671: Jimmy Wales (Founder of Wikipedia) - To Get Trust Give Trust, Why Nupedia Failed, Assuming Good Faith, Walking the Walk, Transparency vs. Sharing Everything, Curiosity as the Ultimate Love Language, and Attracting Trustworthy People

24:51Yeah, I want you to do that. And I trust you, but you got to do it the right way. Show me that I can trust you. And then if, you know, whatever they go out and they say, well, yeah, I just, I'm telling a story from my, when I was a teen, actually said to my parents, It's my friends are going to go and see this movie and it doesn't get out till 1030. And I know my curfew is 10, but can I stay out? They're like, yeah, yeah, you know, just come home. And believe me, I came home right on sharp because I'm like, this is my chance, right? To actually nail this and stay out till 1030. And it's not going to be a big deal next time.

25:29Brilliant. And then other kids are just like, yeah, well, my parents love 10 o 'clock curfew, you know, F them. and they're like, I'm going to stay up to midnight and see what they can do about it. Well, they can do a lot about it, right? And they don't trust you then. And so that kind of thing of like any family situation, probably their parents didn't say, I trust you. The parents was probably like on their case the whole time. Anytime you can just go, you know what? I want you to live up to it. I think you can do it. I trust you. You're going to do the right thing. Make me proud. You're a dad of three daughters, correct?

26:01That's right. Yeah. So I'm with you as also a dad of daughters that I lead with trust. I openly use that exact phrase. I lead with trust. I trust you. I trust you. Now, all of them have different personalities in different ways that they push the limits, right? I'm sure the same with your three. Just because they're related to you doesn't mean they're going to be all the same. In fact, they're like the opposite in some cases. So how do you handle it when you lead with trust, you give trust, and they break it? and they do something to go against it. This is, to me, I think one of the hardest parts of being a dad is you lead with it, you give it, and then it's broken.

26:40It's really, really tough. How do you manage that? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things to look at actually in that question is one, how do you manage it as the parent? But also, what advice would I give to a teenager in that situation? How do they manage it? They've done the thing, they broke the trust, right? Presumably, there's going to be consequences for that. How should they think about rebuilding the trust? Most of it's really basic stuff. I think as a parent, hopefully, you've outlined a reasonable set of parameters. And so you're not saying, you know what? You're 16 years old.

27:17Your curfew is 5 p.m., and you can't call your friends. No, you create a draconian household, then clearly you're going to have a lot of problems. But you've got reasonable rules. and reasonable privileges, and there will be levers to pull and things like that. And to say, you know what, next time, the answer is going to be no. You violated my trust. You went out with your friends. You came home drunk, right? And so there's going to be a period of time when you tell me you're going to go out with your friends, and I'm like, I don't want you coming home drunk. Maybe I'm just not going to let you go.

27:50Like, maybe that's just not okay. You've disappointed me. That's actually the most terrifying and powerful word that a dad can say is, I'm disappointed here. I trusted you and you didn't live up to it. And that's, none of this is one-off stuff, right? This has to do with building a culture at home, building a family life that's healthy. That's a lot of different pieces. I've got advice for everybody on it, but I'm not an expert. Like any other dad, I'm just trying to get through life like everybody, trying to have a good family. And then for the teen, I think one of the things to tie this back to the book, we've got on this great side conversation about relationships and parenting.

28:25But like Francis Fry is a Harvard professor who had a huge job at Uber for a while when they had an enormous crisis of trust. Nobody trusted them. The drivers didn't trust them. Customers were losing trust. Regulators definitely didn't have trust. And one of the things she says is that people say, like, it's a common kind of saying is, once you've broken trust, that's it. You can never get it back. And that sounds plausible to us, right? Oh, like, yeah. But no, is it really true? No, it's actually not true. She thinks companies can rebuild trust faster than you think. In relationships, obviously, it depends on the context.

29:03You know, if there's been infidelity in a marriage, maybe getting back to trust is really hard and impossible. I don't know. Well, like every situation is different. But in many, many cases, and I think with a teenager who's broken a rule, done something they shouldn't have done, they can rebuild trust pretty quickly. And our job is to let them rebuild that trust. And so if they like are genuinely say, you know what? I screwed this up. Here's why. Here's what happened. Here's what I'm going to do differently next time. And then, you know, at the end of the book, we've got the sort of secret eighth rule, which is we call it the meta rule.

