Stay Free - Russel Brand - Larry Sanger - Wikipedia co-founder

In this episode, we talk to Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, about how Wikipedia exemplifies the trend towards censorship, from open source and collaboratively achieved information, and how it can be used as a thermometer for a changing global climate when it comes to establishment intervention, censorship, authoritarianism and centralisation. We also discuss the role of Wikipedia as a proxy for the establishment, and the role it plays in shaping the global narrative, as well as the influence of deep state agencies and corporate interests on the information flow on the internet. This episode was produced by YouWakingWonders and edited by Alex Blumberg. It was produced and produced by Tall Tales Productions. Additional audio mixing and mastering by Matthew Boll. We are working on transcribing this podcast and putting it on a website. Please be kind enough to leave us your comments and suggestions for future episodes. We do not claim ownership of the music used in this podcast. Thank you so much for all your support, it means a lot to us and we appreciate it greatly. You Awakening Wonders is a project of You Waking Wonders. - our mission is to help awaken the world to a better, more informed and more connected world. Your support is invaluable, and we thank you for all the support you all show us your support. If you like what you see here, please consider pledging a small monthly donation. We can't wait to see what you're listening to us on TikTok, We'll be looking out for you in the next episode! in the coming weeks, we'll be giving you a shoutout! We're looking forward to hearing from you! - we're listening out for all of your support in the rest of the world, too! Timestamps: - The Awakening Wonders Podcasts: . . . , and . , and of the Awakening Wonders podcast: - Thank you for your support is much appreciated, Thankyou, and your support will be much appreciated! (Thank you, you're all the more important than you can have a chance to be heard by us in the world thank you, and you'll get a better understanding of what we're hearing from us, too much more in the future? - Timestay me in the podcast? ) - Your support really means the world is much more than enough.

00:00:00.000 Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.

00:00:01.000 Thanks for joining us today.

00:00:02.000 If you're watching us on YouTube, we'll be there for a few minutes before being exclusively available on Rumble because, obviously, this is a time where we have to be supported and we have to be incredibly cautious about the way we talk about an omni-crisis across the world where there is so much suffering, so much conflict, so much doubt.

00:00:21.000 We have to be very, very specific about what we say.

00:00:24.000 And your support is absolutely invaluable to us.

00:00:27.000 We're talking, of course, about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and America's potential role in arming the world.

00:00:35.000 50% or 57% of the world's autocratic nations have been sold arms by the American military-industrial complex.

00:00:41.000 Additionally, we're talking to Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, about how Wikipedia exemplifies the trend towards censorship from open source and collaboratively achieved information.

00:00:57.000 Time now to introduce Larry.

00:00:58.000 Larry, thank you so much for joining us today.

00:01:01.000 You must have started Wikipedia as, I'm imagining, a fresh-faced idealist, full of potential and possibility, believing that Wikipedia would become an open source of knowledge collaboration, perhaps creating a consensus around a variety of complex topics.

00:01:18.000 Can you tell me How Wikipedia changed from the vision you originally had to it and how it can be used as a kind of thermometer for a changing global climate when it comes to establishment intervention, censorship, authoritarianism and centralisation.

00:01:33.000 That's a very big question.

00:01:35.000 So let's just take the first one then, basically how it changed.

00:01:41.000 You know, when it started, there was a very robust neutrality policy.

00:01:48.000 Articles had to be balanced.

00:01:50.000 Many different points of view needed to be able to be stated, and they were, actually, in the first several years.

00:01:58.000 I mean, it was already starting to lean left because that's how most of the contributors were, but still they made a real effort.

00:02:06.000 And over the next 10 years, and really solidifying by about 2015, the left had continued its march through the institutions.

00:02:17.000 One of them, now one of the dominant institutions of big tech, is Wikipedia itself.

00:02:25.000 And so by 2015, it It shared in the same sort of outright bias that you see in in, you know, the mainstream news media.

00:02:44.000 So they they wear their bias on their sleeve and they have for the last several years.

00:02:51.000 And it's this is particularly clear.

00:02:55.000 For any of the issues that we like to refer to as the narrative, or whatever the current thing is.

