shop that has that subject so google probably favored wikipedia as the domain. And then whenever something got searched for because Wikipedia existed, it treated it probably like a news source.

Yeah, you got it exactly. That's pretty much how it worked. I don't know. Perhaps at some point Google made some special decisions that increased the overall ranking of the Wikipedia articles. The PageRank algorithm was simpler back then. And who knows? It doesn't really matter.

I think in the beginning, it was just a lot of excitement about the whole idea. So bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, I guess? Oh, yeah. Very optimistic? For sure. I've been staring at this Project Veritas Wikipedia page, completely dumbfounded. It has their address.

Why is the address for Project Veritas publicly listed with their mailbox number? That's on Wikipedia. That's insane. That's weird. Yeah. that's on wikipedia yeah that's insane that's weird yeah i suppose they probably list locations for other corporations too but it's very clear what they're doing they add methods hidden cameras video manipulation funded by donors trust a disinformation ngo it's very the whole thing is just smearing project and i'll let I'll let you guys in on some new information. Project Veritas has been, I'll call it an upgrade,

upgraded by NewsGuard from proceed with caution, red exclamation point to under review. Good. So that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to get deemed credible by NewsGuard, but I can tell you this. Project Veritas produces videos where you can see someone's mouth moving there you go yeah the new york times says trust our source we won't tell you who it is you can't see him you have no idea who said this and i love it when they say sources familiar with so-and-so's thinking it's like oh yeah i'm familiar with the president's

thinking too because I watch CNN. Does that make me a credible source? Apparently to these people. So I look at Wikipedia and it's become very obviously a political machine at this point. Politicians in Congress edit it. You can go in and see the IP addresses. There's companies called

reputation management firms that you can hire. Anyone. You can go higher if you want a wikipedia page let's say you're you know you're you're a senior level manager at a company and you're like man i want people to know who i am you got five grand just contact a reputation management firm they'll do everything that needs to be done from editing wikipedia to getting the new sources created to then be credible and make it look like there's a grassroots efforts to defend you. If someone tries to get your page deleted and they'll win, because when you've got an army of unpaid Wikipedia editors versus a massive corporation getting paid,

guess who's likely going to win. So at what point did you notice those things, Larry? It was very gradual to tell the truth. I mean, we didn't, let's put it this way. We knew when, I think his name is Virgil Griffith, basically published the identities of people, of organizations behind IP addresses that had edited Wikipedia. This is back in, like, I don't know, I want to say 2005. And the CIA was among them, right? And there were all kinds of politicians' offices. politicians offices so we knew back then a long time ago that because Wikipedia was already in

the top 50 or whatever it was that they were going to start doing that I think I didn't really get an idea of just how much the whole procedure might be controlled by various powerful forces until just in the last, like, I'd say five years, because it really has turned from a well-meaning public service aimed at the neutral point of view, as it was called, as it still is called, but now cynically, to a slightly left-leaning reference. That was like in 2005 or so. to a slightly left-leaning reference. That was like in 2005 or so. And then a clearly biased but still reference work in like 2010. And then basically in the last four years or so, it's just been nothing but propaganda. I mean, at least when it goes into political topics, and anything that has any sort of socio political aspect to it. And I want to add this also in to

support what you're saying. If you just think about it, and this is not to say we don't have evidence that this is the case also, but it just makes sense. Look, it's like ranked 13 by Alexa.com, the website ranking service. And it used to be in the top five, so they've dropped a little bit, but it's still huge, right? And why wouldn't, given that so much of warfare and spying that goes on is digital now, right? It's silly to think that people would not be plowing enormous amounts of money into it, figuring out the way that the Wikipedia game is played

and just manipulating it. And the thing is, it's all, it's a black box. Even to people who are thoroughly familiar with how the system actually works, there are lots of decisions that are made between the power players in the system that we have no way of knowing about because the people involved are anonymous and the decisions are not being made on the website. My favorite way to prove the brokenness, the failed state of Wikipedia, is by going to the article Man. So I am not showing you these articles in any way to make a statement about the politics of gender identity or gender ideology. I am simply showing this because there is a contentious political issue in the area of transgender spaces and gender ideology between conservatives and liberals and progressives. I'm not going to make an assessment on that for the purpose of the

segment. I'm going to show you Wikipedia being broken, quite simply. The first article we have is man. Wikipedia defines man as an adult male human. They say prior to adulthood, a male human is referred to as a boy. They do make exceptions for gender later on in this paragraph, but it says definitively opening statement, a man, a man is an adult human, adult male human. Let's go and see what male means. Male, according to Wikipedia, is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete known as sperm. A male gamete can fuse the larger female gamete or ovum

in the process of fertilization. A male cannot reproduce sexually without access to at least one ovum from a female. Now I'd like to show you trans man. Trans man, according to Wikipedia, definitively opening statement, a trans man is a man, according to Wikipedia, definitively opening statement, a trans man is a man who was assigned female at birth. The word man in this article, trans man,

links you back to the first article, which says a man is an adult male human. Now, I am not saying any of this again about the politics in any way of transgender, but how can Wikipedia simultaneously claim that a trans man is a man, but that a man produces sperm while admitting or acknowledging a trans man does not? So it's a broken feedback loop of an illogical assessment. What happened is on Wikipedia, there are various genres, I suppose. The science editors are adamant about controlling their space in science. You will likely not find a hard biological, you know, evolutionary biologist or biologist who is going to tell you that male means anything other than this gamete sperm or something to that effect.

However, because of the way that impacts political ideologies, you then have political ideologues and activists who dominate the other space, which would involve gender ideology. They then assert a trans man is a man, a trans woman is a woman. However, the science portion of Wikipedia does not agree and will not. But because there's more science editors in that space, the activists can't change that article. If you have four activists and six science writers, the six science writers will dominate the discussion. But in the activist space about transgender ideology, the inverse is true.

And thus, you create an encyclopedia that contradicts itself. That's the easiest way to point out, in my opinion. And I only use the issue of transgender ideology simply because it is prominent in today's news space, and there is a hot political conflict over this. And again, I understand a lot of people say there shouldn't be. That's not the point. The point is, if you want to call conservatives transphobes, well, then you've got transphobes who are editing Wikipedia in contradicting the posts by these individuals. How can you have an encyclopedia that tells you two different things or makes an illogical statement? Well, that's because it's collaborative, basically. It's made by, as you say,

different groups of people. You explained it beautifully. I think that's absolutely right. Well, so then the issue becomes when you look at someone like Project Veritas, when you look at someone like James O'Keefe and Project Veritas, Wikipedia is allowing unreliable sources and conjecture to be used as encyclopedic fact. Right, right.

Well, they bless certain sources as pre-approved that i mean they they include all kinds of stuff that is uh by any objective measure pretty far left um and and they ban all sorts of stuff that is merely on the right and not even very far right. And it's, yeah, basically they have selected the sources. Let's put it this way. I wrote an article for my blog, and it's been cited a lot in the last few months. I think it's called Wikipedia is biased or something like that. I can't remember. Simple enough.

Yeah. And it's very clear that Wikipedia takes sides in the culture war. Now, it didn't used to. But any topic that you can think of that is important to the culture war, you know, from, you know, topics like abortion, to subjects like religion, to figures like Hillary Clinton or Ronald Reagan, and to, you know, philosophies and everything else. Anything that has a connection to the culture war, Wikipedia now takes the left side of the dispute. And that, I don't, even five years ago, it wasn't so clear.

It was biased five years ago, but at least they allowed the other side a say, right? Even if it was biased. And 15 years ago, it was still running off the original steam of real neutrality. And actually, it was striking back then to me to compare Wikipedia to things like CNN or for that matter, Fox News of the time, where you could go there and you could really learn in depth about different competing sides of all these different issues. That is no longer the case. If you go and you look at

about the issue, one of the issues that I found was the adoption of adoption and generally by gay couples. That's an issue that is somewhat controversial. There are different points of view on that. And you wouldn't know that from the Wikipedia article. You mentioned the black box of Wikipedia and the power players that kind of run, if not, you didn't say run the site. I don't want to put words in your mouth there, but sounded like they're making the decisions. And you say they're not people that work for the company. But who are they? That's a good question.

I don't know. Some of them work for PR firms, right? and companies that specialize in the management of reputation via Wikipedia. I think there's got to be a fair number of people who work for spy agencies, not just like the CIA and FBI, but all around the world, probably, you know, doing battle with each other to make sure that the articles are reading the right way. I think there's a lot of corporate shills. There must be, again. There has to be. responsible frankly given the nature of the system not to you know spend some money and and just make the the truth as represented by wikipedia um reflect what they want it to be

and you said that you thought a solution might be to get people to have their real ids in order to be able to be an editor on wikipedia, that's not a proposal that I'm making about Wikipedia. I think it's a good idea. It's never going to happen. But at the very least, what they could do, and this is more conceivable only under great public pressure, will they even do this much? They need to at least identify by real names and identities the people who are making the important editorial decisions for Wikipedia. So the administrators, the check users, and the bureaucrats, as they are called in the system.

Can you describe what the check users are really quick? The check users, if I remember right, are the people who have the ability to look up the IP address associated with any account. If you just go there and you make an edit and you're not logged in, which is still possible on Wikipedia, then your edit will be credited to an IP address. Everybody can see that. But if you simply make an account,

then you can have your IP address hidden from people except for the Czech users and people who are above them. Thank you. It just seems like the people in power, they're biased. They're part of the cult. They're part of the leftist tribe. And you talk about changes that need to happen,

but I just don't see that being possible. I don't see at any point the New York Times shifting back to reality because the people who control the New York Times are either deferential to or part of the cult. Yeah. I'm not really quite sure what you mean by by cult but um i'm just being offensive i'm poking them on purpose i'm talking about the the ultra woke tribal leftist establishment types

right right they're definitely part of the establishment now i mean cold i basically mean establishment the very idea would have been absurd to us back in 2001, 2002. I mean, Wikipedia was part of a counterculture, partly because we were willing to represent all different points of view, partly because we were not beholden to any sort of corporate interests and so forth. And even now, Wikipedia, even though it gets big donations from Google, so it kind of looks like the Wikimedia Foundation

is beholden to Google and maybe some others with deep pockets. Nevertheless, they say they're not responsible for the editorial decisions. And I think that's true, probably, that the Wikimedia Foundation people there are not really responsible for the vast majority of editorial decisions on Wikipedia.

So it doesn't really matter necessarily that they're giving money to the Wikimedia Foundation. It doesn't matter. Those people still have ways of getting money to the people who are making the decisions on Wikipedia. And not only do we have some evidence of that, you know, individuals coming saying that and PR firms saying, well, yeah, that's what we do. But it's obvious, right? I mean, why wouldn't they? This is how, that's what PR is. Right. You use all available avenues that affect your client's reputation.

That's what it's about. Wikipedia is hugely influential. So, of course, it's happening. Why wouldn't it? So Wikimedia is outsourcing the burden of editorialization. It's kind of like when the government outsources their technology programs to private corporations, they can't get FOIA requests because they're not the ones working on it. So we can't sue Wikimedia because they're not the ones that are doing this, maybe getting paid or bribed by Alphabet or Google. Well, that's certainly what their defense would be. Yeah.

And you actually would have to have their cooperation, at least, if you wanted to sue the people who are responsible for defamation using Wikipedia. And they don't want to cooperate with that at all. Right now, Wikipedia is known as a platform and not a publisher. Is that right? There's no legal distinction anyway, so it's irrelevant. Well, for the sake of suing them under Section 230 protection. No, that's irrelevant.

Bypass it. Well, if they were a publisher, wouldn't then you? No, that makes no distinction. Really? Yeah, the issue is whether or not the speech came from Wikipedia or from its users. It doesn't matter if you're a platform or a publisher. You could be a plumbing company, and if you're a platform or a publisher. You could be a plumbing company,

and if you have a comment section on your website and someone comments something defamatory, you can't be sued. But if they edit their users' comments and they're overseeing and making sure they're allowed, then aren't they then a publisher? If it was an employee of Wikipedia that made a statement, then you could sue Wikipedia.

But what if it was an employee that oversaw a statement and said, that's okay to be on our website? Nope. I don't think you're actually disagreeing here. I think that just what it means to say that they have Section 230 immunity is just to say that the editing activity that's going on is not being done by the foundation. It's being done by the users, and therefore the foundation can't be sued for the users.

