Jimmy Wales Will Never Edit Donald Trump’s Wikipedia Page: He ‘Makes Me Insane’

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has been called the last decent tech baron. It’s sounds like a flattering label, although one I usually associate more with yacht-dwelling meatheads who feed their herds of cattle homegrown macadamia nuts; the kind of person who can most recently be found wining and dining with the President of the United States and his coterie of MAGA sycophants.

Wales, on the other hand, keeps things relatively low-key. Even as the site he founded, Wikipedia, turns 25 years old this month, he seems more interested in fixing his home Wi-Fi than joining the tech elite’s performative power games. He has also spent the past few months promoting a new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, that uses Wikipedia’s overarching strategy and unlikely rise to articulate Wales’ playbook for fixing much of what’s broken in today’s deeply polarized and antagonistic society.

On this week’s episode of The Big Interview, Wales and I discussed what it means to build something used by billions of people that’s not optimized for growth at all costs. During our discussion he reflected on Wikipedia’s messy, human origins, the ways it’s been targeted by governments from Russia to Saudi Arabia, and the challenges of holding the line on neutrality in an online ecosystem hostile to the notion that facts even exist. We also talked about what threatens Wikipedia now, from AI to conspiracy-pilled billionaires, and why he’ll never edit an entry about Donald Trump. Read our full conversation below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Jimmy Wales, welcome to The Big Interview. Thank you so much for being here.

JIMMY WALES: Thanks for having me on.

We always start these conversations with a few quick questions, like a little warmup for your brain. Are you ready?

Yes.

What’s an internet rabbit hole you've fallen into most recently?

Home Assistant. I've just started using Home Assistant to run smart home devices, and there's a huge community and thousands of things to read about and so on and so forth. So it's what I'm obsessed with.

What is this community doing?

Troubleshooting. People are working on extensions to deal with every kind of thing in the world, and it's amazing.

What's a subject you never argue about online anymore?

I would say I don't argue with anybody about trans issues. There's absolutely no point in it. It's too toxic. I never did argue about it, but I don't even talk about it.

You're just going to stay away.

Yeah, it's too unpleasant.

What do you trust more: Wikipedia or ChatGPT?

Definitely Wikipedia.

I had to ask. What’s your favorite website or app that is not Wikipedia?

I really do like parts of Reddit. There's some really great communities on Reddit, and great people. I lurk and read in the personal finance subreddit. There's just a lot of really nice people there. I'm always amazed by it.

Reddit is really having a moment. I find that I spend a lot more time lurking in the Reddit app on my phone, because I would rather read thoughtful conversations than scroll on X.

That's exactly it. It's like a place with paragraphs.

And often really thoughtful people. What is the best thing about living in the UK versus the US?

Well, my family's here. I always say this about the US: Tech is in Silicon Valley, and politics is in Washington, and movies and showbiz are in LA, and finance is in New York. But all those things are in London.

So if I lived in Silicon Valley, I would only have tech friends because that's who lives there. Whereas in London, it's much more comprehensive. All kinds of people. So I like that.

If you weren't involved in Wikipedia, what do you think you would be doing instead? What's the road not taken?

I would probably be a programmer, because I really enjoy coding and I really enjoy making things.

What’s harder: building trust or keeping trust?

They're kind of the same thing, but I think building trust is harder. Particularly these days, when we are in an era with such low trust that you have to get past people's skepticism. I mean, part of trust is you can make mistakes and people forgive you because they do fundamentally trust you. Obviously you can lose it by violating it, but I think getting it in the first place is really important.

I have to admit, and this is very embarrassing for me because I'm Canadian, and I historically have liked to keep a low profile. But when I was doing research to get ready for this taping with you, I realized that I have a Wikipedia page. So Jimmy, I have to ask you, what does that mean? What does it mean at this moment to have a Wikipedia page? Does that mean that I've made it?

Mainly it just means there's enough third-party, neutral, high-quality sources to be able to put together a biography and collate the information about you and so forth. I have to admit, I didn't look up your Wikipedia page before this.

Oh, that's totally fine.

I hope it's not too bad. I hope it's OK. But in general, you know, it is not that we have recognized you, it's that the world has somehow. That's reflected in the sources, and therefore it ends up in Wikipedia.

