1251: Jimmy Wales | Building Trust the Wikipedia Way

1251: Jimmy Wales | Building Trust the Wikipedia Way

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes to authors thinkers, to performers, even the occasional drug trafficker, former jihadi, economic hitman, or national security advisor.

If you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on this show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking to the man who helped build the only corner of the internet that somehow still works. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of [00:01:00] Wikipedia, patron Saint of, actually, lemme check on that and proof that trusting strangers on the internet can create something other than a raging dumpster fire.

Wikipedia is one of the last places online where the wisdom of crowds consistently beats the stupidity of mobs. It's a site you can edit in your pajamas at three o'clock in the morning. Yet somehow it's more accurate than newsrooms with multimillion dollar budgets. It's the place where passionate volunteers, many of whom could give Harvard professors a run for their money in bridge engineering or ancient Sumerian pottery, collectively create encyclopedia.

Bigger than anything the Britannica editors could have pulled off, even with a warehouse of Red Bull and a pile of graduate students. Today, Jimmy and I dive into how this whole thing even works, how it hasn't collapsed under the weight of trolls, vandals, propagandists, and corporations with Scrooge McDuck level budgets, and why trust in institutions in each other and in information itself.

Is in free fall. We discussed the crisis of parallel realities. Why collaboration can raise humanity or imprison it. Why transparency beats taking sides, and how assume good faith is not just a [00:02:00] Wikipedia rule, it's a life skill that we've basically forgotten all this and a whole lot more here today on the show.

Now here we go with Jimmy Wales Whale. I'm gonna start with the usual pedestrian question I think everybody wants to know, which is how did Wikipedia come about? What was the original idea and why?

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, so I've been watching the growth of uh, free software, open source softwares, most people call it. And I saw programmers coming together to collaborate in new ways, you know, sharing their code and so forth using free licensing.

And I thought, ah, well that's interesting. That kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software to all kinds of cultural works. And then I had the idea for an encyclopedia, got very excited and started new pedia, the predecessor. And plugged away that for two years, that was not successful for reasons we can get into.

But basically it wasn't very fun for the users. Then pivoted, we didn't say pivot back then. Right now that's a big Silicon Valley word. That's right. But pivoted to the Wiki approach and uh, you know, suddenly we had more work done in [00:03:00] about two weeks than we had almost two years. Wow. So that was

Jordan Harbinger: like, okay, wow.

Yeah, this might work. This whole farming thing out to other people thing. This idea has legs. Yeah, that's, it's funny how many articles are on Wikipedia now?

Jimmy Wales: Tens of millions. Really? I shouldn't know the number. I just had it on a slide the other day. I wanna say 60, 70, 80 million. Wow. That's across. 300 plus languages.

Right. Okay. So not all in English. Sure. In fact, less than 10% of it's in English, which is kind of amazing. Amazing to people. Uh, I mean, you don't notice that because you're probably not clicking on occasionally Thai, Wikipedia or Swahili occasionally

Jordan Harbinger: German Wikipedia. Oh, yeah. Because it'll be be like on Germany, but not in the United States one.

Especially if it's a Europe based article. It's like, oh, this small village in the former Eastern B block, there's a German entry, but there's not an English entry. That's right. Yeah, yeah,

Jimmy Wales: yeah. No, that does happen sometimes. It's actually kind of interesting how, you know, when we think about translating between languages, most people assume.

Yeah, people like English ommunity is huge. They're probably translating it into their own language, but no, actually translating the other way is also a big thing.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think if you are a German guy who is from the [00:04:00] Eastern B block and you move, you still live in Germany, maybe it's important to you to write about your family's old village in what is now Poland.

But if you move to the United States a hundred years ago and now your, your great grandkids wanna read about that. Whose hobby is really going back that, I mean, certainly some people on Wikipedia, but I was looking at my own family and it was all, I'd be surprised. Yeah. Just kind of in German because Oh yeah.

It was so niche that Right. Yeah. Only the Germans who had moved back to Germany from what is now Poland, apparently cared enough to maintain that entry. That's great.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. You know, there was a big famous edit war in English, Wikipedia, and a big, huge, enormous discussion because the names of most rivers in Poland are known in English by their German names.

The poles don't like because there're rivers in Poland and they're like, it's got a Polish name and there's a lot of, there are

Jordan Harbinger: historical reasons we might not wanna use German words for polish things as well.

Jimmy Wales: Exactly. So it was a huge, uh, huge discussion and, and sort of figuring out compromise. But

Jordan Harbinger: yeah, I didn't realize that.

Can you, do you have an example? 'cause I'm trying to name a single river in Poland and [00:05:00] obviously I can't do it. I'm,

Jimmy Wales: I'm pulling a complete blank.

Jordan Harbinger: Does the Danube go through Poland? I don't know. This is American geography. People I apologies, but I, I don't think we're surprising anybody by not being able to do this.

Um, one of the reasons I love Wikipedia actually, is it, this is gonna sound a little hoity-toity, I suppose. It, it. Restores some of my faith in humanity. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It, yeah, because it's kinda like the highest ideals we aspire to. Like let's cooperate, let's all build something together that everyone can use.

We'll make it free or free ish, almost free. Operate at cost, whatever it is. And it's like, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, let's all do this. It's like kind what? The internet wants to be everywhere or originally wanted to be aside from a defense project, but but after sort of, after it was darpa, right?

It was like, let's all share knowledge and it's, let's just be, let's information wants to be free. And it's all these sort of free-spirited hacker types from the nineties. And Wikipedia still is that, but like Google's not that.

Jimmy Wales: It is interesting because in the early dates of the project, so when I started Newp [00:06:00] pedia and then Wikipedia a couple years later.

That was the era when it was the.com boom. And there was a scourge for a little while of popup ads. Like every website you went to had a popup. A mostly those are blocked by brows. Oh yeah. Punch the monkey. Punch the monkey. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: that's right.

Jimmy Wales: And uh, I, I mean, one of my thoughts was like, you know what, most people when you first saw the internet, they're like, ah, this is amazing.

We can share knowledge around the world. I'm like, I bet. People would like sharing knowledge around the world. Let's try that. Yeah. You know, like it seems to be what this technology's for. So let's do that first. And uh, people loved it. So

Jordan Harbinger: I remember using Gopher as a kid, which is a base, I think it was a way to sort of surf libraries.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. It was just, just before the worldwide web. It was a way of like digging through menus on different Yeah. Mostly it was libraries and stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: I still, you know, up to a few years ago, probably could have done the whole thing 'cause it's all keyboard navigated. Right. So you, I could like sort of, it was like, gee, then this, then log, then this, this, this, this, this, this, this.

I'm at IRC chatting with people Yeah. From other countries, which was hither to Impossible. Oh yeah. And was like the, [00:07:00] this feeling that you really don't get from many things nowadays where you're like, I've unlocked a secret portal to the entire world. And you show your friends and they're like, let me get this straight.

This person is in another country. Talking to you using the keyboard and you're like, yeah, mom. And they're like, wait, how though? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're like, I don't know, satellites or something. And, and they're like, how much is this costing me? Nothing? And they're like, I don't even believe you.

Right. Yeah.

Jimmy Wales: You know? Yeah. No, I, I remember the first, you know, I got an email from someone in Australia and I was like, I wonder what that cost the university. 'cause I was, I was at university, I'm like, does a computer there like dial long distance to here? I mean, I didn't know anything about how it worked.

And then I started to learn. 'cause I'm like, oh, this is fascinating.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, remember getting excited. You'd hear you've got mail and you're like, oh, who could this be? Yeah. Right. I mean, this is great. This is exciting. Hold on honey. I'll be right there. I'll be down in a minute. I got email. I gotta check it.

Jimmy Wales: Gotta check it. Yeah. Yeah. Those

Jordan Harbinger: are the

Jimmy Wales: days, man. It's a Nigerian prince. He says There's some money for me. Yeah. You're never gonna believe this.

Jordan Harbinger: We're rich. Our problems are over. Um, it is funny to [00:08:00] hear you explain Wikipedia. I watched in preparation for this, I watched a bunch of your interviews and you, you've been on your book tour.

You went to the uk, there was a journalist on, I think it was the Sunday Times, maybe. It was like, but there's no editorial control. And you're like, well there is, but they're volunteers. And he is like, wow, no one's getting paid to write. And you're like, no, they're volunteers, but nobody checks anything. It could be errors everywhere.

And you're like, no, they, they actually check like everything. And they argue about everything. Everything excessively. If anything, they're maybe checking a little bit too much sometimes. And he is like, but they're not experts at all. Well, many of them are bridge experts and they're writing articles about bridges.

And he's like, but no one's making any money on this. Like, he's so confused. And you could just see his career sort of flash before his eyes where he is like, how long do I have before retirement? Because if people are working for free and the quality is decent and they're doing it all over from all over the world, like my days are numbered here.

Oh, that's funny.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. Well, except, I mean, you know, it's interesting 'cause one, one of the things I always say, uh, is nobody really works for free. It's gotta be fun. [00:09:00] You gotta have some reward from doing it, which is just like meeting other geeks who are into what you're into. Mm-hmm. Or just the process is, is just enjoyable to you and so forth.

And it's really something. I mean, you know how you, you stumble across a page. And you're reading it and you're like, who wrote this? Yeah, this is amazing. Like what, how did somebody know all this? And, and why did they bother? Like they're amazing people and you just wanna go like, can I get you a candy bar or something?

Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: You know, if anybody wants to sort of see how this works, you can go to the talk page. I do this when I prep guests, especially guests that don't have a lot of information about them. I go to Wikipedia, read the entry, but then you go to the talk page, which is where like for people who don't know, this is where editors who are helping keep, maintain the page they go back and forth on, do we include the fact that his daughter.

Is a famous person. Well, yes, but like minimally. Yeah. Oh, and then you're like, oh, that, who is that? Oh, I better look that person up. And then it's like, what about the crime that he got accused? No, he was acquitted. This is just gonna be a distraction. Let's keep it out of there. And you're like, oh, he was accused of a crime.

I better use that.

Jimmy Wales: [00:10:00] Yeah, no, it's actually interesting because I say this to journalists a lot. I'm like, actually, go to Wikipedia. Get yourself oriented, but go to the talk page because there, what you often will find is. This source says this, but that source says that and like, we can't figure it out. Yeah.

It's like, well, there's your question right there, right? This is something the world is interested in, but the existing journalism hasn't really fleshed it out. So, you know, that's probably an interesting thing to ask.

Jordan Harbinger: One thing I've noticed that's kind of funny is I'll look for a question and I'll go, oh, they're gonna, these editors are gonna be so excited that this person clarified this thing that they've been talking back and forth.

Yeah. And then I'll get them on record as the guest, for example, saying, oh no, actually it was my brother, uh, who was accused of this crime. And then someone will add that, and then someone will revert that and go, he's not a source. And it's like, but he's the person. And it's like, well. Who, who's checking that?

He's not lying about that. And you're just like, okay. Yeah, I was talking, I had Yuval Noah Harari on the show. Oh yeah. We were laughing. We're talking about Wikipedia and it's like, we can listen to Yuval Noah Harra be like, this is the origin of why we [00:11:00] evolve the ability to, I don't know, speak language.

And people are like, wow, that guy's really smart. And then he'll try to put in his own Wikipedia entry, like, actually, my real last name is this. I'm, we're from Lebanon. And people are like, citation needed pal. And it's like, but it's my life. And it's, you trust me on so many more important topics. That's so funny.

Why can't I clarify this? Yeah. Oh, that's

Jimmy Wales: great. Yeah. Yeah. I, I know you've all, he, he, he wrote a really nice, uh, blurb from my book. Hmm. I was very appreciative.

Jordan Harbinger: He probably did that praying that you're gonna let him edit this thing on his Wikipedia page that he's so impressed about. Oh, that's, um, but it's not up to you.

It's actually kind of amazing that Wikipedia took off at all, in my opinion, because. And forgive me for putting it this way. It almost seems like a joke, like an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Come on. It's gonna be full of total nonsense. It's gonna be vandalized, it's gonna be full of corporations that pay publicists to go in there, write nice things about them, and every celebrity bio is gonna have people just crapping all over them.

