In this episode, we discuss the latest in censorship and censorship, including the latest on James O'Keefe and Project Veritas and CNN. We also hear from Larry Sanger, founder of Wikipedia and founder of the Knowledge Standards Foundation, and Ian Crossland, co-founder of Minds.
00:02:02.000Interestingly, we have more James O'Keefe news because he announced he's going to be suing CNN as well.
00:02:07.000So the dude is, look, Veritas is going above and beyond their scope of work, and it's good.
00:02:14.000They're literally fighting the good fight.
00:02:16.000They are not only exposing the media for their lies, they're actually taking the fight to the courts.
00:02:21.000And 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, it stands to reason they should be informing their Readers, and thus, Veritas won, defeating a motion to dismiss.
00:02:36.000I gotta 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.
00:03:55.000The 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.
00:04:40.000I'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.
00:04:46.000My 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.
00:05:42.000So, definitely we're gonna get to, I wanna, you know, get into the nitty gritty of Wikipedia because I have ragged.
00:05:46.000I was basically ragging on Wikipedia and then you tweeted at me and then I was like, yes, let's talk about, you know, Wikipedia.
00:05:51.000But we do have some breaking news that I want to get into first.
00:05:54.000From the rap, Twitter permanently suspends Project Veritas' James O'Keefe. O'Keefe says he plans to
00:06:00.000sue the platform for defamation following the suspension.
00:06:03.000Twitter permanently banned James O'Keefe Thursday. The Project Veritas founder spent the
00:06:08.000preceding days posting videos taken of a CNN employee without that employee's knowledge, in
00:06:12.000keeping with his organization's practice of covertly recorded content, but in violation of
00:06:20.000Twitter's policy. O'Keefe, who had over 900,000 followers at the time of his suspension, told
00:06:26.000the rap that he plans to sue the social media platform. Quote, the account you
00:06:31.000referenced, James O'Keefe the third, was permanently suspended for violating the Twitter rules on platform
00:06:36.000manipulation and spam, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed.
00:06:40.000As outlined in our policy on platform manipulation and spam, you can't mislead others on Twitter by operating fake accounts.
00:06:47.000And you can't artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts.
00:06:54.000That's an interesting statement to make.
00:06:56.000Because now James could sue for defamation, assuming it's not true.
00:06:59.000The 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 his statement.
00:07:07.000O'Keefe said, I am suing Twitter for defamation because they said I, James O'Keefe, operated fake accounts.
00:07:13.000This is false, this is defamatory, and they will pay.
00:07:16.000Section 230 may have protected them before, but it will not protect them from me.
00:07:39.000And 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.
00:07:47.000Yeah, he only goes to war when he's gonna win.
00:07:50.000That's what I've learned about James O'Keefe.
00:07:59.000So, here's the next bit of this story, which will get us into the talk of censorship and fake news and things like that.
00:08:05.000According to Newsweek, James O'Keefe, to expand his war on CNN with lawsuits, more video, Controversial undercover journalist and scourge of the left, so saith 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 non-profit organization.
00:08:29.000O'Keefe told Newsweek he will soon sue CNN and two of its journalists, Brian Stelter
00:08:34.000and Anna Cabrera, for defamation in a report about Twitter permanently banning Project
00:09:23.000I believe we brainchilded that here on the show.
00:09:26.000Well, 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.
00:09:33.000So when these news outlets start writing fake stories, there is an advocate to protect you from the media, the smears.
00:09:41.000As we get into this space where everyone's a public figure, it becomes harder and harder to sue.
00:09:47.000For 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.
00:09:57.000It's insane we've come to that point where basically no one is protected anymore.
00:10:02.000If Project Veritas is doing it, I'm stoked.
00:10:04.000This guy's, you know, wins the battles.
00:10:07.000There's a huge need for it, and I can only say that they eventually helped give the same treatment to Wikipedia, frankly.
00:10:22.000There'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 7, 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.
00:10:51.000And the Tennessean, he was the publisher or the editor.
00:11:00.000And he, 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.
00:11:16.000And it was bad and it was totally false.
00:11:19.000And he basically criticized me over the phone back then, and I felt bad.
00:11:28.000It'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.
00:11:39.000When did you... 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.
00:12:20.000I mean, that story about this guy from yesterday, that was, that was the first moment you realized that, you know, defamation was occurring or?
00:12:27.000Of 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.
00:12:46.000So that's what really made it hit home.
00:12:49.000It didn't matter at the time that I was actually starting a competing website.
00:12:54.000I still took responsibility for Wikipedia.
00:12:59.000I don't understand why James hasn't launched a nuke against Wikipedia right now.
00:13:03.000It says on Wikipedia, Project Veritas, Purpose, Disinformation.
00:14:34.000But I mean, I wouldn't agree that I'm unbiased.
00:14:38.000Well, what I mean to say is, we all have our biases, but you don't appear to be a tribalist, like staunchly defending the conservatives for any reason.
00:15:14.000I'm thinking about it when you're 17, like, where did it come from?
00:15:17.000Okay, 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.
00:16:26.000Yeah, and I made some proposals and sent it out to different acquaintances.
00:16:34.000He was one and he said, Why don't you come to work for me?
00:16:38.000I want to start this free, public, contributed encyclopedia built on the model of 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.
00:16:57.000I 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.
00:17:16.000And one of them was an encyclopedia editor.
00:17:19.000And here somebody is offering me the opportunity to start my own encyclopedia.
00:17:26.000So that was my job, basically, to start something.
00:17:29.000He had the domain name, it was called Newpedia, and I organized a group of hundreds of PhDs.
00:17:39.000It 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.
00:17:49.000But 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.
00:18:03.000Negotiating 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.
00:18:11.000So, 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.
00:19:00.000It's a repository of software programming patterns.
00:19:06.000And 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
00:19:31.000So that same evening I went back, and I think Ben Kovitz is the name of my friend.
00:19:39.000We had a Mexican dinner in which he explained all this to me.