So in the instance of James O'Keefe suing Twitter, Twitter publicly stated James O'Keefe did X. They're claiming that James was running multiple accounts. Because they said that, James can sue Twitter. What someone tweets, you can't sue someone for. So a blue checkmark journalist can lie about James O'Keefe and he can't sue Twitter for it. Wikipedia is the exact same.

It's the users who write the pages, not Wikipedia. However, I think you still need to start suing. And I think the issue is the only way you actually can get through these suits is with case law. Times v. Sullivan, which set the standard, was a lawsuit which set the standard. So the only way to break through is to start suing until you find you have the appropriate argument. You argue Wikipedia is a publishing platform where they make statements of fact as an encyclopedia. They call themselves an encyclopedia, which means users are to infer

that Wikipedia is a place where facts are being discussed. If a user posts something and is agreed upon by a plethora of users, then I would argue that Wikipedia must either include this is the opinion of our users in every page. Otherwise, Wikipedia is asserting it's a fact. So my argument would be by putting the free encyclopedia on every page. Here we have Andy No. The encyclopedia makes the average person believe they are reading facts. It does not say on this page, this page was written by a group of users who do not work for Wikipedia. How is the average person supposed to know the inner workings of Wikipedia? So you have to think about the intricacies of big tech infrastructure.

Most people know that when a tweet appears and it says Ian Crossland, it's a picture of you, and then it says something like, you know, I made a new loaf of bread with honey in it today. That statement came from Ian Crossland because Ian's name is on it. But forward-facing Wikipedia pages do not say that. You have to view the history in a different page. The page that is produced, I would argue, is actually published a statement from Wikipedia and not a statement from its users because the statements from its users are visible only in a different page called the view history page. If a bunch of users come together and, and I mentioned this way,

if a bunch of people tweet things, uh, let's say I tweet Ian Crossland made kombucha. Lydia tweets, Ian Crossland made bread. And then Twitter posts with a Twitter logo in Crossland made bread and kombucha. That is a statement from Twitter, not from us.

And it's up to them to verify whether or not your opinions well there's still there's still there's still the actual malice standard where twitter could then argue that we believe this to be true based on the statements of ian's friends which a judge would probably find fair and many states have what's called anti-slap legislation which would knock this out immediately, making it very difficult to sue. The issue is you need to sue until until you win. Yeah, I you make it really you state that argument very well. And I want to see it tested in court. I would just make more, because I'm not a lawyer, I'm not going to try to pretend to

be able to mount legal cases or anything, but I am a philosopher, so I'm going to talk about the philosophical aspects of it. The current legal situation in which there is no legal recourse under the current case law and the current statutory framework that is supposed to govern Wikipedia, it makes it possible for people to be grossly defamed by Wikipedia, and there is no recourse for that. It's an incredibly unjust situation. It just introduces all sorts of evil into the world that should not be permitted in a civilized society. It's so basically there has to be some way to force a legal recourse. And I don't know precisely what it is. Maybe it's changing the law, but I think there's to be a judge out there who's going to say,

look, John Siegenthaler Sr. or whoever, Cheryl Atkinson is another good example. I've talked to her a lot about her problems with Wikipedia and a lot of other people. All of these people need some way to be able to correct Wikipedia. They need to be able to set the record straight because there is a record. It's taken to be factual, just as you say. That's absolutely right.

Well, if it said every citation showed the user who said it, then I would say that's a user's comment. But if a user makes a comment and then Wikipedia puts it all into a page, I don't see that as user comment. I see that as Wikipedia making a statement. Here's another part of an argument, perhaps,

and this is more a perhaps legal argument, that this wasn't the case back in 2001, but it is now. Wikipedia has a reputation. It's a very important reputation because if something appears on Wikipedia, a lot of people just assume that it's factual, right? And, well, what are people supposed to do when lies, really damaging lies, occur in that sort of situation? Well, they could try suing the Wikimedia Foundation, but the Wikimedia Foundation is going to cite Section 230. They can try to sue the user, but how are they going to find out who the user is if the user is anonymous?

So they could sue, there could be a class action lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation to the following, by all these people who are harmed by the Wikipedia system, which basically allows all of these anonymous people to say damaging things that have no recourse. That's itself a damaging situation for all of those people.

It's a perfect class action lawsuit because it's a whole class that is affected by the situation. Do you think it would force Wikipedia to shut down if they were sued like that? Probably not. I mean, something had happened, I hope. I know they ask for donations every year. It seems like they're bootstrapped. I don't know if they're actually getting funded by Google. They probably got enough money, but you still got to fundraise.

They've got a lot of money, and they've got a huge endowment. They're not hurting for money in any way, shape, or form. I had some smear pieces written about me. I mean, it happens periodically, but I don't get it nearly as much as some other people, which is really fascinating to me. So I, you know, I pulled up Andy knows Wikipedia and boy, is it in depth? Like they, these people write about everything the guy does. My Wikipedia is like kind of barren and they're like, why won't anybody write about this guy? I guess no one really cares. But when, when I, when I had articles written about me,

that smeared me, I remember I called a lawyer, called some friends, some people with legal experience. And I was told this news article, first, if an academic writes an opinion piece, and then a news outlet says, a new study says, Tim Pool does X, you can't sue the news outlet. They're referencing a study. Now, the study will claim that they just analyzed information and are giving an expert opinion. You can't sue them either. So, okay. So what do you do when an academic who's an ideologue for the, for what are they called? The humanities

assert something to be a scientific fact when it's just their absurd opinion, nothing. Well, when the, when a news outlet actually smeared me definitively as the writer, I had talked with a lawyer and they said, you can't sue. And I said, why? And they were like, the things they're saying about you are opinions. And I was like, but this is a news article. They're saying Tim pool did this. And they're like, yeah, but that's an opinion. And I was like, I I I I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm flabbergasted by this new lawyer. No, no, no. I've talked to many lawyers and they are correct. So I talked to lawyers for 10 years about copyright infringement, manipulation, lies, and smears.

And I'm not going to pretend to be as well-versed as a lawyer, but I've been through this many times. The problem was when, if they wrote an article that says Ian Crossland is a white supremacist neo-Nazi who associates with neo-Nazis, those are all opinions. You can't sue them. Well, James O'Keefe sued because the New York Times said they were deceptively editing or something to that effect. And this is when we got new precedent, or at least something you could reference so far,

where the judge said, if you are writing a fact-based news article or an article that's purporting to be fact, stands to reason, if your employees are injecting or interjecting their opinions, you must inform your readers of that. This is what brings me to the argument I'm making about Wikipedia. Same exact argument made by that judge. If Wikipedia is asserting two things, that their articles are cited with reliable sources and the articles are not opinion pieces.

This is an encyclopedia, right? Encyclopedia means fact. It's the facts of the issue. But they're not showing the user posts, nor are they putting this article was authored by and a list of every single person who wrote it. Then Wikipedia itself is making this statement. So it's a very similar argument I'm looking at. This is what's changing the game. And it's only possible because Project Veritas decided to sue, even though many lawyers probably said you can't win. They said, we're going to sue anyway.

I've talked to way too many lawyers. I've talked to James about this on the show. We've talked about this and it's very difficult. James O' to James about this on the show. We've talked about this. And it's very difficult. James O'Keefe up on his website. Take this out. Over at projectveritas.com, they have a donation page. Donate to support our lawsuit against the New York Times. They're trying to raise $1 million.

And you know what? I'm willing to bet it's going to cost them more than a million dollars to sue the New York Times. So when you're a small YouTuber or Twitter personality, or maybe you got 100,000 followers, and then a news outlet that has a 24-year-old far left extremist who writes articles for them, writes mangled garbage saying Ian Crossland is a white supremacist, how are you supposed to have a million dollars to sue a major news organization? That 22 to 24-year-old psychopath a major news organization. That 20, 22 to 24 year old psychopath has the powerful institution at their back and they can say whatever they want. You can't.

So this is why we talked about this with James of the People's Defamation Defense Fund. We're entering a territory where everyone is a public figure. A kid standing on the stairs, Lincoln Memorial, they tried arguing he was an involuntary public figure. You got a Twitter account? They'll argue he's a public figure. She's a public figure. Therefore, the actual malice standard applies. How is somebody who is just like a social media user supposed to compete with the New York Times?

It's a scary thing. Project Veritas got passed a motion to dismiss. And they're well-funded. I think they're a they're well-funded. You know, I think they're a multimillion dollar operation. You can look at their, their nine nineties, their, their, their tax forms. Cause there are five, one C three and they have good money, but they don't, they don't make nearly as much as the New York times does. The New York times is bringing in what like 50 million a month or some ridiculous number from subscriptions. The New York times can

just say, okay, everybody halt this month. We're going to dump 50 million to nuke James O'Keefe. And what do you do? It's called lawfare. So James has gotten pretty far and it's, it's amazing. This guy, you know, the right conservatives, moderates, the anti anti-establishment, whatever you want to call this faction has very few active personalities, has very few individuals willing to go to war. The left, every single person on the left, for the most part, is willing to go nuts. They even throw bricks through windows and risk jail time. But people on the right don't do that. It makes me think of David and Goliath, this whole story, that Goliath is the large, unstoppable warrior guy,

and David's this little guy that has no chance in the eyes of the masses of winning. But because he actually has a chance, he knows he has a chance, and he has precision strike. He's able to throw a rock into the eye of Goliath and then blind him and then take him down. But he really had the ability to do it. If you have no ability, don't try. You're going to get killed. But James has righteousness on his side, I believe. These people are doing the wrong thing.

New York Times. It seems like they are defaming. It seems like they are defaming. Twitter seems like they are defaming. You are correct, but you have to recognize David still needed the rock and the sling. Yes. So there's a lot of people with righteousness on their side, or a better way to phrase it is the truth on their side, but do they have the sling and the rock? Which is the money, the fundraising. Exactly.

To be able to pay the lawyers. And if you're a random beggar on the street seeking to defeat Goliath and people are like, I don't know you and you're walking around begging, you're not going to get the resources you need. Well, I like this people's defamation. PDF, PDDF.

PDDF. Yeah. Like basically an open community fund that will help people sue for defamation against these large corporations. I think Wikipedia needs to be sued. You know, let me tell you something. I remember when Cassandra Fairbanks

sued over being defamed because someone claimed that she flashed a white power hand gesture when she was just making the okay sign. It's not, but sure, whatever. The media just kept saying it was because 4chan said it was and congratulations, now it is. I wonder when I see a lot of these lawsuits, I'm very curious like why the arguments tend to be so weak. And, you know, typically I just assume I must not know enough about the law, you know, to frame a proper legal argument. But then invariably these lawsuits

fail. And I'm like, these judges are people. They're not morons. Have you tried explaining to them in basic terms instead of just making these ridiculous arguments? Why don't just say like, take a look at your honor. What do you think? And then you might lose, I guess there's probably there's good lawyers and there's bad lawyers, I suppose one way to put it. But I'm wondering, why is it that I'm sitting here and I can see what Wikipedia is doing and I can break down for you exactly what I see is wrong with this? And it's what I said. When you go to Twitter and you Larry tweet something, we know it came from you. But Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and it doesn't list its users in the article. Even if

you go to the New York Times, the New York Times puts a byline so you know who wrote it. Am I, I'll be honest. I can't tell you who wrote anything on my Wikipedia page. You know why? I'd have to go through three or 400 pages to look at every single individual to figure out what user this actually came from. Even then you're only going to get IP addresses.

Some of them, yes. So it's not even an issue of coming from users. It's just random garbage splashed into a background that Wikipedia then publishes it under its own name. Nowhere on Wikipedia does it say in the article, this article is written by an amalgam of users. Here are the users. Here's how many there are. They're going to need to buy wikipinion.com. It is wikipinion.

It basically is. That's all it is. It's wikipinion.com it is wikipinion it basically that's all it is it's wikipinion i'm sure they own that but um you know so to summarize your point and the point that i was making then um wikipedia has this this um total how do do you put it? It has its reputation. It's asserting, putting its reputation behind the claims, the factual claims that are in the articles. That's on the one hand. On the other hand, they are not taking responsibility for the anonymous contributions,

and yet it is precisely the system of anonymous contributions that they're putting their reputation behind. So they're responsible for the anonymity. They're on principle, they're responsible for the anonymity. And therefore, insofar as that is the cause of the problem, they bear the burden. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder, I wonder. My page on Wikipedia is locked right now, meaning users can't edit it without special permissions. I mean, that sounds like you have to have a certain number of edits, I believe.

