Jimmy Wales

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is the Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales. The co founder of Wikipedia, his free online invention has been little short of revolutionary in democratizing and energizing the way the world disseminates and accesses information. He thinks big.

Presenter0:52

His ambition is for a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. It's going pretty well. Wikipedia currently exists in two hundred and eighty seven languages, is the fifth most accessed website in the world, and has twenty billion page views a month.

Presenter1:12

He comes from a well established line of self starters. The one room Alabama schoolhouse, where he learned to read and write, was set up by his mother and grandmother. His uncle ran one of the town's first computer stores.

Presenter1:25

He says of Wikipedia

Presenter1:26

I was confident it would work right from the beginning. I have to admit, though, that on that first day I woke up a few times in the night to log on and check nobody had wrecked the whole project. So welcome, Jimmy Wales. The beginning then was only about fourteen years ago, I think, of Wikipedia. In terms of sharing information, in terms of how we access information now,

Jimmy Wales1:41

Yeah.

Presenter1:46

That almost seems like the olden days. What do you make of the the pace of change and the the really central role that technology has in the way we understand the world we live in?

Jimmy Wales1:56

Well, it it's true that if you think about an eighteen, nineteen year old, so someone who's just on the verge of entering university, Wikipedia has been there since they were learning how to read. And certainly in the last five years, you know, the age when they would have started to go to the Internet for their homework or for whatever interests them, Wikipedia has been ubiquitous. And so for that generation coming up, Wikipedia is the air that we breathe or the water that we swim in. It's just part of the environment. And that's a a pretty amazing thing to think about.

Presenter2:27

I introduced you today as an Internet entrepreneur, but but actually that slightly muddies the water, because it's important, of course, that people realize it's free to access, it's free content, it is this online encyclopedia. Are you somebody who finds the idea of making money out of information inherently distasteful?

Jimmy Wales2:48

Not at all. Not at all. I am very much an entrepreneur and a business person at heart. I think there's nothing wrong with making money as long as you're doing it honestly, which is not necessarily what happens in every situation these days.

Presenter3:01

And do you yourself subscribe to the the core notion that and it's much discussed right now that information deserves to be free.

Jimmy Wales3:10

Well, I think that that's an old saying that comes actually from Stuart Brand, and everybody forgets the second part of it. Which is what? Information wants to be free and information wants to be expensive. And he's talking about this sort of struggle between the high cost of creating new information versus the fact that once it's created, it becomes quite easy for it to be distributed at virtually no cost. So I think it's complicated. But I do think that for general encyclopedic information, we have shown that a lot of people are more than happy to share what they know and to check each other's work and give it away under a free license so that anybody can use it for anything they want.

Presenter3:16

Which is what?

Presenter3:47

And uh how do you yourself in in terms of the sort of daily interaction with things I mean, do you read, you know, an old fashioned newspaper offline? Do you read books as we used to know them?

Jimmy Wales3:57

Yes and no. I mean certainly get the newspaper on a Sunday morning. You do. Yeah, and my purchasing and reading of books has actually gone up quite a bit in the last uh two or three years as I got Amazon Kindle on my phone and find it quite convenient to have books downloaded there and to read them rather than lugging around the paper. Uh I still love paper books, of course. Uh people forget that books are a really fantastic technology. You can take them to the beach and they don't get ruined and you can even drop them in the bathtub and they don't get ruined and uh they're very inexpensive. So if you you know, if you leave a book on the tube, it's not a big deal. If you leave your iPad on the tube, you're probably pretty upset about that. But it is more convenient often to read a book form of uh literature, but you know on a digital format.

Presenter4:45

Let's go to your music, Jimmy Wheels. Tell us about this, then.

Jimmy Wales4:47

Leonard Skynyrd, Sweet Home, Alabama. It's such a fantastic classic song and of course I am from Alabama. At my wedding here in London, it was one of our main kickoff songs at one point of the evening and everybody really enjoyed that. And then sometimes people they're about to introduce me for a speech or something like this and they'll say, Tell me something that people don't know about you. And I'll say, Okay, well I'll tell you this story, which is that once when I was in Bulgaria, I went on this late night chat program, something like Graham Norton here in the UK, that type of show. And they surprised me. They had the band play Sweet Home, Alabama, and they had me sing it. So I've sung Sweet Home Alabama on Bulgarian national television.