00:19:44.000I went back to my apartment and wrote out a one-page proposal to Jimmy Wales and said, can you guys install the software for me to use?
00:20:01.000So a couple of days later that was done, and so I just went to work describing what a wiki encyclopedia would be like.
00:20:15.000WikiWikis had been around for six years before that, so there was already a sort of internet culture surrounding wikis.
00:20:22.000So we had to sort of change that and reappropriate Not just the software, but also the culture for the purpose of creating an encyclopedia.
00:20:37.000And I was just amazed that 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.
00:21:09.000And I said, well, okay, we're going to have to relaunch this, because originally it was going to be the Newpedia wiki, right?
00:21:16.000It was a different source of content for Newpedia.
00:21:50.000And they were a startup of the old dot-com boom of 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.
00:22:11.000So basically, in that first year, everyone was amazed at how well it was working.
00:22:20.000Even 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.
00:22:52.000There would be a bump In both activity on the site and just new people working on the site.
00:23:02.000And so it looked like a positive feedback loop.
00:23:06.000And I thought, that's just, this can't be true.
00:24:26.000I suppose they probably list locations for other corporations too, but it's very clear what they're doing.
00:24:30.000They add methods, hidden cameras, video manipulation funded by donors trust, a disinformation NGO.
00:24:39.000It's very, the whole thing is just smearing Project Fairchild.
00:24:42.000And I'll let you guys in on some new information.
00:24:46.000Project Veritas has been, I'll call it an upgrade, upgraded by NewsGuard from proceed with caution, right exclamation point, to under review.
00:25:54.000Just contact a reputation management firm.
00:25:56.000They'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 effort to defend you if someone tries to get your page deleted.
00:26:29.000We knew when, I think his name is Virgil Griffith, basically published the identities of people, of organizations behind IP addresses that had edited Wikipedia.
00:26:49.000This is back in like, I don't know, I want to say 2005.
00:26:59.000And there were all kinds of politicians' offices.
00:27:02.000So 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.
00:27:17.000I 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
00:27:47.000A 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, 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.
00:28:22.000I mean, at least when it goes into political topics and anything that has any sort of socio-political aspect to it.
00:28:33.000And I want to add this also to support what you're saying.
00:28:40.000If 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.
00:28:48.000Look, it's like ranked 13 by Alexa.com, the website ranking service.
00:29:01.000It used to be in the top five, so they've dropped a little bit, but it's still huge, right?
00:29:07.000And why wouldn't, given that so much of warfare and spying that goes on is digital now, right?
00:29:25.000It's silly to think that people would not be plowing enormous amounts of money into
00:29:33.000it, figuring out the way that the Wikipedia game is played, and just manipulating it.
00:29:39.000And the thing is, it's all, it's a black box.
00:29:43.000Even to people who are thoroughly familiar with how the system actually works.
00:29:48.000There 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.
00:30:04.000My favorite way to prove the Brokenness, the failed state of Wikipedia, is with, by going to the article man.
00:30:14.000So I am not showing you these articles in any way to make a statement about the politics of gender identity or gender ideology.
00:30:24.000There is a contentious political issue in the area of transgender spaces and gender ideology between conservatives and liberals and progressives.
00:30:34.000I'm not going to make an assessment on that for the purpose of this segment.
00:30:36.000I'm going to show you Wikipedia being broken, quite simply.
00:31:22.000Trans man, according to Wikipedia, definitively opening statement.
00:31:25.000A trans man is a man who was assigned female at birth.
00:31:29.000The word man in this article, trans man, links you back to the first article which says a man is an adult male human.
00:31:37.000Now, 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?
00:31:54.000So it's a broken feedback loop of an illogical assessment.
00:31:59.000What happened is, On Wikipedia, there are various genres, I suppose.
00:32:05.000The science editors are adamant about controlling their space in science.
00:32:08.000You will likely not find a hard biological evolutionary biologist or biologist who's going to tell you that male means anything other than gamete sperm or something to that effect.
00:32:21.000However, 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.
00:32:33.000They then assert, a trans man is a man, a trans woman is a woman.
00:32:37.000However, 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.
00:32:49.000If you have four activists and six science writers, the six science writers will dominate the discussion.
00:32:55.000But in the activist space about transgender ideology, the inverse is true.
00:32:59.000And thus, you create an encyclopedia that contradicts itself.
00:33:03.000That's the easiest way to point out, in my opinion.
00:33:06.000And 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.
00:33:16.000And again, I understand a lot of people say there shouldn't be.
00:33:20.000The 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.
00:33:29.000How can you have an encyclopedia that tells you two different things or makes an illogical statement?
00:33:35.000Well, that's because it's collaborative, basically.
00:33:38.000It's made by, as you say, different groups of people.
00:33:47.000Well, so then the issue becomes, 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.
00:35:01.000But any topic that you can think of that is important to the culture war, you know, from topics like abortion, to subjects like religion, to figures like Hillary Clinton or Ronald Reagan, To, you know, philosophies and everything else.
00:35:26.000Anything that has a connection to the culture war, Wikipedia now takes the left side of the dispute.
00:35:39.000Even five years ago, it wasn't so clear.
00:35:43.000It was biased five years ago, but at least they allowed the other side a say, right?
00:35:54.000Fifteen years ago, it was still running off the original steam of real neutrality.
00:36:04.000Striking back then, to me, to compare Wikipedia to things like CNN, or for that matter, Fox News of the time, you know, where you could go there and you could really learn in depth about different competing sides of all these different issues.
00:37:33.000I 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.
00:37:52.000I think there's a lot of corporate shills.
00:37:59.000They would be irresponsible, frankly, given the nature of the system, not to, you know, spend some money and just make the truth as represented by Wikipedia.
00:38:43.000They need to at least identify by real names and identities the people who are making the important editorial decisions for Wikipedia.
00:38:54.000So the administrators, the check users, and the bureaucrats, as they are called in the system.
00:39:02.000Can you describe what the check users are really quick?
00:39:04.000The check users, if I remember right, are the people who have the ability to look up the IP address associated with any account.