29:42But the A rule is basically and really do it. Right. The rules of trust aren't just a lot of good words. You actually have to walk the walk. And so if you say, you know what, I screwed up. You own that. We screwed up. We didn't do it right. Here's the things we're changing. Right. If it's just a bullshit press announcement and you go back to being the same as you were before, or you've not actually, you're not going to rebuild trust. But if you walk the walk, people will see that. And they'll be like, you know what? They really screwed that up, but they saw that it was a bad move and they changed a lot in the company.

30:17Sometimes change the CEO, whatever you have to do, you know? And that's okay then, like everything is fine. So in the Airbnb example, we just talked about this sort of incident where really early in the history of Airbnb, they had someone rented out their apartment and they came home and it was absolutely trashed. And Airbnb handled it very badly. You know, they sort of got bad advice. They were stonewalling, didn't quite answer. This is old-fashioned PR advice used to be, it's going to blow over. Don't say anything. You'll make the story bigger. In this era, that's often the wrong advice. Not saying anything just means it goes viral and everybody goes crazy because you've done this thing and you're not explaining yourself.

30:59So they just sort of like, that's it. We're going to, you know, we're going to rip off the bandaid. They said, look, we screwed this up. And they did a lot. They did a lot of real things. They started requiring ID from the people who are renting their apartments out. Seems obvious now. Somebody should know who this person is. You're not an anonymous person who comes and stays in my house. I need to trust you. One way I can trust you is, you know, the indemnity, the insurance, basically, for the owners. So that, yeah, like if somebody comes in and completely trashes your house, there's a substantial insurance policy to sort you out.

31:31Okay, that's important because if it's on me, I'm definitely not letting anybody rent my house. Like, that's crazy. So it's that kind of stuff. And they walk the walk. Obviously, Airbnb is massively successful. And like any big company, I'm sure somebody out there is going to be, you know, down in the comments saying, wow, but they did this terrible thing or whatever mistakes they made. But broadly, that story is super valid that you can rebuild trust, but you've got to really do the things. I feel like we can appreciate people who take ownership, especially when something goes wrong or when they've made a mistake.

32:05It's a big deal for leaders too. So this is a show about leaders and leadership. And all of us are humans and all of us are going to make mistakes. breaks, I think the key learning here is how are you going to choose to respond when you do? Now, hopefully you're not lying intentionally, but maybe even if you do or you do something else that breaks trust, how are you going to choose to respond is a big deal. I don't expect perfection. I want to give people second chance. I do. And we want them to when we unfortunately mess up. now I think that's what it's all about from a leadership perspective is transparency which you write about in the book that's rule number seven and making sure that you're not leaving people in the dark sports is my background my kids play sports and when I think about the biggest difference between the coaches they've played for and I've played for that have done really well that I think the girls respond well to that's one of the biggest one is rule number seven is the ones that are super secretive and are really poor communicators and don't let anyone know what's happening until like the second before the game starting.

33:14Everyone just up in arms. What's happening? We don't know. I don't know. And the results end up being worse versus the coaches who are over communicators and always let everyone know where they stand and what's happening and what's the plan. Again, this seems so basic as I'm saying it out loud, by the way, Jimmy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that doesn't seem that hard to be transparent and to lay it all out there. and to be a good communicator. Can you talk to me more about that rule number seven and being transparent and how that builds? I mean, you talk about Harry Truman and Eisenhower and how that goes in the book, but why is transparency so important?

33:50If people can see your workings, they can see what you're doing and how it works and all of that, it just gives them an assurance in the process. I mean, one of the things in the world of software is that open source software is incredibly transparent. Like you can download the source code and you can go through it line by line. And even if you don't download it and go through it line by line, which by the way, most people don't because they don't know how or like who's got the time. But the fact that it is there, you know that other programmers can go through it. Like if there's a problem, you can figure it out.