Presenter5:18

Uh

Speaker 45:18

Yeah.

Presenter5:18

Yeah.

Speaker 45:19

Yeah.

Speaker 45:35

Where the skies are blue.

Speaker 45:40

Sweet home out of the way

Speaker 45:45

But I'm coming on to

Presenter6:00

That was Leonard Skynard and Sweet Home, Alabama. Jimmy Wills The beauty of Wikipedia for so many of its users is that it can inform us on everything from

Presenter6:09

No soft matter physics to the politics of the Russian Caucasus. It's all there in one place. What are the most contentious pages? I mean, what are the pages that you're like not this again?

Jimmy Wales6:19

Well, it's actually a funny sort of thing. People assume that our big internal controversies are going to be about George W. Bush or Israel-Palestine or these kinds of things. And there's always a bit of editing and disagreement going on about things like that. But the real tough battles in the community end up being about quite obscure editorial matters oftentimes. We had to have an arbitration committee case about different punctuation styles. So we're quite geeky. And the things we have a difficult time resolving are sometimes slightly bewildering to outsiders. The names of rivers in Poland, Gdańsk versus Danzig, and what historical era do you call it Gdańsk, and what times do you call it Danzig and why?

Presenter7:00

You are pushing an open door with the Radio 4 listeners on all of this. I wonder what advice you give Wikipedia users in terms of accuracy.

Jimmy Wales7:09

Check the sources. If we've done our job correctly, we tell you some information, but we also tell you where we got it from, and you can click through and go and get that source. And if you see something that's wrong, tell us. Help us. We're trying to make it better. For us, when we look at the best research that's been done on the accuracy of Wikipedia, it's on a par with traditional encyclopedias. That doesn't mean it's perfect. In fact, what it means is, as it turns out, traditional encyclopedias weren't as good as we all hoped. Doing really good research materials really, really hard. And it's not 100 million people adding one sentence each. There's a few thousand people, three to five, we might say, who are really the core community, the core group of very passionate people who put a lot of thought into what's wrong with Wikipedia, how do we make it better, where are the errors, how can we find them, how can we fix them?

Presenter7:30

That doesn't

Presenter7:58

Time for some more music, Jimmy Wheels. We're going to listen to your second one of the morning. Tell me w what this is and why it's on your list.

Jimmy Wales8:04

Well, so this song, Shot at the Devil by Motley Crewe. Motley Crewe was the very first band that I ever saw live and in concert with my great friend Terry. And I was raised in a pretty conservative household, overprotective, you might say. But I was also quite young in school, so all my school friends were doing things that I wasn't allowed to do yet because I was two years younger than everyone. And I had my car, and we would fill up the car and just drive around all day listening to music.

Presenter8:35

You can do that really young in America.

Jimmy Wales8:36

Yeah, yeah, sixteen, I I got my driving license. At great personal peril, let's be clear, but I I did survive it somehow. And it was quite a moment, my first time to a rock and roll show, and we loved the song, but we also mocked the song. But, you know, it's rock and roll.

Speaker 48:57

Yeah.

Speaker 49:00

And then you'll never cry for wow wow wow To put the strength to the test You put the thrill back in there I'm telling you what

Speaker 49:11

The risk in the case, mommy hanging on me lips, my nose gets on the top. But in the single wheel, we're standing in the middle of

Presenter9:23

That was Shout at the Devil from Motley Crew. Memories for you, Jimmy Wills, of driving round with your new licence in your car and enjoying with a degree of irony.

Jimmy Wales9:31

Huh.

Presenter9:31

Uh that song. Um your hometown then is Huntsville, Alabama.

Jimmy Wales9:34

Got sir.

Presenter9:34

Um your Wikipedia page is a little bit sketchy about your date of birth. Is it the 7th or is it the 8th of August 1966?