00:39:13.000If 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.
00:39:46.000And you talk about changes that need to happen, but I just don't see that being possible.
00:39:52.000I 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.
00:40:19.000The very idea would have been absurd to us back in 2001, 2002.
00:40:26.000I 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.
00:40:44.000And 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.
00:40:57.000Nevertheless, they say they're not responsible for the editorial decisions.
00:41:02.000And 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.
00:41:13.000So it doesn't really matter necessarily that they're giving money to the Wikimedia Foundation.
00:41:21.000Those people still have ways of getting money to the people who are making the decisions on Wikipedia.
00:41:28.000Not only do we have some evidence of that, you know, individuals coming and saying that, and PR firms saying, well, yeah, that's what we do, but it's obvious, right?
00:42:01.000So Wikimedia is outsourcing the burden of editorialization.
00:42:06.000It'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.
00:42:14.000So we can't sue Wikimedia because they're not the ones that are doing this, maybe getting paid or bribed by Alphabet or Google.
00:42:22.000Well, that's certainly what their defense would be.
00:42:54.000It doesn't matter if you're a platform or a publisher.
00:42:57.000wouldn't then you know that makes no distinction really yeah the issue is
00:43:00.000whether or not the speech came from Wikipedia or from its users it doesn't
00:43:03.000matter if you're a platform or a publisher you could be a plumbing
00:43:06.000company and if you have a comment section on your website and someone
00:43:09.000comments that's something defamatory you can't but if But if they edit their user's comments and they're overseeing and making sure they're allowed, then aren't they then a publisher?
00:43:18.000If it was an employee of Wikipedia that made a statement, then you could sue Wikipedia.
00:43:24.000But what if it was an employee that oversaw a statement and said, that's okay to be on our website?
00:43:32.000I 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 work of the users.
00:43:54.000So, 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.
00:44:02.000Because they said that, James can sue Twitter.
00:44:06.000What someone tweets, you can't sue someone for.
00:44:08.000So a blue checkmark journalist can lie about James O'Keefe and he can't sue Twitter for it.
00:44:42.000Wikipedia is a publishing platform where they make statements of fact as an encyclopedia.
00:44:48.000They call themselves an encyclopedia, which means users are to infer that Wikipedia is a place where facts are being discussed.
00:44:54.000If 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.
00:45:06.000So my argument would be, by putting the free encyclopedia on every page, here we have Andy Ngo, the encyclopedia makes the average person believe they are reading facts.
00:45:16.000It does not say, on this page, this page was written by a group of users who do not work for Wikipedia.
00:45:23.000How is the average person supposed to know the inner workings of Wikipedia?
00:45:28.000So you have to think about the intricacies of big tech infrastructure.
00:45:32.000Most 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.
00:45:42.000That statement came from Ian Crossland, because Ian's name is on it.
00:45:46.000But forward-facing Wikipedia pages do not say that.
00:45:49.000You have to view the history in a different page.
00:45:52.000The 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.
00:46:03.000If a bunch of users come together, and imagine it this way.
00:46:18.000Posts with a Twitter logo, Ian Crossland made bread and kombucha.
00:46:21.000That is a statement from Twitter, not from us.
00:46:25.000And it's up to them to verify whether or not your opinions, your facts, were real.
00:46:30.000Well, 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.
00:46:40.000And many states have what's called anti-SLAPP legislation, which would knock this out immediately, making it very difficult to sue.
00:46:47.000The issue is, you need to sue until you win.
00:46:55.000You state that argument very well, and I want to see it tested in court.
00:47:04.000I 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.
00:47:19.000The 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 It's grossly defamed by Wikipedia, and there is no recourse for that.
00:48:21.000But I think there's got to be a judge out there who's going to say, look, John Siegenthaler Sr., or whoever, Cheryl Atkison is another good example.
00:48:35.000I've talked to her a lot about her problems with Wikipedia.
00:49:04.000Well, if it said every citation showed the user who said it, then I would say that's a user's comment.
00:49:11.000But if a user makes a comment and then Wikipedia puts it all into a page, I don't see that as a user comment.
00:49:17.000I see that as Wikipedia making a statement.
00:49:20.000Here's another part of an argument, perhaps, and this is more perhaps a legal argument.
00:49:27.000This wasn't the case back in 2001, but it is now.
00:49:30.000Wikipedia 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?
00:49:40.000And, well, what are people supposed to do when lies, really damaging lies, occur in that sort of situation?
00:49:54.000Well, they could try suing the Wikimedia Foundation, but the Wikimedia Foundation is going to cite Section 230.
00:50:04.000They can try to sue the user, but how are they going to find out who the user is if the user is anonymous?
00:50:13.000So, they could sue, there could be a class action lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation to the following.
00:50:21.000by 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.
00:50:39.000That's itself a damaging situation for all of those people.
00:50:44.000It's a perfect class action lawsuit because it's a whole class that is affected by the situation.
00:50:54.000Do you think it would force Wikimedia to shut down if they were sued like that?
00:51:40.000But when I had articles written about me that smeared me, I remember I called a lawyer.
00:51:45.000I 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 Poole does X, you can't sue the news outlet, they're referencing a study.
00:52:02.000Now, the study will claim that they just analyzed information and are giving an expert opinion, you can't sue them either.
00:52:08.000So, okay, so what do you do when an academic who's an ideologue for the, for what do they call it, the humanities, asserts something to be a scientific fact when it's just their absurd opinion?
00:52:43.000I've talked to many lawyers, and they are correct.
00:52:46.000I talked to lawyers for 10 years about copyright infringement, manipulation, lies, and smears.
00:52:53.000I'm not going to pretend to be as well-versed as a lawyer.
00:52:56.000But I've been through this many times.
00:52:58.000The problem was, if they read an article that says Ian Crosland is a white supremacist, neo-nazi, who associates with neo-nazis, those are all opinions.
00:53:10.000Well, James O'Keefe sued because the New York Times said they were deceptively editing or something to that effect.
00:53:17.000And 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.