00:03:06.000 So as I say, around like maybe 2016, when the Brexit debate was happening and Donald Trump's first election, that I think is what really made the switch for the major news media.

00:03:20.000 And I think that at the same time is what I have a bunch of questions based on what you've already said.

00:03:34.000 With social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, now X, it's understood that these sites can be used to form consensus through communication and we're aware as a result of the Twitter files that deep state agencies were sort of embedded within Twitter.

00:03:51.000 Certainly they were spending money, they were directing content, they were Pre-emptively asking for certain types of content, even true information to be suppressed.

00:03:58.000 Most of our audience will be familiar with those practices now.

00:04:02.000 But when it comes to those social media sites, they're communicative tools that create a consensus around news.

00:04:08.000 Wikipedia is a different type of resource.

00:04:10.000 It's not a social media platform.

00:04:12.000 It's in fact the only one of the top five that isn't, I suppose, other than Google, which encompasses different types of social media sites, I suppose.

00:04:20.000 So can you tell us, what is the distinction, and post Brexit and Trump, how did you see that neutrality being impeded upon?

00:04:28.000 Was it because of intervention of deep state agencies?

00:04:32.000 And can you give us a couple of examples of topics that were previously been collaboratively and somewhat objectively conveyed, becoming more biased and clearly subject to, as you say, a particular narrative?

00:04:45.000 I have cited a number of examples in a series of blog posts, and it's hard to pick one, especially because after I make these blog posts, they'll go to the articles and try to clean them up to some extent, so they're not quite as embarrassing to them.

00:05:08.000 But you ask a very interesting question.

00:05:12.000 Basically, What is the difference between the techniques used for information control by Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, whatever, and on the one hand, and Wikipedia on the other?

00:05:34.000 Well, I think the difference is for X or Facebook, They are literally throttling the views that they don't want people to share.

00:05:47.000 I myself, I used to have a blue check, but I now have less traffic than I had before I got my blue check on my posts,

00:06:03.000 and this back in 2019. And so it's really, it's very

00:06:07.000 interesting to me.

00:06:09.000 Now, on Wikipedia, on the other hand, it's actually much more straightforward.

00:06:14.000 They simply don't allow certain points of view to be introduced.

00:06:21.000 Now, from the outsider, or even people who are working and not even thinking about what's going on behind the scenes, It's what it looks like is just a bunch of random people who are anonymous, mostly, debating on what's called the talk page of Wikipedia, negotiating about what the article will be, and just a whole bunch of people who are really, really left wing or really, really, because it isn't necessarily the left, right?

00:06:56.000 It's the establishment.

00:06:57.000 It's the establishment left, mostly.

00:07:02.000 And they are all, you know, pushing a certain point of view.

00:07:06.000 And if you try to give voice to any sort of, you know, skepticism about the jab, just for example, then they will shut you down and block you.

00:07:22.000 But I think what's going on is that any number of prominent players in the media landscape, and by that I mean not just, you know, I'm not talking about the, you know, network anchors or anything like that, I'm just talking about whoever is influencing the media, whoever cares.

00:07:48.000 And that includes especially like PR firms, and quite frankly, a variety of government agencies that make it their business to direct these things, as we have learned in the last couple of years, especially in the Twitter files, right?

00:08:06.000 I hope your viewership is aware of the Twitter files.

00:08:13.000 Yeah, we are.

00:08:14.000 We've had Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, Barry Weiss, David Zweig, all of these people come on our show and very much inform our perspective on how deep state agencies and corporate interests have co-opted big tech, how there's been a sort of formation of new elites, how the online space essentially could be conceived as a new Territory opening up, much like the discovery of what was somewhat dismissively regarded as the New World, which was subsequently being colonised by various sets of interests.

00:08:50.000 The once organic space that afforded the advent of Napster and the changes that that created, or the Arab Spring, has necessarily become co-opted and controlled in the same way that We would have assumed, and continue to assume, that legacy media outlets like the BBC, CNN, ultimately see independent media now as their competitors rather than one another.

