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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and I'm very pleased indeed to be welcoming this week as my guest,

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, a website which I think literally everybody listening will use

multiple times a day. His new book is The Seven Rules of Trust and Why It is Today's Most Essential

Superpower. Welcome to me. This is kind of an unfashionable topic, isn't it?

Unfashionable or timely.

I'm not sure which.

Hopefully I can make it fashionable.

Yeah, we do have a, I would say, a crisis of trust in society.

And I think it's time to think about how do we get back to a more trustworthy and trusting society?

A trust, as you argue, is what underpins the way Wikipedia works.

And I mean, certainly for someone like me looking from the outside, Wikipedia feels a little bit like a kind of fossil of the early promise of the internet where it's based in hacker culture, it's based in the idea of open source stuff,

and it's everybody collaborates and something good happens. And yet the internet seems to have gone in completely the opposite direction in general. Why is that, do you think? Well, I mean,

I think it's not completely correct to say that because we still do have all kinds of amazing things going on.

Open source software continues to thrive and Wikipedia continues to thrive.

And even, you know, we focus a lot on some of the more toxic aspects of social media,

but there's also other things going on, social things going on.

...