00:53:36.000This is what brings me to the argument I'm making about Wikipedia.
00:53:40.000Same exact argument made by that judge.
00:53:42.000If Wikipedia is asserting two things, that their articles are cited with reliable sources, and the articles are not opinion pieces.
00:54:48.000And 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.
00:54:59.000How are you supposed to have a million dollars to sue a major news organization?
00:55:04.000That 22- to 24-year-old psychopath has the powerful institution at their back and they can say whatever they want.
00:56:08.000So James has gotten pretty far, and it's amazing.
00:56:11.000This guy, you know, the right, conservatives, moderates, the anti-establishment, whatever you want to call this faction, has very few active personalities.
00:56:20.000Has very few individuals willing to go to war.
00:56:24.000Every single person on the left, for the most part, is willing to go nuts.
00:56:29.000They even throw bricks through windows and risk jail time.
00:56:32.000But people on the right don't do that.
00:56:33.000It 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.
00:56:44.000But 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.
00:56:55.000But he really had the ability to do it.
00:57:14.000So 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?
00:57:26.000And 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.
00:57:33.000Well, I like this People's Defamation PDF.
00:57:51.000I remember when Cassandra Fairbanks sued over being defamed because someone claimed that she flashed a white power hand gesture.
00:57:59.000When 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.
00:58:07.000I wonder when I see a lot of these lawsuits, I'm very curious, like, why the arguments tend to be so weak.
00:58:13.000And, 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.
00:58:23.000And I'm like, These judges are people.
00:58:38.000There's good lawyers and there's bad lawyers, I suppose, one way to put it.
00:58:41.000But 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?
00:59:23.000So 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.
00:59:32.000Nowhere on Wikipedia does it say, 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.
00:59:41.000They're gonna need to buy wikopinion.com.
01:00:16.000On 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.
01:00:35.000So they're responsible for the anonymity.
01:00:40.000They're, on principle, they're responsible for the anonymity, and therefore, insofar as that is the cause of the problem, they bear the burden.
01:01:00.000My page on Wikipedia is locked right now, meaning users can't edit it without special permissions.
01:01:06.000I mean, that sounds like— You have to have a certain number of edits, I believe, in order to— Well, that sounds like a job criteria.
01:01:14.000What'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?
01:01:21.000Yeah, well, I mean, they've got standards, but the standards are supposed to be enforced only by the volunteers.
01:01:45.000The 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.
01:01:54.000James O'Keefe sued the New York Times because I think two reporters made statements about him.
01:02:01.000The New York Times as an organization is responsible for publishing the speech of these individuals.
01:02:16.000That 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.
01:02:39.000Yeah, 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.
01:02:44.000I 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.
01:02:55.000That would also be equally suable, I would think.
01:02:58.000So this should mean that I can open up membersoftimcast.com to submit articles That I choose which will appear and just say, I didn't write it.
01:03:07.000It was a user on my website who submitted it.
01:03:09.000I just chose to have it published under my brand name, like Wikipedia does.
01:03:13.000And you can click the source and see only in the backend, a list of different people who contributed to it.
01:03:24.000You know, maybe that's what I should do.
01:03:26.000Maybe I should clone the Wikipedia model, because what will happen is, if someone sues and wins, I'll go, oh no!
01:03:33.000Then I'll turn around and sue Wikipedia for everything.
01:03:36.000If they're committing war atrocities against your people and you start committing war atrocities against theirs, it's not necessarily the best tactic.
01:04:02.000I'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.
01:04:12.000At least make a movie about it, like a short five-minute ridiculous dystopian nightmare.
01:04:17.000And then I'll just say, Section 230, you can't sue me over what my users said.
01:04:22.000And they'll say, yeah, but you're the one who's choosing what's get published.
01:05:48.000And I needed to spend my time actually making money.
01:05:53.000But then I permanently distanced myself from the Wikipedia project at the end of 2002, the beginning of 2003, and I made Jimmy Wales an ultimatum.
01:06:07.000I 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.
01:06:30.000Maybe approving, on a different website, official versions of articles.
01:06:40.000And he basically rejected both out of hand.
01:06:45.000It's like, I don't see the problem that you're seeing, is what he told me.
01:06:48.000I 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.
01:06:57.000That's actually what Citizendium does.
01:07:01.000So Citizendium, and like I stopped working on it over 10 years ago now, so and I'm no longer even the owner.
01:07:11.000I gave ownership of that to someone else and I'm sure she'll be announcing it when the time is right.
01:07:22.000But the principles, the following principles are still true.
01:07:30.000There's still a commitment to being more cordial toward good writing, to actually having a coherent narrative that pulls the article into a single coherent whole.
01:07:45.000And the other thing is that there needs to be real names.
01:07:51.000So there has to be real-world consequences for making your claims.
01:07:55.000And the third thing, or is it fourth, is you have to agree to a sort of statement of principles when you're given an account.
01:08:10.000Actually, you can make an account for yourself, but it becomes sort of official after somebody reviews the account.
01:08:19.000This was like a project that you started after you left Wikipedia?
01:08:23.000Yeah, well in 2006, it really got a big start.
01:08:27.000In 2007, there was like front page news and all kinds of newspapers.
01:08:33.000There was a big AP feature story with a sidebar and there's a lot of reporting about it.
01:08:40.000And then it kind of petered out after a year or two, mostly because Wikipedia had its greatest growth curve at the time.
01:08:53.000So, I wish Citizendium all the best, but the system is too similar to Wikipedia, frankly.
01:09:06.000People who want to work on that sort of thing tend to go to Wikipedia.
01:09:14.000I 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.
01:09:31.000There's another alternative to Wikipedia that has been around for a while.
01:10:31.000is the current occupant of the White House.
01:10:34.000His 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.
01:10:43.000And it's got a picture of Joe who looks freaked out.
01:10:45.000And, uh, yeah, it's, uh, I'll tell you this.
01:10:50.000Conservapedia is more biased than Wikipedia is, and Wikipedia is pretty bad.
01:10:55.000I think Wikipedia is definitely giving them a run for their money.