00:09:17.000 We understand that there is an agenda, that the function of the legacy media is to amplify

00:09:22.000 the agenda of the powerful and normalize the agenda of the powerful.

00:09:27.000 And they increasingly are encroaching on the spaces that afforded actual dissent, independent

00:09:35.000 thinking, independent conversation, their publishing of counter-narratives.

00:09:39.000 I suppose what's interesting about Wikipedia is because it was so successful and effective,

00:09:45.000 it became the de facto resource for everybody from school children to, well let's face it,

00:09:50.000 media, like new media, like we look at Wikipedia still.

00:09:54.000 And I suppose there's a difference from looking at, like, Henry VIII and, like, oh, did he have six wives?

00:10:00.000 And seeing potential inflections that might not have been available to Tudor philosophers imposed by more modern perspectives.

00:10:10.000 And that's, you know, that's all part of progress.

00:10:12.000 And that's Interesting and exciting.

00:10:14.000 But if you can't say why did Pfizer why were Pfizer afforded an indemnity agreement?

00:10:20.000 Why are they not publishing those results for 75 years?

00:10:23.000 What is the relationship between vaccine injury and myocarditis?

00:10:27.000 How effective and what clinical trials were conducted For children and pregnant women.

00:10:31.000 What are the studies that suggest that breastfeeding women can safely take the vaccine?

00:10:37.000 That is where you're precisely where you're saying there will not be open conversation.

00:10:41.000 And again, the coronavirus pandemic is more a lens rather than a unique, whilst it was unique in many ways, I primarily myself have started to regard it as a opportunity to see how institutions and power Always function.

00:10:56.000 Where do their interests converge and how are they trying to establish new elites?

00:11:00.000 Now, recently, Larry, perhaps we had on the show Dr. Robert Epstein.

00:11:04.000 You've maybe heard of him and the studies he does of Google activity and how new and how reality is ultimately curated, cultivated and imposed through Google's ability to manipulate ultimately news feeds, I suppose.

00:11:18.000 Now, is it true that Google makes significant donations to Wikipedia And as a result are able to manage and control the reality because I suppose the way I see Wikipedia, you know it's a pretty simple and obvious metaphor I suppose or at least analogy, is like it's like a library and if you have control over what's in that library and what's not in that library, you control the knowledge base itself.

00:11:43.000 You are able to, that's why we live in this siloed and bifurcated cultural space, is because half of the world are not gaining access to any counter narrative.

00:11:53.000 They're receiving hyperbole and bombast and consuming it as facts.

00:11:56.000 In particular, what is the relationship between Google and Wikipedia?

00:12:01.000 And is it true that there are paid consultants managing Wikipedia?

00:12:06.000 And so how is it ultimately that financial interests are managing the information you see in Wikipedia?

00:12:12.000 Right.

00:12:14.000 Well, I think Google has contributed to Wikipedia in a couple of different ways that are really important.

00:12:22.000 They have given millions of dollars, but Wikipedia gets tens of millions of dollars per year now in donations from various sources.

00:12:34.000 I'm not sure that a really significant amount of that comes from Google, but it doesn't matter, because Google's main contribution by far is the massive amount of traffic that they send to Wikipedia.

00:12:55.000 And there is, you know, what internet theorists have called for a long time, the long tail of topics.

00:13:03.000 And Wikipedia, if you want to look up an article about, I was looking at this Civil War general, Sylvester Morris, or something like that.

00:13:17.000 And there's only one encyclopedia article about this Civil War figure, and it's from Wikipedia.

00:13:28.000 You won't find a separate standalone article about that guy.

00:13:33.000 And there's literally millions of topics like that that Wikipedia has the only article about.

00:13:42.000 I noticed back in the beginning, back in the day, how each month, because it happened on a monthly basis, the Google bot would come through and it would spider a new set of articles, and we'd get a new influx of traffic and a new influx of editors as a result.

00:14:09.000 That pattern continued on for years and years.

00:14:13.000 So as a friend of mine likes to put it, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that Google built.

00:14:23.000 And I think there's something to that.

00:14:26.000 And it's very sad.