34:26And by and large, that has given rise to like quite a lot of trust. I mean, the whole internet's sort of based fundamentally on open source software. And so that's really, really a powerful technique in that field and obviously in many, many others. It's a really interesting thing because in some companies, in some situations, confidential information is also very important. So, you know, transparency doesn't mean you're being suspicious and untrustworthy if you don't tell us absolutely every single thing about every single thing, because that's not necessary and it's not right. So it's about judgment calls.

35:04What can we share? What would be helpful for us to share so that people can trust the whole process and all of that? That's huge. So, for example, like, let's say you've got a hiring process and you've got a certain set of criteria you're going to go by and blah, blah, blah, all this. Well, if you are using that process, you can't obviously sort of on the internal company network share the private notes and evaluations of every single candidate. That just wouldn't be appropriate. You know, somebody writes, you know what, actually bad attitude, whatever, like, you don't need to share all that. What do you need to share?

35:42You need to share that process. You need to say, well, here's the way we're making the decisions. Here's the things we're looking at. And then people can go, okay, I get it. Because otherwise it's just like, I don't know, they're hiring someone new and then bam, somebody new's here. I don't know how they got here. I don't know what choices were made. Let's pull back in your story. Had that hire worked and not blown everything up, you might've gone out to everybody and said, you know what? This guy's fantastic. And guess what? He has less experience than who we thought we were going to get. but we thought these sort of attributes overcomes that.

36:15And then people, they're like, okay, great. I understand that. Otherwise, if you were secretive, you're like, oh, it's a little embarrassing that he's not that experienced. So let's not talk about his experience. Let's actually cover up that he's not that experienced. Then people are going to go, who's this guy? He has no experience, you know? So it's like that kind of thing. And again, all of this is pretty obvious, right? It's really, a lot of it's what I would call like kindergarten ethics. One of the chapters is your mother was right. The stuff you learned as a little kid about common decency and building trust is actually really important.

36:48It's actually correct. Let's go to maybe a leader of a company. And I want to go to rule number three, I believe. A strong, clear, positive purpose is essential for people to work together and make something wonderful. Again, these sound obvious, and yet there's still a giant need for a book like this because they don't happen. We know these things, but then why don't we execute on them? Why don't we do them? Why is it still so hard for people to execute on these things that seem fundamental? all. That's part of the motivation for the book is to put this back in conversation, to sort of have that open conversation to go, you know what, look, it's very easy when we look at the state of the world to be just downtrodden, cynical, don't trust anybody.

37:44There's so many bad actors out there. There's so much suspicion and hostility that the idea of giving somebody the benefit of the doubt, right, which we all think is probably the right answer in almost all cases, can get forgotten. And if we forget that, we end up in a really dark place. If you think people on the other side from you politically or people at your workplace or whatever it might be, if you think they're fundamentally just rotten people, then you're going to have a hard time listening to them. You're going to have a hard time understanding where they're coming from. You're going to have a a hard time just dealing with them in a successful manner, even for your own selfish reasons, right?

38:28You're not going to do the right things that make sense to people. That's a shame, and it hurts us all in society, right? How do we build a more prosperous society? How do we have successful entrepreneurs, successful businesses, successful people in jobs, instead of angry, unemployed people and industries failing and all of these kinds of things, if we can't sort of fundamentally come together and go, right, you know what? We're all in this together here on this little planet and we've got to get on with it and we better build a culture and a system that is about that getting things done in a positive way where we're lost so let's get practical for a second let's pick an actual person an avatar let's say this is a person who has been cheated on in a personal relationship and has had a boss who did not trust them and they didn't trust them.

39:22And let's say they had a friendship blow up because a friend lied to them. Right. So this is a rough combo here. Right. But it's real life. It's real life. Right. It happens. Yeah. This happens. That person, they look at this. They see the title of this episode is something to do with trust. And they say, I'm good. That's not how the world works for me. Maybe for Jimmy, not for me. But maybe they listen or maybe they give it just a shot. Right. What advice do you give to them? This person is down and out a bit, or at least they're not trusting because of life in a way has beat them up a bit. What practical advice do you give to that person to try to turn it around?