01:10:58.000I mean, it's almost a parody of itself now.
01:11:03.000There is another, even more instainly left source out there called Rational Wiki, and they're just the worst of the worst of the Wikipedia conspiracy site.
01:12:19.000So 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.
01:12:36.000So the Encyclosphere is not a website.
01:12:43.000It's not even a particular kind of software.
01:12:47.000It will be, when it exists in all of its glory, it will do for encyclopedias what the blogosphere does for blogs.
01:12:58.000It's going to be a network of encyclopedias.
01:13:00.000So what ought to exist is the ability to find the latest and greatest articles from any source, that isn't articles that are encyclopedia articles, to surface the best very quickly, even if they were just written a couple of days ago.
01:13:22.000They 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.
01:14:44.000And 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?
01:15:05.000So 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.
01:15:24.000So, a sort of decentralized, centerless, leaderless system for allowing people to declare what their rating of the various contents of the encyclosphere is.
01:15:39.000And by the way, the encyclosphere is not like a new encyclopedia.
01:16:16.000They're relatively small, and people go to Wikipedia.
01:16:21.000The 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.
01:16:38.000But it's unfortunate that that's the only easily findable source of information.
01:16:45.000But 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.
01:17:02.000It's kind of like what we're working on with the Fediverse.
01:17:06.000Yeah, well, it decentralizes encyclopedias.
01:17:10.000So the Fediverse decentralizes social media.
01:17:16.000I'm wondering when you do ratings on encyclopedia articles, so if you want a grand user rating system, so you want to put the best stuff to the top, if you get one article with 100 ratings, 98 of them are 4 or 5 stars, 2 of them are 1 star, would then you look at that user that put the 1 star and look across 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 rater?
01:17:43.000Well, 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.
01:17:53.000What 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.
01:18:11.000So if a rating of an article about epistemology, say, claims to be from me, somebody can prove that it is actually from me.
01:18:22.000So you need to solve those sorts of technical problems.
01:18:25.000And 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.
01:18:40.000And you don't have to agree on whose ratings are worth What if the solution is actually kind of simple?
01:18:48.000the rest of that. There can be a bunch of different algorithms for deciding what the
01:19:06.000There'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.
01:20:02.000government or by Google or Apple or the U.N.
01:20:08.000or any other sort of giant organization that is not responsible to the people.
01:20:16.000It 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.
01:21:47.000I 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.
01:22:05.000versus a system where you can own your own identity, and you can lay claim to anonymous identities.
01:22:14.000That doesn't force other people to accept them.
01:22:18.000I want to bring up this story real quick.
01:22:21.000Pfizer's 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.
01:22:33.000The reason I bring this up is first they said, you know, it's two shots.
01:22:40.000My point is not necessarily the amount of shots you have to get, I guess, once a year.
01:22:44.000The 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.
01:22:54.000If 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?
01:23:03.000Then the CEO of a massive private corporation comes out and says, Actually, you need three.
01:23:08.000Well, 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.
01:23:21.000This is why we can't allow this kind of thing to be normalized.
01:23:24.000But 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.
01:23:34.000We can't allow the ownership of our identities, but I think it's going to be private corporations that do this.
01:23:39.000There'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.
01:23:54.000Most blockchain projects are not decentralized.
01:23:56.000I'm here to tell you, folks, they're not really decentralized.
01:24:00.000Not in the sense in which the DNS system and email and the blogosphere and Usenet, if you remember that, and many other things, the backbone of the internet, Is decentralized.
01:24:10.000Blockchain ain't decentralized in that way.
01:24:13.000This is why I think Bitcoin is actually a really great risk to freedoms.
01:24:21.000It'll be worth a lot of money because I think there's powerful interests that realize the power of Bitcoin and being able to track everything you do.
01:24:46.000But I remember going back, 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.
01:24:57.000The Libertarian and ANCAP people I knew were like, this is amazing!
01:25:02.000We can have a system of value to exchange.
01:25:55.000And then any address associated with it, banned.
01:25:58.000And 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 are associated with a certain address.
01:26:15.000But what happens if they say, if we track any of these coins Going through any address, they're no good anymore.
01:26:23.000Well, then there's nothing you can do.
01:26:25.000Those coins are essentially defunct, and they've excised you from society.
01:26:30.000With hard US dollars, You got paper money, it's valuable.
01:26:34.000You 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.
01:26:38.000With 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 will be like, I'm not trading with you, Ian.
01:26:50.000That's a beautiful system, I've never, look, I understand the technology, I think Ethereum's brilliant technology, it's gonna do a lot of really great things.
01:27:00.000What people don't realize, you know, when the far right, as they say, started taking Bitcoin, news outlets started publishing the amount of money these people had.
01:28:07.000Unfortunately, they're 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,
01:28:32.000They were all owned by Chinese corporations.
01:28:36.000So, I mean, okay, it's decentralized in one sense, but it's kind of centralized in another really important sense, too.
01:28:43.000The 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 Crosland's banned from society, right?
01:28:58.000And they'll make sure every company is off-limits to you.
01:29:00.000I 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.
01:29:08.000So if you want to subscribe to my channel, you can give me $10 a month, or you can give me $9 a month in Ian coin.
01:29:18.000Listen, this is how Everepedia solves the problem, so I don't want to come down too hard on them, but they have told me that if EOS starts, if like the block producers, the Chinese block producers of EOS start censoring the content of Everepedia, then they'll just make it possible to To transact edits, essentially, using a different coin.
01:29:49.000And that would be cool if we can trust them.
01:29:51.000I just don't like having to trust people when the whole system is supposed to not require trust.
01:31:11.000It's just an encyclopedia meta-search engine.
01:31:14.000It's not much, but it's useful for sure.
01:31:17.000Another 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.
01:31:36.000Let's see, the other one is called encyclosearch.org.
01:31:42.000And then we're also directly paying for the development, it's not encyclopedia related, but it's still decentralized, of a plugin for WordPress.
01:31:56.000that basically it allows you to run your own microblog.