00:14:28.000 But I have to say, Wikipedia is not the only encyclopedia out there.

00:14:34.000 And I hope you're going to ask me about the solution, because there is a very clear solution.

00:14:42.000 All right.

00:14:43.000 Well, Larry, it would be quite remiss and almost unbearably recalcitrant for me now not to say.

00:14:49.000 Larry, watch me do this because I'm a professional.

00:14:53.000 Larry, this is very difficult for me to listen to.

00:14:56.000 Almost inducing despair.

00:14:59.000 If only there was some sort of solution to this centralised, authoritarian, highly censored and cultivated space.

00:15:06.000 Is there?

00:15:08.000 There is, there is.

00:15:09.000 That's all we've got time for today.

00:15:12.000 That's a joke.

00:15:15.000 I'm part of the problem.

00:15:18.000 That was funny.

00:15:23.000 You were a comedian before, that's right.

00:15:25.000 I guess you still are.

00:15:26.000 Hey! 0.99

00:15:27.000 I don't tell you how to build encyclopedias.

00:15:31.000 Don't tell me how to do my job.

00:15:34.000 Alright, well you made me laugh.

00:15:39.000 Yes, I think it's like this.

00:15:42.000 There are a lot of other encyclopedias, and if you do search for articles, for encyclopedia articles on any topic, Even Google will still give you articles from other encyclopedias.

00:15:59.000 Wikipedia is usually the first result, right?

00:16:04.000 But if there are more, and especially if people are going to other sites more, Wikipedia, I think, will not be pushed as heavily by Google and other sources.

00:16:18.000 So there's a couple of things that we need to do.

00:16:20.000 I talked about the long tail of articles.

00:16:24.000 All of you people out there need to start writing encyclopedia articles, and you need to start putting them on your blogs.

00:16:30.000 And I mean about like that Civil War general, the long tail.

00:16:34.000 There are a lot of specialized topics that you have knowledge about that other people don't know things about.

00:16:41.000 should be writing encyclopedia articles about them and putting them on your blogs. We actually have,

00:16:49.000 so when I say we, I mean the Knowledge Standards Foundation.

00:16:52.000 We have a plugin for WordPress that will allow you to push an article that is only on your

00:16:59.000 blog to the encyclosphere. What the encyclosphere is, is a free collection of all the encyclopedias,

00:17:06.000 or at least that's what it will be when we're finished collecting them all. It takes time to

00:17:11.000 collect them all. We've got 35 encyclopedias.

00:17:14.000 We're going to be doubling that number soon.

00:17:19.000 So Encycloreader and Encyclosearch, those are two different encyclopedia search engines and readers.

00:17:29.000 You should be using those instead of Wikipedia if you want to look at Wikipedia.

00:17:34.000 In fact, there's another thing that we do.

00:17:36.000 We have a plugin for Chrome or Chrome-based web browsers like Brave, which is what I use.

00:17:45.000 And if you do a search on any topic that is in the encyclosphere, which is most of them now, then it will come up with some search results above the Google results, if you're using Google or, I think, DuckDuckGo.

00:18:06.000 And if you click on those results, or if you click on a Wikipedia result inside of the results, instead of going to Wikipedia, it will load the article directly in your browser.

00:18:20.000 Right.

00:18:21.000 So, in other words, it will grab it through a web torrent network.

00:18:27.000 You won't even visit their website.

00:18:30.000 None of your traffic will be logged.

00:18:32.000 So, and this is possible now, right?

00:18:34.000 Because, well, we've been working on the technology.

00:18:38.000 Okay, here's another thing that you badly need to do.

00:18:42.000 We really need to start doing this now.

00:18:46.000 We are complaining about the bias of Wikipedia articles, right?

00:18:50.000 Well, we can fix that.

00:18:52.000 We can rewrite the Wikipedia articles.

00:18:55.000 There is, in fact, a big, I think, well-managed It's not a big organization.

00:19:05.000 It's a big project.

00:19:07.000 It's a major new project called Justopedia, as in it's just an encyclopedia.

