← The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
671: Jimmy Wales (Founder of Wikipedia) - To Get Trust Give Trust, Why Nupedia Failed, Assuming Good Faith, Walking the Walk, Transparency vs. Sharing Everything, Curiosity as the Ultimate Love Language, and Attracting Trustworthy People
00:52:08
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- [00:03]
Ryan Hawk
Welcome to the Learning Leader show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes, go to learningleader.com now on to tonight's featured leader. Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia and one of the most trusted websites on the planet, which started as a project in 2001, has grown into a global phenomenon. Eleven billion page views every month, edited by nearly 260,000 volunteers, and the only top 10 website run by a nonprofit. Crazy. During our conversation, we discuss Jimmy's desire to give every person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
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No big deal.
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Then we go into the seven rules of trust. And then Jimmy shares why it's worth.
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It to lead with trust.
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You don't have to earn it, you got it. And why that mentality attracts the type.
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Of people that you want to be around.
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Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Jimmy Wales. This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people or transform your business through talent or technical services. Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal.comlearningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal.com learningleader so let's go back.
- [02:09]
A few years to 1969. You're three years old, your mom buys you a world book encyclopedia from a door to door salesman. And I read that young Jimmy became obsessed with those volumes and you even updated them. Tell me about this time. You're only three years old and you're already creating Wikipedia then.
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Jimmy Wales
Oh, well, I don't think I did any updating when I was three. I was only learning to read when I was four, so I don't know, probably I looked at some pictures when I was three, but yeah, well, I mean, it's kind of a joke really, but the World Book Encyclopedia is quite common to sell to parents. And of course if you buy it when your kid's three because you're all excited about future, then in a few years time some of the articles are out of date and so they would send out the annual update. So once a year you would get the, you know, the 1974 update and then they would sometimes update Articles. So, for example, they had to update the article on the moon because we'd had the moon landing. And so then they would give you these stickers and you could go through the. The stickers and it would say, you put it in next to moon. You would put c update in 1974 annual. So I would do that with my mom. So I always joke that was my first update of the encyclopedia.
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Ryan Hawk
How did that experience and obsessing over revising it impact you as you grew up?
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Jimmy Wales
It didn't seem that important at the time because I didn't know I was going to do this. So it was just a thing. I did look forward to it every year when the thing would come in. But loving the encyclopedia. And of course, later I found out about Encyclopedia Americana, which was another brand, and Encyclopedia Britannica, which everybody knows, because World Book is really for kids and these are the more adult encyclopedias. But just loving that idea that you could go and look anything up that you're interested in. As a kid, you didn't know anything about anything, really. So you would be like, oh, tigers, I wish I knew more about tigers. And you go and you look and like, oh, great, there's a whole article about tigers. I'm going to read that. So I think that early love of, you know, quite random, diverse knowledge is part of what's meant. I would enjoy working on an encyclopedia.
- [04:28]
Ryan Hawk
So let's fast forward a few years to your daughter Kira's birth. So she's born and faced some challenges immediately, Right as she's born and your doctor comes to you saying, jimmy to you and Kira's mom, hey, we want to do this. I don't know if it's an experiment, but a different type of procedure that could potentially help her. And you're in the hospital scrambling around.
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I don't know, how am I supposed.
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To make this decision? I don't have the necessary information. Right.
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And so could you walk me through.
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That experience and how that actually helped spur you to want to create Wikipedia?
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Jimmy Wales
Yeah. So at that time, we had been working on Nupedia, which was a predecessor project which wasn't that innovative. We would recruit academics to write articles and you had to send in your CV showing you were qualified and so forth before you could write anything. It wasn't working at all. We had very, very slow progress, not much coming out, and I was really on the verge of giving up. I'm like, you know, like, I can't afford to see this through. At this rate, it's going to be forever. Before we get anywhere. And then, you know, when Kira was born and I just realized like, actually you go on the Internet and you've got a question like, what is this condition my daughter have? Should I have this treatment? What do I need to learn quickly? And it wasn't there. You know, the only things there were either sort of random blogs and things like that or academic journal articles you might be able to find, which were way above my head, you know, as they often can be, which means I can read it. But would I really come to a good understanding? Probably not. I don't have the context. So I was just like, you know what, we got to get this done, we got to do this. And just before this, one of my employees, Jeremy Rosenfeld, he had shown me this wiki thing that we'd seen online and it was like, oh, this is interesting. It's just like a website and anybody can edit it. And I'm like, oh, you know what, maybe we could use that. Because clearly this top down approach with a seven stage review process before you publish anything, that's no fun and nobody's doing it and maybe there's a better way and we've got to try something, put it up. So Kira was born on December 26th and I opened Wikipedia on January 15th. Wow. And I just downloaded this open source wiki software, Usemod Wiki it was called. We called it Wikipedia because we were afraid the Nupedia academics, they're all very serious academics, were like, well, they're going to freak out. They're not going to like this because it's just too wide open. Turns out a lot of them did like it. Like nobody really had a problem with it. It took off quite quickly, but partly because we had spent two years trying to get this new Pedia thing off the ground. So we had a group of people who were excited and loved the vision. A free encyclopedia for everybody. Particularly at this time. I would say this was sort of the height of the dot com frenzy and all kinds of crazy stuff were going on and people just thought, yeah, this sounds great, we should have this.