Jimmy Wales9:41

It's the seventh of August, but my birth certificate says it's the eighth. There was some sort of an error that happened. I was born, according to my mother, who I believe she was there, at about 11:20 at night. And by the time the the doctor got back to the office, I suppose, he just checked the date and he got it wrong. So I've always celebrated on the seventh, and I didn't know this until actually I was going to get my driving license, and we needed a copy of my birth certificate, and I was alarmed to find that I had to come back the next day because it was a a day delayed.

Presenter9:52

Okay.

Presenter10:12

You say you had a relatively overprotective upbringing, and let's talk about this little schoolhouse then. That sounds kind of fascinating. You it was set up by your mother and your grandmother. Why did they decide to set up the schoolhouse?

Jimmy Wales10:22

What?

Jimmy Wales10:25

Well, as what you mentioned earlier, my family has always been quite entrepreneurial and that doesn't necessarily mean trying to make money, but sort of starting things and and setting things up. And my mother and my grandmother had a music school before this, so they're teaching piano lessons and and all that. And then when I was of the right age, they decided that the schools weren't really appropriate for me. I had learned to read quite young and so forth, so they just decided to start the school. And for most of the so kindergarten through eighth grade, I was in the class of four kids.

Presenter10:56

Tell me about your Tandy TRS-80, which I think was y was that your first ever computer?

Jimmy Wales11:01

Yeah, well my my mother in particular has always been a gadget person. She's always had the latest technology, whatever that might be. And my uncle had a a music store which later became the computer store and uh next door was the radio shack uh electronic store where they were selling one of the first computers you could have at home which was the TRS 80. So we bought one and what could you do on it?

Jimmy Wales11:24

Well, there were different little games and programs. It was all very primitive, of course, but I learned to program a bit and I remember writing a tic tac toe game and that sort of thing. But, you know, it was very basic, but it was very exciting.

Presenter11:37

Now you surely must be the man most hated by encyclopedia salesmen around the world. Did you as you were growing up in the nineteen seventies, did did you have a set of encyclopedias?

Jimmy Wales11:46

Oh, yeah, definitely. We had the the World Book encyclopedias, which is encyclopedias aimed at children. And one of the funny memories I have is that every year they would send out the annual updates and they would sometimes rewrite an entire article and then you would go and you would put a sticker in your old encyclopedias to say, Oh, come and look at the new version, you know.

Presenter11:57

Mm.

Presenter12:06

And were you were you hungry for information?

Jimmy Wales12:08

Oh yeah, definitely. I was a voracious reader.

Jimmy Wales12:11

I think I read every single Nancy Drew book and the Hardy Boys series and all that sort of thing. So, whatever I could get my hands on, I was reading.

Presenter12:19

Let's have your third piece of music then. What are we going to hear now?

Jimmy Wales12:21

Now we're going to hear Delta Dawn, Tanya Tucker. This is a song that I cherish quite a lot. My father used to sing this song around the house and I have these great memories of being in the car with Dad with his 460 air conditioner, he called it, which is you roll down all four windows and drive 60 miles an hour. And singing the song and of course it's quite an easy song to learn the lyrics to. At this age I was probably seven or eight.

Speaker 412:46

Dildon what's that flower you have on?

Speaker 412:52

Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?

Speaker 412:58

Eli say, he was a meeting you here today.

Speaker 413:05

Take you to his mansion in a sky

Speaker 413:11

Tilda don't want

Presenter13:15

That was Tanya Tucker and Delta Dawn. Tell me, Jimmy Wells, Wikipedia's mission statement is that it's based on openly editable content. Growing up, were you encouraged by your parents to be always questioning, to be not cynical, but sceptical about the world?

Jimmy Wales13:31

Yeah, I mean questioning, inquisitive, definitely not cynical, skeptical, I'm not so sure, but always exploring. I mean, I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, which is, of course, very much in the deep south, but it's also an unusual place because that's where the rocket scientists came after World War Two to the Space and Rocket Center there. And all of the moonshot rockets were designed and created and built there. The town grew from twenty thousand people in 1960 to 200,000 in 1980. So that when I was born in 1966 it was very much a boom town with people coming from all over. They were bringing in all these people to work on the space program. I remember when when I was young that we lived close enough that sometimes the windows would rattle when they were testing the Saturn V rockets and things like that. So that environment meant a lot of intellectual curiosity was just built into our culture, which is unusual, I think, for the Deep South at that time.