It's gonna be a waste of time and [00:12:00] energy.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. I mean, that's what a lot of people thought. And, and in fact, it's one of the, to me, it's one of the more interesting things is to sort of take that initial thought that anybody would have and then really think through like, okay, but how do we do that? Like, what is it?

How does it work? You know? And it's a lot of details. It's uh, a lot of it's in the seven rules, you know, things like transparency. You can see every edit. We try to be very open. Like anyone can come and participate and you know, you see something wrong, you can come in and change it, or you can come in and, and leave a note on the talk page and go, Hey, you know, did you see this source?

And, and then people hopefully will go, yeah. Or sometimes they go, yeah, but you know, blah, blah blah, like you just went through. So, uh, yeah, it's remarkable. But I think it's a, is a testament, as you said, it restores a bit of faith in humanity, that there's a lot of just really nice people who just are like, yeah, this sounds cool.

I'm gonna

Jordan Harbinger: help out. Why not just digitize something that already existed, like Encyclopedia Britannica? I mean, look, now it's a hundred times, I don't know, a hundred, a thousand times larger than Encyclopedia Britannica. It's a bit bigger. Yeah. Yeah. A [00:13:00] million times. I don't know. But in the beginning it's like, 'cause encyclopedias, I remember from being a kid and, and I'm sure you're similar age, right?

You look in the wall, the wall of your school, and this whole shelf, this is one encyclopedia. Yeah. So you're like, yeah, we're just gonna recreate that. For free over time, and then eventually it'll be bigger. It's almost like a herculean task to think it's gonna be bigger than World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we actually looked at the 1911 Britannica because it, it was in public domain, so it was out of copyright 'cause it was so old and we could just copy it all in and start from there. And so people did, they copied a few articles in, and then we were looking at 'em and, and you think, oh, right, you'll get the article about Thomas Jefferson.

Like what could possibly have changed? What has changed? Yeah, I'd be a lot. Yeah. Like, it, it's, it's kind of ing, you know. Oh, ancient Egypt. Surely they had it all figured out by No, no. There's been a lot of archeology and things like that. And so, uh, you know, like, I actually dug around, I mean, I found in my mom's house an old ency, I don't remember which brand it was, but [00:14:00] you know, it's, uh, the article on, uh, bicycle, it said, uh.

A bicycle. Men use it to go to work and women use it to go shopping. Oh my God. Wow. Like, okay. Yeah. Maybe, maybe that's not really the best definition of bicycle in the, in uh, the modern day.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. No, because why would a woman wouldn't have a job or anything. That doesn't make any sense. Impossible. God. Yeah.

Impossible, preposterous. Um, one thing that, that I wanted to ask you probably for years now is what do you think of every high school teacher ever being like, Wikipedia is not a source, you can't use it. Yeah.

Jimmy Wales: Well, I mean, it's interesting when people, if they say. You shouldn't use an encyclopedia. I wasn't allowed to use Britannica and cite it.

Oh, you weren't? No. Like Britannica, you should use it as a starting point and then go do further research. I mean, if you're 13 years old and you wrote something, you put a footnote, we should just say great. Mm-hmm. Like you're moving forward. Right. That's fine. Right. Uh, but you know, actually citing Wikipedia in an academic context, particularly at the university level [00:15:00] or higher, yeah.

It's not really a goal, uh, because that's not really what an encyclopedia is for. Now, if you say, don't even read it. Yeah. Now, now you're probably wrong. And especially if you're telling teenagers don't even read Wikipedia. It's like you can tell them don't listen to rock music as well. Yes. Like, it's not a thing they're gonna do, you know, they're a hundred percent gonna use it.

But yeah, actually that has shifted. I, I just was talking to a, uh, high school teacher who just has always been an advocate of Wikipedia in the classroom and. There's always been people who are like, no, actually they should use it. And my thing is like, and this, we can come on to ai. I am sure at some point, this is what I say about AI today.

Like, don't tell kids, don't use Wikipedia. Tell them how to use it. You know, like what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses? You know, how do you understand it? Same thing with ai. Like don't tell kids don't use ai. Yeah, they're a hundred percent gonna use ai, but now they need to know how to use it.

Right? It's gonna be part of our lives going forward. So how do you think about the hallucination problem and all that?

Jordan Harbinger: I have questions about that, that we'll get to, uh, shortly. I think people are probably wondering. How [00:16:00] do you defend against trolls? Vandals, the aforementioned corporations that I said, who they had billions of dollars.

They're gonna want something, they're gonna wanna control that brand image. And even now, if you look up Ukraine or you look up China, or you look up the Israel Palestine conflict, I mean, these are their own small war zones of added wars back and forth. These are very difficult. Yeah.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. So, uh, trolls and vandals, that's actually pretty easy.

So the vandalism, somebody comes and replaces an article with Poo Head or something. Yeah, we just revert it. I hopefully you get one morning, at least one morning that says, Hey, you know, like, thanks for your experiment, but don't do that. Knock it off. And then, uh, you get blocked. And then the patrols, you just get blocked.

You know, again, if somebody comes in and they make a single in temperate remark in their new, hopefully somebody will go, Hey, you know, like, this isn't Twitter. That's not how you do it here. And then you get blocked if you, if you keep it. Those contentious topics is always like, it's really [00:17:00] hard. Like there's so many things going on in the world.

What we try to do in general, and this does work reasonably well, is to say, go meta. Go one level higher. Don't take sides in the conflict. Just write about the conflict in a fair way. Express what all the relevant sides say. And you know, in my book, I talked to a Ukrainian Wikipedia who just, he's a real big advocate that Ukrainian Wikipedia should be neutral even about the war.

Mm-hmm. And his view is like, that's all we have to do. Just tell the facts. Yeah. Like, the facts prove our case enough. And I'm like, yeah, that's actually brilliant. That's fantastic. And there's, you know, things like we talk about wiki voice, uh, which means, you know, it's said in the voice of Wikipedia, Paris is the capital of France.

We just assert that. We don't say according to. So when do you use Wiki voice? It should be very sparingly. Like ideally in an area with lots of controversy. We should not do that. Like we, we shouldn't be saying one side or the other. We should be describing the conflict. That [00:18:00] works pretty well. But obviously there's a lot of struggle.

Jordan Harbinger: There's weird, a weird edge case that I'm sort of dealing with. Like I'll look at my page on there, which by the way was a war zone for years. It was like not notable, not notable enough, and then it was like deleted and then it was like notable now. And people were like, well, he was deleted before. And it's like, well, people get more notable as they get more notable.

And so then it was like marked as not deleted and then people kept moving to deleted. Then that got banneded because it was like, obviously you just have one out for this guy. And then another article got written, someone didn't like it, rewrote it, but it was really poorly done. Okay. Yeah. But it was more neutral in his defense.

Ah. So people were going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And then finally someone rewrote the whole thing and I was like, it's just gonna get reverted again. But that user had gotten banned, who is reverting everything for calling another editor and threatening them. Oh. So they got like banned forever.

That sounds dreadful. It was crazy. And I was just thinking like, wow. And this is my bio page. I mean, it was other people's living bio pages, so it's, it's complicated. But I just thought like, holy smokes, I'm basically nobody. Right. On [00:19:00] Wikipedia. And like there's a mil, there are literally millions of more notable people than some podcasts are on there.

And this is so people take this de seriously.

Speaker 3: Very

Jordan Harbinger: ly. Yeah. One thing that I'm dealing with now. I'm not asking you for advice, I'm just gonna use this to, uh, illustrate something or ask you to illustrate something. One thing that's very strange is people will put a fact in there, but it's got a little bit of like, subtext.

That's odd. Namely, they'll go, harbinger is Jewish, and it's like outta nowhere, just in there in a paragraph about where I went to school and someone will revert it and be like, I don't feel like that's in there. Just to illustrate. That's very interesting. And then they'll put in like, he's Jewish and has acknowledged this when discussing the Israel Palestine conflict.

And that'll get reverted as like, oh, come on, you're implying that he's biased. Oh, that's interesting because of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they're going back and forth, and then that user just sort of disappears, but it'll pop in every few months and then get taken out. Yeah.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. No, it, it's interesting.

I mean, I would say, you know, very often, like it's one of the more complicated things of like, [00:20:00] like when do you note that someone is Catholic? So we'll switch it from Jewish. And it's like sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. Like, actually it's sometimes it's relevant to the biography, sometimes it isn't.

There's also an issue, in my opinion, I've seen both kinds of cases where you think you just want to put it in there because you've got some sort of a bias against Jews, or you just wanna put it in there because you've got some sort of bias in favor of Jews. It's like, yes, we would like to claim the Nobel Prize winner in physics.

Right. Great. Yes. What about Bernie Madoff? No. Somebody wants to force it in there. Yeah. And you know, and it's kinda like, well, come on people. Like, let's be consistent and, and like, yeah, for me it's really about like to what extent is it relevant? So my entry, I don't know what it says at the moment about this, but it's like at one point the categories is another, another issue.

Because unlike most things that can be rewritten and rewritten to sort of smooth out the rough edges to say, you know, uh, so and so was born in a Jewish family but isn't practicing or [00:21:00] whatever, you know, you can, you can, and if that's relevant to their life 'cause they talk about it or whatever, but categories, you're either in or you're.

So somebody had put me in the category, American atheist, and I'm like, that seems weird to me. I mean, technically true in a certain sense, but I'm in there with like Madeline Murray O'Hare, like people who campaign about Sam Harris or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like I'm not, it's not my issue. Like I don't go around.

It's not a thing. It's like it's my private belief and I don't make a big deal out of it. Right. And I sort of regret that it was ever made public because it's like whatever, it's not a point. Right, right. It's as relevant as you having a beer, essentially. And I, I think I've taken out, I think in that case, or similar cases, we try, like with categories, it's like, well, but is it irrelevant?

Like just going around cataloging people who at some point were Christian or Jewish or whatever. Either ethnically belief system, whatever it might be, is like, generally dunno. I mean, it's interesting. Mine, uh, just recently, this is my funny thing. I am both American and British. I have a British passport.[00:22:00]

I didn't grow up there. I'm American by birth. And then I became British and I've lived there for 15 years and I was really happy. It just made me like in a small, happy way. It sure, cool. Said Jim Wells, an American, British American, dash British. I'm like, great. That's brilliant. And now it's gone. I didn't, I haven't bothered to check, like, somebody just read it out in an interview.

Like, oh, let me just read the first sentence. I'm like, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, what happened to British? Yeah. Somebody was like, Hmm, not British enough for me. Yeah. Sorry pal. I'm not sure. I mean, sorry pal. I'm like, Hey, what happened there? Yeah. That's interesting. That is, that's kind of a bummer. It's always amazing to me how there, there'll be a news event and you'll see it on breaking news on CNN or it'll be on Twitter.

Then you go to that Wikipedia page five minutes later. Oh yeah. And you're too late to make that edit yourself. It's already there. In fact, it's already there. Been reverted, been edited by somebody else, had that edited by somebody else. It's already gone through 12 iterations by the time you're on minute number six of, of whatever notable event.

It's

Jimmy Wales: really, really fast. And um, like one of the things I've done in the past is sort of my little, little mini, mini, mini [00:23:00] hobby is whenever there's been a royal wedding, I try to change the name of the person. So like from Kate Middleton to Catherine and, uh, whatever her title, uh, Duchess of Cambridge, you know, and I've been successful doing that a couple times and it's just sort of fun.

And I wait, I'm like, you know, I'm watching the royal wedding. And at the moment when they said, I pronounce you husband and wife, click Oh. And it's like other people are trying as well. I'm, I did it. I did it. It's amazing. Yeah. But there was a funny, uh, incident once that was a very strange, that was a. Pro wrestler who, uh, was expected to be on stage and just didn't turn up, and it turned out they had died.

But then like the weird thing was somebody had vandalized the Wikipedia entry to say they had died at a. About the time that they did die. And so then there was like this like, eh, whoa, that what's going on here? Mm-hmm. Like was it a suicide? And they did it about themselves on Wikipedia or whatever.