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Ryan Hawk
So you think initially, one of the biggest differences why Wikipedia took off and Nupedia did it, meaning it was a speed thing. Because I'm thinking back to then or to just in general, when you think of ideas, hey, let's have strangers drive you around in cars, obviously, where no one would ever do that. That won't work. And that works, right?
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Let's just have anyone be able to edit, update, write, publish and that.
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Be kind of seen as facts. That will never work. Of course not. And yet here we are, right? So I would just love to hear your mindset. So wait a second, anybody could edit it. Are we sure we want to do this? Why would anyone trust that? We're going to talk a lot about trust that. Why would anyone trust this thing? That anybody can go up and literally write whatever they want?
- [08:19]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, totally. I mean, so certainly in the very beginning, you know, we had this small community, very eager people, and I was like, you know what, let's just put it up, let's just start sketching around, start to write stuff. Clearly we thought obviously we're going to have to have some mechanism. We're going to have to figure out like who's the editor in chief of the chemistry section. Right. You're going to have to have some kind of authority and hierarchies and so on and so forth. And because of the experience of Nupedia, which did have sort of very top down structure, I thought, well, let's just not have too much structure for as long as possible. And if we need to solve a problem by adding in some structure, then we will do that. But for now, let's just get started. Like, we've got a lot of good people, they're trustworthy people. I've known them for a couple years online and they're ready to get stuff done. And it's also fun. I knew from very early on it was really fun. There was a point in time when you could be the first person to create a page. He would just write, maybe Paris is the capital of France. And you hit save and you're like, ah, look at that, that's amazing. It's not much of an encyclopedia article obviously, but it was fun. You know, it's like, oh, like we can just start documenting whatever we know. And so people started just doing all kinds of stuff. And then some people would go dig in and like read a really long article and other people would just go around sort of saying, oh, let's add a short entry for every country in the world, or you know, something like that. And so it was immediately apparent. And part of this was I had been working before this, I had been working on a PhD in Finance and I therefore knew a lot. I'd worked in Chicago in the markets and I had published a paper on option pricing theory. And I thought, oh well, look, Robert Merton had recently won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in option pricing theory. And I thought, oh, well, great. I mean, I can write a Short biography of him. And as soon as I started, it was like this heavy, heavy weight, because I knew they were going to take my first draft and send it to the most prestigious finance professors they could find to give me feedback and notes. And suddenly it was very intimidating. It was very hard. It's like, oh, my God, I feel like I'm back in grad school again, where I've got to turn in this thing and professors are going to critique it, and it's just no fun. Like, grad school is not fun. Like, you do it because you've got this objective at the end, and you may do it because the subject matter is interesting, but that piece of it, right, sort of being judged for your work and all that, not fun. And so instead, you could just write. Robert Merton is an economist. He works at the university. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on option pricing. You write a few facts down and you hit save. And it's not very good yet. But what was cool is that you go back a few days later and you see, oh, somebody. Somebody dug in and they added more information and they added the titles of some of his papers and da, da, da, da. So that element has always been really important. That element of, is it fun? Do you enjoy the activity? Do you meet interesting people? Is it a nice place to be? And that actually turns out to be quite important in this era of really rather unpleasant social media, you know, which I know I have been as much of a Twitter addict as anybody, although I pretty much try to stay off of it for the most part these days. But you spend one afternoon, you've picked some topic in Wikipedia, you found a shorter entry that wasn't very good, and you added a few facts, and you read a couple of articles, and then you're like, okay, well, that was kind of cool. But then you also think, you know what? The world's just ever so slightly better. Like, somebody's going to read. And I'm glad. That's cool.
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Ryan Hawk
When you create this environment, though, with.
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A lot of freedom, independence, trust. Unfortunately, there are bad actors in the world, and even though we lead with trust, which I do, and again, we'll go even deeper on this in a second. And I love giving trust before it's earned, as do you, and as you have done with Wikipedia. But how do you manage the bad actors? How do you manage the people that, for whatever reason, they're cynics and they just don't want to see things work, or they like to enrage, right? Like Twitter the algorithms and how they're created, they incentivize that. Which really bums me out because I feel like it did used to be an amazing place to learn.
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How do you deal with the bad.
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Actors in the world? How do you deal with the ones who don't lead with trust? The ones who don't deserve your trust, even though you're willing to give it before they've earned it?