01:32:04.000So like your own Twitter feed that you own.
01:32:08.000Nobody can shut it down via a WordPress blog.
01:32:12.000So I'm already doing that on a website called startthis.org.
01:32:19.000But pretty soon that's going to be running a different theme.
01:32:23.000And 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 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 plug-in.
01:33:09.000If you're asking about the Encyclosphere, the Encyclosphere is...
01:33:15.000So it's hard to explain, and I apologize.
01:33:20.000A lot of people aren't going to be able to get it on the first pass, and it's because it's complicated.
01:33:27.000I'm not accusing anyone of being dense.
01:33:29.000There's all kinds of brilliant people who need this explained several times.
01:33:35.000It'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 and then for just ordinary people to add new content very easily and quickly so imagine a search engine
01:33:59.000that covers all of the existing encyclopedias.
01:34:03.000Maybe 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.
01:34:13.000That might be something you would use to find articles instead of Wikipedia, if it were really good enough.
01:34:19.000Okay, 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.
01:34:39.000Then 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 and professors and researchers and all kinds of people who would be delighted to have an effective way of adding to the world's knowledge.
01:35:04.000And 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.
01:35:18.000See, so it's creating the technical infrastructure for people making lots of different competing apps that tap into the same body of encyclopedia articles.
01:35:29.000I would love for like, um, 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.
01:35:40.000If I want to pop this, you know, in cyclosphere app or whatever it is up browser extension, something like an extension searcher, as well as watching a video and you see the closed captions, I can choose any word that comes up in the closed caption.
01:35:53.000And if I see a bird flying by in the video, I could somehow search what, like, what is that?
01:37:11.000Considering I just bought some Dogecoin, I would love Dogecoin to beat Bitcoin and become the actual... But I guess Doge has no real support or something.
01:37:48.000If Texas secedes, I would wait a little bit.
01:37:52.000And 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.
01:39:30.000It's like, it's a reference to a couple of different things.
01:39:35.000One 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.
01:39:46.000And it's like, I'm tired of being criticized for Wikipedia when I'm like on the front lines criticizing Wikipedia myself.
01:42:38.000Dave says, hey Tim, I was working at a plastic extrusion plant in Wisconsin, in Wisco, and the boxes we were putting some rolls in said made in China on them.
01:42:47.000It makes you wonder how often it happens to other products that are actually made in the USA.
01:45:36.000Here's the funniest thing I love about Wikipedia.
01:45:39.000I proved a point to my friend, this was 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 in the citations.
01:45:51.000So you could take a scientific journal that says, like, you know, the reality of, you know, sleeping babies in a construction zone or something.
01:46:00.000And then find an article about sleep apnea and then say whatever you want.
01:46:07.000Loud 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.
01:46:15.000That's one of the Wikipedia's many dirty little secrets.
01:46:18.000They 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.
01:46:54.000My favorite thing is, instead of coming out and saying the story's not true, what they said was, well, we had low to moderate confidence That Russian agents sought to encourage the Taliban.
01:49:24.000There's a lot of dead citations as well.
01:49:26.000For instance, the news outlets change their articles every day, minute after minute.
01:49:32.000They'll publish an article, then update it an hour later.
01:49:35.000Someone on Wikipedia will take an article that says, you know, Ian Crosland 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 frontflip.
01:49:50.000I 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.
01:49:58.000I think that was a proposal in the original World Wide Web specification, if I'm not mistaken.
01:50:08.000And they decided against it because they wanted to keep the system maximally simple.
01:50:16.000If you start trying to track stuff like that, it just becomes much too difficult.
01:50:25.000I 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.
01:50:39.000I'm proud to say, and humbled to say, 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.
01:50:59.000And that was the right decision to make, basically.
01:51:01.000It wouldn't have flourished the way it did if it weren't kept that way.
01:52:13.000Well, I mean, I don't do them anymore.
01:52:15.000But there's actually a video on my YouTube channel that people won't be able to find of me doing a... I jumped up onto a platform and then front flip off of it.
01:52:23.000Yeah, I probably could still do front flips.
01:52:25.000I mean, I still skate and skateboard and stuff like that.
01:53:22.000And I quote, they do not feel supported here and they don't feel trust.
01:53:26.000They feel second guessed and they don't feel that they can do their job no matter how perfect they do their job without getting in trouble.
01:54:58.000And so also post articles new there's a lot of people like that, but we're also looking for a master of ceremonies
01:55:04.000Yes for the Friday night events of which we want to do every Friday with one big monthly event where our
01:55:12.000Members actually have the option to buy tickets and show up in limited capacities probably like 20 or so people
01:55:18.000That's an MC for Tim cast media Yeah, and the emcee 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, woohoo, fun stuff.
01:56:02.000We have a lot of UFO news coming out right now.
01:56:05.000So this would fall absolutely into the purview of this, this person, this writer.
01:56:08.000The 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.
01:56:15.000We'll be doing that with Cassandra Fairbanks.
02:00:02.000CNN was reporting on Biden wanting to pull troops out, but that Trump had wanted to pull them out by May 1st, and the Taliban's like, get out by May 1st, Biden.
02:00:10.000So CNN kind of transparently reported on that.
02:00:13.000I didn't expect them to acknowledge that Trump wanted us out.
02:00:17.000JP McGlone says, Tim, Duke University in North Carolina is requiring the vaccine for students to enroll this fall.
02:00:24.000This affects new and existing students.
02:00:26.000Students who don't want it but want to finish undergrad are in a tough place.
02:00:57.000Look, most of my friends have gotten the vaccine.
02:00:58.000Most of the people, I think a good, maybe not most, but a good portion of our guests have all gotten the vaccine.
02:01:02.000A bunch of conservative guests are like talking about how they've already gotten it or getting it.
02:01:06.000So I'm, it's a really weird thing to see like Donald Trump talking about getting it, to see Ivanka Trump literally taking her vaccine selfie.
02:01:12.000I do think the vaccine selfies are a bit like, you know, eye-rolly.