That sounds like a job criteria. What's the difference between the New York Times saying you have to have approval from the editor or Wikipedia saying you have to have approval from our editors? Yeah, well, I mean, they've got standards, but the standards are supposed to be enforced only by the volunteers. So it's a volunteer community. That's what they're going to say. If Jane Doe writes an article for The New York Times saying Ian Crossland punched a dog. Oh, Jane, I'm coming for you. And it's a false statement of fact. You could sue. The crazy thing is, even in that case, there's still actual malice and anti-slab legislation.

But the idea is you could sue the New York Times. James O'Keefe sued the New York Times because I think two reporters made statements about him. The New York Times as an organization is responsible for publishing the speech of these individuals why? they're just users on a website, why is the New York Times responsible for able to be sued over what users wrote because they're in the pay because they're employees

that means I should be able to publish articles on timcast.com as statements of fact and say whatever I want about anybody and I can't be sued for it. If Wikipedia can do it, why can't I? Wikipedia has its masthead, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. And then it has all of these statements that are written by who?

I have no idea. Yeah, I don't think it should just be because they're paid employees of the New York Times, and that's why New York Times is liable. I think because like a social network that has unpaid users, if the social network masks that and just posts the user's comments as like mine's, if mine's was to do that. And this is mine's statement. So we can open – That would also be equally suable, I would think. So this should mean that I can open up members of TimCast.com to submit that I choose, which will appear and just say, I didn't write it. It was a user on my website who submitted it. I just chose to have it published under my brand name like Wikipedia does. And you can click the source and see only in the backend,

a list of different people who contributed to it and IP, only an IP address. We have no idea who wrote it. Just IP. Sue me. What are they going to do? Maybe that's what I should do. Maybe I should clone the Wikipedia model because what will happen is if someone sues and wins, I'll go, oh, no. Then I'll turn around and sue Wikipedia for everything. If they're committing war atrocities against your people and you start committing war atrocities against theirs, it's not necessarily the best tactic. I see your point. I'm not saying – Just to prove a point, like look how horrible this is.

No, I'm saying we can write our opinions about people. I can – look, if Wikipedia is issuing opinion pieces and asserting their fact, then why can't I? I think you legally can right now. I would – you know what I'll do? I'll have users write articles and i'll call it the encyclopedia from timcast.com and then i'll define encyclopedia and then people can write whatever they want at least make a movie about it like a short five minute ridiculous

dystopian nightmare wherever and then i'll just i'll just say section 230 you can't sue me over over what my users said and they'll say yeah but you're the one who's choosing what's get published i'm like so is wikipedia twitter twitter the one who's choosing what's getting published. I'm like, so is Wikipedia. Twitter bans people. They choose what's acceptable on their site. I am simply moderating for hate speech. I just got to make sure we don't get hate speech.

I don't want to go. Actually, the Wikimedia Foundation is doing that to a certain extent. They've actually announced a few months ago that they're adopting new policies along those lines. So that's interesting. Banning hate speech? We should start talking about solutions now,

legal solutions. So you were at Wikipedia up until when did you leave? I was just there at the beginning, basically. 2001-ish? 2002. At the beginning of 2002, I was there for the first 14 months. Or you could say the first a little over two years if you include the Newpedia part. The Newpedia part is important because Wikipedia couldn't have taken off as fast as it did if Newpedia weren't behind it.

But when you left, had you seen something going awry at the company? Is that why you left, or did you just have prior pastures? Well, sort of. I made an ultimatum to Jimmy Wales. First, I left because they stopped paying me, because they're a source of funding. I was the last of the new hires to be laid off. Okay, fine. And I needed to spend my time actually making money. But then I permanently distanced myself from the Wikipedia project at the end of 2002, the beginning of 2003.

And I made Jimmy Wheels an ultimatum. I basically said, you need to do something about the problem users that are driving away all the good people. And you need to give some way, some sort of role, even if it's very almost nominal, that academics, experts can have in the system, maybe approving on a different website, official versions of articles. And he basically rejected both out of hand. It's like, I don't see the problem that you're seeing, is what he told me. I could see like a switch that you would flip in the upper left if you wanted to create an overlay that was like the academic overlay of any given Wikipedia page or something like that.

So you don't have to bounce off the web. That's actually what Citizendium does. Oh, so what is Citizendium? So Citizendium, and like I stopped working on it over 10 years ago now. So and I'm not, I'm no longer even the owner, I gave ownership of that to someone else. And I'm sure she'll be announcing it when the time is right. But the principles, the following principles are still true. There's still a commitment to being more cordial toward good writing, to actually having a coherent narrative that,

that, that pulls the article into a single coherent whole. And the other thing is that there needs to be, that pulls the article into a single coherent whole. And the other thing is that there needs to be real names. So there has to be real world consequences for making a claim. So, and the third thing, or is it fourth? There's, you have to agree to a sort of statement of principles when you're given an account. So it's not hard to get an account.

And actually, you can make an account for yourself, but it becomes sort of official after somebody reviews the account. This was like a project that you started after you left Wikipedia? Yeah. project that you started after you left Wikipedia? Yeah, well, in 2006, I really got a big start in 2007. There was like, front page news and all kinds of newspapers, there was a big AP feature story with a sidebar, and there's a lot of reporting about it. And then it kind of petered out after a year or two, mostly because Wikipedia had its greatest growth curve at the time. And so I wish Citizendium all the best.

But the system is too similar to Wikipedia, frankly. People who want to work on that sort of thing tend to go to Wikipedia. I think actually when they do a sort of relaunch of the website, I don't know when that's going to happen, perhaps this year, there's going to be a lot of renewed interest in Citizendium. So there's a there's another alternative to Wikipedia that has been around

for a while. It's called Conservopedia. Oh, yeah. Have you ever seen it? Oh, yeah. Have you ever seen? No. So first, let me just pull up regular old Conservapedia, and it says the trustworthy encyclopedia. And if you go to conservapedia.com, you can see a feature on Conservapedia, over 800 million page views, 1.5 million edits. You've got popular articles like Second Amendment, Satan, Dunn Control, Chess, Bible, George Patton. All right. Well, let's jump over to Equal Rights Amendment. That was one of the featured articles. What does Conservapedia say about it? It was a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed in Congress 1972, sent to the states for advocation. Okay, blah, blah,

blah. We get the point. It's got numerous citations, very similar to Wikipedia. All right. This is a.gov citation. It seems this article is pretty good on Conservapedia. Well, let's see what it says about Joe Biden. Joseph Robinette Joe Biden Jr. is the current occupant of the White House. His right-hand henchman, Chief of Staff Ron Klain, has tweeted that 68% of Americans are correct in their – I'm not even going to read this stuff. And it's got a picture of Joe who looks freaked out. And yeah, I'll tell you this.

Conservapedia is more biased than Wikipedia is. And Wikipedia is pretty bad. I think Wikipedia is definitely giving them a run for their money. I mean, it's almost a parody of itself now. There is another even more insanely left source out there called Rational Wiki. And they're just the worst of the worst

of the Wikipedia conspiracy site. Well, of leftist flavor. Look, it's because conservatives don't do anything. I'm sorry, that's just the reality. They're sitting in their houses, minding their own business. They want to be left alone. That's what conservatism is.

I mean, it's all about like wanting to be left to your own devices and to basically preserve the order. And, you know, like causing a lot of noise is interrupting the order that you want to exist. They're not preserving the order. Yeah, no, they're not. It's like if you're sitting in your chair and you're watching. They actually have to fight now, unfortunately. So right now what we see is Wikipedia was dominated at the institutional level by leftists, tribalists. They're all about the tribe, nothing else.

Media institutions, same thing. Corporations, digital marketing, and conservatives have just sat back and watched it happen yeah so then uh i guess in the long term you lose that's right so can i talk about my new project yeah absolutely so what's the solution so the the solution that i have been advocating for for a few years now and that I've finally been able to start working on is, well, I now call it the Encyclosphere. So the Encyclosphere is not a website. It's not an app. It's not even a particular kind of software. It will be, when it exists in all of its glory, it will do for encyclopedias what the blogosphere does for blogs. It's going to be a that are encyclopedia articles to surface the best very quickly, even if they were just written a couple of days ago. They should be able to leapfrog over the lame stuff that's on Wikipedia

that appears there only because Google happens to push it at people because it's on Google. Are you familiar with cytogenesis? Sure, yeah. You've heard of this? Oh, yeah. So this is, I believe it was an XKCD comic that coined the phrase. Yeah.

So what happens is someone will randomly edit – correct me if I'm wrong. Someone randomly edits a Wikipedia page with fake information. Yeah. And then a writer at the Huffington Post will be like, I need to write about Larry Sanger. So they pull up the wiki and it says he was an Air Force pilot in World War II. And then they go to write their article and say, Larry Sanger, an Air Force pilot from World War II, is also a co-founder of Wikipedia, publish. Then someone on Wikipedia says, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this?

What is this? They're claiming this guy was an Air Force pilot in World War II. He's not that old. And then someone will go, ah, it's right here from Huffington Post, and then they add the source. And now it gets cited in Wikipedia, and cytogenesis references that Wikipedia fake information is used by journalists and then becomes the source for itself. So gross.

It's like eating your own poop. So how do you solve for that in your solution? Well, you mentioned jumping over Wikipedia, for instance. So I'm like, how do you get past things like that? Okay. Well, that's an issue about quality. And what I propose is if we're already defining technical standards for the publishing of encyclopedial articles, in the same way that RSS and Adam are technical standards for defining the publishing of blog posts, right? So if we're already doing that, then we ought to be able to add to those standards some standards for evaluating articles,

for allowing people to post their ratings of articles. So a sort of decentralized, centerless, leaderless system for allowing people to declare what their rating of various, of the various contents of the encyclosphere is. And by the way, the encyclosphere is not

like a new encyclopedia. It's not an encyclopedia. It's a collection of all the existing encyclopedias, or it will be, plus any new stuff that is added. I have a solution. Yeah, okay. Why don't I just like buy some Funkin' Wagnalls or Britannica? Those still exist, right?

Sure. No, but what about the paid encyclopedias? I mean, those could be an easy path, or are those institutions biased as well? Well, a little bit, not nearly as bad as Wikipedia. Dated, I suppose. That doesn't solve the problem. They're relatively small, and people go to Wikipedia. The reason that Wikipedia took off in the first place is that it's got all kinds of information that can't be found in other sources. And unfortunately, that's still

the case. It's fortunate that it exists, right? So don't get me wrong about that. I've never denied that Wikipedia is very useful. It is. But it's unfortunate that that's the only easily findable source of information. But if there were simply a way to get that information easily in front of people from many different sources, as if it were all in one source, then, well, I think people would actually use that rather than Wikipedia. It's kind of like what we're working on with the Fediverse. Are you familiar with the Fediverse? Yeah. Well, it decentralizes encyclopedias. So the Fediverse decentralizes social media. I'm wondering when you do ratings on encyclopedia articles, so you want a grand user rating system, so you want to put the best stuff to the top. If you get one article with a hundred ratings, 98 of them are four or five stars.

Two of them are one star would then you look at that user that put the one star and look across their, their scope of ratings and see if they've often given ratings that are counter to the mass and then downgrade their value as a radar. Yeah. Well, you're thinking about this from the point of view of an app developer, which is fine.

But if you really want a decentralized system, you can't think in those terms. What you want to do is simply create the technical infrastructure, the architecture, as it's called, for getting the ratings out there and associating them with an identity, a real trustworthy identity. So if a rating of an article about epistemology, say, claims to be from me, somebody can prove that it is actually from me. So you need to solve this sort of technical problems. And then once the data is out there, just like once all of the blogs are out there or once all of the encyclopedias are out there

using the same standard, then there can be a zillion different apps that are built on top of that. And you don't have to agree on whose ratings are worth, you know, following and using and all the rest of that. And you don't have to agree on whose ratings are worth following and using and all the rest of that. There can be a bunch of different algorithms for deciding what the most reliable article is.

What if the solution is actually kind of simple? Remake Wikipedia, but require real identities for everyone. That's what Citizen DM did. Oh, really? Yeah. There's also peer identity, which is interesting because rather than me having to give you my driver's license and my identification, so I'm centralized in some database somewhere. If I get enough people, another peers, to acknowledge that this is me, they see that I like dogs. I like Cocker Spaniels.