Turned out somebody, it was just random. Somebody randomly vandalizes a joke. It was reverted very quickly. And then. It [00:24:00] emerged that sort of several hours later, this person had in fact died. They were ill and whatever. Right. Whew. That was weird. Yeah. But 'cause when, when this came up, I'm like, oh wow. Like this.

So do we call the FBI and give

Jordan Harbinger: them the IP address of this person who maybe murdered the wrestler? Or do we let it go? 'cause they're 13 years old and this is Yeah, yeah. Tell someone who's never heard of Wikipedia, but only knows it's an encyclopedia that's editable by anybody. Tell that person, dad, why?

Why they should trust it. Because news agencies, pundits, right? They'll often say, oh, Wikipedia left wing slash right wing, liberal bi, whatever the bias is, you know, this page. What do you think of allegations like that? Yeah, so

Jimmy Wales: I, I mean, I think, uh, you know, the important thing is like our core policy is very, very strong.

And I'm sort of campaigning about it all the time, which is neutral point of view. Like neutrality is so important to our being trusted that we have to maintain that. So when we're, uh, accused of bias, what I always say is, let's take [00:25:00] that seriously. Like let's have a look, right? And sometimes you look and it is sort of like we treat the New England Journal of Medicine better than we treat a social media influencer who claims something like crackpot.

Thank God. No apologies, right? Uh, I don't call that bias. I call that sort of editorial judgment and being thoughtful about it. And other times, uh, you know, I look at, I'm like, yeah, you know what? We could be a bit better. Like this is saying something in wy voice that probably shouldn't. And like, you know, we need to grapple with that.

And so, you know, overall, what I believe is like what trust comes from is that ongoing willingness to get it right. This applies to all kinds of businesses and things like people will forgive, like a business screws something up. Okay. People will forgive that as long as like, oh, you were really good about the refunds, and you sort of examined the, your process.

Like, how do we put out this crappy product and now we've gotta give the refund. Yeah. And like, whereas, you know, stonewalling pretending it never happened, continuing to put out, you know, oh, we've got the new [00:26:00] version and somebody bought it, and it's like, yeah, it's just as much sucks as the old one did.

Yeah. Then you lose trust. And so, you know, I think we shouldn't think that the only way to get to trust is by being perfect. Right? It's like being like, oh, transparent, honest, and going like, oh, actually, like the, one of the, the rules of trust is the transparent, especially when you have something to hide.

You know? I like that. To go like, actually we aren't perfect here. Like that, we didn't get this one. Right. Uh, you know, like we're, we're gonna have a big discussion now and figure out what happened and try and fix it.

Jordan Harbinger: I would love to talk more about trust because we're facing this global crisis of trust.

Across all news media outlets, obviously, but yeah, even among citizens, really. I mean there's just, yeah, we're kind of living in a, I mean, to use the cliche, what the most polarizing time, most polarized time, divided time, whatever. You've made a pretty good argument for why trust is key in society. I mean, the workplace, you need it, the workplace, you need it in the home.

Yeah. And Americans aren't just really divided on their opinions. We live in these sort of different realities, right? Yeah. Where we [00:27:00] each have our own facts and, and it's someone who's on the opposite end of a political spectrum will, will actually have different historical facts than somebody on the other side, which is crazy to me.

Having grown up in the eighties where that kind of wasn't a thing.

Jimmy Wales: It's really troublesome and, uh. We all learned the expression alternative facts, uh, when it was Trump's first inauguration, and there was a dispute about how many people attended, right. And it's like, well, there is a fact there. And you know, like, you can't just say alternative facts.

It's like, there's only one fact that was a Kellyann Conway band and you know, I, I don't really know anything about her and so forth. Me neither. Yeah. I'm just like, probably she regrets saying that, but Oh, I doubt it. I

Jordan Harbinger: think that's her, like, here, that's our tag at the top of her tagline. It

Jimmy Wales: might be, I don't know.

But, uh, you know, like, I do think this is a problem. And, and when we think of an issue, uh, so I live in the uk, which like many places like the United States, immigration is a big political hot topic. And I'm like, okay, like the question of immigration, like, okay, what should our [00:28:00] immigration policy be? How many people should we let in every year?

What do we do about people who came here? Like unauthorized? Like how do we deal with this? Right. A hundred percent all absolutely valid questions, which we can then start to chew on and people have different views on that and what we should do. But if we don't start that conversation with a real grasp of like, okay, but what is the situation?

Like you and I disagree, like you think we should have a lot fewer immigrants, I think we should have a lot more. Fine. How many do we have today? Okay, we better start there because otherwise, who knows? We might actually agree on the actual number. You just think. There's 40 million a year, and I think there's 4,000 a year.

And so suddenly it's, no, hold on, there's 47,000. And you might go, oh, well that's not as high as I thought. And I'm like, oh, that's a lot more than I thought. And then we suddenly are like, oh,

Jordan Harbinger: okay, fine. I've seen this happen in real time. I mean, look, this is a complicated issue, so don't at me folks, but I remember somebody was saying, I can't believe Trump is just deporting all these people.

And then someone else was like, do you know that Obama deported way more people than this? [00:29:00] They didn't know. And we got the numbers out. Yeah. And it was like, oh, that was also bad. And it was like, oh, okay. That's kinda the right, 'cause if, if you're just on one team and not the other. Yeah, yeah. Then when your guy does something, it's okay when the other guy does it.

Yeah. It's not okay. Exactly. But it was like, oh, I didn't know that. So it's kind of funny to see that, but you're right. You need to actually have the facts

Jimmy Wales: and we can all fall into that trap, you know? Definitely. Where, uh, we've heard one side of the story and we're like, oh, okay, well now I have a view on that.

Then it's like, oh, oh, I didn't even have the facts. Right. Right. So like I, I came to a judgment about what we should do based on incorrect information. Nobody likes that. No. Like, I don't think anybody likes that. And actually sometimes I've had journalists who are like, are you sure? Like, people really wanna believe.

I'm like, no. Nobody wants to make a decision based on false information. Like, you end up doing the wrong thing. Yeah. And feeling like an idiot. And so this is one of the problems with the polarization in the media. I, I live, as I've mentioned, I live in London, lived there for a long time now, and we've got two newspapers that I think are good [00:30:00] newspapers.

So The Guardian and the Telegraphic Guardians Center. Left. Telegraph Center. Right. They're politically biased. That's okay. What's funny is because they are a little bit too click beatty at times. Uh, so I have an electric car. I love my electric car. I'm interested in electric cars. I don't have a Tesla. I have a different brand, but how dare you.

Yeah. And uh, so I like to read about electric cars and I've just noticed you can just show me a headline from the last three days. There'll be some story about electric cars. In, in one of these papers, I'll tell you which paper it's from, just from the headline, because the Guardian loves electric cars.

The telegraph hates electric cars. And I'm like, now what about trust? I actually don't trust either of them on this topic. Right? Yeah. I sort of enjoy in some very thin way the guardian articles, which are positive about electric. You agree? Because I like it, but that's not what I really wanna hear. Right?

So, you know, like one of the questions about electric cars is they're heavier, so the tires wear it on quicker. So the particulate matter of tire [00:31:00] pollution is worse for electric cars. I think a very basic fact. To the telegraph. This is just like, oh my God, it's killing us all. And to the guardian, like, that's not even interesting.

And I'm like,

Jordan Harbinger: well, hold on. Like, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yeah, exactly. And so

Jimmy Wales: where I end up is like, actually, I would really like to be able to go to my preferred paper and just say like, oh, okay, well, like here's the balance. And then they're gonna be slightly different, all that, but try a little harder.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about the tire thing. You give an anecdote in the book about Charles Dega. Can you go through that? 'cause I don't think we could be any further away from that kind of relationship with our allies right now.

Jimmy Wales: I don't remember what I said about Charles de Gall.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's funny.

I'll, I'll refresh your memory. And you know what, um, that's, I don't, it's funny when you people write a book, they expect you to remember every single line in it. Yeah. I mean, I, and you probably wrote it two years ago of this particular line. I

Jimmy Wales: did, but also, I mean, the funny thing is, I just, about a month ago, I did the audio book and I read the whole thing.

So I'm just spacing out to that. I

Jordan Harbinger: could also have the name wrong and then I'll be the, a-hole on this one. But, um, what it was was somebody had gone to, I believe [00:32:00] Charles Dugal and said. The Cubans are getting missiles from Russia, and they had all these documents and photographs, and Charles Dega said, I, I, you have the word of the American president.

That's good enough for me. I It was a throwaway line. Yeah, exactly.

Jimmy Wales: Yes. No, I totally remember that. The word of the president's good enough for me. Yeah. And it was like,

Jordan Harbinger: I was like, wait, that's it. Yeah. That's all you need. You

Jimmy Wales: just, yeah. Yeah. Now I remember. It's true. True. You believe us. Holy spoke. Yeah. And I mean, I think that is, yeah.

It's a shame that we don't have that culture anymore. Yeah. Where, you know, where politicians don't feel basically a fundamental obligation to the office mm-hmm. To not be completely partisan and politicize in every single thing you say, so that you can just like deliver neutral facts to another world leader who will then believe you Yeah.

Because you, like it's the president. Like obviously they're not gonna just make some shit up, you know? Yeah. Theory and, uh, yeah. No, that, that's exactly right. And I really was quite proud of the US from a distance living in London, uh, when it was Obama versus McCain, because. [00:33:00] My agreements and disagreements with both of them.

You know, some policies here and there and all that. But you know what, they're both proper people. Either of them is gonna be presidential, they're not lunatics and so forth. And, um, can't really say that these days.

Jordan Harbinger: It's quite a shame. You give some really interesting examples in the book, which I also hope you remember about.

Uh, I'm kidding About, uh, brands that have used symbols or built trust in certain ways. I'd love to talk about this. I always find this stuff fascinating. Quaker Oats not apparently made by Quakers. I don't know. Yeah,

Jimmy Wales: yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's sort of funny one, uh, because it, it is, uh, there is a bit of a, an irony in the story because the story is really about Quakers and their, like the reason the Quaker wrote people chose the brand is 'cause at that time there was a lot of food adulteration.

You might buy oats, but maybe there's a lot of sawdust in there to pat it out or whatever. Like it was a problem. To be fair, could you really

Jordan Harbinger: tell the difference?

Jimmy Wales: Maybe that's what they thought.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jimmy Wales: But the word Quaker, what it said to people [00:34:00] was, it says oats on the box. You know, what's gonna be in the box?

Oats? Like that's pretty straightforward. And it's because at the time, the Quakers had a really good reputation in business that they would do what they said in an era when there was a lot more haggling, which broadly speaking, I would say Americans hate haggling. It's just, it's very stressful. Nobody likes buying a car for this reason.

Yes. And so on, and the posturing and the, and the lying that goes on of like, oh, this is absolutely the lowest price I can accept. Are you kidding me? And that it's not really your lowest price. Right? For the Quakers, if they said, this is the lowest price I can accept, that was, take it or leave it because they told you the true price that they would take or leave, and it was part of their religion, part of their belief system, which at first people thought, well, I mean, obviously you're gonna fail in business because you're not playing the game.

They didn't care. Like that's our religious belief. So like, this is how we live our lives. But it actually worked really well because, uh, suddenly it's like, oh, like they do what they say. I mean, I say this about, uh, for example, Amazon. Like Amazon, you could have lots of complaints about Amazon. People do [00:35:00] fine.

I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about you order the thing from Amazon, it's gonna come in the mail, it's gonna be the thing you bought, and if there's anything wrong, you send it back and they give you your money back. Or even if you complain sometimes they go, we'll refund you don't bother sending it back.

Yeah. Because it's too much trouble for everybody. I mean, if you do it too often, then maybe they'll start, you know, giving you a little grief. But generally they're very good about it. And that is trust. Like nobody thinks, I'm not so sure about putting in my credit card number on this funny Amazon thing.

