The Tim Ferriss Show - #528: Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, on Homeschooling, Atheism, Understanding Financial Markets, Ayn Rand, Favorite Books, and More

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Starting point is 00:01:54 spelled as you would expect in proper English. Try You Need a Budget free for 34 days, no credit card required at youneedabudget.com slash Tim. And just to explain 34 days, that's because most people reconcile at the end of the month or 38 periods. So having a couple of days of cushion helps folks out. So 34 days with no credit card required at youneedabudget.com slash Tim. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end-all be-all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress.

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Starting point is 00:04:10 So check it out one more time. Helixsleep.com slash Tim. and run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is internet and technology entrepreneur Jimmy Wales. You can find him on Twitter at Jimmy underscore Wales. He is founder of the online

Starting point is 00:04:55 nonprofit encyclopedia Wikipedia and co-founder of the privately owned Wikia Inc., including its entertainment media brand fandom powered by Wikia. Will serves on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit charitable organization he established to operate Wikipedia. In 2019, Jimmy launched WT Social, a news-focused social network. In 2006, Jimmy was named to Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world for his role in creating Wikipedia. Jimmy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I've been looking forward to this. It's been many years before we hit record. Seems like 100 years, 99 of which you mentioned are the last 12 months since we last saw each other.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Yeah, it's been a long time. And it's fun to reconnect. And it also gave me an excuse to do what would seem very strange with anyone I know on some level, which is putting together a dossier of information, like some Eastern German intelligence officer in some type of film. But I learned a lot, and I also have a whole slew of questions to ask. And I thought we would begin with the beginning and would love it if you could just take a little bit of time to describe where you grew up and what your family and education looked like in the early days, if you wouldn't mind starting there. I grew up, I was born and grew up in the deep south in Alabama. But I was in Huntsville,

Starting point is 00:06:28 Alabama, which is a little bit different from what your typical stereotype of Alabama is in that after World War Two, they brought all the German rocket scientists over, put them in Huntsville to work on the space program. And they built the space program, all of the real science aspects of it were built there in Huntsville. So it was a high tech town. There was a point in time, I remember they used to brag about locally, when Huntsville had the highest per capita number of PhDs in the country. So they brought all these amazing people in to work on the space program. And what that meant for me as a kid growing up, we lived close enough to where they tested

Starting point is 00:07:07 the Saturn V rockets that sometimes the windows would rattle in the house when they were testing the rocket. So that was kind of exciting. And it was a big deal. And basically what it meant was that the space program, in particular, the scientists were like our hometown sports team. All the kids were very much into it and so forth. And therefore, it made it natural for me to be into computers and technology later on as that began to unfold. What did your parents spend their time doing,

Starting point is 00:07:36 if you could paint a picture? So my dad was a grocery store manager for many years, managed the local grocery stores. And my mother was a school teacher. And in fact, I attended a school that my mother and my grandmother set up, which was a very unusual one-room schoolhouse. So I grew up like Abraham Lincoln. There were four kids in my class. So therefore, because it was so small, there were four kids in my class, but there were four grades together at a time. So we had first through fourth grade and then fifth through eighth grade in two rooms. But what that meant was it was a very flexible and unstructured kind of education. It wasn't everybody line up and sit in rows in the same kind of way. I've compared it to Montessori, but it was not technically speaking a Montessori

Starting point is 00:08:22 school and that unfortunately got reported wrong. So on a lot of Montessori websites, they list me as one of the graduates of Montessori, but that's not technically true. What was cool about it is that we were allowed to go ahead if we wanted to. So we would have our math workbooks. And then if we just could crash through our math workbook in the first four months of school, then we were allowed to go and do other things with our time. And so I spent a lot of time reading, I spent a lot of time reading encyclopedias, because I really enjoyed the encyclopedia. And so it was a, I think, a very conducive kind of education to being an entrepreneur, slash, it also probably ruined me from having any kind of a normal job.

Starting point is 00:09:06 Because I'm used to sort of getting up and saying, oh, what's interesting to do today? And I'll just do the interesting thing that I can find to do. How has that informed how you think about education for your own kids? And how have you thought about that? I don't have kids, but I suppose I'm on the cusp feeling the biological imperative to reason myself into having kids. Yeah. My oldest daughter, Kira, who's now in college, she's at University of Miami, she was homeschooled her whole sort of time growing up.

Starting point is 00:09:38 But that was really quite particular to her. It wasn't really an ideological thing or, you know, I never really in advance thought of that, but it just suited her. I remember we took her to tour a local school, thinking about what school she should go to. And then it's like she was getting ready to go into kindergarten. And I asked her, you know, well, what did you think of that school? And she said, oh, that lady was really funny. She said they would teach me how to read. And she was on her third Harry Potter book at the time. So we were like, oh, that lady was really funny. She said they would teach me how to read. And she was on her third Harry Potter book at the time. So we were like, yeah. And then, you know, we went to another school a year later and I said, well, what did you

Starting point is 00:10:14 think? She said, boring. So it didn't make sense for her to go to school. Later on, she did go to kind of a gifted program one day a week and that sort of thing. But it just suited her. She was better off just kind of studying what she wanted to when she wanted to. And then my two younger kids here in London, they have a much more straightforward, you know, they go to the local school down the street where we live in London. So it's much more of a traditional normal education. How did you, and I think this will be of great interest to an incredible number

Starting point is 00:10:48 of parents, particularly after quarantine and COVID, how did you think about or decide on how to approach homeschooling in terms of teaching yourself, vetting teachers, and so on? We went to various homeschool groups. I mean, it was kind of weird, actually, because a lot of the homeschooling community is extremely religious, which I am not. And so that whole world was a bit not to my taste. But there's a lot of great resources out there. But really, I mean, the truth is her mother did it far more than I did. And that's just because of my work, causing me to travel and so on and so forth. I would say there was a similarity to my childhood. It was this idea of like, actually, what really works well, if a kid is interested and motivated, is just follow whatever you're interested in. I mean, you know, she got interested in penguins, she would read five books about penguins. And that was that just incredibly powerful in terms of mindset to just

Starting point is 00:11:48 be free to pursue whatever you're interested in. I'm not suggesting it's right for every family, right for every kid. That's very much a personal thing. But in general, there's a lot of ways to end up at 18 with a quality education. And one of them is to go through a traditional school process. Another one is to not go through a traditional school process and pursue it in different ways. So you mentioned that you're not particularly religious. You also mentioned that you've been incorrectly cited as a graduate of Montessori. I want to fact check something I've read. I don't know if you self-describe as a non-believer or atheist. Do you self-describe that way or would you put it differently? You know, I do. What is interesting is I, at one point in my Wikipedia entry,

Starting point is 00:12:37 which I try not to pay too much attention to because I recommend that for everybody, it can drive you a bit crazy because it's your, I mean, it really is a hilarious sort of thing. It's like more than anything else, it's your obituary, but it's written while you're alive. I mean, there will be an obituary published somewhere, but it's not going to be as important as your Wikipedia entry. So that means that you can probably pull heavily from your Wikipedia page. You can feel pretty strongly about it. But at one point in time, they had put me into a category of American atheists. And I said, technically speaking a massive atheist activist. And yes, she's clearly an American atheist. That is exactly a good description of who she was. But for me, it's just like,

Starting point is 00:13:31 I don't know, it's a weird category to put me in. It's like putting me in a category of people who eat ice cream. It's like, okay, yes, true. However, I'm not really sure that it's an encyclopedic fact. So... It's not the defining characteristic that you would put on your business card, if that were still the thing. Yeah, exactly. Did you come to atheism of your own accord? Was that something absorbed through the household? How did you come to that point? My parents are religious, but not... I mean, even though we're from the Deep South, I wouldn't say

Starting point is 00:14:08 they are incredibly involved in it, but they ticked the box. And we went to a Methodist church, which is quite mild church compared to some of the very intense churches you can get in the Deep South. You know, I mean, I would say there were a couple of fun stories that are relevant here so one fun story is when i was four and i remember this very vividly so i would have been born in august so it was getting close to christmas so you know four plus some and i didn't you know the whole santa claus thing was i don know, I found that quite perplexing and not particularly believable. And I came up with a very brilliant experiment that ultimately had a deep, deep flaw in it, which was when I went to the shopping mall with my parents and I went and I sat on Santa's

Starting point is 00:14:58 lap, my mom was too far away to hear everything. So Santa asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I told him a bit of this and that. And then I mentioned in particular, I wanted a GI Joe Ranger van. So this was actually a time period I was born in 66. So at this time period, I would say GI Joe had become a little bit less military and he was more of a park ranger because everybody was not that happy about the military due to Vietnam and all that. And I wanted this park ranger van, GI Joe, for my GI Joe to play with. And I didn't tell mom and dad. I told them about a few other things. So Christmas morning came, and I got everything I asked for that I told my parents about, but I did not get the GI Joe van.