I love the number four. I'm a big fan of the color green, just so you all know. And then they then they can be like yeah that's ian and then so all these peers across the network also anonymous can verify that they think that's me and then you go to each of these people and they seem legit because other people have verified that they think that's them you have a system of you know value i don't think that change is just requiring someone to use their name it enables anonymous uh anonymous personalities. Oh, right. But you have a verified identity,

but not your real identity. Yes. Not your person. Yeah. Let's put it this way. Whatever the identity system looks like, I just want to make sure that it's not actually owned by the U.S. government

or by Google or Apple or the U.N. or any other sort of giant organization that is not responsible to the people. It really needs to be a standard, a specification, a technical standard that just gets the information out there and then allows people to, you know, to come up with their own systems of, in this case, identity. I agree. The problem is my identity is based on the U.S. Government has given me my identity, gave me my social security number. That's one sort of name on my birth certificate. So, like, I am a product of this government right now. My parents. That's just my identity, gave me my social security number, and put a name on my birth certificate. So like,

I am a product of this government right now. My parents, my identity. Yeah. That's just a datum though. All right. We want a system of identity that is truly independent of that. Basically, if you allow the government to own your digital identity, and that's what it's called, digital identity, it's super important. It's what it's called digital identity it's super important it's going to be one of the hottest most important issues in um basically internet politics of the next several years um if it's owned by the government or if it's owned by google or whatever then they in a certain way they own you like there's all kinds of things you won't be able to do if they decide to shut you off.

So you have to be able to own your own, not just your own data, but also your own identity. And right now there's fighting going on. It's very low key. It's very polite, but it's real. Fighting going on at the W3C, I know one of the people who is doing the fighting actually, between corporate interests who want a system that can be controlled, where you don't in fact own your own identity that corporate interests do versus a system

where you can own your own identity and you can you can lay claim to anonymous identities that doesn't force other people to to accept them. I want to bring up this story real quick. This is from the Daily Mail. Pfizer CEO says a third COVID vaccine dose will be needed as soon as six months after someone receives two shots, and then people will be vaccinated annually. The reason I bring this up is first, they said, you know, it's two shots. They say it's three.

First, I had one mask, then two. Fine, whatever. My point is not necessarily the amount of shots you have to get, I guess, once a year. The issue is the vaccine passports and the private requirements for you to carry around some form of digital identity that will allow you access and carry around your private records. If they're coming out now saying, well, you need three. What happens if you get your vaccine and you're like, great, back to normal? Now you have your vaccine passport.

We've normalized this. Then the CEO of a massive private corporation comes out and says, actually, you need three. Well, now all the other private corporations, the Walmarts, the stores, the cruises, the airlines are going to be like, well, the CEO of Pfizer said it. So we have to update our rules because they're the experts. Now you are forced to go back in. This is why we can't allow this kind of thing to be normalized. But I bring this up because

the larger point you're making about a digital identity owned by the government is, for one, you're completely correct. We can't allow the ownership of our identities, but I think it's going to be private corporations that do this. There's going to be a consortium of sorts that says

we should have a standard, like a blockchain thing, and then you have your private key won't everyone like this yeah but then what happens centralized because it's on the blockchain right now most blockchain projects are not decentralized i'm here to tell you folks they're not really decentralized not in the sense in which the dns system and email and the blogosphere and usenet if you you remember that, and many other things, the backbone of the Internet is decentralized. Blockchain ain't decentralized in that way. This is why I think Bitcoin is actually a really great risk to freedoms.

And I've said this for a long time. It'll be worth a lot of money because I think there's powerful interests that realize the power of Bitcoin in being able to track everything you do. It's beautiful. The artificial intelligence, the fact that the blockchain is public, they can track you. If you are using Bitcoin, you have started publishing your digital identity to a certain degree. Again, Bitcoin is very valuable. I have some. It's been skyrocketing in value, I think, for obvious reasons. It's useful for governments. But I remember going way back in the day when Bitcoin was first gaining some prominence. And I had some anarchist left friends, some anarchist right friends. And it was really the anarchist left weren't really paying attention to this stuff.

The libertarian and ANCAP people I knew were like, this is amazing. We can have a system of value to exchange. The government can't track it. And I was like, dude, this is the most easily tracked thing ever. What are you talking about? And they're like, no, you're wrong. And I was like, wow, how is it that you have walked into one of the most easily surveilled systems and you don't realize it? So what happens when Bitcoin becomes a standard? It's skyrocketing in value. What happens when a Bitcoin, which has eight decimal points, becomes worth the equivalent of $1 million? You now have a digital international standard of easily tracked currencies that people will

say it's decentralized to a certain degree. But if every massive major multinational corporation requires the use of Bitcoin, well, it's not really decentralized then because this international consortium can simply say, we all agree we will not accept Bitcoin from Ian. This address, banned. And then any address associated with it, banned. And because it's publicly exchanged, you will have to, there's ways to do it, but you'll have to then essentially launder your coins to another address and then to a different address, maybe using Monero or something so that they can't publicly see your coins or associated with a certain address. But what happens if they say, if we track any of these coins going through any address, they're no good anymore. Well,

then there's nothing you can do. Those coins are essentially defunct and they've excised you from society. It's hard to do with cash. With hard US dollars, you got paper money. It's valuable. You can hand it off to somebody. They don't know who had it or when they had it. I mean, they can track it to a certain degree.

With Bitcoin, Ian's money could be deemed all of the money in this address is now worthless. And anybody who trades in it will be banned from the network as well. And people are like, I'm not trading with you, Ian. There's no way to get that money out. That's a beautiful system. I've never... Look, I understand the technology. I think Ethereum is brilliant technology. It's going to do a lot of really great things. But people don't realize when the far right, as they say, started taking Bitcoin, news outlets started publishing the amount of money these people had. There you go. Yeah, I don't think using Bitcoin as a store of value is really the future. I think it's the smart contracts themselves and the ability to transact a token, a digital

piece of information that activates a program. Well, that's Ethereum. Yeah, Ethereum. And right, right, right. That's brilliant technology. You can remove the middleman of the dude sitting there flipping the switch for you once he gets his paycheck. There's a lot to do that.

EOS is another one. That's what the Everipedia, the blockchain encyclopedia. Basically, they forked Wikipedia. They added another million articles. A lot of them are auto-generated. But they've written a lot by hand for sure about all kinds of topics that aren't in Wikipedia. They're like

not notable enough or something. People who are only internet famous or whatever. And it's cool and I support them. They actually are built on EOS. Unfortunately,

an example, and I don't want to say anything too negative about even EOS here, but it bothers me, and I'm sorry I just have to say it, that the block producers, at least back in 2019,

I don't know what the current situation is, the people who are responsible for deciding what goes on the EOS blockchain, they were all owned by Chinese corporations. So, I mean, okay, it's decentralized in one sense, but it's kind of centralized in another really important sense, too. The issue is private corporations, of which there is an ever-decreasing amount that own everything.

The CEO of Disney can go to the CEO of Unilever and be like, hey, so we agree, like, Ian Crossland's banned from society, right? And they'll make sure every company is off-limits to you. I truly believe we need a program that will allow every individual to spin up their own token that they can use as their own value transaction. So if you want to subscribe to my channel, you can give me $10 a month or you can give me $9 a month in Eon coin. But why would they have to give you 10% off? Listen, this is what this is what however, a pedia solves the problem. So I don't want to be, come down too hard on them, but they have told me that if, if EOS starts,

if like the block producers, the Chinese block producers of EOS start censoring the content of Everipedia, then they'll just make it possible to, to transact edits essentially using a different coin. And that would be cool if we can trust them. I just don't like having to trust people when the whole system is supposed to not require trust. That's the whole idea. It's supposed to be trustless.

I suppose we can just talk about the positives. In a society with your digital identity owned by massive corporations, crime will be gone. People will get arrested immediately. There'll be no more need for investigations. Passion murder will happen. Robberies will happen. But people will be immediately apprehended and locked up in a private prison for profit. Sounds familiar.

No more trials. All hard evidence. Everything's on the blockchain and tracked. And we will all Sounds familiar. No more trials. All hard evidence. Everything's on the blockchain and tracked. And we will all live walking around with forced smiles. I don't like that.

Everything is great. I'm happy. Are you happy? Ian, you're happy. I want to talk about Encyclosphere. Hey. Sure.

Okay. No, that didn't make me happy, though. Damn, that was funny. How far along are you with Encyclosphere right now um so well we've been doing laying the groundwork basically um a few different things so we've we've raised some money we've incorporated and we've applied for 501c3 status we've got three different software projects going.

One is called FactSeek, factseek.org. It's just an encyclopedia meta-search engine. It's not much, but it's useful for sure. Another one, another encyclopedia meta-search engine is, and these aren't owned by us. They're just affiliated with us. And the people who are working on those are people who are committed to helping to develop the standards for publishing encyclopedias. Let's see. The other one is called encyclosearch.org. And then we are also directly paying for the development.

It's not encyclopedia related, but it's still decentralized of a plug in for WordPress that basically it allows you to run your own micro blog. So like your own Twitter feed that you own, nobody can shut it down via a WordPress blog. So I'm already doing that on a website called startthis.org. But pretty soon that's going to be running a different theme. And pretty soon after that, there's going to be a a different theme. And pretty soon after that, there's going to be a plug-in in addition to the theme. And in a later iteration, it's actually going to be possible for different blogs to talk to each other.

And it'll look and act something like Wikipedia does. But it's all going to be transacted via blogging standards, the RSS and Atom standards. So like when I pull up one of your articles, I'll be looking at like the dog went to the zoo and I'll be able to click on zoo and it'll take me or like mouse over the word zoo and it'll like pull up like a... Well, no, I was just now talking about decentralizing social media using this WordPress plugin.

If you're asking about the encyclosphere, the encyclosphere is hard to explain, and I apologize. A lot of people aren't going to be able to get it on the first pass. And it's because it's complicated. I'm not accusing anyone of being dense. There's all kinds of brilliant people who need this to explain several times. And that's not because I'm smart. It's because it's got a lot of moving parts, right? So the idea is we're building a network of encyclopedias. Or another way to put it is we're building a way to network together all of the existing encyclopedias, or another way to put it is we're building a way to network

together all of the existing encyclopedias, and then for just ordinary people to add new content very easily and quickly. So imagine a search engine that covers all of the existing encyclopedias. Maybe it doesn't have all of the content of the articles, but at least it has the metadata, so it allows you to find really quickly and easily the best encyclopedia articles on each topic. That might be something you would use to find articles instead of Wikipedia, if it were really good enough.

Okay, what if, in addition to that, you had the ability through, say, another WordPress blog plug-in to just press a button after you've written your own one-off encyclopedia article and it's added to the same database? Then you wouldn't have to ask permission of anyone to add to this. And I think there would be all kinds of hobbyists and experts, professors and researchers and all kinds of people who would be delighted to have an effective way of adding to the world's knowledge. And it wouldn't just like be buried way down in the search results of Google. It would actually be in a format that can be collected and redistributed in a zillion different ways by a bunch of different independent apps. See,

so it's creating the technical infrastructure for people making lots of different competing apps that tap into the same body of encyclopedia articles. I would love for like, as I'm reading any boing boing article or whatever, that I can mouse over and click on any word in the article or just mouse over and it'll show me an overlay if I want to pop this, you know, in cyclosphere app or whatever it is up browser extension, something like an extension. Sure, sure.

As well as watching a video and you see the closed captions, I can choose any word that comes up in the closed caption. And if I see a bird flying by in the video, I could somehow search what is that? So that could bypass languages. They have that already. Yeah, stuff like that. For some time, actually, I think Google built it where you could be watching a video and then stop. Or they demoed this, and the AI can identify in an image. Google does this.