00:19:15.000 They have forked Wikipedia And they just put the articles up there for you to edit and make your own versions of.

00:19:27.000 And it's really great.

00:19:29.000 And soon the Justopedia articles will also be automatically included in the Encyclosphere.

00:19:39.000 So I don't think that people are going to start using like EncycloReader or EncycloSearch anytime soon, but if we organize all of the other encyclopedias in one giant database, that's what we are doing, right?

00:19:55.000 And then we make it available to other search engines like Brave, for example.

00:20:01.000 I've talked to the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich, And he's interested in using our content.

00:20:10.000 I shouldn't say our content.

00:20:11.000 It's not our content.

00:20:12.000 We are simply aggregating the content from all of these sources.

00:20:16.000 That will essentially make a unified but decentralized network of all of the encyclopedias.

00:20:24.000 Wikipedia is in there.

00:20:26.000 It's included in there.

00:20:27.000 But it's all of the encyclopedias.

00:20:30.000 And of course, the whole is greater than the part.

00:20:33.000 Which is just Wikipedia, right?

00:20:36.000 I like the phrase unified but decentralized.

00:20:40.000 That's a flag I can march under.

00:20:43.000 Also, it's very surprising to see that you're a kind of a real-life Neo navigating the matrix, organizing renegades, Trying to create rebellion against centralised information.

00:20:58.000 And in a way, Larry, it seems like you're reviving the spirit of the early internet, where there was this kind of utopian moment that everyone's collective knowledge could be shared, that communities that were geographically disparate but shared an interest could form, that actually the necessity for authoritarianism and centralisation is itself diminished.

00:21:22.000 by the ability for communities to come together around what might be regarded as niche issues.

00:21:29.000 In a sense, the advent of this technology could be used to, in a way I suppose, enhance

00:21:37.000 our anthropological origins as a tribalised but not necessarily oppositionist and conflict-strewn

00:21:45.000 society.

00:21:46.000 There was a time where there was true diversity where we wouldn't expect people in Iceland to have the same culture as the people in Senegal and we would glory in the truly distinct cultures around food and religion and ideology and now there is this homogenizing force that doesn't Well, masquerading as, like, we're interested in diversity.

00:22:08.000 Even when people use the term, like, left, I think, well, is it about redistribution?

00:22:14.000 Is it about the real support of various communities?

00:22:19.000 Or is this actually authoritarianism?

00:22:21.000 I'm sure you're familiar with Martin Guri's analysis that the terms left and right are becoming almost redundant as a new dynamic between centralising authority, establishment authority, and peripheral dissent is becoming the root.

00:22:35.000 That's why there are these extraordinary alliances.

00:22:37.000 That's why someone like me, I'm more inclined to think that Donald Trump is going to provide

00:22:43.000 a solution than I would Joe Biden.

00:22:46.000 Even though I think what's really needed is massive systemic change to the kind of...

00:22:51.000 And now those kind of things can be openly discussed.

00:22:53.000 You could have...

00:22:55.000 Even though what you're undertaking is a vast enterprise, it alludes to and infers an even

00:23:01.000 greater possibility for decentralisation.

00:23:04.000 How significant do you think those principles are, and particularly what you said, unified but decentralized?

00:23:09.000 Do you think that's something that could be mapped onto political ideals?

00:23:12.000 Is that something that you, because plainly it's an ideal of yours, so if a real ideal is like, is a principle, and principles can be applied almost universally?

00:23:22.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:23:25.000 It's interesting.

00:23:26.000 I remember I was once asked to speak to the intelligence community back in like 2008, and they were asking me, you know, would it be possible to create a wiki for intelligence?

00:23:48.000 And that is actually kind of what you just said, It's immediately brought that to mind.

00:23:59.000 In other words, there is something about the notion of trying to organize organic, naturally occurring behavior that militates against freedom, okay?

00:24:20.000 So let me say this, though, before I try to attack your question a different way.

00:24:28.000 I need to say this.

00:24:33.000 I think some of your viewers might be worried that by collecting all of the encyclopedias, unifying them, as I say, that we would then be giving them all a single neck to cut off.