Starting point is 00:15:41 So this proved to me that this whole santa thing was was a hoax but then i realized literally on christmas morning the flaw in my plan which was this was the gift i wanted the most it's like why didn't i ask for something stupid that i didn't even want to test the theory so then i'm like oh great i've ripped myself off i didn't get a a gi joe van so there's that story which was really i mean the relevance to your question is just, it was me having a doubting mind and a testing, you know, I wanted to experiment, I wanted to find out the evidence for something. And then later on, you know, as I grew older, I really, I came to a position because there is a struggle with, you know, am I going to go to hell? The stories that people tell kids about religion are quite terrifying. And I just finally thought, you know what, if there is a good and kind and

Starting point is 00:16:31 loving God, he wants me to be honest. And I can't honestly say I believe this. So if I go through my life and I don't believe it, and then I die, I think God will go, you know what, you came by it honestly. So come on in, You know, it's fine. I'm not asking for stupid blind obedience because what meaning is there to that? So that kind of helped me get my comfort with it. And then later I studied philosophy and the various arguments for and against and so on and so forth. But I think for me, that emotional point where I could say, okay, look, it's kind of the

Starting point is 00:17:02 opposite of Pascal's wager, if you're aware of that. It's kind of like, I'm going to be fine. What did you think you were possibly going to be or what did you aspire to do when you grew up when you were in, say, high school? High school was when I actually got interested in the stock market, got interested in finance in a way kind of accidentally. And actually, we could go back and look at the timeline. So if you go back and see, when did Winnebago stock go from three to 18, let's just say some kind of numbers like that, within a year's time, basically, what happened was I had this sort of moment of insight that gas prices had been

Starting point is 00:17:44 incredibly high. There was this whole inflationary crisis and the recession and everything. And obviously, Winnebago sales were quite down because who can afford to buy a big thing to drive around in a recession. And then also gas prices were high. And then gas prices came tumbling down. And I said, you know what, I think Winnebago is going to have a great year. And so I just started watching their stock price. And I went from three until 18. And I was like, oh, this is easy. Like anybody can make. So I have one good idea, you know, which also reminds me, people say, if you could go back and, and tell yourself something, when you were 20, what would you say? And I would say, buy Apple stock. Literally, don't buy that car, just buy Apple stock. Thank

Starting point is 00:18:26 me later. So I got interested in finance and the markets and decided that when I went to college, I would study finance. So that's kind of what I thought I would do. What appealed to you about finance and markets? You have this childhood of following your interests, whether that be, well, in your daughter's case, hypothetically, penguins or fill in the blank. What was it that grabbed you or compelled you about finance and markets? Well, I mean, I think in part, it's just this idea that it's a very intellectual activity, you know, figuring out the valuation of something.

Starting point is 00:19:05 I feel, I don't know, excited by things that demand of you rationality, really being objective. Like if you are trading or gambling on the basis of some emotional feeling with no facts behind it, then on average, you're not going to do very well. You have to kind of be ruthless with yourself of like, am I investing in Tesla because I think Elon Musk is cool? Or am I actually overpaying for something that's extraordinarily highly valued at the moment? And so I think that appealed to me. And then as I got further into it, just the mathematics of it, I like math and enjoy thinking about things like arbitrage, where you buy and sell something that's different but similar. You can actually

Starting point is 00:19:51 figure out what the relative valuation between the two should be. And the harder that is to figure out, then the more likely it's to be mispriced. That's the sort of thing that I enjoyed about it. Were there or are there any particular investors who stood out or stand out to you, who capture your imagination, perhaps? I would say, certainly, at this point in my life in particular, I would say the long-term value investing type of approach is something I see a lot of wisdom in. So Warren Buffett type of investing, where you definitely aren't trying to time the market from day to day, you aren't doing the kind of arbitrage that brought me into thinking about it and so forth. It's not about that. It's about

Starting point is 00:20:34 really thinking about long term trends, and patience and putting your money aside, in a way that I part of the reason I think such a bill is something that I never did. You know, so I can joke about, you know, buy Apple stock when you're young. But in fact, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. So basically, I've never really built up a normal retirement portfolio and things like that. I just put everything into the projects I'm working on, which is good and bad. But I mean, I think that that kind of idea of, and I think this is something that young people have a hard time with, which is a weird kind of shame, because it's the time when

Starting point is 00:21:12 it matters, which is compound interest really does matter. If you can earn x percent a year, it's kind of boring when you're young. But when you're old, you look back and you Oh, actually, that's quite a pile of money. Interesting. The value investing, the buy and hold, as you mentioned, the Warren Buffett, you get 10 hole punches for the rest of your life. How will you think about your decisions is also a fascinating thought exercise, even if you don't fully ascribe to it, because there is a measure measure twice cut once emphasis on rational decision making. And people would argue, well, that's great. And it worked before 2014 really well before Fang and so on and so forth contributed so much to the S&P 500 or whatever it might be as a counter argument.

Starting point is 00:21:59 But when you read these annual letters of Howard Marks or other investors who would often be put into that class, they talk quite a lot about cognitive biases and different types of malfunctions of reasoning that is perhaps not emphasized at other places. When and how did objectivism enter into the picture? So I, like many people, when I was, I don't know, maybe 20, got interested in, I was interested in philosophy and I was interested in economics and got interested and very excited by Ayn Rand and in particular, The Fountainhead being a real mind-blowing, eye-opening book for me. And so really, as I do tend to pursue whatever interests me, I would say I dove very, very deep into that whole world. And I would say

Starting point is 00:22:52 at a point in time, I would consider myself a real expert in a lot of the real details of that body of thought and body of knowledge. And in many ways, still today has an impact on how I think about things. And what's problematic about it is that the general understanding of her work that most people have is so superficial. It's a cartoon caricature of what her ideas actually were. Could you describe for folks, for folks who have no familiarity, what is the caricature? and subtle and complicated and some really interesting and different ways. And for me, I think what I would say impacted me more, and you can still see it in me today, is the idea that ideas matter and that a really important and incredibly valuable thing to do in life as part of being a successful, flourishing human being is to think and to chew on ideas.

Starting point is 00:24:08 And so a lot of people have a very knee-jerk approach to what they think she was about. And even the knee-jerk approach is something that I find irritating, whether you're for or against some of her ideas. It's really more like, okay, no, let's actually slow down. Let's think about what we know. How do we know it? How can we find out what's true? What does it mean to gather evidence? What does it mean to reason based on evidence? And all of those things to me are incredibly valuable. I would almost say in and of themselves, but they're not just in and of themselves. They're towards the end of being a human being, really. And I suppose one could also argue that even if aspects of it, and I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but if aspects of it could be rightly considered

Starting point is 00:24:58 cartoonish or exaggerated, it doesn't mean that there aren't components that are incredibly, still incredibly practical and valuable. For sure. And, you know, it's like, if what you draw from her sort of sense of life and philosophy and ideas is the idea, I have a fundamental moral responsibility to think really hard about what's right and what's wrong, that's good. That's a really good thing. And if what you conclude is, yeah, you know what, she's actually wrong about this aspect of economics, or she's actually wrong about that aspect of interpersonal morality, that's okay. Because what you got from that was that you're a thinking person. And for me, I always say this, and this is really what I think is the best bits of

Starting point is 00:25:45 Wikipedia, is if I bump into someone and we disagree about some ideas, and I find myself having to grapple with and think through their perspective and understand it, whether I come out of the other end agreeing with them or not, that's an incredibly valuable thing. And I will love that person who has sort of grappled with me in an equal kind of intellectual way. That's hugely fascinating. And for me, this is one of the sad things about Twitter, for example, is that there's just the design of the space is so bad for that. The design of the space is really all about the one line quip that destroys someone with a humor, whether or not you even bothered engaging with what they had to say. For me, it's just so much more valuable to

Starting point is 00:26:37 really kind of understand someone, even if I end up disagreeing with them. You mentioned design of the space with reference to Twitter. When were you first exposed to design of any space online in a meaningful way? Well, I mean, in a sense, obviously, the minute everyone gets online in whatever space you're in, you're subjected to the design elements of that space, even though you may not have thought through it. But I mean, I remember getting on very early onto Usenet groups. So for those who aren't ancient like me and may not remember or know about Usenet, Usenet was an enormous, sprawling kind of message board system. But unlike, say, Reddit, which is probably the, in some ways, the successor, it was not only kind of uncensored, it was also uncensorable,

Starting point is 00:27:32 because it was a peer-to-peer system shared across many, many networks. It was basically a protocol for exchanging data where this sprang up. And the cabal that was loosely in charge of it did begin to build ways of cancelling posts by sending commands to cancel things that the other servers could or could respect or not respect and so on and so forth, to try and bring it under control. Because what happened in that design was a lot of really, really, really bad behaviour, a lot of abuse, a lot of flame wars. So people started creating moderated groups, which had a lot of really, really, really bad behavior, a lot of abuse, a lot of flame wars. So people started creating moderated groups, which had a lot of problems. So I was very interested in that space. And as I was using Usenet, as a reader, you know, just like anybody would use Reddit or something

Starting point is 00:28:16 today, I got very interested in, because I was studying economics and game theory, I'm very interested in thinking through, okay, what are the incentive structures? So everyone who's participating here, they're facing because of the design of the software, because there's a social design of the space, they face various incentives. And the incentives, you know, might be there was, of course, spammers. So people would just come and just spam news group with useless advertising and things like that.

Starting point is 00:28:44 So, okay, that's one incentive structure people have. And, you know, like one of the things, and this is something that I would say today is true of Twitter, which is because of the way Twitter works, let's say you see somebody doing something terrible on Twitter. So abusing another person, abusing you, whatever it might be. Spamming. Well, what are your choices? What are the three things you can do? And they are this, that you can block that other person, which helps you but doesn't help anybody else.

Starting point is 00:29:13 You can report it, but because their reporting on abuse system doesn't scale very well because it's very just top-down and there's a very sad job involved if people have to look at the worst things in humanity and make judgment calls at very low cost. So therefore they're overworked, underpaid, and they're doing a great service at great personal expense, I believe. Or you can yell at them.

Starting point is 00:29:37 That's your third choice is to yell at the person, which if you've ever been on Twitter is very popular. You know, it's like, just yell, yell at them. They're yelling at you. You just yell back and there you go. And so to some extent, Usenet was like that. You would go into a little friendly, little unmoderated news group on some subject you're interested in. And it could go very well for a little while.

Starting point is 00:29:56 And then as it got bigger and bigger, eventually you would see, oh, this is now dominated by the most annoying person here. And the second most annoying person here. And all they're doing is yelling at each other, you know, and it's kind of like good people are like, yeah, you know what? I'm out of here. Like, this isn't the interesting place to chew on ideas. This is just people screaming at each other. What are the principles of designing software, but also designing social rules and norms that can help contribute to building something that's healthy, that's meaningful to people, as opposed to just creating yet another sort of cesspit on the internet?