One of the issues I'm now dealing with—I mean, this is a minor issue—is, sure, there are third-party sources, but those include small podcasts that I've talked to that a friend hosts where I share information about my spouse and my child, and then you realize, “Oh, that's now on Wikipedia.” I'd love it if it wasn't, but it's a lesson that you learn as you go. Have you experienced that with your own existence on Wikipedia?

I think for a lot of people when you enter the public eye in some capacity, often you don't really realize it because you're on a small podcast with your friend and you're saying, “Oh yeah, whatever. No one's gonna listen to this.” But eventually they might.

So yeah, I've had some funny experiences. One funny experience was when somebody vandalized my Wikipedia page to say that “in his spare time he enjoys playing chess with his friends,” which I love the sound of …

That doesn't sound particularly insulting.

It's not bad, but it's not true. Unfortunately, what happened is during a small gap of time before somebody took it out, because they didn't have a source, some let's just say … slightly lazy journalist actually took it from Wikipedia and put it in a biography magazine piece about me.

Oh my God.

So then there was a source, and I'm like, “Well, hold on a second.” So I contacted the journalist, and I'm like, “Where did you get that?” And they're like, “Well, it was in Wikipedia.” I'm like, “Well, it didn't have a source.” It is not there now, I don’t think.

I got invited to do the ceremonial first move in the World Chess Championship. I wonder why; maybe they read in a magazine that I'm a big chess fanatic.

That's really funny. You've been doing a lot of press lately around the book. I was reading a bunch of interviews, and obviously Wikipedia is in the headlines often; I read in one of these interviews that you describe yourself as shy. I'm curious about how you handle being the face of Wikipedia, the author of a book, someone out there doing press. What's that experience like?

It's a funny thing, because I think a lot of people have a hard time getting their heads around that. I do a lot of public speaking, and I do things like this and so on and so forth, and that somehow doesn't bother me at all. I can give a speech to 5,000 people in a room. I don't mind it. It's no big deal.

Actually, for the book, probably where this came up is that Dan Gardner, who I worked with on the book, it's thanks to him that we interviewed people, because he's like, “Yeah, we need to interview people.” Like, we interviewed Thomas Friedman and I'm like, “Well, I've known Tom for years and consider him a friend. I'm a little shy to ask him for an interview,” which sounds like nonsense. And I did, and he was great. So it's that sort of thing. I really like working, I don't like working in a big office with lots of people and lots of meetings. I just wanna get on my computer in a quiet room like this one. That's just much better for me.

Let me back up a little bit. You're originally from Huntsville, Alabama. You left your PhD program to get into tech. Was there a specific moment you remember in your academic time where you decided to leave?

I was really at a point where I wasn't enjoying it. I was a research assistant for a top professor, and then he went off for the summer while I was trying to do my summer paper, which was a big deal. It didn't go well. He wasn't there to help me. At the end of that process I was like, “I just really don't like this.”

A friend who worked in Chicago said, “Well, why are you doing it if you don't like it?” And I said, “Well, I always wanted to work in the markets, but getting an undergraduate degree from the University of Alabama in finance, I couldn't get any good job.” And they said, “Well, come and talk to my boss,” because she worked in the financial markets. I did, and they offered me a job.

From there, we get to something called Nupedia, which was new to me. It was an online encyclopedia with a much more traditional model: articles written by experts, a formal peer-review process. Sort of a precursor to Wikipedia. Can you talk a little bit about that origin story?

Somebody said this to me just recently, and I never thought of it this way. I was describing Nupedia and how it worked, and there was a seven-stage review process to get anything published, and they said, “So that was the Seven Rules of Mistrust.” I said, “Actually, yes.”

A whole system where you had to fax in your CV to prove you were qualified. In other words, there was that challenge of like, “Oh, I don't trust you.” You have to prove every step of the way. As opposed to the open, sort of friendly, “Hey, I'm doing this project, come and help me. Let's start writing together.” There was a lot to learn, and a lot didn't work because it was no fun whatsoever writing for Nupedia because it was very intimidating.

It sounds like a slog. There's a really fraught, and very moving, story in the book about your daughter, where you realize that digital publishing and the internet and access to information wasn't working as quickly as it needed to, which then led to this notion of Wikipedia, if I'm remembering correctly.