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Jimmy Wales
What I think you have to do, and this kind of applies in real life, and in fact, one way to even sort of help yourself think about it, is think about how you normally act in real life. As we know, take a thousand people, probably a small handful of them, are going to be really annoying, right? They're just annoying. They're probably not actually bad actors. They're probably not actively malicious. They're just like, oh, my God, this person's really annoying. But that's all right, whatever it takes, all kinds and so forth. But it's really rare to have somebody who's actually malicious actually super problematic, at least in the default assumption. And so the idea of assume good faith, as we call it in Wikipedia, that, as you say, extending trust first as a starter before it's been earned, you don't approach people with a sense of mistrust. It's conditional, right? You extend that. That sort of friendly hand of trust. And if the person proves themselves to be super problematic, then you've got to not be naive. You've got to deal with it. So in Wikipedia's context, it's like, you know, if you come into Wikipedia and you vandalize, hopefully the first thing that happens is you just get a little note on your talk page saying, you know, knock it off. Like, hey, that's not what we do here. If you do it more, you're gonna get blocked. But, you know, why don't you do something better? And that often works really well. I mean, we tell the story in the book of Kaylana, who's a great Wikipedian, who, when she was very young, her first edit of Wikipedia was vandalism. And then somebody was nice to her after she vandalized Wikipedia, and she felt so bad that she realized at some point she needed to sort of make it up and became this great Wikipedian who really has been a driving force in writing about female scientists and getting more people excited about that subject matter. So the assume good faith is actually quite practical, is to say, like, okay, look, probably most people, even somebody who's done something wrong, they're either mistaken or they're young and just having a lark or whatever, they're probably not horrible people. Then eventually, you know, there are people who you just have to block and you just have to say, you know what? You're not here to build an encyclopedia. And it's fine if. If what you want to do is get in massive arguments and yell at people. I don't know if you've heard of Elon Musk. He's got this great website for yelling at people, and it's right over there called X. Just go knock yourself out. It's a great spot. But if you want to write an encyclopedia and if you're feeling better after a few days, you know, come on back and, yeah, let's. Let's get going.
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Ryan Hawk
Maybe a weird question. How active are you on updating, creating new articles, fixing ones that were. Maybe they're a little off? Are you active at all a lot?
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Jimmy Wales
Not zero, but not that much. I probably should do it more. And the main reason I should do it more is because it's too big a deal if I go in and edit something. So too many people are like, oh, my God, what's Jimbo doing? And that's what they call me, Jimbo. I'm like, is he trying to tell us something? Is this a symbolic, you know, what is it? And I was like, no, I'm just. I just saw something I wanted to edit, you know, but yeah, sometimes I do. I used to do it more, but I'm actually very busy right now with the launch of my book coming up, which we've been implicitly talking about. I don't think we've actually mentioned it yet.
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Ryan Hawk
Yes, the seven rules of trust. So let's. Let's get personal and then also talk about how this could work on a grander scale. So I'm going to go through, like, conversations I have had. So I got lucky to meet with Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and Great Great by Choice. He's one of my heroes. One of the things that he wrote about, one of his recent books was about making the trust wager. So you can either kind of show up cynical, forcing people to go through all these hoops in order for you to trust them, or you can just trust them from the start without making them do anything. He argues that it's a more enjoyable, better life to make that trust wager, even though every once in a while you get burned. I try to live that way. Meaning if I meet you for the first time, I trust you. If I hire you, if I'm working With you, if even with my keynote speaking business or all that, I send invoices after I'm done, expenses, everything's afterwards. I don't make people pay in advance. I trust you, right? We don't have a contract, but we just made an agreement that I'm going to come work for you for a little bit and you're going to pay me. And I've never been burned, honestly, never been burned. And when I bring that up to some people, some who may be a little bit more cynical, they say, oh, just wait, you'll change. Maybe you get a little bit older, maybe you have a little bit more life repetitions, you'll turn on that. You will change your mind once you've lived enough life. And I'm like, I think I've lived enough life. You know, I'm over 40 years old, I've lived enough life. And I don't want that to be true. I don't think that it's true.
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I don't feel like when I read.
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The Seven Rules of Trust, I don't think you think that's true. So what do you think? What do you say to those cynics who look at me like I'm some little kid? Because I think it's good to lead with trust or good to let them pay afterwards? Because I trust that they'll do it even though we don't have a contract. It's just their word. What do you say to them?
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Jimmy Wales
There's a couple of things to say. So first of all, I think most of those people, when they go to a steakhouse and they sit right next to complete strangers who got deadly weapons in their hands, aggressively sawing on some meat, they trust that those people aren't going to stab them. Right? We do trust people every day. Every time you get in a car and you're driving down the street, you've got a huge amount of trust in all the people around you driving their cars. And that they, for whatever reason, self interest, but also just being decent human beings, they aren't going to crash into you. Now, obviously, crashes happen, obviously bad drivers happen. But broadly, if we think about it as that wager, right, the odds are good, the odds are in your favor. I think there's a deeper point, and that's one of the rules that we come up with in the book Seven Rules of Trust is to get trust, give trust. And actually, one of the things about giving trust, if you say to someone, I trust you, just that act of saying, I trust you, you don't Always have to say it out loud. It's kind of obvious in most cases. But in those cases where you say, you know what? I trust you, that actually creates a mood in that person. It creates a willingness to trust back and to live up to that trust, you kind of break that expectation, that cynicism. Most people are like, great, you trust me, you know, so employees you mentioned, right. If you've got a new employee, that is a good time to sit down and say, okay, first day on the job. And let me tell you what kind of manager I am. I'm not going to be on your back all the time. I'm not going to be micromanaging every single thing you do because I trust you. I trust you're going to give it your best. I trust you're going to make judgment calls. You know what? You're new. You're going to make some errors, but I'm going to trust that you're going to do it as best you can. Make an error. That's all right. You know what? You're learning, and I'll be okay with that. And you violate my trust. Right. Then we're going to have a different story. But that's where we're going to start from, is you're going to have autonomy. You're going to be treated as a proper human being, and I trust you're going to do a great job for me. I mean, most people would die to have a boss like that. Like, that's fantastic. Right?