Starting point is 00:30:37 Creating another neighborhood that features people throwing potted plants at your head as you walk down the side street. Yeah, exactly. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in the 4-Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed

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Starting point is 00:32:37 there, because you mentioned the fountainhead, and I may lose track of this question, I want to ask, are there any books in particular that you have gifted often or more often than others to other people? Is there a short list of any type or any that come to mind? Not really gifted, but in the sense of gifted or recommended, let's just say. Recommended. I would say there are two. They're both quite simple in a way as recommendations and quite common. But one would be seven habits of effective people, which is a classic Stephen Covey kind of motivation, self-help kind of thing. I wouldn't say that I have applied all of it or buy into all of it. But I did find at a certain point in my life, being a person who's prone to following whatever interests me at the moment, it's like, okay, pull myself together. And here's

Starting point is 00:33:30 a system for like, getting things done. I tried looking into getting things done, which is a more contemporary kind of popular thing. And I thought it was quite interesting and good, but I didn't buy into it. And I felt like you needed to really buy into it to make that work. So seven habits. And then the other one is a book called Your Money or Your Life, which is basically sets forth the argument that you don't need as much money as you think to live. And in fact, a lot of how we live, which is very expensive, traps us into things that we would rather not be trapped into. So, you know, you've got to commute, you've got to wear certain clothes, you've got to do this, that, and the other. Certainly something that I feel like

Starting point is 00:34:08 you would also resonate with, with four-hour work week, which by the way, also had a huge impact on me. My favorite story about that is I read four-hour work week and then I, not that long after that, I was like, okay, fuck this, I'm moving to Argentina for a month. And I did. And I got a Vonage phone with a number that rang as if I were in New York. So I got into my apartment in Buenos Aires, and nobody knew I was there. They all thought I was in New York, because I was working remote anyway. I realized the flaw in my plan because that month when I was supposed to be there,

Starting point is 00:34:50 I needed to do a speech. To be fair on me, these speeches came up after I had already booked the apartment and had plans to go. I had to go and give a speech in Korea and a speech in Milan. I got to tell you, to get from Buenos Aires to Seoul, South Korea, that's just, there's no way. Like, there's no path to get there. It's like you've got to fly around the world twice to get to that place. So it was a hopeless month. I'm like, okay, well, I still love the idea. But anyway, I don't want to embarrass you by recommending your book on your show, but I assume everybody who's listening will have read that. But it's really interesting because what I like about Your Money or Your Life and what i liked about your book is kind of that like okay hold on you're doing this whole thing you've got this whole rat race thing going on you're following all the normal things why don't you just step back and

Starting point is 00:35:33 go hey is there a radical different way of looking at this to say is there a way i can make my life like super much better and still kind of do the things that I want to do, but without all the things that are blocking me from doing it, because I have to make the money to make the money to do the things, you know, it's kind of that cycle you can get into. Well, thank you for sharing. And thank you for the kind words. I love the Argentina story. There's almost always a wrinkle in the master plan. I'm in Chiang Mai, but uh-oh, I forgot. I could not have foreseen the amazing ping pong-like travel plan that I will now have ahead of me. How did you go from, or maybe this was the intention all along, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:36:18 but how did you go from finance and markets to founding companies. Exactly. I was working as a futures and options trader in Chicago, worked for a small firm of local traders. So local traders are traders who are on the floor. I wasn't working at a big bank where we owned our seats on the floor and we traded with the firm's money. And I was doing arbitrage between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade for Fed Funds and Libor. If anybody's really want to geek out on what all that is. And as a result, I actually had the markets open quite early there, 7.20 and finish at 2. I could be out of the office by 3. And I was just super interested in technology, super interested in the internet. I had been using the internet when I was in grad school

Starting point is 00:37:09 quite a lot. And I could see this thing brewing that was really something very interesting. And I was interested. So one of the things I was doing, because I was a geek, also, I just moved to Chicago, didn't know anybody, didn't really have a life. So I would get off work and I would go home and I would do programming. And I was writing a web browser. So just from scratch, using various components I could find online, open source stuff, writing my own web browser. And when I was in the middle of doing that, and it was, you know, barely functional, to be fair, that was when Netscape went public. And Netscape on the first day of trading was worth something like $4.3 billion. And I saw that number 4.3 billion.

Starting point is 00:37:52 And I was like, you know what, Netscape 1.0 is better than my web browser that I'm writing at home, but it's not $4.3 billion better. It's kind of not that brilliant a piece of software. And it wasn't, you know, it was like really early days. And so I was like, this is really interesting. And I've been excited about the internet for a few years. But this is for the first time, the market validating, this is going to be a big thing. This is quite interesting. I had a friend, Tim Schell, and he and I started tinkering around on the internet. And we did a bunch of different stuff. We started a little web directory search engine called Bomus, which was basically about building web directories. So you could go in and...

Starting point is 00:38:33 Well, web rings, we called it. So you could go in and create a list of websites on any topic and just link them all together to each other so that other people could come. And what was interesting about that is we, and the foreshadowing bit for the future is we decided that we would just let people come in and build these web rings. So you can sign up for an account and create a list of anything you wanted. And the idea was really an early, you know, it was like Yahoo links, you know, so Yahoo used to have, I mean, maybe they still have, I don't know, but they had a web directory rather than a Google style search engine and And they would categorize things and

Starting point is 00:39:08 they hired staff to do it. And so there was a big giant list of links with categories and subcategories. And we're like, oh, maybe anybody could help us build that. Why would you need to hire staff to do that? So that's kind of the early user generated content concept. And then we tried a lot of different things over a few years time, we had, I would say early blogging, slash dot was a big tech news site that was massively popular at the time. And they open source their code slash code, they called it. So we grabbed that and started opening a bunch of different blogs, trying to leverage the traffic we had built. And you know, it went well for a while. So it was growing and it was doing well. And it was the dotcom boom. And then we got approached by,

Starting point is 00:39:53 this is actually a really funny and a great story. We got approached by NBC TV network, you know, NBC, NBC, I, NBC interactive, because at that time, I mean, it sounds like a joke today. It sounded kind of like a joke back then, but they were very dead serious. They thought, okay, the big TV network should move into, like, why should these upstarts like Yahoo and Google, we're going to create a web portal and a search engine, and we're going to have all these different web properties, and it's going to be just like a TV network. So they started building things. And so they paid us a lot of money, they bought out our full

Starting point is 00:40:28 inventory for far more than we've been able to sell it forever. And in exchange, we moved the whole site to bombas.nbci.com. So we became a subdomain of theirs, so that they could count our traffic for their media metrics numbers. And we were about 10% of their traffic, which was kind of interesting because they didn't pay us nearly 10% of what they were blowing on everything. And so there for a short period of time, that was like really our dot com boom era. Like it was amazing. We were making good money. And then lo and behold, they realized somebody higher up realized they were spending about $100 million a quarter, losing $100 million a quarter. And they were like, you know what? We better stop doing this.

Starting point is 00:41:14 Like, this is definitely not working. This is a really bad idea. So then we had a bit of a contract dispute at the end because they were just like, okay, fuck you. We're not paying you anymore. And I was like, fuck you. You've got a contract and, you know, whatever. A tiny company versus a giant company. Yeah. You just take what they give you because there's no way of fighting it really.

Starting point is 00:41:31 So, so then we went back. So then we were sort of off of there. And then that was actually a really complicated time. And I can't tell you whether I would have to really go back and study was that before or after the founding of Newpedia, which was the first encyclopedia project. It was probably around the same time because I think that that wealth made us feel like, hey, we can launch some new things. Let's take this money that's coming in and let's see what else we can create. And that was when we started thinking about the encyclopedia project, I would say. A couple of questions related to the stories you just shared. The first is, at what point did you leave your finance job?

Starting point is 00:42:15 Ah, yeah. What experiments were with the safety net of this background of employment? And when did you make the jump out? So my boss, as I say, it was a small firm, we had, I think there were probably 20 staff total. And my boss was a trader himself. And he sort of knew that I was going home at night and working and stuff on the weekend. And that Tim and I were sort of thinking about website ideas. I mean, really, actually, I kind of glossed over we had a couple of, I would say brilliant ideas that we, we weren't able to pull off. So one was autotrader.com. So basically, I was like, people could post ads for the cars they want to sell and get in touch. And

Starting point is 00:42:55 so we went to car dealers, they weren't interested. So I had this idea for ordering food online, which of course, now is a huge business and at the time again restaurant owners looked at me like i was from mars when i would go in and go i want to put your restaurant online and they're like we've got a fax machine we don't know what you're talking about but we were doing this and that and then the the web ring concept started to take off and we could show you like you know traffic is increasing increasing and michael was a trader my boss and had seen sort of the markets go wild and i was like hey you know, traffic is increasing, increasing. And Michael was a trader, my boss, and had seen sort of the markets go wild. And I was like, hey, you know, I think I can build

Starting point is 00:43:30 something here. And he became an angel investor. He invested some money, not a huge amount, but enough that I was able to kind of carry on paying myself a little bit of a salary and Tim a salary. And we hired a couple more programmers and so on. Also moved to San Diego because I was fed up with the Chicago weather. We started that way. And in terms of that feeling of that moment, when do you jump ship? It felt okay because it was quite clear that Michael and I got along well. He liked my work as a trader. He thought this sounded cool and interesting too. I did feel like, okay, if this whole thing doesn't work, I can just go back to Chicago and start trading again.

Starting point is 00:44:09 It didn't feel like cutting ship and I'm never going to get to come back to my old career, which not everybody has that. There are certain careers, some of the worst are places that I consider to be virtually like cults when people join them. But like the big consulting and accounting firms, where they've got a really rigid kind of upper out culture, where if you think you're about to make partner in two years time, which is a fat salary, you'd be kind of crazy to quit even though you're unhappy. Because, you know, you might get fired anyway, or you might make partners. So you know, it's like a weird, sick kind of life. I wasn't in that kind of situation.

