“I’m a Pathological Optimist” - Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales' Life Lessons

0:01Jimmy Wales:That's our core purpose. It's a good purpose. It inspires people. It motivates people. But also, it helps us to make decisions in a way that is trustworthy. And I think that's true of all kinds of organizations. And it doesn't have to be a charitable purpose. Jimmy, welcome back to Giant Ideas. Last week, we talked a lot about Wikipedia, trust in the AI era. We'll talk this week more about you, but also trust more generally for our listeners and what people can learn. we ask every Giant Ideas guest the same question in part two, which is if you had to say there were three snapshots, photographs that would define your life and the wisdom you've accumulated, what would those photographs be?

0:40Jimmy Wales:Yeah, I mean, that's a fantastic and mind-boggling question. So, I mean, the one that immediately pops to mind, I'm not sure what any big, deep philosophical lessons there are, But I just remembered there was a time, it was several years ago now, probably nearly 20 years ago. And my mom came to visit and she brought a bunch of photos that she gathered from home. She's like, oh, here's some photos of you as a kid that I thought you might want to have. And I looked at one of them and there I was in a – I had a gray T-shirt on and sort of plaid or, you know, like checked shorts. I'm like, oh, OK, great.

1:23Jimmy Wales:And then I looked down at myself. I was wearing exactly the same outfit in my 40s, you know. And I was like, oh, wow. And then so since then, now I wear like flamboyant shirts. I've changed it. When did you switch to that? I was like, maybe I better not dress like a four-year-old anymore, you know. So that's a photo that had some impact on me in a positive way, I suppose. That's all half a joke. It's a true story, though. So I would say, you know, other photos, you know, I think about a lot of the, you know, every year we have our annual conference called Wikimania. We do it in a different city every year and there's a whole community process where different communities bid for it, like the Olympics or whatever.

2:08Jimmy Wales:I'm not really involved. I just sort of stay out of it all. But they tell me where it's going to be. And next year is in Paris. and last year was, I mean, this year, 2026, we'll be in Paris and last year we were in Nairobi. And every year we do a photo, like a massive group photo with everyone who's there. And they always make me go right in the front just because I'm the mascot, you know. And I think those photos are meaningful because these are the people, right, that make my life possible, that make Wikipedia possible, all of those things. and it's sort of fun because as we do it in a different place every year, we get an international crowd who come from all over, but always no matter where you are, of course you get more people from that local area.

2:55Jimmy Wales:And so when we were in Taipei, you saw a lot of Taiwanese people. In Nairobi, we had a lot more African people. I'm sure there'll be lots of Europeans in Paris and so on. And so that global nature of Wikipedia, so that's multiple photos, but I'll count it as one. 25 years of that? 25 years, yeah. Well, we didn't do the annual conference in the early days. I think we've had about 21 though. Amazing. 2021. What would your final photograph be? And then the final photograph, like that's a really tough one. You know, I mean I think I live in the countryside and, you know, like for me, like I live next to the River Thames and we kayak on the river And there's some pictures of me and I think of one in particular kayaking on the River Thames.

3:47Jimmy Wales:And that is also kind of defining for me about I love technology and I'm online way too much and so on. But like one of my favorite things is to be out there on the river with my phone nowhere near me. I mean, it's usually in my pocket because if my kayak sinks, I want to be able to call and get some help. But yeah, so like that for me is representative of something that I definitely believe in, you know, touch grass, that sort of thing. It's really important to balance in life. Dillig English countryside. Oh, yeah. Living. I have a maybe slightly left field one, but what is the reaction you get when you go to a dinner party and you say you're the founder of Wikipedia?

4:26Curious.

4:26Jimmy Wales:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm kind of a shy person, but it helps a lot with that because if I go to introduce myself and I just say, hi, I'm Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and generally the reaction is, wow. People are like, oh, amazing. That's what Kate Middleton said to me when I met her. Nice. Wow. You've written a very timely book about trust. What are the seven lessons of trust that you outlined in the book? And what do you think is the most important one for our listeners to learn from? Yeah, I always kind of refuse to answer all seven because I'm afraid I'm going to miss one and memorize them in order.

5:03We can do the one then.

5:04Jimmy Wales:We can do a few. Well, I think a lot of it – I already talked about transparency, be transparent, especially when you have something to hide. It's kind of the tagline there. I would say have a good purpose is really important. So in terms of building trust, having a purpose that defines what you do makes it easier for people to trust you because you are more predictable and people know what you're going to do. And so with Wikipedia, this, you know, imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's our core purpose. It's a good purpose.

5:47Jimmy Wales:It inspires people. It motivates people. But also it helps us to make decisions in a way that is trustworthy. So you sort of know, like, is Wikipedia likely to decide next week to put ads on the site? No. Like, that's not our purpose. Like, there's no reason that we would do that. Like, our purpose is not to raise as much money as possible. And I think that's true of all kinds of organizations. And it doesn't have to be a charitable purpose, right? But it has to be a good, something useful, something that is meaningful to people that they want to do and participate in and so forth. And so, you know, that, that one's quite good.