You can show an image, and it'll be like, this is a lamp. This is an apple. And so that was one of the ideas. You're watching a show. It could pause, and you could be like, what's that shirt? It would do an instant Google image search and then show you the product, where to buy it. Different idea. One's an encyclopedia one's a

market but uh you know we should jump over to super chats though and uh see what the audience has to say and uh i'm first going to state something uh the other day i get a message from my brother and he's like hey buy dogecoin and i was like whatever and so i just was like fine and i bought some dogecoin i didn't even think twice i don't know i don't care i was like fine and i bought some dogecoin i didn't even think twice i don't know i don't care i was like sure whatever my 10 year old son has bought dogecoin it was at 10 cents it's at 25 cents right now he's made money so i bought some and i'm seeing the chat blow up where people like dogecoin full disclosure i bought some i am not uh confidence i just didn't care all that much because it's a quarter so i like just bought some and now it's, well, we'll see. Could you imagine?

I would love this considering I just bought some Dogecoin. I would love Dogecoin just to beat Bitcoin and become the actual, but I guess Doge has no real support or something. I don't know. Anyway, my friends smash that like button. If you'd like to support the show and subscribe. We are going to take your super chats. The first super chat we have is RJ Colu says, Tim, if states, Texas, seceded, would you move to those states? Yes.

Absolutely. Really? A whole other country? A new country? Texas? Yeah. Would it become its own country? What about if it got invaded?

Actually, I got to be honest. I'd say no. I would. That's dangerous. If Texas secedes, I would wait a little bit. And if Texas stays true to its values and the Constitution and upholds rights and expands them, because I guess they're talking about constitutional carry, I'd probably do it. What would you do, Larry?

I don't know i i if that happened i would worry about the u.s government stopping people from emigrating i mean because i think that would be a real possibility i'd think about that there'd be a lot that would go into the into the decision i there's no way to know without all the facts um The whole situation. Maybe. For sure, maybe. I do want to mention, I am not giving financial advice. I actually would say, I am not confident in the fact that I just bought Dogecoin, but I like it.

It's funny, so I'm glad. The Doge. The Doge. Didn't you buy some? Yeah, I bought a bunch. I bought thousands of them. Thousands. Back when they were like nine cents.

It spiked to nine cents. I was like, I got to get in on this. And then it dropped down to four. And I was like, what have I done? But I had diamond hands. That's right. It's at 25. Now it's at 25.

Listen, listen. I didn't break my bank for this. I bought some Doge because I thought it was funny. Yeah, it's comedy. If Doge goes up to Bitcoin levels, I'd probably be like, I should have bought more. Dude, Lex Friedman and Elon Musk. It's funny is the entire proposal on which it is based. We have some of the preeminent

artificial intelligence geniuses of the world Lex Friedman and Elon. Tweeting about it and loving it. These are like the top geniuses on earth. Alright, we got a very important one from Jonathan Galterini, JDLLM. Larry Sanger, how does one classify as an ex-founder? If you

helped found the company, how do you unfound it? I'm not intending to be rude. LOL, I'm honestly asking. It's tongue in cheek, obviously. It's like, it's a reference to a couple of different things. One is,

when people, when I'm identified as a co-founder, a lot of people have just assumed that I'm still there and they like criticize me for it. And it's

like, I'm tired of being criticized for Wikipedia when I'm like on the front lines criticizing Wikipedia myself. Okay. So that's part of it. Another part is Jimmy Wales back in like 2004, 2005 started denying that I am co-founder. Really? Oh, yeah. That's a big story. It was back then. I don't really care anymore. But, you know, he still hasn't come out and just said, yeah, he's co-founder. And so it's like, okay, fine. I'm just going to, like, distance myself from it entirely. I am going to just, I'm just going to like distance myself from it entirely.

I call myself ex-founder. Jimmy, now you are the sole founder. Okay? You're the sole founder. So that's fine. Go ahead. All right. We got Matt Daniel.

He says, hey, Tim, I bought Dogecoin after you talked about it in January during the GameStop thing. It's gone from.003 to 0.19 i made bank i mean you know what i will i should stop and think to myself about what i'm doing because i often look i remember when i was talking about bitcoin was two dollars and now it's 20 and everyone thought that was it and then i still don't buy any. So I remember when in November, Bitcoin was at 13,000. Now it's at 63. Jeez. Ethereum was at a thousand.

I remember when Ethereum was like, what, five bucks. Yeah. And I was like, oh, that's a cool thing. Everyone's like, this is great stuff. And I'm just like, you know what? I'm not giving financial advice. I'm just going to criticize myself for being so smart and stupid at the same time. Smart enough to be like, I can see why that's valuable, but I'm not going to buy it.

And now it's like 10 years later and I'm like, why didn't I buy it? What's wrong with me? So I'm just going to buy dumb things, I guess. Left is insane. So are you planning on taking substances like MDMA, LSD, or DMT in the future? Yes. If not, can you have someone on the show who knows a lot about them and can accurately describe the experiences?

Those are illegal, by the way. Now, I suppose they're talking about in an academic setting where they have the legal authority to do so. Or in Oregon. No, I wouldn't. However, there is that extended state DMT thing that we talk about every so often, which is really interesting. Have you experimented much with psychedelics?

No. It doesn't seem like that guy ian they're amazing sometimes when actually actually actually you gotta like you just gotta look at larry and then look at ian and it's like larry's definitely the psychonaut i found with ls and i think you need to look in a mirror lsd lets you see shape like structure easier for me it did anyway and i was able to more like mathematically perceive the shapes which helped for like development and coding interesting yeah all right we got uh dr roller gator he says congratulations on 1 million subs lydia great job as always thank you thank you absolutely the real president yeah dave says hey tim i was working at a plastic extrusion plant in wisconsin in wisco and the the boxes we were putting some rolls in said made in China on them. It makes you wonder how often it happens to other products that are actually made in the USA.

Oh, wow. Yeah. I bought an air purifier, and it says designed in Florida, made in China, or like assembled in China. I'm like, I get it. Come on. Just admit it. You made it in China. Yep.

Joseph Cole says, Tim, you've inspired me to move out of the city. I am moving my family out of Denver. We can't take the Dems BS anymore. Thank you for the push. I mean, I don't know much about Denver. I've been there a couple times. I was in Colorado Springs, Fort Carson, I believe, right? Yeah, big mountains.

But yeah, I got out of the city because it's awful. It's nice. And you realize how awful it is once you get out of the city. I've, I've, I've, we've, we've been out of the city since 2005. Wow. In the excerpts. I, I had a, I had a friend hit me up, you know, saying like, you know, I got the vaccine. I'm so excited.

Normalcy. We're coming back. And I'm just like, we've been in normalcy, like out here forever. Like I was, I was talking to one of the locals out here and they're like nothing changed for us literally nothing you're in the mountains you're in the middle of nowhere you wake up in the morning you go outside there's chickens running around pooping all over the place in new york though you can't go outside it's crazy man la was just a depressing nightmare when i was there people waiting in line outside of whole foods that's really sad afraid of each other but you bought some dogecoin to make you feel better.

I made a bunch of Dogecoin. Got a bunch of Dogecoin. Ian secretly a Dogecoin millionaire. I love it. Don't wait. Don't hesitate. Oh, don't give advice. No, no, just in life.

Don't hesitate. Oh, okay, okay. That's good. That's good advice. Daniel says, hey guys, I really enjoy what you're doing here and I've been watching you, Tim, since 2018. You've really inspired me with everything that you've done, and now I have my own independently hosted website, Webitology, on Google.

Hey, there you go. Awesome. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Matthew Alcazar says the Texas State House just passed constitutional carry in an 84 to 56 vote. They passed it? Here, here. Holy cow.

Now that goes to the Senate? I suppose it'll go to the State Senate if they have a state Senate. And I imagine it's going to pass. It's Texas of all places. How do they not have constitutional carry? Right, seriously. West Virginia has constitutional carry. You don't need anything.

You can just go to West Virginia and walk around with a gun. You can put it in your belt and, you know. It's normal in the West. A lot of people don't realize this. Not California. Oh, no, no, no. Not in California. Oregon and Washington are pretty good on guns.

Right? That's my understanding. Alaska. Not the East Coast. Yeah. Colorado. Well, Colorado's getting worse. Oh, yeah, okay.

They're turning bluer. The Bros Durham says, Wikipedia did a number on Count Dankula and the quartering's boss. Interesting. Brendan Leach said, Mr. Sanger, thank you for making research in high school and college so much easier. Count Dankula and the Quartering's Boss. Interesting. Brendan Leach said, Mr. Sanger, thank you for making research in high school and college so much easier. In particular, all of the links to the actual articles.

Yeah, that's what I always said. It's like, if you've got a problem with the article, just click the link. Seriously. Here's the funniest thing I love about Wikipedia. I proved a point to my friends probably 15 or some odd years ago that you could take a link to a long, complicated scientific journal and then say whatever you want so long as you put it in the citations. So you could take a scientific journal that says the reality of sleeping babies in a construction zone or something and then find an article about sleep apnea and then say whatever you want.

Loud banging noises have been found to be soothing for babies and then put that citation next to it. People would click it, see the journal, not read the journal and assume it was true and it would just stay there. That's one of Wikipedia's many dirty little secrets. They have very many and that's definitely one of them that a lot of the citations don't actually say what they're supposed to say. Or they have basically added their own bias to what a less biased source says.

Yeah. I mean, news outlets do the exact same thing. Pathetic. Yeah, absolutely. Framing tools. Brilliant. So my, my favorite, my favorite, you're gonna love this is, uh, we had the big story about Russian bounties on American troops.

Turns out it's not true. My favorite thing is instead of coming out and saying the story is not true, what they said was, well, we had low to moderate confidence that Russian agents sought to encourage the Taliban. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Hold on. If you said we had low to moderate confidence that Russian agents encouraged the Taliban, I would assume there was a small likelihood they actually encouraged it. When you say you had low confidence, they sought to encourage them. You add that word. And what the had low confidence, they sought to encourage them. You add that word,

and what the story really is, they think Russians at some point considered talking to the Taliban, but probably didn't. Yes, I'm seeking to be a trillionaire right now. No article's going to say that I'm a trillionaire right now. Well, no, it would be like saying, breaking news, Ian Crossland paid a billion dollars to

build a helicopter in his backyard. And then later it's like, well, actually, the story may have not been true. And then the quote you give is that you sought to pay a billion dollars to build a helicopter. Yes. I seek to find Excalibur from the Lady and the Lake and then become the

true King of the Britons, too. Tim found Excalibur. That's right the Lake and then become the true king of the Britons too. Tim found Excalibur. That's right. Quote me on it for now. They're creating another point removed where the story is actually, it's probably some Russian guy who was like, Hey Vladimir, do you want to pay Taliban to kill Americans? And then they're like, nah, okay. And then they're like, write it down and publish. We have low evidence evidence what do they say low uh low to moderate confidence low confidence that it may have happened all right we got student

of history who says these people have tickled the dragon's tail and now they will see the wrath of veritas if he is going after them i say go forth and reap all you can he has taken their dignity and professional honor now he'll take the smear merchants ill-gotten gains. It's going to cost a lot of money. I mean, look, Veritas is seeking to raise a million dollars to go up against the New York times. They're going to need to raise millions more to go up against Twitter and CNN and Brian Stelter and Anna Cabrera's individuals. We'll see if they have it. All right. Let's see where we're at jacob nm clutter says tim i think you guys are looking at james not suing wikipedia the wrong way he's going after the new york times to weaken or destroy section 230 if he succeed if he succeeds that would open wikipedia up to be sued yeah this is interesting if if um this will be interesting

there's a lot of dead citations as well. For instance, the news outlets change their articles every day, minute after minute. They'll publish an article, then update it an hour later. Someone on Wikipedia will take an article that says, you know, Ian Crossland did a backflip, put it up on Wikipedia as a fact. And then an hour later, when this editor is long gone the article changes to say correction it was a front flip. Now you've got a bad citation.

I wonder if we'll be able to fix hyperlinks so that in the future if the receiving end of the hyperlink alters the hyperlink disappears. I think that was a proposal in the original World Wide Web specification if I'm not mistaken and they decided against it and the original World Wide Web specification, if I'm not mistaken.