40:05A big part of it is, first of all, reminding people, you get into an elevator and nobody punches you. Nothing bad happens. People are basically decent. And you think about all the different things that people could do that's bad that they don't do when they don't do it because they're basically decent people. But those are just ideas to sort of remind you, like, hold on a second. Maybe there's better people out there. The other thing is, for some people, it's really hard to recover from these things. So if you've had a really bad work experience or a relationship experience, it's tough, right?

40:45And it's kind of hard to not draw the lesson of like, people suck. And yet, a lot of it's just like, okay, right, change the conversation, change the situation, right? If you work somewhere where your boss doesn't trust you and your coworkers are all backstabbing freaks and whatever it might be, it's time to change the channel. Just every night, you should be trying to find a better position, find a better job. And actually, your number one criteria in looking for that next position is going to be finding somebody who you think is a proper person to be your manager. Think of it as you're interviewing the company just as much as they're interviewing you.

41:25You really want to do that. The same with your friends. You know, if your friends suck, find some new friends, right? Now, I know that it's easy to say that in a very glib way, right? That's not really, for everybody, the most immediately helpful advice. but bedrock truth, that's what you're going to have to do, right? And how do you get there? It's like to say, you can be in a position in life where you're like, I actually, I'm ambitious in my career. I'd like to move up the ranks. I'd like to make more money. I want to have a house and a family and all that. And there's all these obstacles in my way.

41:58And my dumb ass friends just want to party every night. And it's really hard to break away from that, well, you know what? Get some different friends if you have to, right? And actually, frankly, what can often happen? This is along that give trust to get trust, right? You may be in a circle of friends who all are thinking the exact same things. They may be all thinking, you know what? This lifestyle isn't good. Like we're going out too much, partying, you know, we've got too many cynical people. Actually, let's try and change it. And how do you do that? That's going to depend on the circumstances.

42:32But a couple of things here. I love that. When you become known as a person who gives trust before it's earned, you seem to magically attract trustworthy people. It's kind of cool how it works. If you're trust willing, will you get burned every once in a while? Maybe. But you seem to attract the type of people that you want to be around. And one of the things I found, Jimmy, if maybe someone's down or you went through a rough stretch, I think it's from rule number Number two, we as humans, we are born to connect and collaborate with others. I'd say get out there in the world, rub shoulders, and be curious.

43:13I found curiosity is the ultimate love language. Asking people questions and being genuinely curious about their stories and learning about them and asking follow-up questions and listening, I found is a great way to just show love and to connect with people. And when you find yourself in the midst of a curiosity conversation where everyone's kind of asking and learning and they're head nodding and they're into it and they give you good body language, I don't know if there's anything better, man. That's human nature connecting. And that's rule number two in the seven rules of trust that I'd love you to hear hear a little bit more about how this is in our nature to connect and collaborate with others.

43:55It's quite easy and quite natural for people to fit into whatever culture is around them. And so, you know, we talk about formal cases of lynch mobs, right? Where people kind of go along with the mob because it's going in a certain way and they collaborate to do something terrible together. And so it's not automatically a good thing, but it's also an incredibly positive thing when it's put to the right purpose and you've got the right vibe and the right people and all of those things. So we naturally like to work together to build something good. And that can be almost anything, right? It can be in a social context, you know, even I wanted to be clear, I do like a party, right?

44:40I mean, when I was saying, talking about an example of frenzy party too much, right? I do like a party. And what is that? It's like, okay, we're all going to get together and we're going to have a great time. And so what are we going to do, right? We're going to have a couple of beers. We're going to joke. We're going to laugh. We're going to have some music, right? We're going to maybe have dinner and we'll have some conversation. We collaborate to build that experience together. None of us could do it on our own because let me tell you, a party with only yourself is not a party. And we all get that.

45:09And like, you can just say, okay, yeah, as humans, we're social and we like to be social. Yeah. One more, Jimmy, before we run, man, let's say you're meeting someone a bit earlier in their career, maybe a college grad, and they want to leave a positive dent in the world like you have done and are currently doing. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to that person? Yeah. And one of the things that I think is really important, and it's such a cliche, right, that you're almost embarrassed to say it out loud, but it's do what you love. Do something that you really care about.