Presenter14:27

That's fascinating. And also it chimes in with something that I was wondering. I was thinking about people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who'd been born ten years before you, and part of the intrinsic alchemy of their brilliance was that as they were growing up, there were a lot of engineers, people who were

Presenter14:43

Moving forward technology in a way that would become fundamental to our understanding of it, they also very early on in their lives had access to computers. When you were young in school, were there computers things that could engage your young brain in a in a more complex way?

Jimmy Wales15:00

Definitely. I mean, at my high school, one of the parents donated an out of date, at that time, mini computer, which is like a small mainframe. And we had computer classes. And it really did transform our lives, really, that access to the computer at an early age.

Speaker 415:07

Yeah.

Presenter15:08

Uh

Presenter15:16

You won a full scholarship to university, and yet I read that you lost it after the first year. What what happened? How come you lost it?

Jimmy Wales15:23

I I drove around that year listening to Motley Crew and was that sound?

Presenter15:27

Was that that was it? Yeah, okay.

Jimmy Wales15:28

That was pretty much it. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I was very young. I graduated from high school when I was sixteen and um I was quite immature. I should have had a gap year.

Presenter15:36

You went on to study finance and just looking at your C V that sort of was slap bang in that era of the trading boom.

Presenter15:43

But at that point that you were studying finance, did you intend to go and be a trader on Wall Street? Was that what interested you?

Jimmy Wales15:48

Yeah, yeah, and I did. I ended up being a traitor. Did you?

Presenter15:50

Did you?

Jimmy Wales15:51

Yeah, yeah. I worked in Chicago in the in the financial markets.

Presenter15:51

Yeah, I work in the

Presenter15:53

Alright.

Jimmy Wales15:54

trading short-end interest rate derivative securities and did that for a while, very much enjoyed it, but the internet became more interesting. I remember I was working all day. I didn't have a life back then, so I'd work all day and then I would go home and I would work on writing a web browser and this was before Netscape went public. Then Netscape went public and on opening day was worth something like $4.3 billion. And my web browser I was running at home was not as good as Netscape, but it wasn't $4 billion worse. And so I thought, oh, something really as interesting is going on here. It's not just me who thinks this is going to be huge. It's being validated now. And so then I started to move into the sort of internet world.

Presenter16:34

Hold that thought. Uh it's time for some more music, Jimmy Wills. Um tell me then about this fourth track. What is it and why is it important to you?

Jimmy Wales16:42

This is Tom Sawyer by Rush. For me, it's a great song, great spirit. My favorite line in this song is, No, his mind is not for rent to any god or government. And it's about intellectual independence. It goes on to say, always hopeful yet discontent. That definitely describes sort of me in certain aspects. And then this one's quite interesting. He knows changes aren't permanent, but change is. And that really resonates to me about the nature of Wikipedia. The individual changes people make to this knowledge base aren't permanent themselves, but the change itself is permanent.

Speaker 417:16

No is fine to stop around To any other government

Speaker 417:22

Always hope for your disconnect

Speaker 417:24

No changes are permanent.

Speaker 417:27

More taken.

Presenter17:45

Rush, Tom Sawyer. So Jimmy Wills, and commercial Internet providers emerged really in the eighties, the early nineties. When did you personally get that the Internet was definitely a thing?

Jimmy Wales17:58

I would say one of the the defining moments for me was when I was in an email conversation with someone and then just then realized that they were in Australia. And it's hard to even describe today because that's quite normal that someone might email you from Australia, but how astonishing that was. And I at the time I had very little idea of how the underlying network functioned. And so I imagined that I was going to be in trouble with the university because some enormously expensive long distance call had been placed on my behalf. So I got very interested and began even and then it had impact in sort of thinking about what does this mean for the planet that people can talk from all over the world for free by sending each other emails. It's an amazing thing to contemplate.

Presenter18:44

Um it sounds then that you were something of a sort of proto geek. You know, you got it earlier than an awful lot of the rest of us. I mean, you seem like a intrinsically a relatively modest man. Does it give you a sort of sense of

Jimmy Wales18:51

Yeah.

Presenter18:56

Not quite superiority, but that you know, you're kind of ahe more than ahead of the game.