I had been working on Nupedia for nearly two years, and it wasn't going well. We had, you know, a couple dozen articles done. In fact, one of the first articles that we published we had to retract, because it was found to contain plagiarism. As soon as we put it out, within three days somebody goes, “Actually, this huge passage is copied from somewhere else.” I was like, “Oh dear. OK. That's upsetting, because that's the whole point of all that review.” It didn't really work. I was discouraged.

Then, when Kira was born, she was very ill and in the hospital, and she had meconium aspiration syndrome and I met the doctor who was explaining it to me. Obviously, I rushed to the internet to try and research what this was, and it was pretty bad. You know, I could find a few blog posts and some academic literature, which was way above my head. I said, “Wow, we really do need an encyclopedia.”

That was December 26, when she was born. I came back on January 15, and I was like, “That's it. We've gotta do this.” I sort of ripped up the whole thing. I installed the Wiki software, which was an open source, very simple wiki package at the time. It was so simple, it didn't even have real passwords. You could create an account, but your account wouldn't have a password, so anybody could log in as anybody. It wasn't even a finished product really, but I just thought we have to get started, because this is really important and life's too short. So we did. And it fortunately worked out.

It did work out. You know, when I think about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation more broadly, “scrappy” is a word that comes to mind. But today, the foundation has over 600 full-time employees across 54 countries. Your annual operating budget for 2025, 2026—when I say “your,” I'm referring to the foundation—$207.5 million in revenue against a similar number in expenses. That's enormous. I'm curious about the experience of actually scaling Wikipedia.

There's a few things to say about that. So first, some 2 billion devices see Wikipedia every month. It's a pretty small staff compared …

I mean I certainly agree with that.

So it’s relative, but yeah, it's a much bigger organization than it used to be. The other thing is there's two tracks that you can think about almost as being somewhat independent. That is the growth of the community and the website, which was very successful and did very well over a long period of time. Then the growth of the foundation, which is the nonprofit organization that owns and operates it, and that was a much bumpier ride. The foundation in the very early days was way too small. People wanted us to do things, but I'm like, well, there's just me here and two other people. We can't do anything.

Then, you know, any growing organization has growing pains. I'm not talking about anything exotic or unique to Wikipedia. You make a few bad hires early on and you're like, “Oh, that didn't work out.” It took some time to think about professionalizing the foundation, while at the same time keeping that real community spirit. A lot of the foundation staff are Wikipedians first. They come to things through being well-known on Wikipedia. Other people come in from various expertise, so that's always a challenge. I'm always a little bit forgiving of companies that hyperscale really, really quickly. Because to go from zero employees to 600 over 25 years, that's some growth. But there are companies that go from zero to 12,000 in just a few years, and it's like, wow. That's gotta be a complete nightmare.

One of the unique challenges to Wikipedia in a global context is that if you're operating in 54 countries, you’re going to be running into regimes around the world, authoritarian governments, who want to control the flow of information that you're providing in ways that Americans are not accustomed to. Right?

It is something that we've dealt with for years, and I assume we always will, but it does seem to be a little more difficult more recently, as we see increased legal problems in different places that are clearly politically motivated. For example, we've been issued several fines in Russia, which obviously we don't pay; we don't exist in Russia, so we're just ignoring them.

We're under threat of block in various places. We are completely blocked in China at the moment. We were blocked in Turkey for about three years, and we fought that. Then obviously we have volunteers who are sometimes at risk. We had a volunteer in Belarus who was arrested. We've had a couple of volunteers in Saudi Arabia arrested. These things are heavy, and we really take them seriously. It is true, whatever's going on politically in the US, which is a lot, we still have the First Amendment.

Ironically, at the same time they're canceling the visas of people who they politically don't agree with, they're also sort of campaigning that Europe shouldn't censor people's speech. So they're a mixed bag on that front. The idea for most Americans that somebody is engaging in a dangerous and heroic act, just to write down that Russia invaded Ukraine, is really something to get your head around.

I think it bears repeating that Wikipedia editors are volunteers. They are doing this in their spare time. They're not being paid. What are the limits of your ability to protect them in these contexts? What can you do, and what do you do?