And they decided against it because they wanted to keep the system maximally simple. If you start trying to track stuff like that, it just becomes much, much too difficult. So, yeah. Actually, I have the last little tidbit directly from one of the co-founders of the World Wide Web, who actually has

weighed in in the Knowledge Standards Foundation, which is developing the encyclosphere. I'm proud to say, and humbled to say, but, yeah yeah he basically said a lot of

the decisions that we made and a lot of the reason why HTML is as sloppy as it is is that we wanted it to be simple and flexible and that was the right decision to make basically it wouldn't have it wouldn't have flourished the way it did if it weren't

kept that way. Is that Barlow? Johnlow um no no i like that guy a lot someone someone mentioned in the comments i don't want to name his name because because i didn't have his permission to shout out to the we have a comment it's a regular comment they said um ian is a backflipping dog punching white supremacist tim pool quote. Because whenever I make reference to fake news, I'll be like, they'll say Ian did this or Ian did that. Start my Wikipedia and I won't take it down. So here's the funny thing too. It would not be a lie if a news outlet said Tim Poole accused Ian of punching a dog. Or they would say Tim Poole said, quote, Ian punched a dog because I did say those words.

Context is irrelevant to these people then someone would take that and put it in wikipedia ian was been accused of punching dogs like that's the laundering of information and flipping backs you guys ever do a backflip flipping backs i have done many backflips actually i used to go to a parkour gym every so often it was fun it freaked me out backflips yeah i should do front flips are easier i mean i guess actually backflips are easier but scarier do you do backflips or back walkovers backflips oh that's impressive well i mean i don't do them anymore but there's actually a video on my youtube channel that people won't be able to find of me doing uh i jumped up onto a platform and then front flip off of it yeah Yeah, I probably could still do front flips. I mean, I still skate and skateboard and stuff like that.

I've got a son who's trying to learn. Skateboarding or parkour? What's that? Skateboarding? Oh, doing... Front flips. Doing flips, yeah. There was a parkour gym in Brooklyn. Now I'd go there and just bounce around.

It was a lot of fun. I was really good at doing side tucks. For some reason, that seemed the easiest to me. And I think it's because it's the least scary Like when you do a front flip You gotta jump right, your head's going down You do the back flip, you don't want your head When you do a side tuck

Your head is not exposed, it's like you fall on your back And it was really easy to learn Because what I would do This is how they taught me I would just roll over, they had this big foam obstacle And you just jump and roll on your back. And then eventually they have you jump more and then jump more, and then they take it away, and then you're side-tucking and flipping.

And then, yeah, the parkour stuff was fun. It's good fun. All right, Krista Lucas says, I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and 20 cops quit over the weekend because of protests. Bravo. I'm applauding. And I quote,

They do not feel supported here, and they don't feel trust. They feel second- feel supported here and they don't feel trust they feel second guest and they don't feel that they can do their job no matter how perfect they do their job without getting in trouble i am going to look into that that is a great story i would love to to to go in in depth on all right let's see knuckles says dogecoin to the moon 23 cents so that was actually a little while ago i think it's actually like 28 cents right now. It's amazing. People are... Snap.

How is Dogecoin skyrocketing like this? It's funny. I'm going to buy. I'm not telling anybody to do anything. I'm going to buy more. You might have to do that. But it's only because it's funny. It might be at...

It might be peaking right now. So you might want to wait a day or two. Just going in. Nope. Don't care. I went in at nine cents and I don't regret it. It did go down but then it went back up. I want to be... day or two just going in nope don't care i went in at nine cents and i don't regret it i want to go down but then went back up i want to be i'm not spending that much money like it's like it's like i'm throwing you know tons of cash into this i bought a little

bit it's funny i want to be able to say i have dogecoin that's yes did you buy doge i did i should have bought it months ago when it was funny still but you know there you go all right jandon patterson says got the whole gorilla t-shirt collection even a pink diamond gorilla t-shirt for the wife got two of the regular plus two versions i am a gorilla 25 member timcast.com as well thanks for telling the truth and big thanks to miss lids oh thanks we um man we got so many so much hiring to do um we need a web dev so email somebody who lives in the dc area email jobs at timcast.com this is a web editor position we dev, so somebody who lives in the D.C. area. Email jobs at timcast.com. This is a web editor position.

We're looking for somebody who can just maintain and knows how to handle WordPress and probably CSS. It's CSS, right? That's what I'm saying. That is content system. What does CSS stand for? Know how to do WordPress stuff. There you go. And so also post articles.

Such a noob. There's a lot of people like that. But we're also looking for a master of ceremonies. Yes. articles there's a lot of people like that but we're also looking for a master of ceremonies yes for the friday night events of which we want to do every friday with one big monthly event where our members actually have the option to buy tickets and show up in limited capacities probably like 20 or so people that's an mc for timcast media yeah some and and the mc would actually be helping run the vlog so the bigger position is coming up with ideas for fun things to film. And then Friday night is the big fun stuff. That'd be a cool job.

Yeah. Bands playing, comedians, all that good stuff. You know. So jobs at TimCast.com. And I don't know. Resumes aren't as important as portfolio material. Cascading style system. Is that CSS? I don't know. material. Cascading style system? Is that CSS?

I don't know. Okay. Send me pictures of websites. Send me links to websites you've made and send me videos about vlog stuff you've done. Thank you. There you go. We're also hiring. We're going through.

We're looking for a paranormal subject matter editor. So cults, murders, mystery, paranormal. We have a lot of UFO news coming out right now. So this would fall absolutely into the purview of this person, this writer. The reason we're hiring for this, because this would also be the production for the new show we're putting together, which is a podcast on murder, mystery, cults, paranormal. We'll be doing that with Cassandra Fairbanks. It's gonna be a lot of fun.

Yeah. All right. All right. Let's read some more. Set Me Free says, good wins in the end because it comes together to defeat evil. That's what's happening now with all these different personalities echoing information. Be good examples in your communities. The left is coming together.

They're collectivists. They're a hive. So, yeah. It's not over until it's over. That's true. Noah Poa says two plus two equals seven, right? Don't worry, Tim. Jerry Nadler is just trying to fit in

like us when he said, we're not packing the court, we're unpacking it. Unpacking it from 9 to 13. Come on, bro. LOL. I tweeted, 2 plus 2 is 7, and then I replied, I'm just trying to fit in. Because you saw the 2 plus 2 is 5 thing? I'm not sure. Big push

from critical theorists that 2 plus 2 could actually equal 5. I'm pretty sure that's not from critical theorists that 2 plus 2 could actually equal 5. Right, okay. I'm pretty sure that's not true. Yeah, I think all science points are wrong. But they can say what they want, I suppose. Crimson says, back on Glocks, while the safety is a drop safety, there is no other safety. It's striker fired, so it has no hammer.

But you can buy a striker-controlled device that replaces the backplate to function like a hammer. Safety plus. Oh, there you go. BCH broke $900? That's Bitcoin Cash. Wow. There was a period where Bitcoin Cash, wasn't it like $10,000 or something? I don't remember.

Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash forked, and then there was like, no one knew which one was going to take over. And Bitcoin Cash skyrocketed and then fell down and dropped dramatically. This strikes me as the entire market is escalating because the U.S. dollar is depreciating from inflation. People want to have stored value somewhere else. They're trying to hide it by making it go up and down and up and down. But it just keeps going up.

And the U.S. dollar dollar keeps getting printed a lot of comments are talking about dogecoin like throughout the show people have been like dogecoin that's right dogecoin is big peanut butter jelly says doge because stupid people don't know how to buy xrp eh dogecoin's funny xrp isn't funny. What am I supposed to laugh about? I invest in things that I think are interesting to me, like a cell phone company or something like that. I like technology. I invested in Tesla, like electric cars. I have a fraction. I was like, whatever.

I had some $20 laying over, and I was like, just whatever. But Doge is funny. Cancer Culture says, when will you have Tim Dillon on? He is the funniest comedian on earth i don't think we will have tim dillon on probably because he's just too famous tim i'd like to have dave chapelle on the show too but it would be good i don't think he'll come on either um maybe we go down to austin and get everybody to come do a big show with everybody we're planning on doing that tour so maybe you know bradley swan says donate to project veritas they will fight in many way in

in ways many of us cannot due to our jobs or life circumstances find the donate link in one of their videos and donate to these heroes there you go bobby bob says i googled riots expected tomorrow and all but the bottom three results were about the capital you know have you seen that we did this on the show. We Google searched riots on Monday because we just had these riots and what comes up? The Capitol, Trump, Capitol, Trump, Trump, Trump. We go on Bing

and we get Minnesota. We go on DuckDuckGo, we get Minnesota. Google is absolutely filtering out Minnesota. But if you Google protests, you'll get the riots. It's called protests now the reason we protest the reason we know it's google is because cbs nbc cnn did write about riots and you can see those articles on being inducted go so that means google was filtering these out so you couldn't see them

i know google is evil cnn was reporting on b wanting to pull troops out, but that Trump had wanted to pull them out by May 1st. And the Taliban is like, get out by May 1st, Biden. So CNN kind of transparently reported on that. I didn't expect them to acknowledge that Trump wanted us out. J.P. McGlone says, Tim, Duke University in North Carolina is requiring the vaccine for students to enroll this fall. This affects new and existing students. Students who don't want it but want to finish undergrad are in a tough place. Thoughts?

College is stupid. So if a bunch of students don't want to get the vaccine and don't want to go to school, I don't care. Look, I think first and foremost, always talk to your doctor. I don't like the idea of mandated vaccines. However, if a private institution like a university wants to require that, then I don't know. Then don't go there. It's that simple, isn't it?

I look, most of my friends have gotten the vaccine. Most of the people, I think a good, maybe not most, but a good portion of our guests have all gotten the vaccine. A bunch of conservative guests are like talking about how they've already gotten it or getting it. So it's a really weird thing to see Donald Trump talking about getting it, to see Ivanka Trump literally taking her vaccine selfie. I do think the vaccine selfies are a bit eye-rolly. But it is weird that Ivanka literally is coming out and be like, get this, Trump sent out an email where he was furious that the FDA and the CDC pulled the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

He was like, I did this. I deserve the credit. They're trying to make me look bad. But there are so many people who are like not, you know, they don't want to get the vaccine. I'll tell you this. I believe in freedom, individual liberty. You do what you want. If a private business wants to require it, that's where the problem is.

Because the vaccine passports is the freaky invasive stuff. But I do think ultimately you've got to talk to your doctor and I think you should take your doctor's word for it. I mean, if you don't trust your doctor, you got bigger problems. Or take a doctor's word for it. You don't, you know, you're not bound to, well, you have a second opinion. Dr. Fauci is a doctor. Yeah.

You can have multiple doctors. A second opinion is still your doctor. Well, you could go to another doctor and get another opinion as well. Yeah. Yeah. You go to 10 doctors. They're all your doctors. Yes. yes yes i'm saying don't trust people on tv or youtube oh yeah don't take my word for it trust us doctor doctor i just i think what the problem is private corporations do at a certain point have a right to say like we don't want you coming into our

institution or whatever the issue is when all of society does it you have this problem and i'll throw and i think that's where you might need regulation to defend rights maybe under the 14th amendment and i cite the um was it the cuyahoga river person of flames did yeah all of these companies were contributing a little bit of the pollution and saying it's not me i'm only doing a little bit and then we're like okay but y'all can't do it at the same time so it's the same thing with the vaccine passports it's fine you know i think if the company's like you know you should have a vaccine it's the same thing with the vaccine passports. It's fine, you know, I think if the company's like, you know, you should have a vaccine, it's a problem when a regular person can't buy food and is not being treated fairly in

society because of a medical issue. Right. And I'm not talking about anti-vaxxers. I'm talking about people who are literally told by their doctors they advise against the vaccine for several reasons, of which there are many, many reasons. Not everyone is able to go out and take every drug. So let me address this person's question. This is an idea I like to get out there. I've been talking about it since the 90s. I'm a big advocate of degrees by examination, basically. It's a way

to basically do something like homeschooling at the college level. What I really want to exist is, and I've never seen this before. I mean, degrees by examination exist, and they're very cool. You can look into it. You know, there's, I think it's Empire State College in New York. And then there's a system also in New Jersey and other places. I think Arizona has a program like this. But what I would like to see is a committee of like three or four professors who do like a portfolio examination and an oral exam and maybe a written exam that comes at the end of a course of study. And then those people just by themselves, independent of any institution,

they declare that you are, you have knowledge that is the equivalent to a bachelor's degree. Is there any reason why a lot of people, would you accept as the CEO of your company, would you accept that as proof of being college educated? I don't think proof of college education means anything. Okay. So as a joke, I used to tell people that I had a PhD in nuclear physics, and they would be like, you do? Absolutely, from the College of Milton. And they would go, oh, wow.