Mm-hmm. Because who knows if they're ever gonna send my thing? Nope. They'll send you a thing. We all know that. We accept that. We don't even think about that as being part of trust. But of course that's business. Like you can't do business, um, otherwise. And so this is why we tell, you know, the story of Airbnb.

Uber like companies that have had a real crisis of trust and like how did they recover from that?

Jordan Harbinger: I try to do that to some extent. I mean, it's a podcast. I don't sell anything directly, but we have ads on the show and years ago there was a, a company that did something that was not kosher and a lot [00:36:00] of people had bought this because I had advertised it.

And so I ended up going to that sponsor and saying, you've gotta refund my people who are over the 90 day thing because you. Kind of lied about this, it's the right thing. And they did up until they basically realized they were gonna lose a lot of money, and then they decided they didn't care. So I ended up refunding some people Oh, wow.

Out of my own pocket. Oh, amazing. Which really stings, right? Because it's like, it's not my fault they lied to me, but it's kinda like the buck stops here. And I had to make this weird decision where it was like, do I want my listeners to continue to trust me even if they're not sure about trusting that particular sponsor?

Jimmy Wales: So I watch a lot of Tech Hardware video, I'm a super nerd, right? And I'm, I'm building out a home server and all that. So I watch all this Wirecutter videos. And there's not Wirecutter that's actually, do they have video? I should look into that. I'm actually not sure YouTubers right? Yeah. Line of tech tips or something.

Some, some, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And a lot of them do, uh, you know, they have sponsorship and they have, and they're generally good about disclosing. I think it's a rule on YouTube. FTC, the Federal Trade Commission will come down on you. And so, but, [00:37:00] um, you do wonder, uh, sometimes. And, and, you know, but I, and I like, you know, for some of them, uh, you think, well, I, I know this YouTuber.

There's never been a negative review of any product on this channel. Hmm. And whether they're getting paid or not. 'cause I'm like, they're trying to suck up to get more free stuff. I mean, that's what I feel like. So I like a YouTuber who like, oh yeah, thanks to so and so for sponsoring the video. But they didn't have any prior approval.

And I also know sometimes they do like, I wanna see you do that and then go, they provided the product, I gave them no promises and a good thing. 'cause this thing sucks. You know? Like, yes, that'd be great. You know? Yeah. And then other people might be less willing to send them stuff. And so I always talk about that's YouTube.

But also like, I like boats. I'm interested in boats and I used to have a little speed boat in Florida. I loved it and so forth. And I like boat magazines, but I've never seen a negative review in a boat magazine. Those are for sure all

Jordan Harbinger: sponsored.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. And well, are they sponsored or they're just don't want to rock the boat in the industry?

Yeah. Like, whereas it's slightly different with car magazines. Some of them are [00:38:00] powerful enough that they can run a negative review. I think these are little magazines. There's not that many people reading boat magazines, you know? But, um, and I'm just like, oh, that's interesting. 'cause it means the reviews, I just don't quite trust them as much.

Yeah. Right. Even if they're not sponsored, uh, you're just like, well, I, you never say anything bad or you learn to read between the lines. Yeah. Like, oh, we'd like to see a little more horsepower in this one. Like, oh, that means it's weak, you know, like.

Jordan Harbinger: Wikipedia has a million nerds with unlimited internet and no bedtime.

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Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again all free at Six Minute Networking dot com. Now back to Jimmy Wales. People will ask me what? Well, your ads are all effusive about the products, so obviously we can't trust that. My retort to that is I just don't accept the sponsors for whom the product sucks.

I usually get the product in advance, and if it falls apart in my hands, I just say no. That's right. Yeah. If it's gambling or crypto related or porn vaping, I, it just doesn't [00:42:00] appe you, you never hear it. The reason I don't have a negative thing to say about it is because I tell them to kick rocks and we never take their

Jimmy Wales: money.

Yeah, totally. And I think that's right. I think it's right to talk about that, because otherwise what does it mean for the whole of your podcast and the whole of the, and I, you know, I say this about, there was, um, I used to be on the board of the Guardian, uh, newspaper and they had this real struggle.

'cause they don't have a paywall. They're ad supported, they're a nonprofit or owned by a nonprofit. I didn't know that they, and they've got a big trust fund. And so, you know, like it's complicated. Like, and they're really trying to, to thread the needle on lots of things. They really struggled with accepting, uh, sponsored content in the paper, and it would be clearly marked on all of that, but like one of the ones was, uh, Volkswagen.

Volkswagen was promoting their blue, they call it their, their green initiative was called. Volkswagen is, is that the one

Jordan Harbinger: they lied about and had to scrap all the cars? Well, and

Jimmy Wales: then, and then the scandal broke and it was a little bit awkward. So even though it sat at the top, this is paid [00:43:00] content, right?

So on and so forth, it didn't feel great for the journalists there who had been assigned to write the stuff as sponsored content and so on for the brand, for the paper didn't feel great. And I mean in this case there was nothing wrong with this content. The content wasn't lies, it was like they had, I don't remember the exact sound, they had faked some tests or something like that.

Yeah. What it was emissions tests.

Jordan Harbinger: It was the, there was firmware on a chip that goes on the engine that was designed to, when it was being tested for emissions, run a certain way and when it was on the street run a totally different way that didn't pass the admission stand. I mean, it was blatantly fraudulent nonsense.

It was absolutely

Jimmy Wales: crazy and, and I think all the more shocking, again to bring it back to thinking about trust because you know, there are certain companies which over promise and under deliver all the time and you wouldn't be surprised. But like Volkswagen. Pretty boring brand to be honest. Like it's a perfectly good car and fine.

And like you wouldn't think Volkswagen's gonna scam you, but it did once a century. They

Jordan Harbinger: do something pretty terrible. It's a century so far, so. [00:44:00] Yeah, exactly. Um, it's crazy. There were so much food alteration. You mentioned in the book that food used to just be dangerous and kill people until 19 0 0 6. Was it 1906.

We started to pass laws about, hey, if this says it's milk, sorry, but it's gotta actually be milk. I mean, that's insane to me that we didn't have any laws before that.

Jimmy Wales: I mean, it's funny because that's, even if you take quite a libertarian view. Yeah. That's just not defrauding people. Yeah. Like that isn't like, that's a low ball, onerous regulation.

Yeah. Like it's sort of like, yeah. Don't do things that are stealing money.

Jordan Harbinger: There are certain laws where they're treated more harshly because literally every, even remotely well adjusted member of society knows not to do that. Like kill someone, right? Yeah. Or hit stab someone. Yeah. And these are certain crimes where you go if you park in a certain place and you weren't supposed to park there 'cause it's Thursdays and everybody in that city knows that.

It's like, that's way less of a crime than you stab someone, you go, I didn't know I wasn't allowed to stab people. It's like, no matter where you live [00:45:00] on planet earth, this is not allowed. And so those crimes are treated a little bit differently.

Jimmy Wales: It is funny how like social norms around certain things can be.

So I have a house in the countryside in, in the UK where I live and in the little village there's one little grocery store, there's like two parking spaces in front. Then like a double yellow line up and down the street. And when I first moved there I was like, oh, well you can't park there. It's a double yellow line.

After some time I realized like literally everybody does and that's it. And nobody has ever gotten a ticket. And like that's just the rule. The rule is you sort of park anywhere along there and I'm like, oh, some like the local council should probably like repaint the street. Yeah. Because either that or start giving tickets, but believe me, there's gonna be some outrage.

'cause like people need to go to the grocery store, you know? Uh, they need to fix it. And I'm like that kind of little stuff. Actually, this is one of the things about like when the speed limit was 55 and basically people ignored it because it was ridiculous. Yeah. It's something like if the law doesn't [00:46:00] make sense and people are just ignoring it, and that's okay because like it doesn't make sense, then you undermine respect for the rule of law.

And that's like not a great thing.

Jordan Harbinger: This reminds me of, you know how every year the dictionary says, Hey, this word that doesn't actually mean this. Well, it means that now because everyone's been misusing it so much. Oh right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So literally now means figuratively or literally. So it's lost all meaning.

'cause you can either mean it literally, or you can just be completely talking out of your ass. And it means the same thing

Jimmy Wales: mean I I thought you were gonna say something about six seven because, oh God,

Jordan Harbinger: I

Jimmy Wales: just saw a

Jordan Harbinger: story that's being added to the mean three year olds are saying, I what? I don't understand what it means.

They're laughing and I'm like, can you explain this? Of course they cannot. They cannot. No one can. Uh, no one can. One Wikipedia cultural rule, I guess, if I can call it that, that I love, is you always assume good faith. And I would love to hear more about that. I feel like we need to do that in life generally.

Yeah. And I mean you see it on Reddit, but usually you don't.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like assume good faith. It's not a suicide pact. Right? [00:47:00] You don't sort of always assume everybody's of goodwill even after they've really proven that they aren't here to build an encyclopedia. But it's like sort of that initial thing, like, I mean, the simplest kind of example is you see somebody doing something wrong in Wikipedia.

And chances are, and like the evidence proves this and like long experience is like they probably just need to be, uh, helped out a bit. Like have it explained like, oh we, that's not how we do it. Or actually, like I just reworded your sentence. It was a little bit punchy and shouldn't be. Or the worst would be is if you got in trouble 'cause your footnote was not formatted correctly.

Oh yeah. Like that would be so annoying. It like, nobody's required to learn our formatting. Footnote rules. Luckily the visual editor helps with is like they added a link. That's great. Yeah. You know, uh, and so that assume good faith, it's even more important. So it's important in those first interactions.

Somebody first comes to site, but also when there's a heated argument. Right. To try to remember this is a person on the other side and they're different from you and they're like you [00:48:00] because they're people and people are all like that. You know, like, don't interpret every single thing they say as some kind of hostility.

It's really easy to do online as we see in social media all the time to jump to the wrong conclusion. Read something into what they said. Are you really saying this? I actually didn't say that. No. And you know, it's very helpful. Um, you know that civility in the book, we, we say, uh, your mother was right. We teach it to toddlers to like be nice to other people and it's actually good.

Like it actually works. It's actually a very profitable mechanism. Not don't mean making money, right. But it's like, it's a positive thing. It's like it, you treat people as if they are all up to no good. Well first of all, you're gonna have a miserable life. But also people like, they'll maybe live up to that, right?

And that's not great. And, and instead, you know, I actually, I I talk about this a lot in the context of teenagers and parents. 'cause I've have. Teenage daughter and [00:49:00] one who's now grown out of it, and one who's about to be a teenager. And, you know, it's like, okay, like with teenagers, what do parents need to do?

Well, you need to start trusting them. And I, you know, I sort of advise, particularly if it's a bit of a problem situation. It's like, say, I'm gonna trust you. Like they want to go out and do something. I'm, I'm gonna trust you. I want you to live up to that trust and then we're gonna have a better path forward.

You go out a few times, you don't come home drunk, I'm gonna trust you more. You come home and you didn't do what you said, you know, you whatever. You forgot to pick up your sister from school, whatever. Uh, I'm gonna lose trust. And you know what? Kids respond really well to that. Like they really want, like, we all do a rational framework in life where like things make sense and it's like, oh yeah, actually my parents aren't tyrants.

They're a little strict. But like they do trust me a little bit. And if I live up to that trust, they're gonna trust me a little more. Great. Like now you've got a positive family situation. And that applies everywhere. Like in companies, like, I'll tell you the, now I'm on a rant. No,

Jordan Harbinger: I [00:50:00] like it. This is a good, I'm crossing off things in my notes that you're covering organically.

One, the worst

Jimmy Wales: things I've seen are like these companies that when people work from home, they're using software to monitor their keystrokes and their mouse movements to make sure they're not away from their desk for more than a few minutes. And I'm like,

Jordan Harbinger: what in the hell is that? Like? And you go to Etsy and you find that there's a device that will just move your mouse constantly so that you can go to the grocery store.

Like,

Jimmy Wales: so you, you, you are trusting somebody to do their job, whatever that is. Right? But not enough that they are gonna, and so it's like, you know what, actually there's a reason why people wanna work from home. It's 'cause of the flexibility. If you said, you know what, we're not gonna monitor everything you do.

