Wikipedia | The Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Shares | How Jimmy Whales Founded Wikipedia At Age 32 & How He Scaled It + The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

(Speaker 9)
Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, but this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi -million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you, and they have a lot of time on their hands. This started from the bottom, Now they’re here.

(Speaker 7)
It’s the Thrive Time show starring the former U .

(Speaker 23)
S.

(Speaker 9)
Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s bunny, Dr. Robert Zubner. Two men, eight kids, co -created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses.

(Speaker 22)
We started from the bottom, now we’re at the top.

(Speaker 3)
Started from the bottom, now we’re at the top. Teaching you the systems to get what we got. Colton Dixon’s on the hoops. I break down the seeds, bringing some wisdom and the hoops. As the father of the squad, so if you see my wife and kids, please tell them it’s the CNC up on your radio. And now, freak the song.

(Speaker 3)
website called Wikipedia. Perhaps you’ve heard about this thing called Wikipedia. Perhaps you’ve Googled anything ever and you’ve found a Wikipedia search result. Well, today’s guest is the founder, the inventor, the creator, the man, the man. the legend behind Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. Welcome on to the Thrive Time Show.

(Speaker 1)
How are you, sir?

(Speaker 21)
Very good. Thanks for having me on.

(Speaker 20)
All right.

(Speaker 3)
So, Jimmy, I want to start at the very beginning. You were born, which is.. . And then after that, how did you start Wikipedia?

(Speaker 2)
What happened from the time you were born to becoming the Wikipedia founder guy? Yeah, I was born, dot, dot, dot, and started Wikipedia, right? And so the middle bit. Yeah, so I was born in Alabama, sweet home Alabama. And I, you know, grew up there, went to a very small school that was run by my mother and grandmother. It was sort of like a Abraham Lincoln one room schoolhouse.

(Speaker 2)
We had multiple grades in each room. So, you know, sort of first through fourth grade and fifth through eighth grade were all grouped together. When I was growing up, the NASA headquarters for the science is in Huntsville. So that’s where the Space and Rocket Center is. And we live close enough to the Redstone Arsenal that sometimes the windows would rattle when they were testing the Saturn V rockets. So that was exciting.

(Speaker 2)
And really, the space program was kind of our hometown sports team, so to speak. And at the time, Alabama grew from 20 ,000 people in 1960 to 200 ,000 in 1980. And I was born in 1966, kind of in the middle of that boom period. And it boomed because of the space program. Which meant a lot of people were from all over. You know, it wasn’t a typical sleepy southern cotton town that it had been before.

(Speaker 2)
And they brought in tons and tons of engineers to work on the space program. So it was kind of a high tech place. So that was all in the air. My uncle started one of the first computer stores in town. and I learned a little bit of programming from him. He was an electrical engineer who was a geek like me.

(Speaker 2)
And yeah, so then I ended up, I didn’t study computer science in college, I studied finance. Went to the University of, well, I first went to Auburn University, and then to the University of Alabama, and then later to Indiana University. But I got very, very interested in the Internet and really pretty obsessed with this new technology and started a little website, a search engine web directory, launched an early blogging platform that wasn’t particularly successful, and ultimately launched a project called Newpedia, which was the predecessor to Wikipedia, which didn’t work because it was top down and too hard to contribute. And we can talk about that if you’re interested.

(Speaker 3)
And then launched Wikipedia, which went on to become a big success. Now, I’ve got a lot of questions that are blowing my mind here thinking about it. You were born in 1966. And Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs came out with the Apple I in 1976. So that means when you were 10, that’s when the Apple personal computer began to become a thing people thought about.

(Speaker 2)
What age were you when you started monkeying around, touching, working with your first computer? Yeah, I mean, it was probably around then. My mother’s quite into it. tech of all kinds. We always tease her. She’s an early adopter, but she tended to early adopt the wrong technology.

(Speaker 2)
We had a Betamax instead of a VHS. We had a Commodore computer, Commodore PET it was called, that Eagle computers came out, and that was an interesting sort of business computer. And my uncle was a dealer for Commodore and for Eagle. But, you know, very early on, I would say. I would say certainly by 1980, something like that.

(Speaker 3)
But I had been reading about, you know, computers and all of that before then. Uh, did you play the heck out of Oregon Trail? I mean, did Oregon Trail do something for you? Were you a Oregon Trail guy or a Pong guy or a Pac -Man guy?

(Speaker 2)
Did you care about these things or not so much? Not so much. I mean, I didn’t, I definitely didn’t play Oregon Trail, but yeah, yeah, a bit of Pong for sure, you know, and then later Pac -Man and Galaga, that was sort of in the arcades at some point when I was a teenager. But I’ve never actually been much of a gamer. I mean, I, you know, play a few games on my phone or whatever like that, but in terms of being a gamer, not really.

(Speaker 3)
I just, I don’t know if I have the right hand -eye coordination for it. So what age were you when you started Newpedia, which ultimately became Wikipedia?