And they wouldn't ask anything beyond that. So my brother actually made that up. And the point is I never said it was an accredited university. I never said any – I never even elaborated. People just assume things are true. It's the stupidest thing to me where someone's like, I got my piece of paper. It's like, okay, you know what I did? I took two months of a community college course that cost like $500,

and now my highest level of education is some college. Well, you're thinking about the value of a college degree differently than I do. You think of it as a, or you seem to think of it anyway, as having only economic value. I think it represents a certain level of intellectual attainment in a particular subject. Completely disagree. It ought to anyway. It ought to and does, two different things. My experience from people in colleges is that they're underwhelming. I mean I've gone to MIT several times.

I spoke at MIT for one special event in front of a large group of people from various backgrounds talking about media technology, drones, the things we're applying them to. And it was fascinating to me that the people at MIT of all places who are working on this tech knew less about this tech than I did as some random dude who went out into a parking lot and bought a drone and hacked it with his buddy, you know, running the SDK through Linux and then screen grabbing to broadcast. And I'm like, we just did it. And then I, I was really, I was really amazed the first time I went to MIT and I saw their lab. It's cool. Saw the things they were building. And I was like, my buddy does this in his garage. And he's not spending tens of thousands of dollars on tuition to do it. That's weird to me.

You guys are both making interesting points because I think it was a comprehensive enough examination that elucidated that the person really does understand this breadth of knowledge. That is almost better than someone that went to class for four years, sat there, barely listened, went in, wrote down the test information they remembered and then forgot it within a few weeks. So just going there and being there doesn't necessarily mean you understand the concept. I would love to see examinations taking precedence. This is why I just said resumes mean very little to me. Send me your portfolio well i mean okay maybe for jobs here but in in larger institutions where the you know hr has

certain requirements stay away from those jobs okay i don't disagree but okay not everybody's going to take your advice oh they should right now college degrees in my opinions are evidence to the contrary of independent thought the ability to think critically and solve problems. And the reason is the people who go to college right now are the ones who were just told by their parents to do it and they don't know why. I think half that the statistic is that 50% of people change their majors, like some ridiculously large number. They don't know what they want to do. And so I prefer to find people who are like, I pursued my dreams and tried to solve problems on my own. I didn't go to college.

Because then you're going to have someone who's a problem solver, a thinker, someone who can think critically. The people who I found when I've worked for various companies who have college degrees, they just did what they were told. And they're really good at just doing what they're told. But I need people who can solve problems and I need quality control. I think there's there's an important point to be made here again you're just thinking and you're not the only of one most people think of college degrees this way and the value of a college education this way it's basically an economic transaction i i think you're misunderstanding me okay people are supposed to go

to college to learn how to think critically and and and develop intellectually and some do some but most don't okay the issue is fine well then that's the criticism in my experience criticism isn't a criticism of college per se it's of how college is pursued today i don't like how it's pursued today, absolutely. As a former college professor myself, I remember people at Ohio State and Columbus State, and no offense against the people who go to those institutions. They're very smart, actually. But they had no motivation to better their minds and to get a liberal arts education.

That means something important. A lot of people who go to these institutions, they don't even realize what it means. So here's the issue. Okay. I used to love playing Magic the Gathering. I now say I hate the game and don't play it because the game's bad. Because I spanked them like 100 times at it. No, the game's bad. The power spanked him like a hundred times at it. No, the game's bad.

The power creep has gone insane. That is true. It's become boring. It is structural. Monotonous. And people use essentially crowdsourcing to solve the games as soon as they're made. It's just not fun anymore.

Net decking. Yeah, net decking. It's just competition has become boring. The win ratios are predictable. It's just become very boring and then you have new cards coming out that are just insane power creep i'm not going to say to be like no no magic the other thing's great because of what it used to be well it's not that anymore college may have been a place where you could show up and learn and explore experience but it's not been that way

since my entire life it has never been that well this is actually one of the reasons why I am pushing young people. I occasionally do this on my blog, and I've been talking to my sons about it, too, that education is super important. It's really important. It isn't important for educational reasons or, sorry, for economic reasons. It's important for educational reasons. For developing your mind, it actually makes life more interesting. And it's hard to explain why this is, why knowledge is important.

Having it in your head, not just in a place to look it up. Knowledge, having a systematic understanding of the world is important. I'll give you an example of how I think about this. So I started reading the Bible, and I've read it through all the way through twice in the last, I guess, 15 months or so. I'm starting again, and I'm also reading commentaries and stuff. I'm actually getting into it. I'm reading a little bit on the side, obviously,

that is very similar to the reading that one would get at seminary. I have absolutely no motivation, no desire to go to seminary. I have talked to a few seminary professors, though, and they're actually interested in my whole proposal of like saying, you know, declaring Sanger to have like a Master of Divinity degree in five years after you've gone through these, you know, texts and written certain things and that sort of thing. I think that would be... But the reason I'm doing it is not so that I can do anything with the degree. It's other than...

But we agree on that. Okay. Good, but you're not saying these things and I am. So I'm confused. So you're saying that you're not going to seminary, but you're learning anyway? That's my point. Yeah. Why go to college to learn things you don't have to go to college to learn?

But you're doing the kind of work that one does at going to college. So if somebody wants— College-type study is still important. Do you agree? College-type study, and what does that mean? So if somebody college type study is still important. Do you agree? College type study. And what does that mean? Reading difficult books, thinking deep thoughts about them, having meaningful discussions with other people about them, writing long papers, doing research.

That's just study. Sure. So if someone wanted to learn how to be, you haven't answered my question. Is it important or not? Studying is important. Okay, good. Yeah. The idea that college is bad as an institution, everything it represents is a corruption of these ideas.

There may be some positive aspects within these institutions, but they are overwhelmingly corrupt. The best way I can explain it is. There's a lot of good people even today in colleges. I don't support a lot of the institutions very much. But it needs to be said that there's a lot of people who they don't want to lose their jobs. And they're still decent. Some of them are even conservative or libertarian. Simple question. Would you learn more about journalism going to college or hanging out in my house?

You'd learn different things for sure. You would learn more about journalism hanging out in my house than you would in college. You know how I know? Okay. Because I've actually been called to speak at numerous colleges. Sure. And it's amazing when I was a 25-year-old high school dropout with a backpack and I was called to give guest lectures for PhD courses in journalism

and they had no idea any of the modern components of journalism. It was fascinating. Oh, they could tell me things about, you know, like Woodward and Bernstein. And I was like, is that relevant to today's modern understanding of how newsrooms operate, about how to gather news, how to disseminate information, how to be a journalist. So I I'm, I'm out here, you know, I'm 25 and I was consulting with the BBC, sitting down with their mobile experts, explaining to them like what to do, how to do it. Universities were asking me to go and speak there. And there's this idea among people that they're better off

going and going to these schools and spending tons of money instead of literally just going and doing journalism and being surrounded by the experts in the field. The value of being here would be they would learn faster because of the mentorship and college. The one-on-one. Yeah, it's supposed to simulate mentorship. You have a professor that you're mentoring with, but it's become so big. It's the education industry that they've even industrialized it is the problem I have with it, that it's a money-making machine. Now, look, look, look, look.

There's a distinction that needs to be made here, though, right? You're talking about professional training, and I actually happen to agree with you. I'm not. You're inferring that. I'm talking about if you want to have a modern understanding of journalism outside of any doing a job. I didn't say work here. I said hang out here.

No, no, no. But I understand. But this is all in the context of discussion about the value of college education. And your point seems to be that learning in the context of, you know, on the job, basically. I got to stop you. I didn't say work here okay no no okay right so someone who's literally sleeping on my couch will learn more about journalism than someone in a college okay yeah i kind of has nothing to do with work because they're gonna hear conversations about the president of cnn high level staffers at various news organizations they're going to see various top-level journalists who will be hanging out here

and telling them stories, as opposed to going to college. What they will not get is a liberal arts education. What does that mean? Well, a liberal arts education has a number of different components in which basically you systematically develop an understanding

of the world through a study of the great books. Why wouldn't they get that? Well, I don't know. Do the people who work here often read Homer? Yeah, I think we have like 3,000 books. No joke. We get sent dozens of books every week, and we have tons of bookshelves.

Classics? The great books? I'm pretty sure we do. I was just handed The Art of War, for instance, and we've got a bunch of different versions of the Bible if you don't want to read then you don't read yours is a very unusual workplace then I guess I should say

it's not about work everyone here is doing something but for the most part we get books sent here some of them are insane some of them are classics some of them are modern some of them are old some of them are insane. Some of them are classics. Some of them are modern. Some of them are old. Some of them are ancient philosophy. And they're all here on the bookshelves

available for people to read if they want to. Well, that's great. My head is off. I think that's great. So all right. But so what's the point of going, spending tens of thousands of dollars to be surrounded by other people with no experience and hang out with people with no experience to be mentored by someone who has limited experience who's going to tell you to read a book it's the structure like here at this house you have to seek it to find it it's not there's no classes to go to there's no like expectation of you but at college there's someone there waiting for you they're they're giving you a place to be a seat to sit in and they're focused on so you're saying unmotivated people will somehow understand these concepts while being told they have to do it?

Sometimes. Actually, yeah. I mean, basically, unfortunately, like it or not, students need a structure that is imposed by their parents or their teachers or professors. And that's the way most people are, like it or not. I mean, and I wish that people were, like, motivated to do a lot of extracurricular activities, you know, bettering their minds as they are, like, working near your office or whatever. that'd be great if the world worked that way. But for the most part, it doesn't. So the results of taking unmotivated people who often,

not every, I'll put it this way, not everybody has the ability to reach the levels you're describing. We live in, there's a reality. Some people are smart. Some people are average. Some people are not smart. Some people are strong. Some people are tall. I read this really great article years ago.

It was actually, I believe it was from a professor who said, the challenge with universities is that when unmotivated people go to these schools because their parents told them to, instead of learning and truly understanding what they're being told to learn, they simply memorize details. The problem with memorizing details as opposed to understanding is that they then start to mash things in a broken way. You know, the saying is,

knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that it doesn't go in a fruit salad. The problem is if you take unmotivated people and you put them in a room and you say, tomato is a fruit, they'll go, okay. And then later on in life, they'll go, tomato is a fruit,

put it in the fruit salad. Motivated people who are dedicated and passionate will sit there and they'll understand and say, tomatoes are fruit, huh? Then why do we call it a vegetable? Then you'll go through culinary. You'll start researching. You'll learn about different culinary arts and you'll go, wow. And then you'll understand.

Unmotivated people being put in a box where someone tells them to read a book doesn't mean they'll understand it or they want to understand it well i agree but there's a lot of people who are inspired to become uh to better themselves essentially to better their minds when they go to college that's just a fact it's happened a lot i'm i'm worried that because a lot of people are are listening to you and i understand i think i understand what you're saying i've heard a lot. I'm worried that because a lot of people are listening to you, and I think I understand what you're saying. I've heard a lot of it. They're going to take your advice

and they're going to end up being anti-intellectual, frankly, and that's not a good thing. Telling people to study and research is anti-intellectual? Let me show you this. I'm going to give you this. And we'll put it in the library. Okay, sure.

Okay, so this is Essays on Free Knowledge. I wrote it. One of my most controversial blog posts is in here. It's called, Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism? The things that you've been saying are in this article. I basically responded to it. It's from 2011. And I would love to have

your feedback on that. And also there's a follow-up where I have replies to objections. There are like hundreds and hundreds of objections and it generated all kinds of controversy as you know bloggers so responded are you of the opinion that independent study

and research is anti-intellectual no no no i'm this is how we got onto this subject of course it's it's uh it's perfectly intellectual and it's a a great. So what I want to do is reform the university system or force it in one way or another to reform. So it recaptures its old spirit of true knowledge seeking where there is, there is not, there are not essentially doctrinal or ideological tests for participating in the system. That bothers me. I think that's a huge part of the problem.

But discouraging people from going to college is going to be interpreted, whether you intend it this way or not, I think it's going to be interpreted by a lot of people as saying the sorts of things that one learn in college are not important. I know that's not what you're saying, but... From my understanding, I think from talking with Tim a lot about this, it's that the things you learn in college aren't worth the modern cost of college fiscally, because. I actually agree with that. But it's more than that. And people are being indoctrinated. And you get the 99.4% of the people that want to go work for a firm instead of start their own company that end up going there and becoming part of the machine.