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Ryan Hawk
Does that sound so basic, though?
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Like, that sounds like.
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Obviously that's what we should do. It's obvious. You know what I mean?
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Jimmy Wales
Yeah. Go sort of randomly looking through Reddit, right. And you'll see a lot of people talking about the company they work for or the boss they work for. And they've got a really negative attitude. And I think in some cases they need to work on their own attitude, but in other cases, they've got that attitude because they've got a boss who's basically a jerk. They're putting spyware on my computer because they don't trust me to work from home without spying on all my clicks. I mean, that's just a ridiculous practice. And in the short run, yeah, you probably. People sit up straight and they get the job done a little bit better in the long run. The minute they log out, at the end of the day, they're logging to a personal computer and they're looking for a job because they're like, these people aren't treating me like a proper person. So this isn't okay. So to get back to your question, like, it's a good bet. Most people are basically decent, but it also creates that environment where trustworthy behavior is rewarded and people love that. Wouldn't it be fantastic? If you feel like in any position I've got to go off and do this other thing. My people are so good, they're going to just crack on with the work. They're going to make judgment calls. Sometimes they'll make a call. I would have made it differently. That's okay. They're smart. Sometimes they're going to get better than I did. Brilliant. That's exactly what you want in any kind of organization. And to build that kind of culture rather than a low trust culture, I think it's really a recipe for success.
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Ryan Hawk
It sounds so basic, but it takes me back to a moment earlier in my career. I was VP of sales at a big company. Jimmy. And the boss that hired me got fired and they brought in somebody else. He was there for a few months at this time. And one of my. I had an open position in one of my management roles. So I was both looking for a new manager as well as that person had open positions like as sales reps. And so I was doing both. I was acting manager to hire sales reps and looking for a manager. And I made an offer as VP of sales, you know, running a 500 million plus revenue organization. I made an offer to a rep who didn't have as much experience as we would normally like, but was brilliant, had all of the athlete work ethics, super smart, had it all, like checked every box except for the experience one. I offered him in writing. HR signed off the whole deal. He came back to me and looked at it and said, he doesn't have enough experience. You can't offer that guy. I might go, what are you talking about? I go, well, I already did, so we're past that point. And then he goes, no, he didn't have enough experience. You can't offer my go hype. Did you talk to him? Did you see him? Did you? And he goes, no, I don't need to. He didn't have no experience. And I said, you have to trust me. I'm telling you, this is a good hire. I believe in it with every ounce of my being. And he goes, I'll never ever forget this moment, Jimmy. He goes, you haven't earned my trust. Renege on the offer. I go, I can't renege on the offer. I gave him my word. It's in writing anyway. Long story short, that moment when somebody looks you dead in the eye and says, you haven't earned my trust. I knew at that time, that very day I went home and talked to my wife. I'm not going to be in this job for long. And I voluntarily left pretty much as soon as I could because of that exact moment. That's. That's the destruction. It can have to be a cynical. Not. I mean, it's getting me fired up just thinking about it. You could probably tell just the moment of being a. Doing the opposite of what you just said, it makes to me absolutely no sense.
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Jimmy Wales
Absolutely, absolutely. And we, you know, we generally understand it in some context, but somehow forget it in other contexts. I think part of it is, let's say, in the context of social media, toxic social media, the whole culture is so degraded there that, you know, you probably are right to assume anybody that's sort of pops up and yells at you, you probably can't have a conversation with them because whatever, it's just a bad environment. But outside of those kinds of edge cases, usually, basically, people are pretty decent. I also think there's an element of this that is also relevant in parenting because we all know of people who have bad parents or had bad parents who didn't trust them. I think everybody's heard a teenager say, well, it doesn't matter what I do, they're going to think the worst anyway, so I might as well do the bad thing. And it's just like, wow, that's really unfortunate. As opposed to, again, sort of almost like that first day employee who's a young person just starting. But to say to your teenager, like, yeah, all right, you know, you want to go out, you're going to go out and stay a little bit later than before. Yeah, I want you to do that, and I trust you, but you got to do it the right way. Show me that I can trust you. And then if, you know, whatever, they go out and they say, well, yeah, I'm telling a story from when I was a teen, actually said to my parents, my friends are going to go and see this movie. And it doesn't get out till 10:30, and I know my curfew is 10, but can I stay out? They're like, yeah, yeah, you know, just come home. And believe me, I came home right on sharp. Because I'm like, this is my chance, right, to actually nail this and stay out till 10:30, and it's not going to be a big deal next time. Brilliant. And then other kids are just like, yeah, well, my parents love 10 o' clock curfew, you know, F them. And they're like, I'm going to stay out to midnight and see what they can do about it. Well, they could do a lot about it, right? And they don't trust you then. And so that kind of thing of like any family situation, probably their parents didn't say, I trust you. The parents was probably like on their case the whole time. Anytime you can just go, you know what? I want you to live up to it. I think you can do it. I trust you. You're going to do the right thing, make me proud.