There are limits. We've had cases in the past where it's really hard. Sometimes volunteers would come to me and say, “Oh, why aren't you writing a statement to The New York Times?” I was like, “Well, actually, behind the scenes, one of the problems is that sometimes the families prefer to just lay low.” If you make a big deal out of something the person who might have been in prison for six months could have it arbitrarily extended to 10 years—or be executed.

These are really hard problems. What we try to do is work with the right professionals, like human rights lawyers. We liaise with law firms in whatever jurisdiction to do what we can. But the truth is, in many cases, it's a genuine risk that people are facing. One of the important things that people can and should do is be very, very careful about their privacy online. Use a VPN, really take the technical measures to protect yourself, because that's probably as effective, probably more effective, than what anybody can do for you after the fact, depending on where you are and what's going on, obviously.

Does that advice feel more salient in the United States than it did a couple years ago?

I always say I'm a pathological optimist, so I'm not too worried. But in one interview I started talking about something and the interviewer said, “Jimmy, you're not cheering me up. You're supposed to be the optimist here.” I was like, “I don't think Trump is gonna have a coup, or engage in a coup. I don't. I hope not.”

But you might as well use that VPN.

That's one example in the technology world where—I mean, I live in the UK and VPNs are under political attack. VPNs are demonized as something terrible.

Literally everybody should be using a VPN. Do you use public Wi-Fi and you're not on a VPN? That's a really bad idea. Use them and be serious about them, because it's actually very important.

I want to ask you a little bit about bias. In The Seven Rules of Trust you talk about the importance of sticking to the facts, and that comes up over and over. It's very much a core principle that informs how Wikipedia is run, how it's edited, what ends up sticking to the page and what doesn't.

Whether it's Wikipedia or a newspaper, there is a really important element of trust to non-biased publication of information, right? Share this point of view, share that point of view, but don't, as Wikipedia, take a point of view. There has been, and continues to be, especially in the media, a very heated debate about the idea of objectivity, about the idea of unbiased publishing and whether that's even possible.

It sounds like you certainly think that it is, and I'm curious for you to share how that actually works for someone to sit down and edit a Wikipedia entry. Maybe they themselves have very strong feelings about Ukraine, about abortion, about whatever the subject is, but how does setting that aside actually work in practice?

If somebody says to me, “Oh, I don't think neutrality is even possible. I don't think there's such a thing.” I say, “But wait, do you think there's such a thing as bias? Do you agree that Fox News is biased?” “Oh, yes, yes. They're definitely biased.” “Well, could they be less biased?” Yes. OK. Well, that's what I'm talking about.

Be less biased. Be more neutral. We don't have to have a magical, perfect ideal of neutrality to say there are ways to get it wrong and let's try to avoid that. If you really feel super emotional about a particular topic, it's going be hard to be a good Wikipedia writer on that topic. You should probably just avoid it. This is what I do. I wouldn't edit anything about Donald Trump, because the man makes me insane. I just think I would find it hard to write in a dispassionate manner. But at the same time, I do think it's possible.

A lot of people come to Wikipedia with a spirit of goodwill and collaboration. The classic example I give is a kind and thoughtful Catholic priest and a kind and thoughtful Planned Parenthood activist. They're going to work together writing about abortion. They both understand Wikipedians can't take a side, can't say abortion is a sin. It can say the Catholic Church position on abortion is such and such, and critics have said this, and the Pope has responded that, and so on and so forth. There's sort of two elements here. One is: How emotional you are about it. That can be a problem if you can't calm yourself down enough. But in other cases, how ideological you are might not inhibit you from writing in a fair way. I mean, that Catholic priest and that Planned Parenthood activist may never agree, and they're not about to budge in their views, but they both probably believe if you understood the issue as well as they do, you would probably agree with them.

You see this a lot in social media debates. It's like the person who's getting really angry and flaming everybody who disagrees with them. I think they’re just not that confident in their ideas, because if they were that confident—like if somebody said to you two plus two equals five, you wouldn't fly off the handle and go insane at them because you would be like, “Oh, that's a very odd thing to say. Why would you believe that? And certainly if that were true, planes would crash. None of science would work. That's a completely bonkers thing to say.” But we don't get mad about it. Again, I don't think many people are very angry at people who think the Earth is flat. You just think, “Can you tell me more, because I'm really interested in where in the world did you come up with such an idea?” Whereas if it's something that we're less confident about, that's where we can get emotional and so forth.