Starting point is 00:44:47 It was like a very entrepreneurial company I was working for. So therefore, it felt like, okay, look, this is a side thing I want to do. To him, it was just like another trade. It's like, okay, we'll put some money on this and see how it works out. Just like, you know, it's like, here, Jimmy, here's some money to trade with. Let's see how it works out. Right. And if it doesn't work out there are other options there are follow

Starting point is 00:45:06 up opportunities yeah and i talk about this none of this was in silicon valley but i talk about this particularly in places you know i travel all over the world well i used to this year i'm just in my attic but i think one of the great things about silicon valley is precisely this concept which people get in a very deep way, which is, if you try a startup, and it doesn't work out, that's not the end of your career, you're not forever a failure at all, then you get a job at Google. And if you're interviewing for jobs in Silicon Valley, having been at a startup that didn't work out isn't a black mark. In fact, it can be quite interesting. If people can look at and go, oh, that's interesting. You were working on food delivery two years before it came a big

Starting point is 00:45:48 thing. That's actually not a good example, because that's been a big thing for a long time now. But you know, it's like, oh, wow, that's interesting, because you were too early, or you missed it because of this, that and the other. But actually, that was a great idea. And your talent is so great, not not a problem. And I think in a lot of societies around the world, I mean, I have talked to Japanese entrepreneurs, Korean entrepreneurs, and they really struggle with this. This idea that if I go and work at a startup and it fails, my whole career is doomed. Like I've missed the boat. I should have gone to work for a big company. And I think that's unfortunate because it fails to generate the culture that can generate innovation.

Starting point is 00:46:28 It highlights a number of things for me as we're talking and rather as I'm listening. Number one, the cultural consequences, both internationally, but even domestically are different depending on location, the financial consequences and the optionality that you have or don't have are also affected by your choices in this case of say employment, right? What type of game are you signing up for? What are the incentives? Like your boss viewed it as another trade. He's like, sure, I'll stake this guy. It's like, you're at a blackjack table and you have possibly a system for beating the odds. Like, yeah, great. Let's try it. I have to make sure that he has enough money that he can survive like a short string

Starting point is 00:47:10 of bad luck. But let's see what happens versus, as you put it, maybe in a big five accounting firm or somewhere else where it's up or out and the game is kind of zero sum and then you have to completely switch lanes. And I want to come back to actually one question that if I don't ask is going to bother me. How did the television network find the web ring? Was it dominant enough that it was on everyone's radar, or was there something else that happened? Because that seemed to provide the fuel for some of what happened later. How did that actually come together? I would say, no, we were by no means dominant. We only ever had a little bit of press coverage. It

Starting point is 00:47:56 wasn't like a famous thing. We were on certain lists. So back then there were a few, sort of like today, you can look on Alexa and get the Alexa ranking of something. And it isn't very accurate necessarily, but it's the thing that's out there. And so I think you could look us up and see, oh, this has a lot of traffic or a fair amount of traffic. But I actually think, I literally have no idea. I mean, I got a call out of the blue and they're like, well, we don't want to buy you, but we'd be interested in this type of partnership. I think they did that type of deal with a lot of different sites. I think they were just looking to build out. And in a way, if you think about a TV network, that's kind of their mindset.

Starting point is 00:48:33 This is like paying for a production company to create a show. So we're going to go out and we're going to find a production company and a writer, and we're going to back them to build this thing. And they're not necessarily actually making the TV shows. They're working with other companies to do it. I think that was kind of their view. It's like, let's put some money in and let's sponsor and let's bring onto our network 50 of these things to generate a bigger property. But I literally have no idea how they found me. That's a good question. And I would imagine there's some behind the scenes, although predictable conversation on their part, which is some type of arbitrage, right? They're saying, hey, look, we can pay these guys X, and then we can charge 2X for the CPM of the

Starting point is 00:49:16 advertising, even though they ended up losing 100 million per quarter, which isn't ideal. But it makes sense. They would just try to roll up a bunch of this traffic and then sell it for a multiple of some type. Yeah, no, I think it was slightly different from that, because that is a perfectly valid strategy. Today, it's not uncommon that a successful smaller website gets bought by a bigger company for the simple reason that the bigger company has traction in the ad sales market and can get more. So it's a win-win. They can pay you more for your small website than you would make on your own and they can arbitrage and make money on it. That's great.

Starting point is 00:49:50 But in this case, I believe because it was the dot-com frenzy, I think it was really more, if we can get big enough that we can go to the market and say we're as big as Google and that's worth this small of billions, we can spend it out for those billions. That's kind of whether they can actually make money or not, as a real business, because

Starting point is 00:50:11 this was in the dot com mania, which by the way, is mostly leftist. But I would say there's a lot of this stuff going on now, where people are more interested in, can we blow up big enough to sell to the market before it kind of becomes obvious that this isn't actually a great business? The new, new economy, as it was back. Yeah, exactly. Now, you mentioned a few different kind of shots that you took. You mentioned food, you mentioned this auto trader- concept you were trying different things presumably to see what would stick what might gain some traction but you don't have infinite time right you have this finite resource of time so you can't try everything

Starting point is 00:50:59 how did you choose these particular shots? So really, seat of the pants, gut, you know, I would say certainly not through a long process like you might engage in if you were a big five accounting firm or a consulting firm coming in to advise, where you would create lists of 25 opportunities and then tick through the pros and cons of each one. You didn't write a hundred page white paper for yourself before starting. Exactly. And in fact, later on when I was realized that it would be a good time to start thinking about raising venture capital, one of the things that was really impossible for me is to sort of write a business plan in the traditional sort of MBA school kind of way, because I'm like, I just, most of the numbers you're going to write

Starting point is 00:51:51 down are complete fiction. You know, it's like, yeah, three year, you know, revenue estimate. I'm like, Oh, wow. I don't know. You pick the numbers. I don't really, that's kind of not possible. And so it was actually good. Good VCs know that and don't waste your time with a lot of nonsense. So that's kind of how that worked. I would say it would have to do with, did I find it personally interesting? Did I think we could leverage where we were to get somewhere? So just as one example, we knew because of the web ratings, people were coming in

Starting point is 00:52:26 and building things. And we knew what was most popular on our site, which was basically female actresses and porn stars. That was massively popular in our search. That was so much of our traffic. And so we're like, okay, that's weird. What are people who are into Pamela Anderson, who was huge, like she was our number one thing for a long time. What are people who are into Pamela Anderson, who was huge, like she was our number one thing for a long time. What are people who are into Pamela Anderson also into and we're like, well, they're into TV, they're into sports, they're basically men. So let's figure out that. So we started a baseball blog, and just stuff like that didn't really work. But that was kind of the thinking on some of the projects is to go,

Starting point is 00:53:05 like, we've got this big audience, what else could we do with them? And what might be a good thing to do? Other ones, like the food one, and the used car one, those are all before any success. So those are just like random ideas of let's build a website, what could it be? And then you've started looking at these adjacent opportunities once you had identified the type of people who were providing traction. Yeah, exactly. Although, to be clear, though, the Newpedia project was not something I thought that was adjacent traffic to. It was kind of like, actually, this idea of a free encyclopedia for everyone, that's just awesome, meaningful. So that was really much more, there was no clear business idea, no business plan, no

Starting point is 00:53:48 nothing. It was just, I think I know how to build this. I'm just going to build it and we'll figure the rest out later, which was also kind of a dot-com era thing. Don't really know a business model, but I just know this sounds like a cool thing. And if it's a cool thing, we'll find a way to fund it eventually. The field of dreams approach. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:04 They build it and they will come. Yeah. And in this case, just so I understand the transition, so you have this web ring, you partner with this network, you begin to amass enough capital that you have fuel for whatever purpose you may decide. And then this deal falls through big company, you know, huge company versus small company contract dispute. Forget about it. Right. Just

Starting point is 00:54:30 bloodletting exercise. Yeah. Did you have to make the decision to abandon the audience and what you had built to then jump to new PDA with no real plan for business or revenue? Or was it an easier decision than I'm making it out to be? It was. I mean, I would say the immediate thing that happened and a great lesson for entrepreneurs, immediately after we lost the big sweet deal, we basically started looking for another deal, looking for partners. And we basically carried on. And over the course of a year, we basically spent all the money that we had made during the term of the deal. And what I should have done is recognize that we were in a dot-com crash long before I could admit it to myself, and that there was

Starting point is 00:55:18 going to be no more sweetheart deal like that, like that that was just ridiculous, and they were overpaying, and we weren't going to find any way of making that much money. And I could have cut the staff sooner. What we did, though, we were, I think I would say we were about 18 to 20 people when the deal blew up. Obviously, we didn't hire anybody. And then people move on in any kind of company. So you know, a couple people left for their own reasons, somebody moved away, and so on, and we didn't replace them. So we were slowly starting to cut expenses. But being young and feeling responsible for people who work for me and all that, I found it very hard to just like lay people off. That's just not my strong point of being like,

Starting point is 00:55:56 kind of brutal with people and stuff. And they're doing good work, we're going to find a way we just have to find a revenue stream and so on. And then a Black Friday came when it was just like, yeah, this is it. Like, I can't carry on like this. We're literally not going to make payroll for another month if we don't dramatically cut. And so we did. We went down from, I think on that day, we went from 16 people to four. That was a pretty brutal time.