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Ryan Hawk
You're a dad of three daughters, correct?
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Jimmy Wales
That's right, yeah.
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Ryan Hawk
So I'm with you as also a dad of daughters, that I lead with trust. I openly use that exact phrase, I lead with trust. I trust you. I trust you. Now, all of them have different personalities and different ways that they push the limits, Right? I'm sure the same with your three. Like, just because they're related to you doesn't mean they're going to be all the same. In fact, they're like the opposite in some cases. So how do you handle it when you lead with trust? You give trust and they break it and they do something to go against it. This is, to me, I think, one of the hardest parts of being a dad is you lead with it, you give it and then it's broken. It's really, really tough. How do you manage that?
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Jimmy Wales
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things to look at actually in that question is one, how do you manage it as the parent? But also, what advice would I give to a teenager in that situation? How do they manage it? They've done the thing, they broke the trust. Right. Presumably there's going to be consequences for that. How should they think about rebuilding the trust? Right. Most of it's really basic stuff. I think as a parent, hopefully you've sort of outlined a reasonable set of parameters. And so you're not saying, you know what, you're 16 years old, your curfew is 5pm and you can't call your friends. No. You create a draconian household, then clearly you're going to have a lot of problems, but you've got reasonable rules and reasonable privileges and there will be levers to pull and things like that, and to say, you know what? Next time the answer's gonna be no, you violated my trust. You went out with your friends, you came home drunk. Right. And so there's gonna be a period of time when you tell me you're gonna go out with your friends, and I'm like, I don't want you coming home drunk, maybe I'm just not gonna let you go. Like, maybe that's just not okay. You've disappointed me. That's actually the most terrifying and powerful word that a dad can say is, I'm disappointed here. I trusted you and you didn't live up to it. And that's. None of this is one off stuff, right? This, this has to do with building a cult. Family life, that's healthy. That's a lot of different pieces. I've got advice for everybody on it, but I'm not an expert like any other dad. I'm just trying to get through life like everybody, trying to have a good family. And then for the teen, I think one of the things to tie this back to the book we've got on this great side conversation about relationships and parenting, but, like, Francis Fry is a Harvard professor who had a huge job at Uber for a while when they had an enormous crisis of trust. Nobody trusted them. The drivers didn't trust them. Customers were losing trust. Regulators definitely didn't have trust. And one of the things she says is that people say, like, it's a common kind of saying, is once you've broken trust, that's it. You can never get it back. And that sounds plausible to us, right? Yeah. But no, is it really true? No, it's actually not true. She thinks companies can rebuild trust faster than you think in relationships. Obviously, it depends on the context. You know, if there's been infidelity in a marriage, maybe getting back to trust is really hard and impossible. I don't know. Like, every situation is different, but in many, many cases, and I think with a teenager who's broken a rule, done something they shouldn't have done, they can rebuild trust pretty quickly. And our job is to let them rebuild that trust. And so if they, like, are genuinely say, you know what? I screwed this up. Here's why, here's what happened, here's what I'm going to do differently next time. And then at the end of the book, we've got the sort of secret eighth rule, which is, we call it the meta rule, but the A rule is basically and really do it right. The rules of trust aren't just a lot of good words. You actually have to walk the walk. And so if you say, you know what, I screwed up, you own that. We screwed up. We didn't do it right. Here's the things we're changing Right. If it's just a bullshit press announcement and you go back to being the same as you were before, you've not actually, you're not going to rebuild trust. But if you walk the walk, people will see that and they'll be like, you know what? They really screwed that up. But they saw that it was a bad move and they changed a lot in the company, sometimes change the CEO, whatever you have to do, you know, and that's okay. Then everything is fine. So in the Airbnb example, we just talked about this sort of incident where really early in the history of Airbnb, they had someone rented out their apartment and they came home and it was absolutely trashed. And Airbnb handled it very badly. They sort of got bad advice. They were stonewalling, didn't quite answer. This is old fashioned PR advice. Used to be, it's going to blow over. Don't say anything. You'll make the story bigger. In this era, that's often the wrong advice. Not saying anything just means it goes viral and everybody goes crazy because you've done this thing and you're not explaining yourself. So they just, they just are like, that's it. We're going to, you know, we're going to rip off the band aid. They said, look, we screwed this up. And they did a lot, they did a lot of real things. They started requiring ID from the people who are renting their apartments out. Seems obvious now. Somebody should know who this person is. You're not an anonymous person who comes and stays in my house. I need to trust you. One way I can trust you is the indemnity, the insurance basically, for the owners. So that, yeah, if somebody comes in and completely trashes your house, there's a substantial insurance policy to sort you out. Okay, that's important because if it's on me, I'm definitely not letting anybody rent my house. That's crazy. So it's that kind of stuff and they walk the walk. Obviously, Airbnb is massively successful and like any big company, I'm sure somebody out there is going to be down in the comments saying, wow, but they did this terrible thing, or whatever mistakes they've made. But broadly, that story is super valid, that you can rebuild trust, but you've got to really do the things.