00:24:50.000 That's absolutely not the case.

00:24:53.000 In other words, we're not unifying them under any sort of management.

00:24:57.000 The thing that unifies them—this is the important point.

00:25:00.000 It's a technical point.

00:25:02.000 All right, is that there is a standard for encyclopedia articles now.

00:25:10.000 We call it the ZWI or zipped wiki file format.

00:25:17.000 Well, all of those encyclopedia articles that I described have been represented.

00:25:24.000 They have been captured in the ZWE file format.

00:25:29.000 And there's also a standard way of organizing the articles in a database so that different organizations that manage different aggregators of different collections of encyclopedias They can exchange articles via these files, all right?

00:25:54.000 It is the fact that there is a technical standard that no one is in control of, that everyone sort of agrees to use organically, right?

00:26:07.000 That is the thing that enables Freedom on the internet.

00:26:13.000 The reason I'm going on this, I know it sounds very wonky, I know it sounds like irrelevant and and merely technical, but it's not.

00:26:21.000 This is the core of the issue.

00:26:23.000 This is the core of the issue of internet freedom, and a lot of non-techies don't realize this, but I'm telling you, it's the thing that enables freedom and always has on the internet, the thing that made the internet free in the first place, were Standards, okay?

00:26:43.000 And I mean technical standards, communications standards.

00:26:48.000 And when there are standards, Well, that means that you actually have to build clients that connect with a network, which is necessarily amorphous and existing in many different places.

00:27:04.000 And so for example, we have two different aggregators started by two different programmers using

00:27:12.000 two different programming languages, and they are exchanging their files between them.

00:27:18.000 And we're encouraging others to-- another guy wrote one out of the blue, not part of our organization,

00:27:25.000 I should say.

00:27:28.000 So the thing that we need to be doing, the real solution here

00:27:35.000 to the technical problems, actually involves things like--

00:27:42.000 I'm not saying that Blue Sky is the answer.

00:27:44.000 It probably isn't, and there are other things, but Blue Sky is an example of the sort of thing that I'm talking about.

00:27:51.000 So Blue Sky on social media is this project that was started By the former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey.

00:28:05.000 It basically aims to enable people to host their own data, to host their own lists of followers and people they follow, so that you could actually own your own presence online And interface with others via standards.

00:28:33.000 So even the Knowledge Standards Foundation has started a project like this, and I'm not saying that ours is the best solution either, but we use the RSS standard.

00:28:44.000 We actually are built on top of the blogging network.

00:28:48.000 Right?

00:28:49.000 And so it is actually a plugin for WordPress.

00:28:53.000 That's the sort of thing that I'm talking about.

00:28:55.000 In other words, if you really, really want decentralization online, and if you want to make that a reality, then you have to adopt standards, and you have to adopt free clients that are easy for grandma to install, That plug into those networks.

00:29:18.000 If you just start creating alternate websites like Rumble, for example, that's just another, it's just another competing centralizing force.

00:29:29.000 So, now, okay, to address your question about, you know, how I mean, it's called freedom, right?

00:29:51.000 I mean, I would think rather that we are taking pre-existing political concepts, self-determination, freedom, individual rights, and applying them to the sphere of tech.

00:30:06.000 Basically.

00:30:07.000 So I actually think it goes the other way around.

00:30:09.000 I don't propose to innovate politics.

00:30:16.000 I mean, I'm a conservative libertarian.

00:30:20.000 Conservatarian, as we call them in the United States, right?

00:30:25.000 Right. So, but I mean, we must not lose sight of the fact that

00:30:37.000 so much of our governance now takes the form of technology.

00:30:44.000 Right, we are the The policies that something like Twitter more directly affects my life than a thousand laws passed by Congress or Parliament or whatever.

00:31:01.000 So, in other words, the technology policy matters a lot.

00:31:06.000 That's important.

00:31:08.000 Yeah, I understand, Larry, what you're saying, and I can see where these ideas mesh together.

00:31:12.000 Ultimately, there's a requirement for standards and principles, and that those have to be indefatigable, enshrined and clear.