There are some things you gotta get done, you get them done. That's fine. You know, we're gonna trust you and all that. And like, by the way, everybody understands, like you work from home this week 'cause your kid's sick. That means guess what? You're not gonna be moving your mouse every five minutes. Yeah.

The kid's sick. You gotta go out of the room and you know what, we kind of expect you to make up for it. Stay a little late, hop on for an hour at night. 'cause you missed an hour during the day. Yes. And we're just gonna let you do that. [00:51:00] I mean, just the goodwill that you destroy by having that sort of paranoid approach to the people you work with.

You're not gonna get creativity, you're not gonna get insight. You're gonna, you're gonna get people working to rule and nothing more because they're like. These people are not proper people and I don't have to do this, and, and I'm looking for a job like ex your job by, yeah. Yeah. Now, the reason I didn't move my mouse for five minutes is I went to the other non-work computer and looked for a job, right?

Yes,

Jordan Harbinger: exactly. No, I, I mean, look, I'm not running Samsung or Microsoft, but I always just trust my team to get things done. On their own time. And we got guys like Bob who's gonna edit this in the show notes and he's gonna do it at four o'clock in the morning Pacific time. And you know what, fine, fine. Yeah.

And, and my engineer, Jace, is in another time zone 'cause he is near the, from the UK as well. And it's like, he's gonna do this at a weird time, on a weird day when he is back from his vacation. And that's fine. The only time it's not fine is if something doesn't work. And that is so rare. Yeah. Yeah. In our business, it's so rare that [00:52:00] something happens that is objectively like, oh, because you did this too late or at a weird time, that it's not worth the juice, ain't worth the squeeze to solve the problem with some sort of tyrannical solution.

A hundred percent.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. And, and like the main thing is. Did it get done in the podcast out on time? Then the rest is, is not matters and that that objectively No. Obviously something. I'm not saying businesses and you're not saying businesses shouldn't care about time and all that. Like, I mean, it's sort of like Yeah, the grocery store's open until you know, these hours.

To those hours, so coming in at 4:00 AM ain't gonna help. Right, right. Yeah. The store's closed. Right. On the other hand, it's sort of like at every moment when you can think about, okay, is there a way I could just extend trust and build a better relationship with the people I'm working with or who are working for me?

If you're, you know, a manager or whatever, that's great because you're gonna get so much more out people and they're gonna like it so much more. Like then it becomes part of their life to do a good job.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jimmy Wales: As opposed to you beating them down and they're just like, whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: The other thing it does is.

Let's say I say something [00:53:00] on this show that sounds like it's iffy. It makes me sound, I don't know, casually, accidentally, misogynist or racist or something. It's clearly not my intent.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: My team will catch that. They will edit that. Yeah. And they'll go, you probably didn't mean to say like, and I'll go, oh God, did I say that?

Well, you cut off one sentence and then you started another one, and it sort of sounded like maybe Ah-huh. Yeah, but we fixed it. But if you are on their ass about everything, they're gonna go, you know what? Every time we make an edit, he doesn't like, he crawls down my throat. I'm just not gonna deal with this.

He said it. He said it to let him deal with the consequences.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, no, that's great. But it's

Jordan Harbinger: like if you give them that trust, they'll go, I'm not gonna get in trouble for changing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Wales: Oh yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: And then you go, oh my God, thank God you took that outta the video, because that is clearly not what I meant.

And they go, yeah, we got you.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. No, no, no, exactly. But also with your listeners, if you say something a bit punchy. They know you and they're like, oh, he didn't really mean it it that way. Me. Yeah. Well they might, some people go crazy. I mean, it's the internet, you know? But broadly [00:54:00] speaking, you know, like track records matter.

Jordan Harbinger: In your book, you discuss what happens when companies or organizations take sides politically. I'd love to talk about this because I've only seen this go wrong and maybe that's a selection bias kind of thing. But I feel like I've never seen a company come out squeaky clean doing this

Jimmy Wales: ever. They can. So I will give a counter example.

'cause I do think it's worth noting. Okay. Upfront. So Ben and Jerry's has always been a socially active, socially conscious company. It's part of their brand. Mm-hmm. So nobody's going crazy at Ben and Jerry for being woke because it's Ben and Jerry. Like, if you don't like that, you probably weren't a customer anyway.

And that's part of their brand. It works for them. Most brands, most companies. The problem with it is basically, first nobody really wants to hear from you on this issue. Like, I don't really care. What Pepsi's views on trans are like, I don't care. Yeah. Like, it's not what I'm, this is not the relationship. I just wanna know, is your sugary drink [00:55:00] killing me?

Well, probably, but you know, yes. But it's delicious. So we'll overlook that, but it's delicious. So, yeah. So I, yeah, I like it. But yeah. Okay, now, now that's our relationship and yeah, as you say, like it generally goes wrong and uh, you know, it's sort of, you've annoyed half the people. You probably haven't persuaded anybody.

You know, I talk about this in the book, uh, because it's like, one of the mistakes I think people make is like, don't fight other people's fights. Like, it's just not worth it. That's interesting. It's not the right thing. It's sort of like my, I try, I don't always succeed, but broadly speaking, I don't talk about general politics.

Like y you know, if you ask me my views on Obamacare, I'd be like, my views are about as important. As any other random person, like I'm not an expert in healthcare policy, like just because I'm known for one thing that doesn't make me an expert on other things. And frankly, I don't think people should care, and I don't think I should campaign about it.

If you say, oh, but Jimmy, I saw you make quite a point to statement about internet public [00:56:00] policy and freedom of expression. I'm like, yeah, that's relevant to me. Like it does matter. That is my fight. Like I've got Wikipedians who've been arrested in various places for speaking the truth. I've got, you know, like all these things going on and it's like actually open public discourses of value.

That means a lot to keep Wikipedia going. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to bat for that any way I can. I do think it's a mistake, right? If sort of I start a campaign, I mean maybe just in my private life when I'm retired, I'm never gonna retire. I'm just like, this is my life. But you know, maybe I'll pick up a cause and and start campaigning for that.

But broadly I don't think I should because it doesn't work. And so, you know, another example that I probably am out of step with a lot of my friends, which is to say like when Jeff Bezos, you know, instructed the Washington Post to not endorse presidential candidate, I actually think that's a good idea. I think he was right, although the timing was terrible.

Yeah. Like doing it just before the [00:57:00] election, he was interpreted as him doing a favor for Trump or whatever. Or that he secretly supports Trump, which I doubt, you know, whatever. But if they had done it at a proper time, say after the previous midterm elections or something, you know, sort of just like, okay, like we're done.

And the evidence, there's like research on this that shows that. Political endorsements by newspapers lowers people's trust in the journalism,

Jordan Harbinger: even if they agree with the endorsement. I would agree with that. Yeah. Just from my personal,

Jimmy Wales: because you suddenly are like, well, like now is the news headline. Is that part because the paper's going to bat for their guy?

Like maybe they are, uh, maybe they're not, but I don't know. I don't trust it anymore. And also there's evidence that's like, okay, the Washington Post endorsed the Democrat for like 15,000 years in a row, right? Except for, except for one. Is that right? Yeah. Ever, ever since Whenever it was like

Jordan Harbinger: since, yeah, yeah.

Basically my entire lifetime. Yeah. And then some And it sort of like a Democrat. Yeah.

Jimmy Wales: Nobody was like, I'm a Trump voter, but oh, the Washington Post. Well, and I better reconsider. No, of course not. And all your readers who [00:58:00] are, you know, left-leaning, 'cause it's a left-leaning paper, they're not changing their mind.

They're gonna vote that way anyway. So the whole thing is pointless. It's like theater for, to make, I don't know who feel good, but it's not really the right thing. And, uh. So I'd like to see fewer endorsements or maybe a rare endorsement would be probably more effective. It might damage trust, but maybe you feel like actually we have to this time.

Jordan Harbinger: You're right, it has to be core of the brand. I mean, nobody is machine gunning cases of Ben and Jerry's, but Kid Rock I believe, didn't he Machine gun a case of Bud Light? Because they were like, Hey, we gotta do it trans thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It got blown way out of proportion. I mean, it was absolutely, it got blown.

I mean,

Jimmy Wales: it was all ridiculous. But in, in this sort of era of crazy culture wars, it's sort of like, what's the point? Like Bud Light, it's just like a pretty straightforward beer.

Jordan Harbinger: Is it Chick-fil-A? The fast food company that they're only open six days a week. Oh yeah. And um, there was a large boycott, 'cause they were, I'm gonna get this wrong 'cause I'm going off memory, but basically they were like anti-abortion.

There was a large boycott. And what [00:59:00] they did, instead of saying, look, this is a religious franchise, this is how we feel. Instead of doing that, what they did is they, this is the opposite of this, is like Antit transparency. They sent a letter to, uh, millions of people and it was, Hey, I'm just a small franchisee.

I own the Chick-fil-A on the corner of, you know, Vandyke and East Jefferson. You're hurting my business, uh, because of the corporate policy I beg you to reconsider. But what they did is they sent that to every franchisee to plug in their location Uhhuh. So it was like, not from that franchisee weird. It was actually from corporate to go against the boycott.

Wow. But they didn't say that. They made it look like, Hey, I'm just a guy who owns a Chick-fil-A. Don't boycott me. I'm one of the people. But it wasn't, it was straight out of corporate communications. Yeah. That was like a torpedo to the hull

Jimmy Wales: of trust. Yeah. And you know, it's, it's sort of like, that's a good example because Chick-fil-A, they're closed on Sundays because the owners are religious.

Right. That's fine. Then yeah, [01:00:00] overstepping the line and then yeah, being a, a little bit, I don't know, like that's kind of weird. Yeah. I don't know what the deal is. And of my, one of my favorite, uh, YouTubers, I'll even give him a shout out network, Chuck. He does internet like networking, but also AI videos.

He's really fun to watch. He's great. He's just recently started, uh, for like 30 seconds. At the end, he stops and he prays for you, the listener. He is really sweet and I'm like, okay, not my, not my thing, but he's also really good. He is just like, yeah, you can click off now we're done. He's like, maybe this isn't for everybody, but, um, it's what I believe Jesus saved my life.

I'm like, you know what? I like this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like he's done it right at the end. If he sort of infused it through and sort of like. Preaching at me, I'd be like, well now I'm out. Like, yeah, he's doing it

Jordan Harbinger: for himself on your behalf, not doing it to try and recruit you into his. Yeah, and I'm just like,

Jimmy Wales: yeah, cool, cool dude.

Like whatever. That's

Jordan Harbinger: fine.

Jimmy Wales: Like it's free country.

Jordan Harbinger: I found it interesting that you mentioned that even people who agreed with the agenda that the corporation takes, they lose trust in the organization, which is kind of surprising. The only increase in trust [01:01:00] is from extremists who also agree with that perspective.

Right? So you're basically, unless you are Ben and Jerry's, where it's inside, like the part of your ethos is this,

Speaker 3: yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: You are losing when you do that. Which sort of brings about the question, why do organizations take stances at all? Like who is idea is this? If this data is relatively well known,

Jimmy Wales: I think the data may not be relatively well known, might be the case.

And I just think that there's often the case, you know, there's a lot of different reasons. There can be like internal pressure and so on. Like why aren't we making a statement about x. Then I think you need to have, as a leader, you need to have a good answer to that, which is to say, well, like, you know, we're not the right people obviously.

You know, if it's something about, uh, discrimination or something like that, then it's like, yeah, but I mean, our statement is our company policy and like, we are gonna do the right thing. We're not gonna campaign about it because frankly we sell coffee cups like nobody cares. Like, that's not something we should be

Jordan Harbinger: weighing in on.

Transparency, you mentioned that [01:02:00] earlier, not hiding things, call balls and strikes, even if it's against your own side. That's crucial. Definitely. The Airbnb example is really good. Would you take us through that?

Jimmy Wales: Oh yeah. So Airbnb, like early on in the history of Airbnb, they had this huge trust crisis. So what happened was, uh, this woman put her, I think she was here in San Francisco, she put her apartment on Airbnb and then somebody rented it and absolutely trashed the place and they got bad advice, uh, pr, legal advice.