6:31Jimmy Wales:That's quite important. We'll be believers in the power of purpose at Giant Ventures. So, I mean, you could say it's having a set of values or principles that you're transparent about and then abiding by them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And abiding by them, actually, there's a hidden eighth rule in the book. because we struggled with exactly how many rules. Seven just sounded so much better. But we also realized the eighth one wasn't actually a rule, but more of like a meta rule, which is you actually have to do all the things, right? And so just saying a lot of lip service and putting a mission statement on the wall means nothing if you're not actually walking the walk.

7:09And I think that's really, really important. What makes certain people, I'm not talking about companies here, human beings more trustworthy and certain other ones less trustworthy?

7:18Jimmy Wales:Yeah, I mean, a lot of it's pretty obvious, right? We know in our personal lives, you know, if someone, we put trust in someone and they violate the trust, they lie to us or whatever, then we trust them less going forward. You know, some of it has to do with, like people are very forgiving of mistakes. If you own up to them and if you take responsibility, people will be like yeah okay that wasn't great uh but yeah here we are let's sort it out whereas you know dithering and and shifting and and kind of trying to hide your tracks and all of that yeah it's not good in fact that's one of the personality traits of some of the ai models that's really problematic you know it's like they never quite want to you know own up to the error they made they're just going to keep talking and get talk their way around it and um or they They apologize too quickly and they don't seem to mean it.

8:17Jimmy Wales:I mean, they can't really mean anything, I don't think. But so I think that, you know, some of those elements we definitely know really intuitively. I mean, one of the, you know, the things about trust is a lot of it isn't really sort of a mysterious science, right? It's pretty straightforward. You know, there's a framework that we use in the book, authenticity, empathy, logic, that when you dig into it, it's like, oh, OK, yeah, like all of those are pretty straightforward. Right. But that's like academic research to to sort of work out that framework. And, you know, so like empathy, like that.

8:59Jimmy Wales:So one example that might be a little less intuitive to people is give trust to get trust. And so with Wikipedia, way before I was thinking about writing a book on trust, I would say sometime in the first year or two, I put on my user page in Wikipedia, you can edit this page, my user page in Wikipedia. I trust you to do something useful. And actually people, when you give that expression of trust, people do live up to that. They're like, oh, okay, that's great, right? And I think, you know, as a parent of teenagers, I think this is really important. Parenting is just like you have to, if you extend trust to your teen and also do it in an explicit way to say, look, okay, you've asked to do this thing.

9:47Jimmy Wales:I'm going to trust you, right? But here's what I expect you to do. And in fact, if you deceive me or lie, you're going to lose these privileges. But I do trust you. And I want you to live up to that. and that sound that that description of wikipedia sounds like parenting on a metascale with you as the granddaddy or something i think that concept of give trust to get trust is so important as my biggest lesson about trust i used to work with someone who was a kind of had a very techno economic approach to life and he would say i trust then verify and i just thought it's just the worst approach and he didn't basically didn't trust anyone and therefore no one trusted him you have to be open and vulnerable basically don't you yeah yeah yeah and i i do think there's a there is an impression that I think a lot of people have about business that to be successful in business you have to be a ruthless backstabbing bastard and in my experience people are ruthless backstabbing bastards basically end up like sad and lonely and not successful and if young people go in thinking oh I've got to be a hard-ass schemer scammer whatever yeah people are going to be on to you pretty quickly and that's the end of that right and again it's like you know one of the things uh you know in the silicon valley culture is that uh like failure doesn't end your career and actually i've talked to entrepreneurs for example in korea uh young entrepreneurs in korea who were just like really saying it was emotionally very hard to be an entrepreneur because basically family members thought, why aren't you getting a job at a big company?

11:24Jimmy Wales:Like this is embarrassing and like, why would you do that? And it's so risky. And if you fail, no one's ever going to hire you and so on. And they may have had actually legitimate reasons to fear that if that was the culture. I don't know enough about how, you know, business culture in Korea is. Whereas in Silicon Valley, it's like, okay, somebody comes in for a job interview. it's like okay what have you been doing the last five years oh i i worked in a bank and i did this and that okay fine like not that interesting oh i i was at a startup and basically it spectacularly failed and here's what happened here's what i learned people like yeah great that's fine like actually that's much better right you've you've been in the wars and that's a good thing and so that um uh you know that element of things that is it's just hugely important i'd argue that trust is one of the main things that made Silicon Valley what it was.