One of the criticisms leveled at Wikipedia has been that Wikipedia relies a lot on the press. You rely on The New York Times, on WIRED, on a variety of different sources to inform your entries. If an individual thinks well, all of those sources are leftist, they are biased, therefore Wikipedia has an inherent problem with bias because of what it relies on.

How do you see the media at this moment? What would you like to see, if anything, change about how journalists, including WIRED, approach politics, approach abortion, approach all of these subjects that are so fraught and that are really tied up in this conversation about trust that is so fundamental?

There's so many elements to pick apart. We could probably have a four-hour conversation about just this, but the accusation that the media is vaguely liberal is probably not entirely untrue. Hopefully, in my view, at really good publications, which is a lot of publications, the journalists may vote a certain way, but they take the time to be good Wikipedians themselves and to report in a neutral way. I think you can do that, but you have to watch yourself. You always have to be careful about that. There was some claim that now Wikipedia has banned all but left-leaning sources. I'm like, “Well, yeah, if you think The Wall Street Journal is a communist rag, then maybe that's true.” But that actually isn't true.

I think there has clearly been a rise in low-quality, populist right-wing media, and we could probably name a few of the famous names. That's a fact. That's just something that's out there. What I would say is, if there are any right-leaning billionaires who are worried about the media, why don't you fund some really good, quality conservative journalism? If you think The New York Times is sort of vaguely liberal, have another newspaper that's sort of vaguely conservative.

For Wikipedia, what I always say is, look, we have to grapple with this always. We have to always be ready. If somebody gives us a criticism, we have to say, “OK, if we've not got it right, what do we do to improve? How did we get it wrong? What are our processes that aren't working well?” Or, you know, maybe sometimes we look into them and we're like, actually everything's fine. I'm sorry, we're not going to treat the comments of a social media influencer on vaccines the same as the New England Journal of Medicine. That's not gonna happen. At the same time, let's be careful that we aren't jumping on a bandwagon and in a moment of emotion. Let's try to be the place where we say “here's the parameters of the debate” rather than trying to take sides in that debate.

One of the challenges I have come up against in my job around neutrality and bias—actually, it came to mind because I was reading an interview you did with The New York Times–where you said, “In various places around the world, not speaking just of the US, facts are threatening. And if your policies are at odds with the facts, then you may find it very uncomfortable for people to simply explain the facts.”

A lot of people in the United States reject factual information. They might level a term like bias when in fact they're talking about something that is just true. There is still true and false. You know what I mean? But there is this perception that factual information is sort of inherently political and that it is liberal and that it is biased.

I've resigned myself, in some cases, to just accepting that those people live in a different version of reality than I do, and it is a reality informed by certain fictions. How do you think about that, and how do you think about reaching those people? So much of your book is about trying to reach more people with this shared framework of trust. But how do you reach people who won't even engage with facts as facts?

That is definitely hard, but I actually think there are fewer people who are really hardcore about that. I think most people on all political spectrums will say, “I want to be told the truth. I want to make decisions based on facts. I don't wanna live in a delusion.” They may be rejecting elements of the media or this, that, and the other, sometimes for bad reasons, sometimes for good reasons. Sometimes because they have lost trust and so now they don't trust anything.

An old friend from a million years ago said something on Facebook and I was like, Hmm, hold on. I don't think that's right. I just Googled quickly and I found a debunker, sent it, and he said, “I can't believe you were sending me a link to The New York Times.” I'm like, “What?” “They just make stuff up.” I was like, I don't know what to do here.

But usually, the response might’ve been, “Well you do know, of course, The New York Times is left-leaning and they may have left some things out that might be uncomfortable for their position, you should read this.” That is a conversation; that's something we can work on. But just rejecting it wholesale, as if the mainstream media is propaganda? That’s a huge problem. I think Elon Musk has talked about how Wikipedia echoes mainstream propaganda. And I'm like, just the words “mainstream” and “propaganda” are quite an amusing combination. It's a really odd thing to say.

For the media, I think it's really important to be aware that those people exist, and a few of them are just not reachable. I assume that's been true throughout all human history. But there are a lot of people who are like, “No, actually, I'm not listening because you've made these mistakes in the past and didn't correct it.”