- [31:56]
Ryan Hawk
I feel like it's. We can appreciate people who take ownership, especially when something goes wrong or when they've made a mistake. It's a big deal for leaders too, because. So this is a show about leaders and leadership and all of us are humans and all of us are going to make mistakes. I think the key learning here is how are you going to choose to respond when you do. Now, hopefully you're not lying intentionally, but maybe even if you do or you do something else that breaks trust, how are you going to choose to respond is a big deal. I don't expect perfection. I want to give people second chance. I do. And you know, we want them too when we unfortunately mess up now. I think that's what it's all about from a leadership perspective is transparency, which you write about in the book. That's rule number seven and making sure that you're not leaving people in the dark. Sports is my background, my kids play sports. And when I think about the biggest difference between the coaches they've played for and I've played for that have done really well that I think the girls respond well to, that's one of the biggest one is rule number seven is the ones that are super secretive and are really poor communicators and don't let anyone know what's happening until like the second before the game starting. Everyone just up in arms, what's happening? We don't know, I don't know. And the results end up being worse versus the coaches who are over communicators and always let everyone know where they stand and what's happening and what's the plan. Again, this seems so basic as I'm saying it out loud, by the way. Jimmy.
- [33:32]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that doesn't seem.
- [33:34]
Ryan Hawk
That hard to be transparent and to lay it all out there and to be a good communicator. Can you talk to me more about that rule number seven and being transparent and how that builds. I mean you talk about Harry Truman and Eisenhower and, and how that goes in the book, but why is transparency.
- [33:49]
Jimmy Wales
So important if people can, can see your workings, you know, they can see what you, what you're doing and how it works and all of that, it just gives them an assurance in the process. I mean one of the things in the world of software is that open source software is incredibly transparent. Like you can download the source code and you can go through it line by line. And even if you don't download it and go through it line by line, which by the way, most people don't because they don't know how or like who's got the time. But the fact that it is there, you know, that other programmers can go through it, like if there's a problem, you can figure it out. And by and large that has given rise to quite a lot of trust. I mean, the whole Internet's sort of based fundamentally on open source software. And so that's really, really powerful technique in that field and obviously in many, many others. It's a really interesting thing because in some companies, in some situations, confidential information is also very important. So, you know, transparency doesn't mean you're being suspicious and untrustworthy if you don't tell us absolutely every single thing about every single thing, because that's not necessary and it's not right. So it's about judgment calls. What can we share? What would be helpful for us to share so that people can trust the whole process and all of that. That's huge. So, for example, like, let's say you've got a hiring process and you've got a certain set of criteria you're going to go by and blah, blah, blah, all this. Well, if you are using that process, you can't obviously sort of on the internal company network, share the private notes and evaluations of every single candidate. That just wouldn't be appropriate. Somebody writes, you know what? Actually, bad attitude, whatever. Like, you don't need to share all that. What do you need to share? You need to share that process. You need to say, well, here's the way we're making the decisions, here are the things we're looking at. And then people can go, okay, I get it. Because otherwise it's just like, I don't know, they're hiring someone new, and then bam, somebody new's here. I don't know how they got here. I don't know what choices were made. Let's pull back in your story. Had that hire worked and not blowing everything up, you might have gone out to everybody and said, you know what? This guy's fantastic. And guess what? He has less experience than who we thought we were going to get. But we thought these sort of attributes overcomes that. And then people, they're like, okay, great, I understand that. Otherwise, if you were secretive, you're like, oh, it's a little embarrassing that he's not that experienced. So let's not talk about his experience. Let's actually cover up that he's not that experienced. Then people are going to go, who's this guy? He has no experience. You know, so it's like that kind of thing. And again, all of this is pretty obvious, right? It's really a lot of. It's what I would call like kindergarten ethics. One of the chapters is, your mother was right. The stuff you learned as a little Kid about common decency and building trust. It's actually really important. It's actually. It's correct.
- [36:51]
Ryan Hawk
Let's go to maybe a leader of a company. And I'm going to go to rule number three. I believe a strong, clear, positive purpose is essential for people to work together and make something wonderful. Again, these sound obvious, and yet there's still a giant need for a book like this because they don't happen. We know these things, but then why don't we execute on them? Why don't we do them? Why is it still so hard for people to execute on these things that seem fundamental?
- [37:29]
Jimmy Wales
That's part of the motivation for the book, is to put this back in conversation, to sort of have that open conversation to go, you know what? Look, it's very easy when we look at the state of the world to be just downtrodden, cynical, don't trust anybody. There's so many bad actors out there. There's so much suspicion and hostility that the idea of giving somebody the benefit of the doubt, right, which we all think is probably the right answer in almost all cases, can get forgotten. And if we forget that, we end up in a really a dark place. If you think people on the other side from you politically, or people at your workplace or whatever it might be, if you think they're fundamentally just rotten people, then you're going to have a hard time listening to them. You're going to have a hard time understanding where they're coming from. You're going to have a hard time just dealing with them in a successful manner, even for your own selfish reasons, Right? You're not going to do the right things that make sense to people. That's a shame. And it hurts us all in society, right? How do we build a more prosperous society? How do we have successful entrepreneurs, successful businesses, successful people in jobs instead of angry unemployed people and industries failing and all of these kinds of things, if we can't sort of fundamentally come together and go, right, you know what? We're all in this together here on this little planet, and we've got to get on with it. And we better build a culture and a system that is about that, getting things done in a positive way, where we're lost.