12:15Jimmy Wales:It's such a high, it was, and maybe it's such a high trust culture and the pay it forward mentality is just a huge part of it. And I think maintaining that is hugely important. I mean, I think, you know, there is a reason why, you know, the term friend, what is it? Friend DNA? Yeah, friend. Friend NDA. Yeah, friend NDA, friend NDA. just like it's like a non-disclosure agreement that just basically says like you're my friend i'm going to trust you i'm going to tell you what we're working on it is private even though you might be in a position to use it in some way i trust you not to do that like that would not have come from a sort of top three law firm they don't they don't have that culture uh and for good reason in that context but i think that sort of thing where you just say actually expect people to be honorable, expect them to do the right thing.

13:09Jimmy Wales:And actually, this is one of the things that I do think a lot of young entrepreneurs need to absorb and to learn. Because I don't know how many people, you know, they've got some idea and they're like, well, I can't tell anybody this idea because they'll steal it. And I said, well, then you're never going to do anything, right? You can sit in the corner and think about your idea, but basically you need to start talking about your idea. and frankly nobody's going to steal it because probably your idea isn't that amazing it's just an idea like it's actually the execution and the and the real doing is what makes things happen um and you know so i mean i always talk about like the before wikipedia i had newpedia so newpedia was a predecessor same vision free encyclopedia and all of that but i didn't know about wiki and I didn't really know how to build an online community and so forth.

14:01Jimmy Wales:And so we set up this seven-stage review process to get anything published, which somebody pointed out to me recently. They're like, oh, it was the seven rules of mistrust. And I was like, oh, wow, that's actually, that is right. Because you had to fax in your CV to prove you were qualified and everything you wrote was going to be triple-checked by other, you know, before it would be published. It was sort of like, we don't trust you, we don't trust you. That's the whole feel of it. Very different from Wikipedia, like, oh, come and write. You know, like, great, let's get started. Let's do something together.

14:28Jimmy Wales:But also had I thought, and I did think this, I mean, I was in a real panic the first two years with Newpedia because I thought this is so obvious to have a free encyclopedia, like open source software, gather people to write it because it's just like software. Like you can work together on it, collaborate. There's going to be so many people trying to do this. And so I got started. Unfortunately, I didn't keep it quiet. I just tried to find people to help me, you know. But then two years later, like literally nobody was doing it, right? And switched to Wikipedia because it wasn't working and so on.

15:01Jimmy Wales:And so that's sort of like if you have an idea and you think, oh, my God, like if I tell anybody they're going to steal my idea and start doing it, probably they're not. They're probably just too busy doing their own thing or doesn't sound that great to them or whatever it might be. So that, you know, trusting people is hugely important. You've created one of the biggest systems of decentralized trust, and you wrote in your book that you think it's human nature to trust. Were you born with that view? What in your life gave you that, I think I agree with it, but that optimistic view on human nature?

15:32Jimmy Wales:Yeah, I mean, well, I always say I'm a pathological optimist, so I always think everything's great. So there is that. And the reason I talk about that is because I know it's not completely realistic. And we do have to think about, you know, not everybody is trustworthy, and sometimes you're going to get burned. But, you know, on the whole, it's a good bet. Like by and large, if you trust people, they will behave in a trustworthy manner. And, you know, it's good to talk to people about trust. I'm going to trust you and please do the right thing and so on. And so, yeah, part of it is just my upbringing, my family and all of that.

16:05Jimmy Wales:And, you know, actually one of the things when we turn to that more personal element, you know, obviously there are people who have a really hard time with trust because they've been raised in an abusive environment. and that sort of thing. And like people do get that, right? But they also get like, okay, if that's where you are in life, that's something you have to work on, right? It's actually very unhealthy. It actually isn't rational. It isn't doing you any favors. And you would be well served to get some therapy and to really think about it and to sort of do things to build trust because the cost of not trusting people is so high that you end up missing out on all kinds of amazing sort of great opportunities.

16:49And, you know, I mean, part of the reason that I have this attitude is that it's very

16:55Jimmy Wales:practical. And frankly, you know, when we look at social media, look at politics, you know, it's sort of very toxic out there. I mean, I would say worse than normal in the last few years. and if you spend too much time there you will just think wow most people are horrible and it's just like the whole world is toxic and humans are terrible and then you think no actually you know what you go around town you see people doing stuff basically nobody's stabbing each other and you know when you get in an elevator you don't think okay which one's gonna come at me first right i'm trapped in this little box with eight strangers there's gonna be blood you know now you think yeah we're in the elevator it's fine you know the elevator's stuck oh we're stuck in the elevator.

17:35Jimmy Wales:It's annoying, you know? And so we do get like that generally most everybody is perfectly trustworthy and nice and, uh, you know, happy to help and all of that. Well, that optimistic vision, I think neatly kind of encapsulates a lot about Wikipedia and it's one of, I think the microcosm of just the best of humanity. And so thank you for creating it. Yeah. Well, thanks. Yeah. It's been good fun. And thanks so much for joining us on Jot Ideas. It's been awesome.