Starting point is 00:56:24 But 16 people down to four, it was okay, because we could pay ourselves. That actually matched our revenue to our expenses. And so as a part of all that, it was possible to carry on and to sort of carry on at a lesser level. And in fact, we did then I moved from California to Florida because it was cheaper. We looked at saving money every way we could, we didn't have an office, we started all working remote, because why waste money on an office if you're barely paying your own salaries. And it was around that time that Wikipedia then had been started, and basically just started to boom, it was just growing and growing. We were having fun working on it. And we're like, wow, this is now bigger than anything we ever made before. And that's kind of cool and exciting. But again, it was not a moment of, we have to give up this one thing and take this huge step

Starting point is 00:57:18 to do this other thing. It was more like, okay, this thing, we don't see any way to make a lot of money out of it. It's not really working. Although it's popular, it's not really the right thing. This other thing, which is our side project is actually doing well. So let's actually go that way for a while and see how that goes. Meanwhile, the other thing just kind of sat there making money, not a huge amount, of course, but it's like, this is enough to pay ourselves to work on this other thing i'd certainly want to dive into newpedia and then what evolved from there but before i do i have to ask since you mentioned you know i should have cut head count earlier to stem the bleeding when i begin to fantasize about

Starting point is 00:58:01 that what if there's part of me that thinks, wow, sometimes you need life to save you from what you want. Because if you had potentially done that triage, who knows, maybe you'd still be working at that company for all we know. For sure. I mean, one of the, so as we get from Newpedia into Wikipedia, really, one of the things, so I always say Wikipedia is a child of the dot-com crash, really. Now, it was started before the crash, you know, it was kind of going. But what I mean by that is when Wikipedia really started to grow, there was no possibility of getting any investment money.

Starting point is 00:58:35 There was no possibility of raising money to do it. It wasn't big enough that if we put ads on it, it wouldn't have made a material difference. It wasn't going to change everything to be able to put a few ads on and get a couple grand a month or whatever it might have been. And what that meant was, interestingly, okay, imagine you start a community website, let's call it YouTube, and it starts to grow and boom, and you're really excited and you see some problems on the site and you think, okay, what are we going to do about these problems? And what do you think first is, okay, let's hire moder hire moderators like let's hire people to do content moderation and behavior

Starting point is 00:59:08 moderation and had we had funding to do it we might have evolved into the same type of model that we see at twitter youtube facebook like everywhere basically which is the users use the site and the moderation other than just person to person blocking is really done in a very opaque way by the company itself. And the difference with Wikipedia, what makes it so fundamentally different from everything else on the internet is because I had zero money to hire moderators, we were actually forced to invent ways to deal with things in the community. So we started to think about, okay, what would it mean to have moderators, like admins, from the community, volunteer admins? So it's like, okay, well, there needs to be checks and

Starting point is 00:59:56 balances. So they're elected by the community, they've got certain rules, they can lose their adminship if they do the wrong things. And then you can go on Wikipedia. And there's to this day, there's hundreds and hundreds of pages of discussions and debates about all of these kinds of things. But the key is, it's all in the hands of that community. And we had to devise things like the arbitration committee, which is like the highest Supreme Court. And there's a million little things in Wikipedia. Whereas if we had had money, probably we wouldn't have done it that way. Probably would have never occurred to me to do it that way. It was really necessities, the mother of invention kind of thing. I remember reading a quote, which I'm absolutely going to butcher, but it was from Jack Ma,

Starting point is 01:00:35 the founder or perhaps co-founder of Alibaba. And it was along the lines of when we started, we had several huge advantages. We had no money, no plan, and the subprime mortgage crisis. Because I think in part, there's a survivorship bias, of course. I mean, you have kind of the diehards who remain. But there was incredible resourcefulness by necessity throughout that entire period. And I don't want to skip over Newpedia, because there are reasons, I suspect, why people know widely of Wikipedia, not so much Newpedia. So what didn't work at Newpedia? And when did you know, this is really not going to work? So Newpedia was the same vision, free encyclopedia, freely licensed. But I didn't know

Starting point is 01:01:45 anything about building communities, really. I didn't know anything about wiki software, which was around at the time, but I didn't know about it, really. And it had a seven-stage review process to get anything published. So the idea was, which seemed correct, given what we knew at the time, was actually incorrect, although it does foreshadow something that if you're going to be an encyclopedia written by volunteers on the internet, then people are going to make fun of you unless you're more academic than a traditional encyclopedia. You've got to be really, really super serious. Otherwise, it sounds ridiculous. And so that actually was plausible and correct, and so on and so forth.

Starting point is 01:02:25 But what it meant was, we built a system that was not any fun. It was very intimidating. And, you know, to answer your question of when did I know? Well, basically, we were, I don't know, maybe a year in. And a point came when I was frustrated, because I'm like, it's really slow progress. Nothing's getting through the system. We've hardly published anything. What is wrong? Why can't we produce content? And I thought, well, I'm going to just write an article myself. And I decided to write about Robert Merton, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in option pricing theory. When I was in grad school, I had published a paper on option pricing theory, and I'd worked in the markets in Chicago. So I knew that area quite well. And I thought,

Starting point is 01:03:09 I'll just write a short biography of Merton. I'd read all of his academic papers and worked through the math of all of his work. And so I sat down to write, and I had a massive immediate writer's walk because I knew they were going to take my biography, and they were going to send it to the most prestigious finance professors they could find to critique and review it. And it was like, no fun, like, that's scary. And I was like, I'm going to write this thing, I'm going to get it back, it's going to be full of how stupid I am. Because I haven't been in academia for four years, I left that world. And I realized then I'm like, this is never going to work. This isn't fun. This is too hard. And so that was when we effectively pivoted to a wiki model where it's

Starting point is 01:03:53 just like, okay, here's a blank screen, type some stuff, and let's start writing an encyclopedia. And in fact, the reason it was called Wikipedia rather than just pivoting Newpedia is that we thought that our very, very serious Newpedia community would be radically against this, that they would be very academic and like, that's crazy, you can't do it that way. So we're like, okay, let's just try it as a side project. And it took off, it took off very, very quickly. I mean, we got more work done in two weeks than we had in two years, nearly two years. And that was very exciting. And actually, just one little side note that's really interesting. When we were pursuing the Newpedia model,

Starting point is 01:04:31 one of the earliest pieces that we published to great fanfare with our small community, we're like, great, it's past the seventh stage. And here it is. And it took a couple of days only before somebody emailed and said, this is actually plagiarized. Here's where it came from. And we're like, oh, really? And we looked into it like, oh, so the whole academic review process with professors looking at everything didn't catch

Starting point is 01:04:57 the plagiarism nearly as fast as showing it to 200 people and then just like Googling and checking it. And so that was like a really interesting insight to go actually, open peer review, sort of the open review, much like open source software, is actually quite powerful, and may actually catch things that a small group review, even of experts, won't catch. And so that was quite informative. I'd love to ask you how you came across wiki software. And in the course of doing homework for this conversation, I came across, and again, I can't believe everything you read, but a description of how Tim Berners-Lee, who I

Starting point is 01:05:36 believe is not too far from you, across the pond, who's best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, was distraught when Mosaic came out because it was effectively read-only. We were talking about Netscape earlier. And he really wanted people to be able to modify web pages. I'm very liberally paraphrasing my interpretation there. But then this software provides that capability. How were you or your team exposed to that?

Starting point is 01:06:07 The first I was exposed to it. So Jeremy Rosenfeld was one of my employees. He worked for me and did a bit of this and that writing. He came to me and showed me a wiki. And it was just before Christmas and said, Hey, you know, I've heard you talking about how we have to make it simpler for people to participate. Have you seen wiki? And I'm like, no, what's wiki? And he showed it to me. And then not long after I sort of posted on Ward Cunningham, who's the inventor of the wiki concept, basically, wiki just means a website anyone can edit. And I asked, what do you think about using a wiki to make an encyclopedia? And he responded quite famously, something like, yeah, you could use wiki for writing an encyclopedia,

Starting point is 01:06:45 but it would still be a wiki, which was quite funny. So then my daughter was born, the one who was later homeschooled, and she was very, very sick when she was born. And it was quite an emotional, traumatic time. It's like, wow, and it's kind of one of those real, throughout the conversation, I've told you, no, that wasn't really like a breakpoint moment. And there was no moment of just leaping. And, you know, it was all transitional from one to the next. But that was like a huge moment. So when she got home from the hospital, I was just like, you know what? Life's too short.

Starting point is 01:07:15 We've been thinking about trying this wiki thing. We're just going to go for it. I'm just going to install this wiki software. So I downloaded an open source wiki package that was very, very basic, set up it, typed hello world, and we were off to the races. That was really that moment when it was like, okay, let's just make this happen. I'm looking at a paragraph from an Esquire article, Esquire UK. And I'm just going to read two sentences, one or two sentences here. Wikipedia is a universe unto itself. Its ambition unequaled

Starting point is 01:07:52 and its scale unprecedented. It's 300. That number I'm sure has changed over time. Staff and contractors are fond of a single phrase, quote, thank God our little enterprise works in practice because it could never work in theory, end quote. Often to this day, I'm continually amazed that Wikipedia works. And the article continues, in theory, Wikipedia should be a disaster, etc., etc. What were some of the decisions? Because, of course, Wikipedia has evolved over time, and a lot has been learned and added to the ecosystem over time. But what were some of the early decisions that ended up in your mind being deciding factors for that sort of minimally viable product that made it catch in those first few months? Just to be clear, and the way you said it is correct,

Starting point is 01:08:44 sometimes that quote is attributed to me. I've never said that. So I'm not even sure I agree with that. I think it works in theory. It works in practice because it works in theory, but that's a whole complicated question. So I would say key decisions that made a huge, huge difference that were really kind of open questions in the early days were things like neutrality. So the idea of, there was a proposal early on that maybe instead of having one entry about, let's say, abortion, a controversial topic, say we have one entry about abortion, why don't we just have competing entries? So different people can write whatever they want. And then, you know, they can vote on them or just

Starting point is 01:09:24 take competing entries. And I was like, you know what they can vote on them or just take competing entries. And I was like, you know what, no, I actually I want there to be a neutral entry, which kind of tries to take into account all points of view, describes them fairly doesn't take size, but just explains the ideas. And I think that was hugely important, because the thing about neutrality is that all kinds of diverse people, as long as they're thoughtful and kind, can get behind that. They can go, okay, yeah, like, I get that. That's okay. And you wouldn't know it from watching TV debates or going on Twitter, but most people are pretty reasonable and will say, like, I disagree with this, but it should be presented in a fair way that the defenders of it would identify. So that was a key one. I think another one was the idea. I mean, this is weird