Jimmy Wales19:03

Well, no, not really because I mean I remember in in particular Napster, when Napster came out and people were there was all the controversy, file sharing, music and all that stuff. I never even heard of Napster until it had twenty million users and I was like, What is going on? I'm on the internet every day. How did I miss this? you know? And change continues to happen very, very quickly and obviously we'll miss out on some of it. And I think in particular the really rapid shift that we've been experiencing to mobile internet really opens up a whole new world and a lot of people think mobile first in a way that I don't think I ever will.

Presenter19:37

Um you built up then this small web portal company called BOMUS. By the late nineties it had around about, I think, sixteen employees. How were you as a as a man manager, as an organizer? Was that your thing?

Jimmy Wales19:49

No, I I'm a pretty terrible manager actually. And it's it's one of the things that I learned the hard way in that period that I need good management around me to actually organize the work and get things done. I tend to go off and just start building and working and doing things and sort of talking about big visions. But in terms of the actual day-to-day practicalities of getting things done in a group of people, I need help with that. I'm just not very good at it.

Presenter20:20

Let's have some more music then. What are we going to hear? This is your fifth disc of the morning, Jimmy Wales.

Jimmy Wales20:25

Uh so this is uh Public Enemy, Fight the Power. I chose this actually because we at the Wikimedia Foundation we've decided to file a lawsuit against the NSA. So that definitely puts you in a fight the power type of move.

Presenter20:37

Just very briefly, your fight against the NSA, this is the American Security Agencies, and right now a battle is going on as to whether or not they have the right to routinely monitor people's interaction online.

Jimmy Wales20:48

Yeah, exactly. And they are, you know, spying on people while they're reading Wikipedia and things like this. So in cooperation with the American Civil Liberties Union, who's classically does these kinds of lawsuits, and several other plaintiffs, we filed what I hope will become a landmark civil rights case. But you know, it's the courts. It's going to take a few years to figure out. So fight the power, you know.

Speaker 321:13

Listen if you're missing y'all, swinging while I'm singing. Giving what you're getting, knowing what I know in while the black man's sweating, in the rhythm I'm rolling. Gotta give us what we want. Gotta give us what we need. Our freedom of beat, that's freedom of death. We gotta fight the powers that be.

Speaker 321:33

The power!

Speaker 321:36

Petroleum

Speaker 321:38

Fight the power!

Speaker 321:41

The power

Presenter21:42

That was fight the power of public enemies. So uh Jimmy Wales, by the the year two thousand Larry Page and Sergey Brin had already set out their stall. They they said uh they claimed that Google would, in their words, organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. You started a a company called Newpedia.com. What were you offering that was different from what they are offering?

Jimmy Wales22:04

Well, Newpedia was really the predecessor to Wikipedia and the vision was the same, a free encyclopedia for everyone, but I didn't know how to organize community online. There was a lot I didn't know. And so we set up a very academic system with seven stages of review for everything that could get published. And it it failed ultimately. It was very intimidating for volunteers to participate. But it was this idea that

Jimmy Wales22:27

Sort of the difference between a search engine and an encyclopedia. A well-done search engine, which I think Google generally is, can organize the world's information and make it accessible. But it's still whatever random bits and bobs happen to be out there on the Internet. Everything from academic journal articles to blog posts to whatever, you know, when you search. Whereas an encyclopedia is a very particular type of thing, a very particular summary of human knowledge. And I think it's quite important.

Presenter22:54

So Newpedia was this peer review encyclopedia. As I understand it, by the end of your first twelve months, you'd only publish just over twenty articles, so not really a huge success. Are you an inherently very optimistic, confident person? What made you think that, you know what, I'm going to pick myself up and dust myself down?

Jimmy Wales23:03

Um so

Jimmy Wales23:14

Well, I always say that I'm a pathologically optimistic person, meaning I always think everything's going to be fine and work out great, and I definitely am aware I need some pessimistic people around me to sort of get things done and to be, you know, a bit calmer about things. But, you know, it comes in a way from wanting to do something interesting. So if that's the fundamental drive, then whether it's successful or not in some external sense, for me what's important is, was it interesting? Was it fun? Was it something that I enjoyed doing?