To basically Stonewall, don't admit responsibility, da da dah, you'll make it worse, da da da. And after a few weeks, they were like, it was just getting worse and worse and worse because this woman wrote a very emotional, you know, like, I'm sitting in the stairwell of my apartment building in tears. I can't bear to go back in and see what happened.

And the company was doing nothing to help and and so on. And they, they realize, and people have been saying this to them for a long time, like a venture capitalist told 'em, you're gonna get somebody killed. Yeah. You know, like this whole thing is crazy. And they

Jordan Harbinger: have been killed [01:03:00] in Airbnbs or assaulted. Oh, have.

Oh yeah. Oh, that's right. I interviewed Brian Chesky and he, who's like a really good dude as far as I can see. Oh yeah. I think that's right. And it's very rare, right? But it's like they rent the place out, but then they have a key and they're hiding in the closet when the person comes. It's again, it's, it makes the news because it's like what in the psychopath just happened?

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they realized like. If people think a normal thing that's gonna happen, you put your house on Airbnb and it gets trashed. We're gonna have no landlords, we're gonna, nobody's gonna participate. So they basically like push the brakes on the whole company and put, said like, everybody has to work.

We have to think, we have to brainstorm. Like, how do we build trust? Like people aren't trusting us. In fact, it's gotten really bad because we screwed up this whole situation so badly. They did a lot of things. They made a lot of changes at that time. Like, I mean, at the time, apparently you could rent a place with just an email address crazy anonymously.

So like some rando who can't even be tracked [01:04:00] down after the fact is gonna get your keys and go and sleep in your house. Like, oh my God. Like, that's clearly a stupid idea. And this isn't about, oh, well, I mean, I actually think anonymity online's a good thing. It's, you know, like, but largely that's not somebody sleeping in your house.

So once they're in my bed, yeah. I draw the line, I wanna know

Jordan Harbinger: who you are.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. You gotta, and so you, now you have to upload your ID and sort of prove your existence and, and all that. And a lot of the, oh, like, uh, you know, indemnity, like insurance, it's like, yeah, if somebody trashes the place, uh, then Airbnb's got a policy of like, we're gonna make you whole, we're gonna fix it for you.

Like, oh, that's actually really good. Like that. That sounds like a good thing.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm kind of surprised that they didn't start off with that, but I guess they just weren't thinking about that particular Well,

Jimmy Wales: I, I think that was, and it was kind of, it was one of these examples, this is my opinion on it. It was one of these examples of 20 something tech bros who don't have certain fears because it's not been part of their experience, just not thinking it through, you know, it's like, oh, like [01:05:00] that never occurred to me that people would be afraid about that.

'cause I'm not, you know, you think about, like, for my mom, she was very nervous about Uber for a long time, and it was actually reassuring to her to learn. It's GPS, like your phone is on GPS. Uber knows where you are every second of the journey. The driver knows that Uber knows where you are. They can't just drive off with you Right.

And dump you off in the woods somewhere because it's all gonna be tracked. Your phone's tracking and so on. Oh, hadn't thought of that. Oh, and by the way, like Uber does vet the drivers like you, you don't just sort of sign up on the app and start driving. Like they actually check into you a bit and things like that.

Oh, okay, great. Like those steps taken to build trust. 'cause it's quite a thing to like, you know,

Jordan Harbinger: but as a guy you're like, whatever, I'll just choke him if he bogs punch me.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, yeah. I don't care. I never, I never really thought about that. Yeah. I could take him. Yeah. Yeah. We all think what, only one bear.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Jimmy Wales: exactly. I could take

Jordan Harbinger: one bear, but like that's when I get [01:06:00] into a Prius. So I'm not thinking, I hope this person's not a psychopath. I hope I get to the airport. Right. But I guess, you know, if you're a 15-year-old girl, maybe you're a little rightfully more concerned that this person Yeah, no, there's

Jimmy Wales: great stuff.

Like, uh, I didn't talk about this detail in the book. I just happen to know about it. Like Uber now has like teen Uber. Which my daughter uses in London, and it's, what's the difference? The difference is when she requests a ride, it's, she's a sub-account under my account. I get notified. I can track where she is.

Parental control, Uber parental control. Uber, okay. And it's like, it's really great. It's sort of like, you know, like, oh, do I let my 15? I mean, she's very trustworthy. It, you know, like for some people, I mean like when I was 15, 16, I, and I was driving around, that was actually frankly quite a bad idea. I was, I was loose,

Jordan Harbinger: you know, but I was hitchhiking in Ukraine when I was 20.

I don't know if I have any room to be like, this is a terrible idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Wales: Exactly. Yeah. But it's probably, it's like, oh, okay. Like how will parents think it's okay for their kid to take an Uber? It's like, well, I get notified [01:07:00] when they get the Uber. Yeah. I can see. Oh, almost Tom. You know, it's great.

Jordan Harbinger: How do we take a trust inventory of our organization? I mean, this is, I could ask this question in a million different ways. Sure. How do we stop taking trust for granted? How do we rebuild trust in our organization? How do we rebuild trust across society? Pick whichever very hard question you would like to answer.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, I mean, I, I think that trust inventory in an organization is really, I, I just picked the easiest one, but like, you know, I think organizations that have had a trust crisis or you have a trust problem, this is really obvious, but I even think companies that don't, should actually take a moment and companies are always doing like away days and things like this to brainstorm.

Oh, do one on trust. Like, say like, actually we need to think about what are the things that we've done in the past that caused our customers, our partners, our employees to trust us, and where do we maybe fail? How can we improve those things? Because like, trust buys you a lot of space. [01:08:00] Let's say you, you've got a, a customer and you suddenly realize like, actually we're gonna deliver, but we're gonna deliver two days late.

If you have a good trust relationship, and you can go to them early and say like, we're seeing this problem emerging, and you know, they aren't gonna go mental and like it's all gonna be fine and they're gonna trust you and they're gonna like want a discount and whatever. But you can cope with that.

That's much better because you've built up that trust a relationship where people are like, oh yeah, well, like stuff happens, supply line problems, whatever. Like, oh, like half your staff quit because of whatever. You know, like, okay. Like, we'll, we'll work it out. We'll find a way through. And you know, that's just like good business.

Jordan Harbinger: The classic trust example I always go to is how the government kind of bungled it with COVID and masks and Oh yeah. You know, even if you talked about this in a couple of your, uh, media hits, which was like, don't buy masks. Why? Uh, because they don't work. Oh, okay. Then we won't. Wait a minute. You're getting masks for the hospital.

Well, I thought those didn't work. Well, actually, we just told you that because we didn't want you to go buy the masks when we needed them for the hospitals. Now by the way,

Jimmy Wales: they're mandatory and now it's like [01:09:00] they're mandatory.

Jordan Harbinger: So wait a minute. So then we're panic buying it. And then when they go, you don't really need to worry about this.

We're like, well, you said this other thing. We can't test anything that comes outta your

Jimmy Wales: mouth. 'cause the stakes were too high In the UK we um, I frankly think it costs the conservatives, the election, although they might've lost it anyway, but it was this very emotional, like this spectacular photography, spectacular sort of poignant.

When Prince Philip died, the queen, you know, her husband has died. She's in Westminster Abbey, the church for the funeral. And she's sitting literally all alone. No family? No, no, nobody. Because they had to protect the queen from COVID. Oh, okay. Fine. So that's very moving. It's like, oh, these are really tough times.

And everybody loved the queen. Like she's just no trouble at all. She was great. And then we emerges a little while later that the night before in number 10, Downing Street, which is like the equivalent of the White House, they were having a party and people were like, are you kidding me? Like at a time when none of us were supposed to be doing anything, you are having a party.

[01:10:00] The Queen's gotta like, that's just not okay.

Jordan Harbinger: You've seen the Gavin Newsom thing where he was at like French laundry up in Napa having a party with no mask on. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like the same day. The same, yeah. He had told us to all stay home and we were just like this fucking guy. Right? Yeah,

Jimmy Wales: yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, and, and it's exactly like, oh, wow. Like that piece of trust and, and you know, like the queen, like whatever your views are in the abstract on the monarchy, like people trusted the queen. Sure. You know, and so actually when she came out at the beginning, I mean, they, they try the queen out. Everybody listens and she says, this is a serious thing.

We've all gotta stay home. We will meet again. Brilliant. And everybody's like, all right, yeah, we're British. We're gonna do the right thing. We're all in this

Jordan Harbinger: together. Well, except for those people, they don't have to follow any of the rules

Jimmy Wales: except those people who are supposed to be in charge of the country.

Right. And not okay. Not okay at all. And so that kind of stuff. It's bad in the moment, but it's also corrosive in a, a longer term way. Definitely. You know, that you're suddenly like, and you know, if you've got a, a situation where people are like, well, they're all liars, they're all criminals, now I'm gonna vote.

And if you tell [01:11:00] me my guy, you know, committed a, a scam of some sort, I'm gonna be like, yeah, they're all like that. Yeah. And like, oh no, they're not all like that. Or they shouldn't all be like that. Your guy's worse though. And in fact, I think as voters gotta be pretty harsh on these things, you know, to go, like, actually you're in a position of leadership, you're in a position of trust like a teenager.

We should say to them, I expect you to live up to that trust. I'm gonna be really disappointed in you if you don't, you know,

Jordan Harbinger: well, we reciprocate the trust we get from our government and we do.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. That's problem. So there's, there's all kinds of things that can undermine that.

Jordan Harbinger: On Wikipedia, you can ban bad actors and people who don't assume good faith or acting in good faith, you can't really do that in society at large, I think.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. If you're talking about the problems of social media, we can get quite in a depressed mood of like, oh, it's so toxic, it's terrible. It's different podcast. Exactly. And if we think about this, like you go to McDonald's and you eat your food and you've got your tray and you've got your like bits of paper [01:12:00] and so on.

What does everybody do? They go over. They put the paper in the garbage can and they put the tray on top and they walk out and nothing bad would happen to you if you didn't do that. You'd be a jerk. You

Jordan Harbinger: know, in Europe they don't do that. You know how weird that you ever go to Europe and go to McDonald's?

You go clean up your stuff. Oh, it's not right. Oh yeah. And you go, I'm just gonna leave it here. And my friends are like, yeah, you leave it. And they clean it up. And I'm like, nah, no, no, no. I gotta throw it away. And I'm walking around looking for the trash can and it's not there because they take it and they put it in the one.

Oh, it's just a different system. That's interesting. Yeah. So you're, you're like, I can't just, I remember the first time I was like, you can't just leave your wrappers on the McDonald's table. You've, you've caveman. How dare you. This is defensive. And they're just like, no dude. Dude, you can have a beer from the machine.

Funny. You can leave your crap on the table. Those are the differences. Wow. Yeah.

Jimmy Wales: So it's a different system, different rules. But you know, it's not that Europeans aren't trustworthy in the same way, it's just Okay. Different rules. But like, you know, whenever you feel a bit of despair, you're like, you know, look at that guy in his MAGA hat, or look at that lefty.

Yeah. Hip blue hair. Guess what? They're all just gonna put their [01:13:00] stuff in the bin.

Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of bad faith, untrustworthy internet grifters, it's time to pay those bills. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by masterclass. I'm one of those people who always wants to be learning something.

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And honestly, if you wanna stand out in any marketplace as a hire, as a consultant, or just somebody who knows what they're talking about. Visibility is one of the best investments you can make. Whenever I post, I get dms from people I haven't talked to since 2014. It keeps you top of mind, which is everything when opportunities pop up, but consistency is the hard part.

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If you wanna see what my posts look like, find me on LinkedIn. If you want Quilt Mind to help you show up without sacrificing your sanity, message me or email Jordan, audience@quiltmind.com. That's Jordan audience at Q-U-I-L-T-M-I-N d.com. If you like this episode of the show, I [01:16:00] invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make this show possible.

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Now for the rest of my conversation with Jimmy Wales, speaking of left and right wing bias, do do you think Wikipedia has a left wing liberal bias? 'cause some people definitely accuse y'all of having that.