Starting point is 01:10:12 now to think this was a big decision, but it really was at the time. So somebody started to upload into Wikipedia, the full text of Hamlet, for example. And that was like, okay, what do we think about that? And I was like, you, what do we what do we think about that? And I was like, you know what, Hamlet should be available for free online in a well supported way. But it's not an encyclopedia article. And so it doesn't belong in Wikipedia. So we created a separate project called wiki source, where people put all kinds of source texts, you know, things like that. So it was a lot of those kinds of things. Tim Schell, who was my business partner from the earliest days, when we first started, there was no such thing as a separate talk page. And he said, if this is ever really going to be

Starting point is 01:10:54 an encyclopedia, we need to separate the discussions about the articles from the articles themselves. So we need a separate page. And he proposed using slash talk would create a subpage. Well, that was genius, right? Nobody knew it at the time. And now it seems so obvious. You're like, yeah, so what? But actually, it made a huge difference because it meant that you could say, look, whatever discussions and debate you have, put them over there, talk about how to improve the article, but the article itself, you should always try to keep it in a readable format as an encyclopedia article. Whereas before that, what we would do is if you objected to something in the middle of an entry, you would just go in and put in a parenthetical remark, or you would indent a paragraph and comment on what was just written, which made it very hard to read other than just as an interesting tool for a weird wiki type of conversation. Listening to you list off these different decisions, and maybe this is being really dramatic, but it seems like any one of those taken in a different direction could have

Starting point is 01:11:52 mortally wounded the entire enterprise. I don't know if that's overstated, but I mean, that seems to be a set of very critical decisions. Were there any significant mistakes made in the early days that either ended up needing to be fixed or that have, just as kind of like a vestigial tale, have remained in the system? Were there any mistakes that particularly come to mind as memorable in the beginning days, which could be the first few months, first few years, whatever timeframe? I always have a hard time with this type of question. And I always explain what I mean by saying I'm a pathological optimist. So I always think everything's going to be great. That's not correct, by the way. Everything is not always going to be great, but that's the way I feel and approach things. So when I look back at the past,

Starting point is 01:12:43 what I know is we did the best given our knowledge at the time. So when I look back at the past, what I know is, we did the best given our knowledge at the time. So even, let's say, the first attempt with Newpedia clearly didn't work. And so you can imagine in a fantasy kind of way, oh, we could have just started Wikipedia two years earlier, instead of doing this whole Newpedia detour, which didn't work. But then again, I'm like, you know what, we learned a lot. That detour was didn't work but then again i'm like you know what we learned a lot that detour was kind of a necessary part of the growth of people in the community of myself that i don't know how we could have skipped that step and so it's kind of like saying yes i could be the greatest player in the nba other than the fact that i'm five foot seven and not athletic at all

Starting point is 01:13:23 but had i been, you know, it would have been completely different. Yeah, but I'm not. And I never was. So, you know, had I been genius enough to figure out that the Newpedia project wasn't going to work two years earlier, then great. But how can I regret that? Like, I wasn't that genius and I can't play basketball.

Starting point is 01:13:39 So, you know, it's kind of like that. So for me, I think this is when I'm talking to people who are interested in being entrepreneurs or thinking about their career, things like that is to say, look, you have to sort of get your mind to a point where you really do believe because it's true, that doing this thing, that even if it doesn't work out, you're better off for having done it. Because otherwise, you could paralyze yourself. What if I fail? What if I fail? What if I fail? That doesn't mean you completely go narcissistic and fantasy land that nothing can ever fail. I mean, I really like the fail faster, lean startup kind of thinking. I said,

Starting point is 01:14:19 let's just try a little experiment. And if they work, great. If they don't work, that's okay. We learned something and we didn't sort of stake our entire self-esteem on that one idea, because I think that's really important. So when I look back, I would say, yes, of course, there are things. I mean, there are things about Wikipedia that I find weird today that you would have think sort of 20 years on, we would would have solved so if you go on the talk page of any wikipedia article or you go to wikipedia you find me you go to my user talk page you leave a comment for me when i go to respond to the comment i have to type colon colon to indent my comment or you know colon and then once we've had a dialogue of like five layers deep i've got to actually type colon colon colon colon colon, colon, colon to indent.

Starting point is 01:15:05 That's insane. Like, why not have a Reddit discussion system? Like, just automatically indent. I hit reply to your comment and it goes just like in Reddit. And there are some good reasons for it. It's complicated, right? But it's actually like that's a vestige of the past. That's there because it's always been there.

Starting point is 01:15:23 It actually works for us. It's a weird barrier to entry for new people because people come in and they're like, I want to respond in this thread. And I clicked edit and there's all this weird colon stuff. I don't really get it. Whereas in other places, you just would hit reply to the comment you want to reform something like that, you suddenly realize there's a huge amount of history and culture and the way we do things that actually is tied up in that software affordance. What I mean by that is, at Wikipedia, if you leave a comment, like if you and I are in a discussion and you comment something to me and I go to reply, and I notice that you've misspelled

Starting point is 01:16:04 a word, clearly just a typo, nothing weird, but I'm like, actually that word's misspelled. I can correct your typo and hit save just as a part of my edit. And suddenly our conversation just reads much better because your typo got fixed. And people can see that I did that. So like, if I change your comment to be the opposite of what you said, people go crazy. But that kind of little thing, which seems kind of silly, it actually is part of the whole process. Or if somebody comes onto my talk page, and they're like, insulting and rude, and somebody else is like, that's not helpful at all. Anybody, literally anybody can just come and delete that comment, because it's just a wiki page. And again, everyone could see that they deleted it. So if

Starting point is 01:16:42 they're called out on it, there's a history and you can track it and you can go, oh, this person deleted a comment. Why did they do that? And then you look at it and you're like, oh, yeah, actually, thanks for deleting that. That person was just being a racist jerk and that's not really useful. So we got rid of it. So all that kind of stuff. So then you think about, okay, well, let's build a threaded comment system where anybody

Starting point is 01:17:00 can edit anything. It's actually quite hard. It's one of the things that at my pilot project of WT Social that we're doing is we've got comments. It's like, can other people hide your comment? Can they edit your comment? And that's the kind of thing that we're experimenting with. And it's hard, actually. It's super hard. And it's also such a superpower. Maybe it's a practiced skill, it's probably both actually, of really, and this term is used a lot, user-centric design, but putting yourself in the decision tree of someone who is trying to do something. It seems so obvious, obviously useful, but it is not always

Starting point is 01:17:41 obviously done, if that makes sense. Yeah. And actually, one of the things I find that it actually does get done, and I think slightly overdone, in let's put myself in the shoes of a bad actor. So what could a bad person do? And I feel that if you over-design for what a bad person could do, then you fail to think about the design for perfectly nice people. So you could say, yeah, actually, a bad person could be really irritating by going around Wikipedia, changing people's comments to say the opposite of what they were going to say. So then if your natural response is, okay, let's just not let people do that, then you also cut out all the health that is possible if you leave people open to do that. I have this analogy to, I call it the steak knives analogy, which is, imagine you're designing a restaurant and you think, okay,

Starting point is 01:18:32 in my restaurant, I'm going to serve steak because I like steak and I'm going to give everybody steak knives. And one thing we know about people with knives is they might stab each other. So therefore, I'm going to build a cage around every table so that no one can stab each other so therefore i'm going to build a cage around every table so that no one can stab each other uh and yeah when you hear this you laugh because you're like oh that's hilarious because like yeah but then what do we do about it actually that is true people could stab each other and what we do is we we recognize that it's really rare for one thing that we actually don't want to live in a society where we live in cages because some people might be crazy we have various institutions in society to deal with the problem. So for example, if somebody does start

Starting point is 01:19:09 stabbing people in a restaurant, usually some brave soul, hopefully young and strong, will tackle the person, stop the violence immediately. And we would call that a hero. We think that's a great thing to do in society is to do what's necessary to prevent damage in a tragedy. And then we've got the ambulance that comes to hopefully fix things. And we've got the police to take the bad person to jail. And none of those things are perfect. People sometimes will get stabbed and it is a tragedy and there is no recovering from it. And that's terrible. But we still say, you know what, we don't want to live in cages, we wouldn't think let's redesign everything so that we're in a cage. And so I kind of feel this way about when I think about things like the way social networks are designed,

Starting point is 01:19:53 I often think, why can't I go and edit somebody else's comment? Well, the reason is because they're thinking, well, bad people will do it. And so now no one can do it. But actually, maybe if you have the right kind of systems and processes and transparency in place, it could be a great thing. Maybe not. But I just think too often, if you design for the worst people, then you're failing to design for good people. It makes a lot of sense. The steak knife metaphor drives the point home. And I have just a few questions. I want to move shortly to current projects and how you think about current projects. But I have a few broader questions first. The first is, what motivates great contributors? And how do you keep them happy? Or what are the things that keep them happy?