02:01:16.000But it is weird that like Ivanka literally is coming out and like, get this, Trump sent out an email where he was furious that the FDA and the CDC pulled the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
02:02:14.000I 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.
02:02:20.000The issue is when all of society does it, you have this problem.
02:02:24.000And I'll throw, and I think that's where you might need regulation to defend rights, maybe under the 14th Amendment.
02:02:29.000And I cite the, was it the Cuyahoga River burst into flames?
02:02:53.000And I'm not talking about anti-vaxxers.
02:02:55.000I'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.
02:03:02.000Not everyone is able to go out and take every drug.
02:03:04.000So let me address this person's question.
02:03:09.000This is an idea I like to get out there.
02:03:11.000I've been talking about it since the 90s.
02:03:14.000I'm a big advocate of degrees by examination, basically.
02:03:20.000It's a way to basically do something like homeschooling at the college level.
02:03:26.000What I really want to exist is, and I've never seen this before.
02:03:34.000I mean, degrees by examination exist, and they're very cool.
02:03:39.000You 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.
02:03:49.000I think Arizona has a program like this.
02:03:52.000But 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.
02:04:10.000And then those people, just by themselves, independent of any institution, They declare that you are, you have knowledge that is equivalent to a bachelor's degree.
02:04:23.000Is there any reason why a lot of people, would you accept as the CEO of your company, would you accept that as like proof of being college educated?
02:04:41.000I don't, I don't think proof of college education means anything.
02:04:44.000So, uh, I could, I, I, you know, you know, as a joke, I used to tell people that I had a PhD in nuclear physics and they would be like, you do?
02:05:41.000It ought to and does, two different things.
02:05:44.000My experience from people in colleges is that they're underwhelming.
02:05:48.000I mean, I've gone to MIT several times.
02:05:51.000I 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.
02:05:59.000And 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.
02:06:06.000As 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.
02:06:32.000You 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.
02:06:42.000That 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.
02:06:53.000So just going there and being there doesn't necessarily mean you understand the concept.
02:06:58.000I would love to see examinations taking precedence.
02:07:00.000This is why I just said resumes mean very little to me.
02:07:21.000Right now, college degrees, in my opinion, are evidence to the contrary of independent thought, the ability to think critically and solve problems.
02:07:27.000And 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.
02:07:33.000I think half the statistic is that 50% of people change their majors, like some ridiculously
02:07:51.000The people who I found when I've worked for various companies who have college degrees,
02:07:57.000And they're really good at just doing what they're told, but I need people who can solve problems, and I need quality control.
02:08:03.000I think there's an important point to be made here.
02:08:07.000Again, you're just thinking, and you're not the only one, most people think of college degrees this way, and the value of a college education this way.
02:08:15.000It's basically an economic transaction.
02:08:40.000I don't like how it's pursued today, absolutely.
02:08:43.000As 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.
02:09:54.000College may have been a place where you could show up and learn and explore and experience, but it's not been that way since my entire life.
02:11:07.000I'm I'm reading a little bit on the side, obviously, that is very similar to the reading that one would get at seminary.
02:11:19.000I have absolutely no motivation, no desire to go to seminary.
02:11:25.000I 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.
02:11:48.000I think that would be... But the reason I'm doing it is not so that I can, like, do anything with the degree.
02:12:25.000College type study and what does that mean?
02:12:27.000Reading difficult books, thinking deep thoughts about them, having meaningful discussions with other people about them, writing long papers, doing research.
02:13:40.000Because I've actually been called to speak at numerous colleges.
02:13:44.000And 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.
02:13:57.000Oh, they could tell me things about, you know, like Woodward and Bernstein.
02:14:01.000And I was like, is that relevant to today's modern understanding of how journalism newsrooms operate?
02:14:06.000About how to gather news, how to disseminate information, how to be a journalist?
02:14:09.000So I'm out here, I'm 25, and I was consulting with the BBC, sitting down with their mobile experts, explaining to them what to do, how to do it.
02:14:18.000Universities were asking me to go and speak there, and there's this idea among people that they're better off 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.
02:14:30.000The value of being here would be they would learn faster because of the mentorship and college.
02:15:53.000Well, 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.
02:16:55.000But 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?
02:17:28.000I mean, basically, unfortunately, like it or not, um, Students need a structure that is imposed by their parents or their teachers or professors.
02:17:42.000And that's the way most people are, like it or not.
02:17:46.000And I wish that people were motivated to do a lot of extracurricular activities, you know, bettering their minds as they are, like, uh, working near your office or whatever, that'd be, that'd
02:18:04.000be great if the world worked that way. But for the most part, it doesn't.
02:18:07.000So the, so the results of taking unmotivated people who often not, not every, I'll put
02:18:13.000it this way. Not everybody has the ability to, to reach the levels you're describing.
02:18:25.000I read this really great article years ago.
02:18:27.000It was actually 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.
02:18:43.000The problem with memorizing details as opposed to understanding is that they then start to mash things in a broken way.
02:18:50.000You know, the saying is, knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing that it doesn't go in a fruit salad.
02:18:57.000The problem is if you take unmotivated people and you put them in a room and you say, tomato is a fruit!
02:19:21.000Unmotivated 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.
02:19:29.000There's a lot of people who are inspired to become, to better themselves, essentially, to better their minds when they go to college.
02:19:38.000That's just a fact, it's happened a lot.
02:19:41.000I'm worried that because a lot of people are listening to you, and I understand, I think I understand what you're saying, I've heard a lot of it, that they're gonna take your advice and they're gonna end up being, anti-intellectual, frankly, and that's not a good thing.
02:20:00.000Telling people to study and research is anti-intellectual?
02:20:57.000Of course, it's perfectly intellectual, and it's a great thing.
02:21:04.000What 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 are not essentially doctrinal or ideological tests for participating in the system.
02:21:31.000I think that's a huge part of the problem.
02:21:35.000But 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.
02:21:53.000I 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.
02:22:08.000And 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.
02:22:19.000I've spent a lot of time at various universities throughout my life, and boy did I find it laughable.