Jimmy Wales: I do, and I don't. So I think broadly we're in a good place on that and not always, like, I, I just think you know, what we have to say is like, neutrality is our policy and we should vigorously pursue that.

Now, some of the complaints we get are just not reasonable. Like I, there was a think tank or something that put out a thing saying, uh, something like, you know, Wikipedia's ban all conservative sources and it's like. [01:17:00] If you think the Wall Street Journal is a communist rag, then yeah, maybe so. But like we haven't banned all conspiracy.

That's nonsense at the same time, you know, it's sort of like, okay, let's grapple with it. This is always my approach is like, okay, if there's a complaint, let's figure it out. Like let's assume good faith in the complainer to start, right? And then you dig in a bit and you, and then you're like, oh, okay, actually nothing here.

And in other cases you're like, Ooh, hold on, let's chew on this a bit more.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. If they're complaining that you can't link to, what is it, like derma or something like that in Wikipedia, maybe we're not the problem.

Jimmy Wales: Well, and I, I do think like one of the issues is we do have a, a rise in low quality media.

I would say that the right, just objectively speaking has a few more of those that have gotten quite popular. And it's not about the left or right bias of that outlet. We can cope with that, but it's like, oh, what about the quality? Like, are you correcting errors? Are you running inflammatory stories that don't hold up?

I've been [01:18:00] saying like if any sort of right wing billionaires wanna start funding some kind of really high quality, thoughtful, intellectual, conservative media, I think that would be a good thing. Because the right deserves better than some of this crap that they're following. And you know, like let's have a real intellectual boom on the right.

Like why not? Like, that would be great.

Jordan Harbinger: A lot of the sources, I know people are gonna get upset about this, but a lot of the sources I see on the right that are crap are kind of like just click bait farms. Yeah. It's not even like, oh, you disagree with this opinion. Yeah, it's, you won't read something well reasoned on some of these, what is it called?

Like grays, gateway, pundit. It's like they're just making things up. It's not news, but with a right slant, it's just fake. So I just want, because we have listeners all across the political spectrum, I want people to be clear, we're not talking about the Wall Street Journal. Yeah,

Jimmy Wales: yeah. We're talking

Jordan Harbinger: about, and, and

Jimmy Wales: like, one of the, one of the, the messages that I want have for people all across the political spectrum is like.

Be [01:19:00] kind and thoughtful and come and help us. Be network Chuck, you know, and, uh, like, believe what you wanna believe. Do good work, you know, treat other people with respect. That's fantastic. Like, you'll make a great Wikipedia.

Jordan Harbinger: A lot of people think that you personally make millions or even billions from Wikipedia.

I would love to talk about that because I was hoping to have our next conversation on your yacht.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, no, no. So Wikipedia is a charity, so nonprofit organization. Uh, we are, you know, largely volunteer driven. Uh, we've got a few hundred employees, mostly more here than anywhere else, but a few dotted around the world.

Um. About 175 million ish budget, annual budget. So quite low compared to, you know, any other top five. Yeah. Dot com Yeah. Website. Sure. And, uh, yeah, and, and by the way, I am not an employee at all. I am a volunteer, so I make my money in other ways. And, uh, if people think that's great, they should buy my book.

That's, I [01:20:00] was gonna say, those

Jordan Harbinger: book dollars, man, keep 'em rolling in. But, um,

Jimmy Wales: but you know, broadly, you know, for me, so like one of the common questions I get, you know, from journalists is like, Ooh, how does it feel to not be a billionaire? And I'm like, I don't know. How does it feel to you? Like, how does it feel to all of us?

Like, that's not a thing. How does

Jordan Harbinger: it feel to not be a billionaire? I don't know. Ask literally everyone on the planet who's not. There's a few more options.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. So, you know, uh, yeah, no, we're, we're a funny fish. And actually, I, I think our business model, which is donations and not, we're not funded by a few wealthy donors.

Uh, we're not funded by governments. We're funded by the small donors. Got my five bucks a month rolling in. Yeah, it's massive and, and it's really important because it gives us intellectual independence. The community has intellectual independence. Nobody can lean on us and go, oh, right, well this article, you know, like I'm your biggest donor.

This article, I don't care for it. Then if we were financially under the thumb, that would be bad. You know, sometimes people say, ah, [01:21:00] you know, like, why don't you get, uh, you know, Google and Facebook and why don't those guys pay for wrong? What could go wrong? Yeah. And I'm like, yeah. I'm like, they should donate more.

Sure. But I don't think we, nobody wants that. Uh, because eh, just think that through like that might not be great. And it's not 'cause I'm anti, you know, you know, sure.

Jordan Harbinger: Have, uh, Vladimir Putin donate while you're at it? See if he wants to change any of the content of the articles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and you know,

Jimmy Wales: that's, I'm sure there are multiple authoritarians who'd be happy to open the checkbook for us.

And it's like,

Jordan Harbinger: no, I don't think so. So how does Wikipedia respond to government pressure? Is there, there's probably not from the United States, I would assume. Mostly not recently. Mostly not. Tell me, tell me more. You know,

Jimmy Wales: I, we got this really weird letter from the DC interim district attorney, but he didn't get the permanent job.

That's sort of the end of that, I guess. Yeah, I guess, uh, like really asking a lot of pointed questions that I felt were deeply inappropriate in a society with the First Amendment. Like, that's not a thing, that you're the government, you're not allowed to do that. This is [01:22:00] where I said like, it's great that we've got staff, um, who actually run things in a very calm and sensible way.

'cause back in the day I would've just written, you know, go fuck yourself. Like, you know, and that's not the best thing to do. Right. On legal letterhead? No. Yeah, on legal letterhead, what we did was we, we just responded like, we're like, okay, let's assume good faith. We'll just answer your questions. It's like, yeah.

You know? Yes. As a matter of fact, we do allow foreigners to edit Wikipedia. We were a global website. Like that's not a thing that you could be upset about. So anyway, we just try to do that around the world basically. Yes. We've been blocked in China for quite a long time now. We were blocked in Turkey for about three years, and we fought that.

The courts in Turkey until we won at the Supreme Court in Turkey, which I'm quite proud of. That's actually un shocking. And we didn't compromise one spec on Wikipedia. Wow. We don't censor their content to satisfy governments. And we were very fortunate. So actually this is one of the areas like, so a lot of internet companies have [01:23:00] been, some are better than others in various, you know, you get down to the details, they're better or or worse, but you know, generally they cave in quite quickly.

Even Elon Musk proponent of free speech just caved into censorship in various places. Sure. And I think they thought we would, but we're like, actually we're principled and no, we're not. And in fact, what's interesting about our business model, a lot of money from small donors who really believe in, we competing, believe in the ideas that I'm putting forward about the fundamental human right to access knowledge and to participate in dialogue and discourse about the facts of the world.

Our donors would probably punish us quite hard. Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: for sure. If you changed stuff to go in China. Actually, yeah. I'm out

Jimmy Wales: like, great news. We've decided to go into China and we've allowed like a Chinese university to take over Chinese Wikipedia and they will handle making sure the content is legal In China.

People would say, oh my God, I am so disappointed. Like that is so out of character that's so wrong. This goes back to our thing about [01:24:00] when should you take a political position? In our case, like that's when we'll take, like we don't censor Wikipedia. We're not going to, and you know, it's actually getting to be more complicated because all around the world we're seeing the rise of more legislation that is, you can tell the people writing it, their mental model is Facebook or Twitter or whatever.

They don't really understand how Wikipedia works, and so they want to impose duties on the organization to do the content moderation and things like that. I'm like, well, we don't do that. Like our community does that. In fact, if you forced us to have to do that, we would be undermining our volunteer community.

Like, it's not gonna work. It's a bad idea. And, you know, other things, you know, like restrictions that would require us to identify users and things like that. Gather data we don't gather now. Like basically, you know, I, I do try to be diplomatic a bit and I'm also like, you know what? We didn't do that in China.

We didn't do that in Turkey. We're not gonna do it in [01:25:00] your country either. So, yeah, yeah. You know, take us as we are.

Jordan Harbinger: I've got a friend who's an editor. From Iran, and this person is anonymous, which is not, and they use A VPN and they, they think they were blocked for a while and they had to be like, Hey, the reason I'm using this is because if I get caught doing this, I'm going to jail.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, no, it's legit. And I like, that's, uh, you know, user privacy is massively important.

Jordan Harbinger: I assume Wikipedia's blocked in Iran. No, no. I'm very surprised about that. So here,

Jimmy Wales: here's a, here's a funny thing that that happened. So we used to be not encrypted, and now we're encrypted. So just for most people, they may not know what that means.

So like if you visit a website and it's HTTP, then that's in the clear. Anybody spying on your connection can see what you're reading and all of that. H-T-T-B-S like when you go to your bank, they can see that you're talking to us, but you can't see which page you're reading or what the content is. So when we moved to HT PS many years ago now, we thought this is gonna be interesting because at the time, a lot of countries were, they were often filtering [01:26:00] out political opposition and things like that.

So there was a lot of that going on. I was like, well, okay, when we do this, we should expect we're gonna get blocked in a lot of countries around the world. No, we didn't. And I think what it came down to is because they could no longer filter certain pages, they had a decision to make. You can block all of Wikipedia, or you can have all of Wikipedia.

And a lot of 'em are like, I guess we'll just have Wikipedia then. Like, 'cause they know we're not radical, we're not whatever. But that's really important. 'cause it does mean like if you are in Iran and you have questions about human sexuality and you wanna read about it like you need privacy. Mm-hmm. Like you need to be able to do that anonymously.

It's really important that you can do that. And you know, I think what they decided was like, actually Wikipedia is so useful. Whatever. Can't control everything. That's interesting. And that's

Jordan Harbinger: great news. Where is Wikipedia blocked? China. China North Korea probably. Well, I

Jimmy Wales: always joke about North Korea is like the one guy with a computer can look at anything he wants.

Right. You know, so, right. Uh, they've got a broader like, yeah, so [01:27:00] I, I wouldn't say where Eritrea probably it's

Jordan Harbinger: blocked, I would imagine.

Jimmy Wales: I don't think so. I don't know really.

Jordan Harbinger: That would surprise me if they were open there. So just China?

Jimmy Wales: Just China

Jordan Harbinger: at the moment. The end, yeah. Wow.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah. Wow. We've had, you know, we've had various short term blocks and things like that we've dealt with over the years, but you know, that's the only one that's really right now and Wow.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We're the servers all

Jimmy Wales: over the place? Uh, yeah. Kind of all over. I mean, but fundamentally in the us but we do have caching, servers and things because Yeah, tn you gotta deliver or CDN, like the speed of light, uh, to go all the way around the world is like a half a second. So, which is surprising, but it's true.

For me, it was surprising. It's that slow. I didn't realize that, but

Jordan Harbinger: I just thought it Well, yeah. If you're

Jimmy Wales: loading a webpage, that's meaningful. And so we need to like stage content near people. Yeah. But we have to be very thoughtful about where those servers are, they in safe places and so on. Yeah, I

Jordan Harbinger: was curious about that because what you, I mean, it would be crazy if you just never know if they're, even if they're in the United States, hey, we're shutting this down until the DOJ investigates that all these are, uh, compliant with.

Yeah. I, I,

Jimmy Wales: [01:28:00] I've not in the past worried much about that these days. I think you have to at least do a little bit of contingency planning. Yeah. And think these things, things are, I don't there's any imminent threat, but, uh, crazy times.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Crazy times. Exactly. What do you think are the incoming challenges for truth for sourcing news and information from AI generated content?

Because Sure. Yeah. Before you'd see a photo on Twitter. It would be like, look what Israel did. And then somebody would be like, three days later, this is a photo from the Syrian Civil Wars. Of course not like, but now it's like you could put Israeli flags and Israeli soldiers and people that look like real Israelis in there and it's just fake.

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, no. So I think, uh, this is a problem. We've been fortunate that people are widely aware these days that like just seeing a photo. Actually I think it was a really important and positive moment. There was a very famous, uh, photo of Pope Francis wearing an expensive puffer jacket and it went viral and it got a lot of news coverage.