I live in the UK, and one of the big political things that we've been through was Brexit. If you go back and you look at the rhetoric around Brexit, all the major political parties, certainly all the journalistic sources, for the most part, and even some of the more right-leaning sources, were against Brexit. There was a real tone that the people who were for Brexit were just racist. The people who were for Brexit were not persuaded by that, because calling people racist doesn't usually change their minds about anything. They were like, “Hold on, you're not listening.” In fact, people probably weren't listening, and that led to a protest vote that actually had dire consequences.

I was gonna say, yeah, look at you now. That went really well.

The public polling suggests that people pretty much agree that that wasn't a good idea. At the same time, these things happen. What we really have to do is say, “OK, how do we get back?”

One of the symptoms of all this, that I have been pointing out recently, is the US just went through the longest-in-history government shutdown, because Congress is so filled with partisan hacks. They are unable to trust each other enough to find some bipartisan solutions and some compromise.

You mentioned Elon Musk a few minutes ago, and this is someone who has built an alternate-reality version of Wikipedia. Do you know why he is so opposed to Wikipedia's continued existence?

I think it's a few things. I mean, I only know things he said. So he thinks Wikipedia is Woke-ipedia.

Wikipedia feels threatened in so many different ways, right? There's the Elon Musk of it all. There's the AI scraping. There are the people finger-pointing. How precarious do things feel for Wikipedia right now, and what feels like the most pressing threat to you? Are you waking up at 3 in the morning because of Wikipedia? Are you waking up at 3 in the morning because of AI? What are you thinking about Wikipedia's place in the world right now?

I don't worry about Wikipedia. It doesn't even come across my mind most days.

AI can do a passable impression of a human being until you look a little closer. I worry about community health. One of the things I say in the book but I've also just said to Elon, is that putting out this idea that Wikipedia has been taken over by far-left activists has two harmful consequences. One, you're telling those kind and thoughtful conservatives who might help with whatever bias you see that Wikipedia is going to be a hostile place for them. And you're telling those crazy woke activists that Wikipedia is their new home. Then we have to deal with them. So for me, the thing I worry about is community health. Are we bringing in a diversity, an intellectual diversity of new people? Are we treating people well when they come in?

In this era of hostility and these culture wars, are we at risk of letting those cultural wars infect our culture of neutrality and being thoughtful and being kind. That's what we have to preserve, because as long as we do that, we'll continue to thrive. The other thing that's funny about Wikipedia is we are a charity, we're a nonprofit organization. But we're even more than that. We are a community. So we're just a bunch of geeks who like writing an encyclopedia as a hobby. As such, when we think about the competitive landscape in a kind of dotcom way, “Ooh, what if Grok takes 30 percent of your traffic? What's that gonna do?” I'm sure it'll hurt the foundation's revenue if we have less traffic. But is it gonna change anything about the community? Not really. Because we write Wikipedia, because we enjoy it, and we're really happy that other people like it. So we'll carry on, even if at a different scale.

But also I think as long as we keep our spirit, I think people will always really want that sort of information that's not just written by human, but that's also been chewed on and thought about and debated and worked out by humans to say, “How can we make it as good as we possibly can?”

What would you tell someone listening who loves Wikipedia, who uses it all the time, besides donating, what can they do to make sure that Wikipedia is around and thriving in 10 years?

I always encourage people, if you like the spirit of Wikipedia just make a little edit now and then. You might find that you enjoy it, and you might come and join us.

Does anyone ever tell you that the idea of becoming an editor on Wikipedia is intimidating? That it feels a bit too powerful?

It shouldn't be. Just pick something obscure and make a little edit. If you've read a book and you're like, oh, actually there's not that much about this book, let me add a little something. Hopefully you'll enjoy that experience. We try to be this friendly bunch of nerds, and we're always looking for friends.

I remember writing high school papers and being told, “You cannot use Wikipedia as a source.” But just looking at everything coming out of Venezuela the last few days and seeing how much of it was AI-generated, Wikipedia now feels much more rigorous and accurate than so much of what we’re seeing online. Where do you see our digital experience going from here, and what do you see as Wikipedia's place in that?