- [39:06]
Ryan Hawk
So let's get practical for a second. Let's pick an actual person, an avatar. Let's say this is a person who has been cheated on in a personal relationship and has had a boss who did not trust them and they didn't trust them. And let's say they had a friendship blow up because a friend lied to them, right? So I'm. This is a rough combo here, right? But real life, it's real life, right? In real life, it happens, yeah, this, this happens. That person, they look at this, they see the title of this episode is Something to do with Trust and they say, I'm good. That's not how the world works for me. Maybe for Jimmy, not for me, but maybe they listen or maybe they, they give it a. Just a shot, right? What advice do you give to them? This person is down and out a bit like. Or at least they're non trusting because of life, in a way is beat them up a bit. What practical advice do you give to that person to try to turn it around?
- [40:05]
Jimmy Wales
You know, a big part of it is so first of all reminding people, you know, like, you get into an elevator and nobody punches you, nothing bad happens. People are basically decent. You think about all the different things that people could do that's bad that they don't do, and they don't do it because they're basically decent people. But those are just ideas to sort of remind you, like, hold on a second, maybe there's better people out there. The other thing is, for some people, it's really hard to recover from these things. So if you've had a really bad work experience or a relationship experience, it's tough, right? And it's kind of hard to not draw the lesson of like, people suck. And yet a lot of it's just like, okay, right, change the conversation, change the situation, right? If you work somewhere where your boss doesn't trust you and your co workers are all backstabbing freaks and whatever it might be, it's time to change the channel. Just every night you should be trying to find a better position, find a better job. And actually your number one criteria in looking for that next position is going to be finding somebody who you think is a proper person to be your manager. Think of it as you're interviewing the company just as much as they're interviewing you. You really want to do that. The same with your friends, you know, if your friends suck, find some new friends, right? Now I know that it's easy to say that in a very glib way, right? That's not really for everybody, the most immediately helpful advice, but bedrock truth, that's what you're going to have to do, right? And how do you get there is like to say like, you can be in a position in life where you're like, I actually, I'm ambitious in my career, I'd like to move up the ranks. I'd like to make more money. I want to have a house and a family and all that. And there's all these obstacles in my way and my dumbass friends just want to party every night and it's really hard to break away from that. Well, you know what? Get some different friends if you have to. And actually, frankly, what can often happen, this is along that give trust to get trust, right? You may be in a circle of friends who all are thinking the exact same things. They may be all thinking, you know what? This lifestyle isn't good. Like we're going out too much partying, you know, we got too many cynical people actually, let's try and change it. And how do you do that? That's going to depend on the circumstances.
- [42:32]
Ryan Hawk
But a couple things here. I love that when you become known as a person who gives trust before it's earned, you seem to magically attract trustworthy people. It's kind of cool how it works, right? If you're trust willing, will you get burned every once in a while? Maybe. But you seem to attract the type of people that you want to be around. And one of the things I found, Jimmy, if maybe someone's down or you went through a rough stretch, I think it's from rule number two. We as humans, we are born to connect and collaborate with others. I'd say get out there in the world, rub shoulders and be curious. I found curiosity is the ultimate love language. Asking people questions and being genuinely curious about their stories and learning about them and asking follow up questions and listening, I found, is a great way to just show love and to connect with people. And when you find yourself in the midst of a curiosity conversation where everyone's kind of asking and learning and they're head nodding and they're into it and they give you good body language, I don't know if there's anything better, man. That's, that's human nature connecting. And that's rule number two. And the seven rules of trust that I'd love to hear hear a little bit more about how this is in our nature to connect and collaborate with others.
- [43:56]
Jimmy Wales
It's quite easy and quite natural for people to, to fit into whatever culture is around them. And so, you know, we talk about horrible cases of lynch mobs, right, where people kind of go along with the mob because it's going in a certain way. And, and they collaborate to do something terrible together. And so it's not automatically a good thing, but it's also an incredibly positive Thing when it's put to the right purpose and you've got the right vibe and the right people and all of those things. So we naturally like to work together to build something good. And that can be almost anything, Right? It can be in a social context. You know, even I wanted to make clear I do like a party, right? When I was saying, talking about an example of friends who party too much, right? I do like a party. And what is that like? It's like, okay, we're all going to get together and we're going to have a great time, and so what are we going to do, right? We're going to have a couple of beers, we're going to joke, we're going to laugh, we're going to have some music, right? We're going to maybe have dinner and we'll have some conversation. We collaborate to build that experience together. None of us could do it on our own because let me tell you, a party with only yourself is not a party, you know? And, you know, we all get that. And, like, you can just say, okay, yeah, as humans, we're social and we like to be social.
- [45:14]
Ryan Hawk
Yeah. One more, Jimmy, before we run, man. Let's say you're meeting someone a bit earlier in their career, maybe a college graduation, and they want to leave a.
- [45:24]
Positive dent in the world like you.