02:22:26.000I 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'd think a freshman in college would have learned that they don't understand.
02:22:40.000How I could have sat down with a third-year music business 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.
02:22:51.000And I said, then why are you in college?
02:22:54.000That's what college was breeding in Chicago.
02:22:58.000Your experience, you know, the way you viewed college is this positive thing that needs to be brought back.
02:23:04.000And so encouraging people to go into corruption won't improve it.
02:23:08.000If the system is reformed, then maybe later we can say, hey, this is actually good, go do this.
02:23:12.000However, technology maybe has made the whole institution archaic.
02:23:16.000You look at the story of someone like Aaron Swartz, who helped contribute to the foundation of Reddit, as well as, I think, um, wasn't he involved in RSS?
02:23:30.000I had some interactions with him back in the day.
02:23:32.000So, how do we encourage young people to be inspired, to get involved, to seek out on their own?
02:23:38.000College does the opposite of that today.
02:23:41.000It beats people down and dulls them and makes them hate these things.
02:23:45.000Maybe not completely, but in a very large way.
02:23:48.000Then they come out with massive debt, they become indentured servants, and many of them, because of the hopelessness, become communists.
02:23:55.000No, jeez, I agree with all of that entirely.
02:23:58.000So 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.
02:24:23.000I do believe that it makes people indentured.
02:24:26.000I'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.
02:24:34.000So what if you hung out at Hackerspace instead?
02:24:36.000I guess I don't disagree in my own case, yeah.
02:24:39.000What if we just turned the local libraries into Hackerspaces and you can go and hang out for free?
02:24:42.000Oh, that'd be such a good use of libraries.
02:25:26.000I used to go to the library because they had free movies to rent.
02:25:29.000And I would get books, movies, and I would go on the internet.
02:25:32.000Now what we can do is create community centers where people have fun hanging out with each other, exploring ideas.
02:25:38.000And 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.
02:26:24.000They're being mentored by people who are talking about interesting things.
02:26:27.000It'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.
02:26:35.000So we've got to mediate for the scaling problem.
02:26:37.000I think that's why you want to pay them.
02:26:38.000Community centers where people can explore and expand and engage in practical activities.
02:26:45.000Now, 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.
02:26:55.000If you want to be a lawyer or a doctor and you have to have certain credentials, yes, college exists for those reasons.
02:27:01.000So let me Let me ask you first, have you heard of different homeschooling philosophies like a classic method and unschooling and these different homeschooling approaches?
02:27:25.000So 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.
02:27:38.000My 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.
02:28:16.000Those are not the things that are relevant to the controversy between us here.
02:28:20.000The thing that's relevant is, does education need to be regimented from above by some leader of the curriculum?
02:28:34.000Because, look, there's some people who really want to learn They have a hard time motivating themselves and they actually want the direction.
02:28:43.000They need the direction and they really would benefit too.
02:28:49.000So I'm not saying we don't have teachers.
02:28:52.000I'm saying the current institution of college is a broken down old rusty pile of garbage that you can't polish.
02:29:00.000Well, but I think if you're going to appeal to all the people that we need to appeal to, 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 decentralized and so forth.
02:29:20.000But I think the issue is, there's a reason why the left targets children.
02:29:24.000They don't need to appeal to the old people.
02:29:26.000The old people walk away and the young people do what the generation was told to do.
02:29:31.000So what we need to do is we need to inspire young people to be seekers, to be hackers, to be interested and to achieve things.
02:30:23.000They always say kids will imitate you, but they're trying to learn.
02:30:26.000So teach these kids things and congratulate them and make them feel good.
02:30:31.000The one thing that will really help people be inspired is if you've got a little kid And they go in and they're, you know, doing something positive and you cheer them on and other people are like, wow, this kid's cool.
02:30:42.000They're going to feel good from the social acceptance.
02:30:44.000It will encourage them to pursue doing good things.
02:30:48.000However, what we do in this country is we don't teach our kids until they're five.
02:30:52.000Then they start learning rudimentary basics.
02:30:54.000I mean, I'm sure parents to some degree teach their kids some things, obviously.
02:30:58.000But then they basically go to an institutionalized learning facility where many teachers are just not good at what they do.
02:31:57.000What you're describing here sounds like just what our educators are taught in progressive education institutions and have been for the last hundred years.
02:32:12.000So 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.
02:33:35.000And then you can earn crypto from your math class.
02:33:37.000See, I think gamifying education is going to be the wave of the future.
02:33:40.000Because 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.
02:33:48.000And then 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.
02:34:12.000Getting kids to get that dopamine hit, a goal was accomplished.
02:34:16.000The 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.
02:34:24.000But anyway, we've gone very, very long rewarding the kids.
02:34:27.000Oh yeah, I guess we have from the beginning.
02:34:56.000Email us at jobs at timcast.com if you think you have what it takes.
02:35:00.000I'll put it this way, MC's probably got to be able to play music and skateboard because you're going to be helping produce these vlogs, so.
02:35:07.000And we're also looking for a web dev and web editor.
02:35:10.000But you can follow me on every social media platform at Timcast.
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02:35:18.000This show is live Monday to Friday at 8pm.
02:35:20.000So subscribe, smash that notification bell, hit the like button.
02:35:46.000It's called Essays on Free Knowledge, the Origins of Wikipedia and the New Politics of Knowledge.
02:35:52.000And 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.
02:36:04.000I 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 this stuff, sign up.
02:36:18.000We're starting a seminar slash deliberation about the policies of the future in Cyclosphere, probably beginning next month, I hope.
02:36:29.000No promises, but it's going to be free.
02:37:04.000Lsanger on Twitter and you can like follow my RSS feed feeds actually larrysanger.org and then I have my micro feed or that actually the future the future name for it actually is going to be mini feed that's what it's going to be mini feed as it lives on startthis.org Really appreciate you coming, Larry.
02:38:00.000We will see you all tomorrow, 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.
02:38:07.000Thanks for hanging out, and we'll see you all next time.