Starting point is 01:20:44 That's a great question. It's exactly what we think about a lot with the Wikimedia Foundation and how do you keep them happy or what are the things that keep them happy? That's a great question. It's exactly what we think about a lot with the Wikimedia Foundation thinks about a lot, which is what we call community health. Are people having fun? Are they doing good work? Are they enjoying doing good work? Do they feel supported? Are they supported? And all of those things. So a great Wikipedian, in my view, is someone who really takes seriously the values and ideas of Wikipedia, like neutrality, for example, quality, for example, reliable sources. And they take all those things more important than any particular, say, political opinion they might have. So as I consider myself a good Wikipedian, I would not, for example, edit the entry on Donald Trump, because he makes me crazy. And I wouldn't be able to be neutral, I would go in and I would probably just my blind rage at this ridiculous person would make it really hard for me to be a good Wikipedia in that area that area so i just don't go there and i think a lot of good wikipedians are like that it's like okay here's something i really am passionate about but i know i can't really be neutral about it so i really should just stay away from it and i think that's a great

Starting point is 01:21:53 quality and also just this idea of kindness and thoughtfulness to say i go into this debate it's gotten a little rough and tumble but what can I bring to this debate that will actually help other people be calm, help this be productive? Maybe I can find a compromise between different people who have different perspectives. And I think those are really great people to have in Wikipedia. Systematically, are there things that you can do with respect to the fostering of those values or the cultivation of the engagement of the people who have those values? What are some of the organizational decisions? So one of the things that we've done recently that I think is a really fantastic thing is we've introduced a new universal code of conduct, which is really came from the community,

Starting point is 01:22:44 a huge consultative process within the community to really get the wording exactly right. And the idea is to say, look, we have a code of conduct, which is really about all these values. It's about being inclusive, being open, being friendly, being a safe space, not to use a buzzword. But that's been a fantastic thing. And it really is about saying, look, we know these values work for Wikipedia, they make Wikipedia better. And we also know that sometimes it's quite hard to enforce them because of a variety of factors. So in terms of bad behavior, so bad behavior at Wikipedia, if you come to Wikipedia, and you just start insulting people and being racist and being

Starting point is 01:23:26 a real jerk, that is so easy to deal with, like the community will just boot you out immediately, you'll get blocked. That's that end of story. It's really not that complicated. There's no internal community drama about it. It is what it is. The harder ones are, what about a contributor who's like super productive in writing in some area? And they're also quite rude and kind of jerky to other people. Maybe they're just on the border line of the sort of thing that would get them blocked. But they're just like basically a negative energy in the space and they're causing a lot of trouble. That's the ones that the community really does struggle with. I think any system would struggle with because it's like, we appreciate the work that you're doing, but you're basically probably driving off more good work than you are able to contribute yourself

Starting point is 01:24:13 by being a jerk all the time. And that is the kind of thing that the universal code of conduct is really meant to sort of help us step up and say, you know what, actually, the fact that you've written 35 great entries about some obscure topic does not excuse you insulting people. End of story. It's just not okay. And we will find someone else to write those 35 things because it's not necessary to be a jerk in the community. No matter what we do, those are very human decisions. They're very, you know, there is no simple formula. One of the things we've never done in Wikipedia and never would do is have points or likes or that sort of thing,

Starting point is 01:24:50 because it's just inhuman, really. It's like, human personalities are so rich and so varied that really, like, the best thing is, like, the kind of great Wikipedian, in my mind, is the person who's able to go in and kind of hold hands with that contributor who's doing great work but being difficult and kind of coach them into being nicer as a human being. It's like, hey, you don't have to go around with a chip on your shoulder all the time. I'm going to help you deal with the problems that you're trying to address, but you should probably stop yelling at people. And we have great people in the community who are good at that. And that's really kind of amazing. I'd like to revisit this pathological optimism. Because I mean, the term pathological

Starting point is 01:25:31 is funny, right? And I mean, if we go to pathos, right, I mean, this kind of feeling, or in some cases suffering, but let's go with the feeling, I would like to feel more optimism. And not to say that I'm Eeyore or anything like that, but if I could turn the dial a few clicks for a general higher state of optimism, I feel like I would be better for it. Is that something that just came hardwired in you out of the box? Is it something that you've developed? How would you answer that? I would say it's just kind of a deeply ingrained part of my personality but i also think i do cultivate it because you know like anybody i think you can work yourself into a funk it's not hard to do and you can therefore become more pessimistic than you should

Starting point is 01:26:23 it's not hard for people to do that. And I think if you have a certain set of practices around saying, no, actually, I'm going to remember, count my blessings. I'm going to look for the fun bit of this and the opportunity and what can I change? And sometimes what happens to people, and this is actually if we go back to things like your money or your life, there are a lot of people who are stuck in jobs they don't like, but they don't feel that they can leave because they've got this mortgage and car payment. And one of the things that book does is say, okay, why do you have that mortgage and car payment? What if you drove a crappy car instead of the expensive car? does that mean why would you do that to yourself

Starting point is 01:27:06 if it's causing you to be stuck in a job that you hate now obviously that's easier for some people in some circumstances than others but it is a common thing that people get themselves into a situation where they're living a lifestyle that's too expensive for what they're earning and therefore they're unhappy and they don't see a way out. And one way out is to go, you know what, you're valuing the wrong things. So that's about reflecting and saying, you know what, actually, you know what the greatest thing in the world is, the greatest thing in the world is, and you said you're trying to sell yourself on having kids, the greatest thing in the world is going out with your kids and look at here in the UK, they call them wood lice,

Starting point is 01:27:45 which sounds disgusting. We call them rolly pollies in the South, which is much nicer. But you go out and you find some rolly pollies, right? And you look under a rock and you get the rolly pollies and you roll them, you know, you get them to roll and you put them on a twig. And that's great stuff. That's what life is. It's absolutely free. And if you remember that sort of thing as a practice, not just hopefully, but just actually go, you know what, I'm in a funk about work, but you know what, there's more important things in life. Let's go do that. Then it turns out that if you can turn your head around in that way, then actually, when you get back to the work problem, you're more

Starting point is 01:28:18 likely to have a creative solution to the situation, whatever that might mean. What are some of your practices? Maybe they are just consistent, in which case they're kind of preemptively avoiding funk tendencies, or when you get into a funk, are there particular practices? You said Count Your Blessings, for instance. It doesn't have to be this example, but if it were something like that, how might it manifest in your life? What does it look like? I don't know. It's so ingrained that it's not like... A morning journaling practice.

Starting point is 01:28:49 Yeah, I don't. I don't. It's just sort of like, yeah, just kind of pulling myself together. But I don't want to be too glib. I mean, people do struggle with genuine problems of depression. People are in genuinely very hard circumstances. So it's quite easy from where I sit to go, yeah, just cheer yourself up and everything's going to be great. And I know that's not right, which is why I call it pathological. But I do think there's something to, if you can find that positive side, then you do have a better chance of working out whatever the actual problem is. Right. Well, you also, I mean, speaking as someone who has a history of, and this goes back hundreds and I'm sure thousands of years in my family line, just given the software, but history of depressive episodes twice a year, probably extended episodes up until maybe seven or eight years ago.

Starting point is 01:29:37 It's difficult to see solutions with that shroud of mist over your perceptive faculties, if that makes sense. You see problems, but you don't see solutions. And that in and of itself is a meta problem. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is. It is. And like I said, I don't want to be glib about, these are real issues. They're hard issues for lots of people. And so it's really, if you're in the midst of a depressive episode, literally the last thing you need is for me to ring you on the phone and go, hey, just look on the bright side, man. You know, like, come on, asshole. Are you kidding me? Everything sucks right now. And I don't really need this. You know, that's not really what I

Starting point is 01:30:17 mean. But I do think there are things, you know, sort of remember the good things, you know, at the dark moments can be can be quite helpful. What are you working on right now? What is it that you know, sort of remember the good things, you know, at the dark moments can be can be quite helpful. What are you working on right now? What is it that you're, you're directing your time and energies to? So I spend a lot of time on WT social sort of design and so on got a very small team, though. So the software progress is very slow. I deliberately chose not to raise money at the outset, because I felt if I did, if I'm trying to reinvent social networking, if I raised money early, which I could do because of my position, I would suddenly be on a certain kind of VC driven treadmill to get to a certain place and to do this and that and the other. And I just didn't want to, I wanted to have complete creative freedom to really kind of think

Starting point is 01:31:03 and innovate in about some quite hard problems. So I spent a fair amount of time working on that. But I also, during lockdown, so at the beginning of lockdown, I would say when we first, last March here is when everything went into complete shutdown. It was an amazing, weird time, you know, suddenly, from traveling all over the world giving speeches, I'm like here at home, and the kids are here and all that. And basically, for the first couple of months, I was like, Oh, I'll just carry on. I always work from home, I work remote, it's no big deal. And then I'm like, actually, this is weird, because I can answer more emails. But as anybody who, I mean, I'm sure you're this way.

Starting point is 01:31:46 In fact, I have a feeling, I remember there's something you wrote about email, but like literally with email, the problem with email is the more email you answer, the more email you get, you know? Like there's no such thing as finishing your email. Like, you know, it's just like, forget it. You're never going to finish your email

Starting point is 01:32:01 because if you email a hundred people a day, they're all going to freaking email you back tomorrow and then 20 more people. So, you know, it's kind of hopeless. So then I realized like, this is not productive. This is not it. And I thought, you know what, I actually, what am I going to do with myself? I don't know. I mean, I'm normally spending a huge amount of time preparing for speeches, researching the client who I'm speaking for so I can customize to what they're interested in. And I travel and I do my speech, I do press interviews and all that. And suddenly, that's all gone, completely gone, along with, by the way, my income. So that's a little bit annoying. And I just thought, you know what, I love programming, I love coding, never get a chance to do it. So I

Starting point is 01:32:39 basically just started doing online programming classes. And just like, I want to get my, re-up my skills, start doing things started really learning a lot of interesting things got very interested in web RTC. So video on web. And then with my friends and family, we started doing a weekly pub quiz here. And now I also do it with my mom and dad and my family in America. And basically, it's just like, you know, you could get on once a week and somebody has created a quiz and you do the quiz and everybody jokes around and that's it. And I thought, well, this is great, but it's on Zoom. It's not really that great. You know, Zoom is great. It's just a business video conferencing tool. So I created a new

Starting point is 01:33:17 website, which is called Quiz Night Beyond, where it's just like a fun website. So it's all about quizzes. You can go in and create quizzes and you can invite people, you can schedule just like a fun website. So it's all about quizzes, you can go on and create quizzes. And you can invite people you can schedule just like you schedule a zoom meeting. And everybody meets and in the middle is the quiz and everybody's doing it together. And there's the videos and it's all about teasing your friends and joking around. And that is going to launch well, I mean, hopefully by the time this podcast is out, it will have launched, but it's quiz night beyond.com. And I'm really enjoying it. It's like, it's one of these things, it's like that entrepreneurial itch of like, here's something that I want to do,

Starting point is 01:33:51 which is do quizzes with my family during lockdown so that we get a chance to see people. And let me, in a second, I'm going to go on a side rant about social networking. And yet it doesn't quite work the way I would like it to. And now I see a way to solve that problem and like tick and I'm going to do it. Is it going to be a commercial success?