I think we all have to worry about it, not just in the context of Wikipedia, but more broadly in the decline of local newspapers. Because I like to be optimistic, I was thinking the other day, oh, are there ways that AI could somehow support local journalism? That's a really fraught topic because the easiest way is the lazy way, which is just turning AI loose, starting to write a bunch of nonsense, and it's just gonna be slop.

The Guardian recently published a story about you, and the headline stood out to me. They asked whether you were “the last decent tech baron,” which is a very flattering way to be described. When I think about a tech baron, I think about Mark Zuckerberg feeding his cows macadamia nuts on his compound in Hawaii. I don't know that I would necessarily think of you as a baron, but I'm curious about how you think about yourself relative to the Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezoses and Sam Altmans of the world. Do you feel like you are part of that cohort?

I mean, I am and I'm not. Certainly, I know them all, some of them better than others over the years. But the way I live my life is quite different. I'm a geek, and my office is in my basement. At the same time—and this is where I can be a little bit grandiose—in 500 years, people are gonna look back at Wikipedia and go, you know what? That was one of the good things. That was a really difficult time in human history, and there was a lot of crap, but a bunch of really nice people got together to gather knowledge and share it with the world. I'm really happy and proud to be a part of that.

What advice would you give the tech barons about how they can participate in rebuilding trust? So many people don't trust what those barons have built. They don't trust Meta. They don't look at Facebook and think that is a place to find trustworthy information, a place to have trusted conversations. They don't look to the AI industry and feel a sense of trust in those leaders.

I think a big part of it is the algorithms that are optimized for short-term engagement. They have such clear negatives associated with them that you should really rethink that as a business strategy. I've said this to people at Facebook. If people become convinced that you are part of the destruction of civilization, that's not good for business in the long run. Optimizing for next quarter, sure, you could probably goose your revenues a bit, but it isn't really the right answer.

I thought you were gonna ask me for my advice for Elon. My advice for Elon is always the same: Hey Elon, remember that electric car idea? That was good.

Yeah, maybe go back to trying to save humanity.

Yeah, that was a good idea. Some good electric cars. Just stop posting on Twitter. Don't waste your time. There's more important things that you could do.

As a serial optimist, do you think we are too far gone? Or do you think that there is a better, more trusted, more collaborative society on the other side of the AI, of the algorithms, of the polarization of all of it. Is it possible?

My best evidence for that is to step back and not think about social media for a minute, and just think about people in your personal life and the way we treat each other. When you step into an elevator you don't immediately think, “OK, which one of these people's gonna try to slit my throat?” The elevator gets stuck halfway between floors. What do you do? You sort of nervously chuckle and you chat a bit and you laugh together. You're not afraid of them. They're people in an elevator just like you.

Most people assume good faith. We see that and we trust people all the time in all kinds of ways. I think we can just say politics has gotten super broken. Things about social media are super broken, but people are still the same.

We have a very short game I would love to play to wrap up. It's called Control, Alt, Delete. So, what piece of technology would you love to control? What would you love to alt, so alter or change, and what would you love to delete? What would you vanquish from the Earth if given the opportunity?

I would love to be able to control my home Wi-Fi network, which has been driving me crazy all morning.

Join the club.

That's a silly answer, but that's my answer. So, alter? Broadly I would say the algorithms of social media. I'd like to see them become more responsive to genuine quality as opposed to just engagement. I've said for a long time, if I went on Facebook one morning and they gave me an option to say, “We'd like to show you things that we think you're gonna be less interested in but that we think are high quality. You may not agree with them, but we think they're high-quality because we’ve got these signals. Do you wanna see more like that?” I would say yes.

But what would it do to their ad business?

Well, maybe in the long run I would revert a long trend, which is that I hardly ever go on Facebook anymore, you know?

Then, delete? I think X/Twitter, just delete it. The whole thing's dead. Yeah. It's too late to reboot.

I deleted my account maybe two years ago. I can't even think about it. I cannot disagree with you there.

I haven't deleted my account, but I just go on less and less. I think a lot of people, a lot of journalists, feel like they need it professionally. Because you can post stuff there and people will see it. I do have some friends there who I know. Actually, one of my good friends quit, and I was like, “Well, OK, there's one more reason to just not bother.”

One more reason to give it up. Yep.

I think they should just delete it and start over.

Maybe start over with a different owner.

That would be a good start, yeah.

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