45:48And, you know, oftentimes for young people, there is this struggle between here's the thing that I really want to be doing, and here's the thing that's going to make me some money. and both of those are legitimate goals right there's nothing wrong with saying i want to do the thing i love and i want to live a prosperous life and i want you know i and so my answer is like okay first of all work really hard to find a way to put those together uh look really hard for a way to have do what you love be make some money if it's about make some money it's like some money for what purpose so maybe what you need to do is go do that thing you know you're going to make some decent money, but you're going to have an early retirement goal.

46:30I always wanted to be, I'm going to make this up. Somebody says, actually, what would really make me happy in life is I want to be a first grade teacher, but I've also got this sort of opportunity to go and be a banker at a top bank and I can make a lot of money. Okay, right. And you think the banking thing will be fun? Nope, nope. I'm going to hate every minute. Okay. So I'll either go be a teacher. Like, don't worry about it. Like money's not everything. Go have a great life. Go be a first grade teacher. Or you kind of combine the two and you say, actually, I'm going to go off and do this banker thing.

47:03This is what my salary is going to be the first few years. I'm going to set a really clear goal and I'm going to be careful about lifestyle inflation, all of this. And at some point I'm going to say, thank you very much, bank. I got some kids waiting on me. You know, do that. Like you can do that. It's an amazing thing. Realistically, I think when you're young and you've got many different opportunities in life, really think about that passion piece. Because here's kind of the worst example. You go to work at a company, you're a top salesperson at the company and management level, and you get a new boss and he doesn't trust you, and he won't let you hire the great salesperson you just met.

47:42And if you said, yeah, but you know what? I'm making a lot of money here. and I don't want to give that up. I'm going to suck it up. I'm going to hate every second of it. You know what? Nah, forget that. Like, you're not going to be happy. And by the way, you're not going to be as successful, right? Chances are you're not actually going to make as much money doing that as you would if you went off and did something that you're really, really passionate about. Now, maybe first grade teacher isn't it, right? But if we're talking about young people, it could be, you know, all kinds of things. I really want to run a restaurant.

48:16Okay, run a restaurant. You might own a chain of restaurants, right? And it's going to be a hard slog those first three years. It's really hard to make money as a restaurateur, but you might be able to do it. And so give it a go. I think the passion part is really big because one of my friends, Brooke Kupps, says the way he defines passion is choosing extra work. If you don't really like the thing, you're not going to choose extra work. But when you do, you choose extra work all the time. What I get to do now is writing and speaking and talking with smart people like you and being able to chase my curiosity.

48:50I want to choose extra work literally every day because it's so cool. It's so fun. It's awesome. I know sometimes people do have to have a job and to provide and they may not love it. I get that. I'm a realist too. But trying to find something where you can have a love in the work, that's how you get excellent at it versus, this is a job that isn't cool with a non-trusting boss. I just don't think you can do that for long periods of time. You can do it for a little bit. Anybody can do anything for a little bit of time. And I think that's the focus of me to think about. Jimmy, man, I really appreciate this.

49:24The book, The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last. I really appreciate you being here, man. I encourage everybody to read. And I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Perfect.

49:43It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Jimmy Wales. A few takeaways from my notes. If you're trying to start something new, don't have too much structure. Get started and iterate as you go. With Wikipedia, they focused on movement, on getting after it, and then figuring it out as they went. They valued speed and they led with trust. That led to a lot of their early and continued success. Get started. Get moving. Iterate as you go.

50:26Then to get trust, give trust. Make the trust wager. Lead with trust. You do not have to earn my trust. You have it. Use these exact words with people you work with. I trust you. And then follow through. Your actions need to match your words. You do not have to earn my trust. You got it. And I found that living this way seems to attract the type of people that I want to be around. And then if you screw up, which we all do, own it. Apologize. Admit it. Address the issue and be transparent. Say what you did and what you plan to do to make things better. people are forgiving. We want to forgive you.

51:10But only if you take ownership, admit the mess up, and then make a commitment to fix it. That is how you rebuild trust after it's been broken. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message, trusting me, by telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Jimmy Wales. I think it'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that and you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and you subscribe to the show, rate it hopefully five stars, and you write a thoughtful review by doing all of that. You are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis.

51:49And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.

52:05you