00:31:20.000 And when you start to culturally mess with ideas like freedom of speech, of free speech, Then you facilitate and now through technology are able to execute forms of previously unimaginable tyranny.

00:31:36.000 So what you're saying is the principles that preceded online spaces have to be applied in them and there has to be a consensus around what they are and you've explained to us very lucidly and clearly what the Tissue is that connects these ideas that there are ways to govern these spaces that are in alignment with values that we used to consider to be important.

00:31:59.000 We still claim that we consider important, but everywhere we see them trespassed against.

00:32:05.000 Larry, thank you so much.

00:32:07.000 Is there before before we leave, What is the function of the Knowledge Standards Foundation?

00:32:13.000 Is this something that's beyond what you're describing in terms of the aggregation of these various encyclopedias, or is that part of that same deal?

00:32:23.000 Well, we've got a lot of different things going.

00:32:26.000 The most important task that we have is to aggregate all of the encyclopedias, make them available via search engines and readers, but even that isn't as important as simply aggregating them, making all of the data available And encouraging developers to build on top of that in order to, again, have a decentralized but unified collection of encyclopedias that together is greater than Wikipedia.

00:33:03.000 Larry, thank you for being so clear about a subject that's very, very important and sometimes so vast it's difficult to contain without anchoring it to a simple principle like freedom.

00:33:14.000 And the phrase, unified but decentralised, is one I'll remember for a long time.

00:33:19.000 Thank you for joining us.

00:33:20.000 I hope that you'll come on again and talk further about some of these principles and ideas, will you?

00:33:26.000 Sure, absolutely.

00:33:27.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:28.000 Send your viewers, please, to encyclosphere.org.

00:33:33.000 The name of the network is the Encyclosphere, so it's called encyclosphere.org, and there you will find links to EncycloSearch and EncycloReader and our other projects.

00:33:45.000 Couldn't you think of a name that was more difficult to spell?

00:33:48.000 Why don't you call it Encyclo-Sphinx Establishmentarialism?

00:33:53.000 Christ, Larry!

00:33:54.000 Just focus on the marketing!

00:33:55.000 I can see what Jimmy Wales was doing in that operation.

00:33:58.000 He was making it manageable!

00:34:03.000 People complain about Wikipedia, too.

00:34:05.000 What kind of name is Wikipedia?

00:34:07.000 Geez, nobody's ever going to use that.

00:34:10.000 That's like you're doing it to failure.

00:34:12.000 So I'm not worried.

00:34:15.000 Thank you, man.

00:34:16.000 Thanks so much for joining us.

00:34:17.000 We're going to post a link in the description to many of Larry's endeavors, each of which is more difficult to spell than the last.

00:34:25.000 On the show tomorrow, we have Dr. Asim Malhotra, the man for whom this sign was invented.

00:34:30.000 When he starts talking, it's very difficult to stop him.

00:34:33.000 Why don't you click the red Awaken button and support us?

00:34:35.000 Because you know what we're going to do?

00:34:37.000 We're going to ensure that conversations like that one, unified but decentralized, are continued.

00:34:42.000 Wouldn't you like to see Dr. Robert Epstein and Larry Sanger together talking about how we can radically use the internet,

00:34:50.000 how we can free ourselves from these colonizing and centralizing forces.

00:34:54.000 Also, as well as that, there's extended interviews, meditations, and readings,

00:34:59.000 ideas that are gonna change the world.

00:35:00.000 Your voice, how is your voice gonna change the world?

00:35:03.000 You just heard from Larry there.

00:35:05.000 Your principles are important.

00:35:07.000 Some voices that have joined us include Matt Z, GJ2335, Kelvin Zero, Wastler B, Evo J and The Rugged Nerd.

00:35:16.000 Thank you for becoming Awakened Wonders.

00:35:18.000 Thank you for supporting our voices.

00:35:19.000 Join them.

00:35:20.000 Join us.

00:35:21.000 Join us again tomorrow.

00:35:22.000 Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.

00:35:24.000 Until then, if you can, stay free.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - October 20, 2023

Larry Sanger - Wikipedia co-founder

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