Presenter23:46

Let's go to your next piece. Tell me about this then. It's your sixth of the morning, Jimmy Wills. What are we going to hear?

Jimmy Wales23:50

So this is a box violin concerto in A minor. This is a piece that my fourteen year old daughter recently had her first solo in her orchestra. So it's quite meaningful to me in that regard.

Presenter25:04

That was part of the opening of Bach's violin concerto in A minor played there by Lesolie Stromain with Artur Gremieux on violin conducted by Arpad Gerritz. So you are then a father of uh of three girls. You mentioned your fourteen year old, your eldest there. Do you put filters on all their devices? Are you on it?

Jimmy Wales25:23

Uh the little ones are too young. They don't really surf the web. But Kira has never had any filters on her Internet usage and she's a little geek. She started her own blog when she was, I think, six years old. But she's also kind of a goody two-shoe, so it's never been a real problem.

Presenter25:41

You were married very early for the first time when you were twenty. You're married now to Kate Garvey. She is your third wife. At your wedding, I understand, in twenty twelve to Kate, your wife's maid of honour was reported to have joked in her speech that Kate had succeeded in marrying the only world famous Internet entrepreneur who wasn't a billionaire. So given that you don't measure your success in private jets, how do you measure your success?

Presenter26:06

Yeah.

Jimmy Wales26:06

I

Jimmy Wales26:08

I that's the question just boggles my mind. I don't think in those terms, so I never really measured my success. It's just not the kind of thing that I do. I I'm just me and I do my stuff. And I guess I would say if I had to, I measure my success as to whether or not what I've done is interesting, whether it's been something useful and productive and that sort of thing.

Presenter26:29

What what are the responses that you get from people? You've mentioned you travel a lot and you are the guy who invented Wikipedia. I mean, sparing your blushes, what do people say what do people say to you about what you've done?

Jimmy Wales26:41

Uh well, people are very sweet. Um certainly, you know, with with young people they often say, I I wouldn't have my university degree were it not for you and that sort of thing. You've changed the world and all that. But Do you think you have?

Jimmy Wales26:55

My community has, and I'm a part of that community. I'm proud of that role. But yeah, we've changed the world, and in hopefully a good way. I mean, I do think that when people look back on this era, they'll point to Wikipedia as something good about this era, that a group of people got together as volunteers and gave this incredible gift to the world, just out of sheer love of knowledge. I mean, that's just an amazing thing to feel that I'm a part of.

Presenter27:20

Let's have some more music, Jimmy Wills. We're going to hear your seventh. Oh, yeah. Tell me about this then.

Jimmy Wales27:27

Well, this is one that will be very familiar to anyone who is a parent of the under five-year-old set, particularly girls.

Speaker 427:35

It's time to see what I can do To test the limits and break through No right, no road, no rules for me I'm free

Speaker 427:51

Oh, I am one with the wind and sky. Let it go.

Speaker 427:58

Let it go, you'll never see me cry.

Presenter28:04

Idina Manzel and Let It Go. Do you actually? I mean, you've chosen that for your daughters and for the amount of times I'm guessing that you've heard it at home. Do you like it?

Jimmy Wales28:12

I like the song, yeah, I enjoy it. Cold never bothered me anyway.

Presenter28:16

You even know the words, John. I know all the words. It's terrible. I've read that you were an obsessive gamer in your day. Have you grown out of it?

Jimmy Wales28:16

Uh

Jimmy Wales28:17

I know all the words. It's terrible.

Jimmy Wales28:24

No, I've never been an obsessive gamer. Well, it's misunderstood. What I said once is that I had the potential to be an obsessive gamer. And I realized that I better not. Uh I got quite obsessed with Tetris for a little while, but I think we all did maybe.

Presenter28:26

Oh, so that's what it is.

Presenter28:31

The art

Presenter28:35

Uh

Presenter28:39

So you had the f the foresight to realize that you better not go there. I do you tend to be obsessive across all things? You know, if you're exercising, you're going hell for leather.

Jimmy Wales28:48

I am not very moderate in my interest. So if I am interested in something, then I tend to go quite deep into it. And so a year and a half ago, I took a month off to learn Ruby on Rails, a new development environment, even though I'm unlikely to ever have any professional need to actually code. But I got interested in it, and I thought I should understand this.