Starting point is 01:34:07 I hope so. Is it not? I don't care because it's something I want to exist. So I'm making it so that I can use it. And if everybody else likes it, that's great too. And then my side rant on this front and part of what inspires me, the whole concept of WT social is around the social networking is really broken. It's not healthy. Jimmy, what does the WT stand for?

Starting point is 01:34:29 Oh, WikiTribune. It's basically a pivot. WikiTribune was kind of thinking about how to get people involved in news and how to collaborate on news. And as we were doing that, I learned a lot. But I came to realize the real problem with news is not what's going on in journalism. It's what's going on in the wider ecosystem where they live. It's that the advertising-only social media really rewards clickbait headlines full stop. And so clickbait headlines, clickbait content, low-quality stuff goes viral. And it's not conducive to serious, hard-hitting journalism, which also can go viral, but it's very expensive. So with WT Social, I just really am in this process of thinking, what's wrong? What's wrong with social networking? What's unhealthy here? And I suddenly realized, as we started doing the weekly quiz, my family is kind of dispersed. My mom and dad live in Alabama. My sister lives in Seattle. Brothers in New York, we're kind of dispersed. My mom and dad live in Alabama. My sister lives in Seattle, brothers in New York, we're kind of dispersed. And so whatever we talk, we have phone calls from

Starting point is 01:35:30 time to time, got a family WhatsApp group, we've got the kids only WhatsApp group where we talk about, you know, what's going on with mom and dad, and how can we help and that sort of thing. And basically, what I realized is by seeing them all once a week, and we're just doing a quiz, it's just a fun thing to do. And there's mom, and there's my sisters. And there's, you know, I have the one sister who I had kind of grown apart from not not no serious break or anything, but just, you know, we weren't talking that much for a long time. Suddenly, I see them every week. And we're joking around. And we're laughing laughing we're laughing about stuff when we were kids and it's really human and I realized you know like what is social networking what do we when we think about social uses of computers that's so much better so much

Starting point is 01:36:15 healthier than for example something that's completely innocuous but like if I click like on a picture of my sister's dog on Instagram, are we kidding ourselves that that's social? That is the most limited form of human engagement. It's just like, I like your picture of your dog. Okay, so what? That's not a conversation, right? That's not actually joking around. It's not talking about the family.

Starting point is 01:36:39 It's not teasing each other about a quiz question, you know, like real human interaction. So for me, that's, that's really interesting. And so that's kind of what I'm focusing on is like, okay, how do we really reimagine, like from the ground up? What does it mean to use computers in a social way? And I think we've got this really interesting opportunity to do that around video, simply because, because of lockdown, like everybody's gotten used to doing zoom calls, right? It's a thing. And obviously, we'll stop doing as much of that once we can go back and meet in a bar or whatever.

Starting point is 01:37:10 But there are certainly old friends who I wouldn't meet in a bar necessarily around London because they live all over the world who I'm like, oh, now it wouldn't be that weird to go, oh, let's get a bunch of people together and go on Zoom together. Like, why not? It's kind of fun. Well, count me in. I love this idea in part because Zoom calls and video conferencing without some type of context can work, but it can also be very challenging. So having an activity is key, at least for me. Yeah, I'll read my co-founder at Wicked Tribune, put it this way. She's like, when you go to your extended family for a holiday dinner, one of the reasons we have that huge

Starting point is 01:37:57 dinner is to give everybody something to do. Even if you really love your family, it's like suddenly you're popped in front of your mom dad brothers sisters cousins and you're sitting in a room staring at each other it could be quite awkward but instead we've got these rituals we've got something to do we've got who's going to make the mashed potatoes and and then we go and we sit together and you know people have their traditions christmas traditions and that sort of thing and this is kind of that it's like okay yeah if you're going to get your whole family together once a week for a call and you've got nothing to do, it's going to be weird. It's quite often can be very awkward, but it's like, let's do an activity

Starting point is 01:38:32 together. It's a conversation starter. It's kind of a icebreaker. I want to also emphasize what I think is perhaps sometimes missed, not always it gets discussed, but the genius of scratching your own itch in the sense that there are many companies that people might assume have these 10-year, 20-year master plans that have been executed to perfection with all of these strategies and tactics and plans for team and flywheels and so on. But there are certainly, I would say, just as many examples, maybe more examples of companies that started as products to scratch the itch of one or two people. And if you design in that way, if you build in that way, you have at least a guaranteed market of one, which is far less speculative than a lot of what goes on.

Starting point is 01:39:29 So I'm excited to see where it goes. Yeah, I think that's right. And actually, what I think is interesting about it really is that when you think about what can be successful, so if you're an entrepreneur and you want to go into business, I always tell young entrepreneurs, if you just look around and you do some analysis and you pick the thing you think is going to make the most money, but it's kind of boring to you, chances are you're not going to make that much money because it's boring to you. It's not something you find is a passion in and of itself. You're just there to try to tick off some boxes and make some money. You might think that's a clever thing. You're like, well, it's boring, but I'm going to only do it for five years.

Starting point is 01:40:05 I'm going to sell out for a ton of money. It's like, no, you're probably going to do it for two years, and you're going to hate every minute of it. You're not going to be good at it because you hate it. Versus if you scratch your own itch, you're like, oh, here's the thing. If this existed, I think that would be cool. I think it'd be interesting. By the way, it doesn't have to be a consumer product.

Starting point is 01:40:20 It could be B2B. Just anything that you come up with that you're like, wow, this should exist, and I be cool then if you've built it you can be proud that you built it and if there's some weird reason why it just didn't work out as a business yeah fine no big deal jimmy it's so nice to reconnect and spend time together and i have one one last question one or two last questions and this one sometimes goes nowhere fast and i'll take fast, and I'll take full blame for it if that ends up being the case. But if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get a message, a quote, a question, an image, anything out to billions of people, what would you put on that billboard? Or what might you put on that billboard? Or what might you put on that billboard? Well, I mean, I think the thing that immediately pops to my mind is my

Starting point is 01:41:12 original vision statement for Wikipedia, which is, imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Because to me, that is still like, wow, that's so exciting, right? Just to think every single person on the planet, completely for free, has access to the sum of all human knowledge, you can do anything, you can learn, you can grow, you can heal, you can cure you know, it's amazing to think about what are all the implications of that statement. And so I just think the more people who are thinking that way, obviously for Wikipedia, but it's not about Wikipedia's organization, but it's just like,

Starting point is 01:41:51 wow, what can we do to make sure that education and knowledge are universally accessible? Because we've got a lot of problems on this planet. We need as many smart, educated people to figure them out as we possibly can. So let's make sure everybody has the ability to join in that intellectual project. Here, here. Well, Jimmy, people can find Quiz Night Beyond at quiznightbeyond.com. It's always fun to connect. It's been a little while. Yeah, too long. And I really appreciate you taking the time today from so far away, although so close via voice. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Any closing comments, requests of the audience, anything at all before we bring this to a close? No, no, it's good. I mean, I hope people will check out

Starting point is 01:42:37 Quiz Night Beyond and come and visit me on WT.social and, hi on Twitter and try not to be a troll on the internet. And that's all. That is a good parting message to leave embedded in the minds of everyone listening. When in doubt, don't be a troll on the internet. It is not net positive. Jimmy, thank you so much for the time. Really enjoyed the conversation. And to everybody listening, we will put links to all resources, all websites, everything that popped up in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

Starting point is 01:43:29 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

Starting point is 01:44:02 It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by You Need a Budget. What is You Need a Budget? You Need a Budget is a cult favorite budgeting app for a reason. It works, and I'm going to come back to that cult favorite because, oh my god, they really do have a cult following. The app and its simple four-rule method will change the way you think about your money and help you gain total control so you can plan for the things you need and get the things you want without guilt or stress.

Starting point is 01:44:44 To give you an idea on the cult favorite side, to date they know of at least seven customers who have customized their license plates to mark the occasion of purchasing a new car in cash. And these fans do this by including YNAB, you need a budget, on their license plates. So people love this app. You need a budget has helped millions of people transform their finances, save their marriages, and live life on their own terms. I even asked Pete Adney, who's been on the podcast, best known as Mr. Money Mustache, super popular episode, what he thought, and he's a big fan of the founder and what they're doing. So it was check, check, check, green light, green light, green light across the board. You Need a Budget's simple four rule method will actually teach you how to manage your money. You will learn a new way of

Starting point is 01:45:28 thinking, new habits, and new behaviors that will help you get out of debt, break the paycheck to paycheck cycle, and build wealth faster. The You Need a Budget team is committed to your success. They offer free live classes every day of the week, video courses, boot camps, challenges, and active fan groups in every corner of the internet. There's something for everyone. If you want to learn, they can teach you. The You Need a Budget team believes that no one can tell you what your money should do. Only you can decide what matters most to you. Your budget is simply a tool to help you stay focused on your true priorities, reach your goals, and live a life of your design. On average, new budgeters save more than $600 by month two and $6,000 in their first year. So try the app free for 34 days, no credit card required at youneedabudget.com slash Tim,

Starting point is 01:46:14 spelled as you would expect in proper English. Try You Need a Budget free for 34 days, no credit card required at youneedabudget.com slash Tim. And just to explain 34 days, that's because most people reconcile at the end of the month or 30 periods. So having a couple of days of cushion helps folks out. So 34 days with no credit card required at youneedabudget.com slash Tim. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end-all, be-all.

Starting point is 01:46:49 That all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything, seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #528: Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, on Homeschooling, Atheism, Understanding Financial Markets, Ayn Rand, Favorite Books, and More

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #528: Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, on Homeschooling, Atheism, Understanding Financial Markets, Ayn Rand, Favorite Books, and More

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