I've spent a lot of time at various universities throughout my life. And boy, did I find it laughable. I lived with so many people who spent so much money going to college, and it was remarkable to me how I could sit in a room with people and explain to them basic concepts you major who had no idea how she'd not read Homer. She didn't know what the word solipsism meant and she didn't know how to manage bands. And I said, then why are you in college? Oh, that's what college was breeding in Chicago. So maybe your experience, you know, the way you viewed college is this positive thing that needs to be brought back. The way I see it is it's corrupted. And so encouraging people to go into corruption won't improve it. If the system is reformed,

then maybe later we can say, hey, this is actually good, go do this. However, technology maybe has made the whole institution archaic. You look at the story of someone like Aaron Swartz who helped contribute to the foundation of Reddit as well as, I think, wasn't he involved in RSS? Or no, no, no, I'm sorry, Creative Commons.

He was like 13 and he was on the internet. He got involved with very prominent individuals. I remember him. I had some interactions with him back in the day. So how do we encourage young people to be inspired, to get involved, to seek out on their own? College does the opposite of that today. It beats people down and dulls them and makes them hate these things. Maybe not completely, but in a very large way. And then they come out with massive debt. They become indentured servants. And many of them, because of the hopelessness, become communist. No. Geez, I agree with all of that entirely. I mean, I don't...

What we agree on is we want to encourage people to read the classics, to read philosophy, to understand these deep questions and thoughts. But it's not going to happen. We can agree on that. Yeah. Now, my opinion is college is corrupted, siphons money, makes people disinterested, and leaves them as angered, indentured servants. Yeah. So it's a bad thing. Well, I would disagree with that.

I do believe that it makes people indentured. I've been to college 20 years ago, so maybe it's a bad thing well I would disagree with that I do believe that it makes people indentured I've been to college 20 years ago so maybe it's changed but I learned a lot and I would pay that debt thrice over to have that experience again so what if you hung out at Hackerspace instead

I guess I don't disagree in my own case what if we just turn the local libraries into Hackerspaces and you can go and hang out for free oh that would be such a good use of libraries right so the issue is technology but the books are still there of course okay and the internet so i i i hung out i hung out at various uh man i traveled around i met a lot of different

interesting people i had access to the internet so i was able to read and research well that's how a lot of people do use libraries i mean. I go and do work at libraries sometimes. So we can abolish college but recenter libraries as the centers for inquiry, investigation, research, knowledge-seeking, but also activities. Yeah. Libraries are amazing. I love libraries. I used to use them all the time when I was a kid. Get access to the internet.

Rent movies. People don't know this. I used to use them all the time when I was a kid. Get access to the internet, rent movies. People don't know this. I used to go to the library because they had free movies to rent. And I would get books, movies, and I would go on the internet. Now what we can do is create community centers

where people have fun hanging out with each other, exploring ideas. And you could have people come to the libraries and perhaps teach these people. And you could have a subscription model

where each of these, we'll call them students, would learn from these teachers, but pay them $20 a class via PayPal. Cut out the middleman. No, no, no. They're free. This is precisely what I've been advocating. Teachers deserve to make a living. What he is trying to do is cut out the middleman of college and just pay the teacher directly.

I'm saying libraries are free and there's no schedule. There's no structure. There's no structure. There's no professors. You show up and Richard is there and he's machining rocket parts. And you go and you go, what's he doing? Machining rocket parts. And then he talks to you about rocketry. And then one guy's reading a book on philosophy.

Aristotle. And then kids are going around. They're being mentored by people who are talking about interesting things. It's just a scaling problem because if too many people are surrounding the rocketry guy and he doesn't have time to work on his product or enough, he can't explain. So we've got to mediate for the scaling problem. I think that's why you want to pay them. We need to create community centers where people can explore and expand and engage in practical activities. Now, I will stress there are absolute important reasons for college, and that's literally the sciences where you have to do

these things under regulated conditions. If you want to be a lawyer or a doctor and you have to have certain credentials, yes, college exists for those reasons. So let me ask you first, have you heard of different homeschooling philosophies like a classic method and unschooling and these different homeschooling approaches? I've heard of unschooling.

I know the girl, Dana Martin. So let me sort of, I actually think we agree a lot more than we disagree. But you basically want, your model, your mental model for education is essentially unschooling. My mental model for education is, it makes room for that, for people for whom it is good, but it isn't good for most people. Most people need more structure. My sons would not thrive under an unschooling model. They simply wouldn't learn the things that they should learn.

I'm not advocating for an unschooling system. I'm saying there are benefits to converting libraries into hackerspaces because hackerspaces are greatly beneficial. I think there are many different ways people learn. Some people learn through physically grasping an object and rotating it. Some people learn through hearing from another person or through reading, through demonstration. There's many different ways to learn.

Those are not the things that are relevant to the controversy between us here. What's relevant is does the education need to be regimented from above by some leader of the curriculum? Because, look, there's some people who really want to learn. They have a hard time motivating themselves, and they actually want the direction. They need the direction, and they really would benefit too so so i'm not saying we don't have teachers i'm saying the current institution of college is a broken down old rusty pile of garbage that you can't polish well but there's i think if you're going to appeal to all the people that we need to appeal to, they're going to serve. If we're going to serve all of their needs, then there's going to be something like college that emerges, even if it is like decentralized and so forth.

But I think the issue is, is a reason why the left targets children. They don't need to appeal to the old people. The old people walk away and the young people do what the generation was told to do. So what we need to do is we need to inspire young people. I appreciate the book. You've got to sign that. Yeah, absolutely. Sign it.

We need to inspire young people to be seekers, to be hackers, to be interested, and to achieve things. And there's probably some people who can do it, and they need direction. But a lot of what I see happening is that young people are not being properly educated and motivated, notably that in America we don't teach children anything before the age of five, which is insane to me. It's like from zero to five, right, the most important years of your life. I taught my boys to read both when they were one. They knew how to read picture books by the age of two,

and they were reading chapter books when they were three. And the problem is most Americans don't do anything until they're five, which is ridiculous. And they loved it, too, by the way. I didn't force them at all. Because kids want to learn. It's literally within humans to try. They always say kids will imitate you because they're trying to learn. It's literally within humans to try. They always say kids will imitate you because they're

trying to learn. So teach these kids things and congratulate them and make them feel good. The one thing that will really help people be inspired is if you've got a little kid and they go in and they're doing something positive and you cheer them on and other people are like, wow, this kid's cool. They're going to feel good from the social acceptance. It will encourage them to pursue doing good things. However, what we do in this country is we don't teach our kids until they're five. Then they start learning rudimentary basics. I mean, I'm sure parents to some degree teach their kids some things, obviously. But then they basically go to an institutionalized learning facility where many teachers are just not good at

what they do. Many of them are mean. I think I had two good teachers in my life, two. And there's a phrase that I think breaks down exactly what's wrong with schooling. School sucks. Why would kids say that? Why is it that I can be so inspired? I built my first computer when I was like eight years old. Why? Because I had good parents. They taught me before five. They inspired me. They cheered me on. They talked about how amazing these things were. And I wanted to do these amazing things. Many other kids were riding around on their bikes careless. And so all they wanted to do was get social acceptance from their friends who also were riding around on their bikes having fun. I wanted to do things. I wanted to play music. I

wanted to skateboard. I wanted to accomplish things. so how do we get kids to do that we need to create a new culture of inspiration of hands-on activities having kids feel good when they accomplish something i think what what you're describing here sounds like just what our educators are taught in progressive education institutions have been for the last hundred years. So, yeah, they're like vigorously nodding their head to the suggestion that we need hands-on education, that they need to get out there and actually build things. And it comes from the parents. Yeah, they need inspiration. They don't need indoctrination. Less reading of books and more making and doing.

I didn't say less reading of books, though. Well, that's what they say. And they regard it as, well, they regard it all of a piece. You see, this is why it's so easy, I think. And if you read the essay that I was referring to there about geek anti-intellectualism, you'll see why. And so, like, I have a feeling that, like, you don't have kids, right? No. Yeah, well, I mean, when you have kids, you're probably going to be a homeschooling dad, I'm guessing. It's going to be a very interesting curriculum. There will be many whiteboards. Yeah, I hope so.

Monday morning from 9 to 10 is parkour hour. No, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm commanding it. Then it's going to be Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Alright So the first is Just to get loosened up

To climb around To get that agility And then the next hour Is the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu I hope you have boys And then You can earn crypto From your math class

See I think gamifying education Is going to be the wave Of the future Because if you can earn crypto Even if it's just like Non-fungible tokens That are worth anything But you can spend on like A hat for your avatar and then you're rather than riding

around and showing your friends how cool you are outside you'll go to class and be like yo i don't need video games because look how good i am at my class you can see my cool my son has actually stopped playing some of his io games um in favor of trading crypto. You're agreeing with me. Oh, yeah. When I'm saying it's the dopamine hit. Yes.

Getting kids to get that dopamine hit, a goal was accomplished. Yeah. The problem I see is that many, many parents don't do anything with their kids until,

so the kids don't develop this, you know, this mindset. But anyway. Yeah. We've gone very, very long. Start rewarding the kids. Oh, yeah, I guess we have. This has been absolutely wonderful. Thanks for hanging out and talking about Wikipedia. Really appreciate you coming, Larry.

Absolutely. For everybody who's watching, we're not going to have an extended bonus segment tonight. Consider this, the extra half an hour we did. Free bonus segment. Awesome. Free bonus segment for everybody. It was interesting.

We rolled with it. But we are going to have more vlogs coming up because we do have one we're ready to publish we're just there there's like some some bumps we're gonna get through probably might be up like a saturday or sunday thing we're gonna start filming these we need a master of ceremonies email us at jobs at timcast.com if you think you have what it takes i'll put it this way mc probably got to be able to play music and skateboard because you're going to be helping produce these vlogs and we're also looking for a web dev and web editor

but you can follow me on every social media platform at Timcast my other YouTube channels are YouTube.com slash Timcast and YouTube.com slash Timcast News this show is live Monday through Friday at 8pm so subscribe, smash that notification bell hit the like button, it's all greatly appreciated and did you want to shout out anything, Larry,

mention, maybe your book or social media, follow you? Sure, okay. Well, okay, go ahead and buy my book, please. I don't think you're intending on promoting it. I'm hawking it. It's on Amazon. The e-book is also on Gumroad

and Amazon. What is it called, the book? It's called Essays on Free Knowledge, the Origins of Wikipedia, and the New Politics of Knowledge. And a lot of things that we've talked about actually are in this book, especially in the last new chapter,

The Future of the Free Internet. Cool. Thank you for the book. Yeah, sure. I want to encourage people who are interested in the Encyclosphere project, especially if you're technical. Even if you're not and you're just interested in the stuff, sign up. We're starting a seminar slash deliberation about the policies of the future

Encyclosphere probably beginning next month, I hope. No promises. slash deliberation about the policies of the future in cyclosphere, probably beginning next month, I hope. No promises, but it's going to be free. Donations are encouraged, and it's going to be serious. We're going to have, like, Bill Ottman has already agreed to talk in the week that we're going to do about decentralizing social media. So sign up for that seminar. Sign up for the Encyclosphere. It's encyclosphere.org, just like

it sounds. Well, I've got a lot of other things going on. You have social media accounts too, right? You have at least a Twitter. El Sanger on Twitter. And you can follow my RSS feeds, actually, LarrySanger.org. And then I have my micro feed. Actually, the future name for it actually is going to be mini feed. That's what it's going to be, mini feed. It lives on Start this.org.

Right on. Really appreciate you coming, Larry. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm looking forward to working with you in cyclosphere and involving that in this Fediverse more and more, man.

You guys can follow me at Ian Crosland.net and at Ian Crosland across pretty much every social media platform. So hit me up there if you ever want to message me or anything and get involved. Thanks. Very good. Super fun conversation. Thank you for coming, Larry.

I feel like I learned a lot, even though this is way out of my field of expertise. I am Sour Patch Lids on Twitter. And join me on my quest to have more followers in the actual Sour Patch Kids account. We'll have fun with that. We will see you all tomorrow. But don't forget to sign up at TimCast.com. Become a member because we've got a lot of really cool stuff in the works. Thanks for hanging out, and we'll see you all next but don't forget to sign up at timcast.com become a member because we have a lot

of really cool stuff in the works thanks for hanging out and we'll see you all next time bye guys