Presenter29:09

You're in demand, greatly in demand, as a public speaker. When you're talking to CEOs and people in the top flight of business about the future of the Internet, what do you tell them is the next big thing?

Jimmy Wales29:20

Well, lately what I've been talking about is very inexpensive Android mobile phones that are full smartphone three G that are selling for less than fifty dollars and they're selling tens of millions of these already. And in the next five years the number of people in the developing world who will have access to the full Internet in their pocket is just skyrocketing and that's going to have an enormous impact on the internet, on culture, on business, on the political arrangements in those places where people have in the past not had any empowerment related to information or communication.

Presenter29:58

And as we break down barriers, whether they're barriers of communication or travel or understanding, there's such an upside to that, of course, but we must also surely have to think about the downside and understanding

Presenter30:12

That some cultures are in different places from our culture. We are not one great big soup.

Jimmy Wales30:17

Yeah, we're not one great big soup. But I always have a hard time as a pathological optimist thinking of the downsides of anything. So mostly when I hear people talking about the downsides, I just think I'm not buying it. I think it's almost completely upside. Obviously, you're going to have little bits and bobs around the edges. You know, things like, well, now terrorist groups can recruit through the web and things like that. But that's always going to be such a tiny, tiny percentage of what's going on. And at the same time, we've got this overwhelming tsunami of knowledge and information sharing and people meeting each other. I mean, it's very hard to imagine people to be completely alien to yourself if you've talked to them online. And so the kind of rabid nationalism that has really polluted the world so badly in the last century is unlikely to have the same impact now because you can propagandize a group of people as much as you want about how evil the other people are. And they're not going to believe it because they know those other people. They've actually talked to them online or played a game with them. There's obviously limitations, but overwhelmingly, I think we're moving to an era where people can see other people as human beings. And that's really important.

Presenter31:31

Let's hear your final piece of the morning, then, Jimmy. What what's this?

Jimmy Wales31:34

So, this is the song Jackson by Johnny Cash and June Carter. I chose this recently. My wife and I went with some friends to Lucky Voice, the karaoke place, and we were quite stuck for a bit as to what to do. And we sort of went on YouTube and started looking for songs to sing together. And we hit upon this one, and we had such a fantastic fun time doing it that I just had to pick it.

Speaker 431:57

Look and laugh at you and Jackson, and I'll be dancing on the pony king.

Speaker 432:05

Never meet you round town like a scalded hound with your tail up between your legs. Yeah, go to Jackson.

Speaker 432:15

You big talking man?

Speaker 432:18

And I'll be waiting in Jackson

Speaker 432:22

And my J-Pan players

Presenter32:26

That was Johnny Cash and June Carter and Jackson. It's time, Jimmy, for me to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book along to the island, too. Do you know what it's going to be?

Jimmy Wales32:34

Along

Jimmy Wales32:37

Uh yeah, I think I'll take um The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

Presenter32:40

Right, that's yours. And we allow you a luxury.

Jimmy Wales32:43

Can it be my cell phone with internet acc?

Presenter32:46

Absolutely. Under no circumstances can it I think you already knew the answer to that question. It cannot be that.

Jimmy Wales32:51

It cannot be that.

Presenter32:52

So what will it be?

Jimmy Wales32:53

A nice Cabernet.

Presenter32:55

Oh yeah, I could give you a seller if you're famous.

Jimmy Wales32:56

Oh, a cellar. Oh, that's much better than a very large cellar of a nice Cabernet.

Presenter32:59

Price

Presenter33:00

And a glass too, so I'll drink it out of the

Jimmy Wales33:01

I'll drink it out of the bottle if I have to.

Presenter33:04

Um, if you had to save just one of these eight disks from the waves, which would be the one that you'd save?

Jimmy Wales33:10

Gosh, it's a tough call. I think I would say the violin concerto. It tickles my brain mathematically.

Presenter33:11

Um I

Presenter33:15

Okay.

Presenter33:17

It's yours. Jimmy Wales, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Presenter34:02

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter34:05

You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website bbc.co.uk slash Radio4.