- [45:27]
Have done and are currently doing. What are some general pieces of life, slash career advice you'd give to that person?
- [45:36]
Jimmy Wales
Yeah. You know, one of the things that I think is really important, and it's such a cliche, right, that you're almost embarrassed to say it out loud, but it's do what you love, do something that you really care about. And, you know, oftentimes for young people, there is this struggle between, here's the thing that I really want to be doing, and here's the thing that's going to make me some money. And both of those are legitimate goals, right? There's nothing wrong with saying, I want to do the thing I love, and I want to live a prosperous life. And I want, you know, and so my answer is like, okay, first of all, work really hard to find a way to put those together. Look really hard for a way to have. Do what you love. Be make some money. If it's about make some money, it's like, some money for what purpose? So maybe what you need to do is go do that thing. You know, you're going to make some decent money, but you're going to have a. Like an early retirement goal. I always wanted to Be, I'm going to make this up. Somebody says, actually what. What would really make me happy in life is I want to be a first grade teacher. But I've also got this sort of opportunity to go and be a banker at a top bank and I can make a lot of money. Okay, right. And you think the banking thing will be fun? Nope, nope. I'm going to hate every minute. Okay, so either go be a teacher. Like, don't worry about it. Like, money's not everything. Go have a great life, go be a first grade teacher. Or you kind of combine the two and you say, actually, I'm going to go off and do this banker thing. This is what my salary is going to be the first few years. I'm going to set a really clear goal and I'm going to be careful about lifestyle, inflation, all of this. And at some point I'm going to say, thank you very much, bank, I got some kids waiting on me. Do that. You can do that. It's an amazing thing. Realistically, I think when you're young and you've got many different opportunities in life, really think about that passion piece. Because here's kind of the worst example. You go to work at a company, you're a top salesperson at the company and management level, and you get a new boss and he doesn't trust you and he won't let you hire the great salesperson you just met. And if you said, yeah, but you know what, I'm making a lot of money here and I don't want to give that up. I'm going to suck it up. I'm going to hate every second of it. You know what? Nah, forget that. Like, you're not going to be happy. And by the way, you're not going to be as successful. Right. Chances are you're not actually going to make as much money doing that as you would if you went off and did something that you're really, really passionate about now. Maybe first grade teacher, isn't it? Right. But if we're talking about young people, it could be all kinds of things. I really want to run a restaurant. Okay, Run a restaurant. You might own a chain of restaurants, right? And it's going to be a hard slog those first three years. It's really hard to make money as a restaurateur, but you might be able to do it and so give it a go.
- [48:27]
Ryan Hawk
I think the passion part is really big because one of my friends, Brooke cup, says the way he defines passion is choosing extra work. If you don't really like the thing. You're not going to choose extra work, but when you do, you choose extra work all the time. What I get to do now is writing and speaking and talking with smart people like you and being able to chase my curiosity. I want to choose extra work literally every day because it's so cool, it's so fun. It's awesome. I know sometimes people do have to have a job and to provide and they may not love it. I get that. I'm a realist too. But trying to find something where you can have a love in the work, that's how you get excellent at it versus this is a job that isn't cool with a non trusting boss. I just don't think you can do that for long periods of time. You can do it for a little bit. Anybody can do anything for a little bit of time and I think that's the focus that you think about. Jimmy man, I really appreciate this. The book the Seven Rules of Trust. A blueprint for building things that last. I really appreciate you being here man. I encourage everybody to read and I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress.
- [49:39]
Jimmy Wales
Man. Perfect.
- [49:44]
Ryan Hawk
It is the end of the Podcast club. Thank you you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note. Ryan learningleader.com Let me know what you learn from this great conversation with Jimmy Wales. A few takeaways from my notes. If you're trying to start something new, don't have too much structure. Get started and iterate as you go. With Wikipedia, they focused on movement, on getting after it and then figuring it out as they went. They valued speed and they led with trust. That led to a lot of their early and continued success. Get started, get moving. Iterate as you go then to get trust. Give trust, make the trust, wager, lead with trust. You do not have to earn my trust. You have it. Use these exact words with people you work with. I trust you and then follow through. Your actions need to match your words. You do not have to earn my trust. You got it. And I found that living this way seems to attract the type of people.
- [50:55]
That I want to be around.
- [50:57]
And then if you screw up, which.
- [50:58]
We all do, own it.
- [51:00]
Apologize, admit it, address the issue, and be transparent. Say what you did and what you plan to do to make things better. People are forgiving.
- [51:10]
We want to forgive you, but only.
- [51:12]
If you take ownership. Admit the mess up and then make a commitment to fix it. That is how you rebuild trust.
- [51:19]
After it's been broken.
- [51:21]
Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message, trusting me by telling a friend or two hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leaders show with Jimmy Wales.
- [51:32]
I think it will help you become.
- [51:34]
A more effective leader because you continue to do that and you also go to Apple podcast and Spotify and you subscribe to the show, rate it hopefully five stars, and you write a thoughtful review. By doing all of that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis, and for that I will forever be grateful.
- [51:53]
Thank you so, so much.
- [51:55]
Talk to you soon.
- [51:55]
Can't wait. It.