Because [01:29:00] it's like obviously fake, like this is, Pope Francis was quite famously, he didn't take advantage of any of the luxury, like he lived in a dorm room and that sort of thing. Like that he would be, it wouldn't be my first choice of a pope who goes in for the grandiosity of the office. Right? But people knew that and that they're like, oh wow.

Like it really looks real. And that's important that people should know. Like just because you see something floating across social media, that doesn't mean it's true. And I hope it's actually pushing people in the direction of saying, actually I do care about old school journalism. Like I wanna know where that photo came from.

Is it from a trustworthy news organization? If it's from Reuters, that's one thing. If it just rocked up in my Twitter feed, that's completely different. My little personal story about this was, I saw you remember there was a dam in the Ukraine. War a dam in Ukraine, which got, uh, blown up and flooded like a huge portion of the country.

This was a few years ago. Yeah, a few years ago. And people [01:30:00] have been worried for, uh, some time that this 'cause it, it's like a major piece of infrastructure there. And then I was actually in the, in the US at my mom's house and uh, it's late at night and I just saw on social media, I saw this little short video of like drone footage of water gushing through the dam.

And they're like, oh my God, the dam's been blown. And I was like, eh, has it because it's not on the BB, C, it's not on CN, it's not on Reuters. It's no, it's not in the news. And you know, I said like, this could be fake for all we know. And then somebody goes, oh no, look, look, you can see the water flowing. Like you can't do that with ai.

And I'm like, well, I mean, this is a few years ago by today. I think everybody would go, well, of course you can fake water flow with ai. Like, anyway, as it turned out, I didn't believe it until the next morning. And then I got up and it was in all the news everywhere because Oh wow. Journalists had checked it and dah, dah, dah, dah.

And I'm like. Okay. I'm proud of myself in this case. I didn't jump to a conclusion. Turns out it was true, but I was waiting to check. And I think that's what a lot of us should do. Particularly, you know, when we [01:31:00] live in an era of social media pylons that can be just ridiculous and toxic. Like, just don't believe it.

Just like go slow down a bit.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you worry about people relying on things like chat GPT and its attendant hallucinations instead of Yeah,

Jimmy Wales: I mean somewhat. Uh, again, I think people are aware, but I think they need to be aware that, you know, AI hallucinates a lot and there was a lot of hype just before the launch of chat to PT five, the most recent version that, you know, like it was gonna be a lot better.

It's a little better, you know, but it still gets things wrong. And it certainly, when we look at it from the Wikipedia point of view, it's like if you wanna write about, uh, something obscure and you ask Chad Bt about it, the chances of hallucination are much higher than if you write about something famous, like ask it, you know, write a Wikipedia entry about the Eiffel Tower.

It's probably gonna have some mistakes, but it's gonna be pretty much passable asking to write about somebody who is a contestant on Philippines version of American Idol in [01:32:00] 2003. It's gonna make stuff up. Uh, it's gonna get it all wrong. It, it has, I mean, one of the first things I'd be working on if I were them is to, to have, it's like train it to go, like, I don't know, like, yeah.

Beats me. Like, why are you asking me such an obscure question? Yeah, I can make something up for you. You know, like, let's be a little more cautious about it. It's true, but we know that we can't really use it to write Wikipedia entries or to even help that much. Although there are areas where we are looking at okay, like, yeah, are there things it could do that would be useful to us?

So this summer I was talking to a French Wikipedian, long time community member and she said, oh yeah, I don't have time to edit much anymore. But my hobby is, I find broken links like a dead link. It's on 4 0 4, the website's moved, or something like that in French Wikipedia on old pages. Haven't edited a long time.

I see what was that link supporting? And then I go and I search and I find a new source and I add that. I said, oh, but do you think what? What if you had a tool? So finding a dead link, you don't need AI for that. You just, [01:33:00] the link is dead, right? So you find a dead link and then it, it could look at the article, see what the sentence before was, what was being supported by that.

Then it could go and read a bunch of sources, find something that looks like it's it, and make a suggestion to you. Like it could find two or three sources from known good quality sources. And then all you gotta do is click on it and confirm that it's right. She's like, oh wow. That would be like, that would speed up my work quite a bit.

And I'm like, yeah, I think that would work. I think an AI could do that. 'cause it's just gotta do like a very simple task and because it's only gonna make a suggestion. If it gets it wrong, that's fine. Like you're still gonna do it. It's just like what you are gonna do anyway, which is click on a bunch of sources and read them, it filters through and finds the most likely ones.

Mm-hmm. And then you go and read those. Right. And it's like, great. So like, I don't think we should be afraid of that kind of technology and be like, ah, it all sucks and it's terrible. Mm-hmm. It's like, no, let's use it appropriately. Unlike say Wikipedia, where they're trying to write the encyclopedia from scratch using.

Yeah. That's not gonna be great.

Jordan Harbinger: What's your favorite article on [01:34:00] Wikipedia?

Jimmy Wales: One of the ones that I've always found interesting and amusing is there's an article in Wikipedia called Inherently Funny Words.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm familiar with the starter with this piece. Yeah.

Jimmy Wales: My great, the great story about it is there was a moment in time when it almost got deleted because it had become kind of a dumping ground in the early days.

Like people just like go by and just add some word. They thought it sounded funny. Mm-hmm. No sources and all of that. And so somebody's like, oh, this is nonsense. Like people are just writing random words and that's not, that's not, and and so it, they nominated for deletion. Then we have a whole process.

Somebody's like, wait, wait, wait. Hold on a second. This is actually a legitimate concept, right in the theory of humor and a lot of famous comedians and humorists have talked about it and like they went through and like rigorously sourced it all and uh, it became quite a good article. Yeah. The only real casualty, this, there used to be a picture, it was a cow.

With horns, like strapped to its head with a rope and it was just like a funny picture. And then the caption was very dry humor, [01:35:00] it just said, according to some cow, is an inherently funny word. I don't know why I think that's so funny, but I loved it. And, uh, it had to go 'cause there was no source. Could you remember any inherently

Jordan Harbinger: funny words?

I'm trying to think of one right now that's, um, appropriate for the show and I can't Badger. Badger. Yeah, that is kind of a, there's a,

Jimmy Wales: I mean, I, it didn't really work. You smiled a little, but Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: But like, I was thinking more along the lines of like, bedazzled, you know, that's an, that's, that's, yeah, yeah. No, I

Jimmy Wales: think inherently funny.

So the, the part of the theory is like, words with a g like yogurt are funnier than other words without a G. The theater for comedians is like, you've written this great joke. If the punchline is a inherently funny word, it just hits harder somehow.

Jordan Harbinger: We'll have to link to that article in the show notes and people can Oh yeah, definitely.

Find me some examples of funny words. I know we're out of time. You've helped create something that impacts humanity to a large, with pretty decent degree. I mean, that's, you know, yeah. Good flex, like, yeah. What advice do you have for people, maybe especially young people who want to make some sort of similar impact [01:36:00] in their lives somehow?

Jimmy Wales: Yeah, I mean, I, I think I have a few bits of advice and, and most of them are quite standard, so I'm just repeating cliches, but I actually believe them. So one is just get started, you know, so read up on the lean startup methodology. I'm not necessarily endorsing every aspect of that, but like the idea is like get to minimum viable product and that doesn't necessarily mean you're making a product, whatever it is, right?

But just like test like early, like get out there doing it and find out is it even remotely gonna work? Is it even helpful? Are people interested at all? Because there's a big, you know, problem with. Entrepreneurs is the term I've heard, like a wannabe entrepreneur who basically spends their life writing and rewriting long business plans.

And it's like, yeah, great. Maybe you do need a business plan, maybe you don't. But if that's all you're doing, you're never gonna find out if it's gonna work or not. So you just kind of have to take a shot and and go. And you know, the next five years I read this when I was a kid and I was like, it was the most profound thing I had ever read in my [01:37:00] life.

And I still come back to my life. Like the next five years will go by no matter what you do. That's kind of interesting, right to say like, oh, okay, so you might as well do the thing because you're not gonna stop the progress of time and you've only got so long. So just get started. And you know what, if it doesn't work out.

You can still be proud. Like I tried something and actually this is one of the great strengths of Silicon Valley. In a lot of cultures it's a lot harder for people 'cause it's like, well if I try something and it fails, I'm gonna have this black mark on me. I'm not gonna be able to, whatever. I've got the shame my family's gonna.

Whereas here people are like, oh that was cool. Like you tried that. It didn't work. Yeah, whatever. Most things don't work, you know? That's true. Yeah. At least you tried it. You know, like that's better than, you know. You kept your job, you hated in a bank and, and you wrote business plans for five years.

Jordan Harbinger: This is one of the few places I think on earth where you could lose millions of dollars of some of someone else's money and they go, well we gave it a shot.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: That's great. Thanks for coming in. Great. And thank you for coming in. This has been a really fun conversation. Yeah, we [01:38:00] gave, give it a shot. Hopefully the podcast

Jimmy Wales: is entertaining. We'll see how it goes. We'll see how it goes. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Thank you. What happens when the only way to survive is to lie so well, you forget who you really are.

FBI veteran Scott Payne went undercover with one of the most dangerous biker gangs in the country and almost didn't make it out.

JHS Trailer: This is the way I was trained and this is what I think. Anytime you or something that you're not pretend to be something that's opposite of you for a long period of time, especially in deep cover.

Generally one or two things is gonna happen. You're either gonna slip up and they're gonna catch you or you're gonna become it because there's so many horror stories and undercovers, it sucks that the same mistakes are being made today that were being made in the eighties. You got a small department, you got somebody that's running the undercover, but that person is also the case agent who is going to get promoted if the case succeeds.

I'm not saying people are gonna do the wrong thing, it's just a bad foundation, I guess. People is kind of my business, [01:39:00] even as an investigator. At the end of the day, you need to be able to sit down with somebody and have a conversation with 'em and gather in intelligence, get information, because if all else fails and computers shut down and phones, that's great.

It's all good stuff, but it's all human intelligence and you just need to be able to talk to people. You gotta be believable. And this is where a lot of people think about undercover and when I'm out training and speaking, I mean, I'll ask, they're like, what do you think undercover is? That's, some people say acting.

I go, okay, what else you think is. Lying it pretend to be something you're not. The true definition of undercover work is you're forming relationships that you're most likely gonna betray. That sucks if you look at it that way, but you need to be able to figure out a way. You're gonna do it and rationalize it in your mind so it doesn't have an adverse impact on you.

Jordan Harbinger: Go inside basement strip searches, a brotherhood built on betrayal and the psychological damage that still lingers on episode 1120 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Big thanks to Jimmy Wales, a guy who helped build something that has [01:40:00] shaped how billions of people learn, argue, collaborate, and sometimes rage.

Edit one another and look, whether you're a student being told, Hey, Wikipedia is not a source. Or somebody whose bio page was once a war zone high, yes, been there. Wikipedia is one of the last standing examples that trust, openness, and transparency can actually work at scale. If you wanna rebuild trust in your organization, your community, or even just your household.

Take a page from Jimmy's playbook. Assume good faith, be radically transparent and call balls and strikes even when they land right on your toes. You'd be amazed how fast this compounds into credibility. And for those of you wondering how to make an impact like Jimmy's, you don't have to found the next world encyclopedia.

Just start by solving a real problem. Obsess over quality and collaborate like your idea. Depends on strangers showing up and doing the right thing, because it probably will like to. All things discussed will always be in the show notes, transcripts in the usual place. And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with somebody who still thinks anyone can edit.

It means no one checks anything. Remember, advertisers deals, discount codes, and [01:41:00] ways to support the show are of course also on the website at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Our newsletter wee bit wiser. It's specific, it's practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships, and it's only two minutes of reading per week.

We promise what depends on how slow you read. But if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. Test me. It's a great companion to the show. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at Six Minute Networking dot com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and this show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others or by drinking a ton of caffeine, which I have done today. If you can't tell, the fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what [01:42:00] you learn, and we'll see you next time.