(Speaker 2)
What age were you when you started Newpedia slash Wikipedia? I’d have to do the math, but I would say early 30s, so 33, maybe 32, something like that. So certainly not 19, not 21, you know, like a lot of the people who came later were doing very, very early startups. But, you know, still, I was a young person. It was, by the way, we’re coming up on the 25th anniversary. So to date Wikipedia back to 2001.

(Speaker 3)
It’s been quite some time now. Where were you when you were starting Newpedia slash Wikipedia? Were you in your home? Were you in a basement? Were you in a garage? Were you in a shed like the founder of Hewlett Packard?

(Speaker 2)
Or where were you? No, no, I mean by this time I had my my little internet startup that we’re were doing all kinds of experimental projects and things. This was during the dot -com boom. We had an office in San Diego. moved to San Diego because I was previously, as an Alabama boy living in Chicago, I found to be absolutely brutal and decided I needed to get out of there and go somewhere where the weather is good.

(Speaker 2)
And I did my research like a good geek, and I found that the best weather in the country was San Diego.

(Speaker 3)
So I moved to San Diego. Now, I’m not going to pry into your personal life, but I’ll tell you about mine. I’ve got five great kids. Five great kids. One incredible wife, five great kids. And, you know, I hope they grow up to be productive kids.

(Speaker 3)
I happen to be a Christian, so that’s kind of the worldview I teach my kids. And, you know, when you start a business, you kind of have a worldview, or maybe you want your business to grow up to be like, bleh, when it gets, you know, when your business, you start it, but you maybe have a vision of what it’s going to grow up to be.

(Speaker 2)
Is Wikipedia today what you envisioned it to be when you started it? It is pretty much. You know, the thing about an encyclopedia and part of what made it all work is the purpose of of our community, the purpose of everything we’re doing is about a free, neutral, high -quality encyclopedia. And everybody has the same rough idea of what an encyclopedia should be. If I say, encyclopedia article about the Eiffel Tower, you’re going to imagine what that would be like, and you’re going to think, oh, it’s going to tell the history, it’s going to tell who the architect was, and what was the public reception, why was it built, there’ll be a picture or two. Everybody knows what you’re supposed to do.

(Speaker 2)
Early on was a good purpose, which is will come on to purpose later, I’m sure, and was really. it simple. But it also means we’ve just stuck to it over the years.

(Speaker 3)
It just keeps being the very simple, central tenet of everything that we do. So for those that don’t know, what’s your role today with or without Wikipedia? What do you do?

(Speaker 19)
What are you working on now that you’ve built the world’s largest encyclopedia of knowledge?

(Speaker 2)
What are you working on now? Yeah, so I’m still very involved in the Wikipedia world. I am not the CEO. I haven’t been really in decades. That doesn’t mean I’m not involved. It means I’m a terrible manager.

(Speaker 2)
And so I prefer to let people be the CEO as soon as I possibly can. I’m more about creating and inventing and leading about the vision. And so I’m on the board and I have an active role in the community and so forth. I just wrote a book called The Seven Rules of Trust. It’s my first book. And so that’s just come out.

(Speaker 2)
And so I’m spending a lot of time talking about the book and we’ve sold it in 20 languages. So that’s exciting. So for the coming year, I think I’ll be traveling quite a lot. I still, I love to program as a hobby. I’m not very good at it, but I still enjoy that. And I’m actually really enjoying It’s halfway between vibe coding and actual old school coding.

(Speaker 2)
In other words, I do use AI to help me, but I do know how to code, so I sort of check everything myself, and it’s just for fun. And then, you know, what else do I do? I’ve got a small side project called Trust Cafe, trustcafe . io, which is an experiment in a new type of social network based on trust rather than engagement and clicks. Anyway, I’m on boards. I do this and that.

(Speaker 2)
But I always joke, I’m lucky to have become successful because I make a terrible employee because I just get up every day and do whatever seems like the most interesting and fun thing to do.

(Speaker 3)
And so luckily that’s worked out for me. Now, I’m going to pull up your book here for anybody out there that is unaware of your book here. Your book is called The Seven Rules of Trust, A Blueprint for Building Things That Last. The Seven Rules of Trust, A Blueprint for Building Things That Last. So that’s the cover, folks, kind of an orange -yellow cover right there. I’ll put a link on the show notes so people can get it.

(Speaker 3)
Let’s talk about the book. What inspired you to write a book? I mean, you could be on Wikipedia, scrolling through Wikipedia, looking at things. You could be on Instagram. You could be sipping Mai Tais at a beach somewhere.

(Speaker 2)
What inspired you to write the book? A very good friend of mine, Richard Edelman, has been running the Edelman Trust Barometer Survey for many years. So Edelman PR, big PR company. And this survey is across many countries looking at questions of trust in society. And what they have documented is a real decrease in trust over the last 25 years. Trust in journalism at an all -time low, trust in politics, trust in business, trust in each other to some extent.

(Speaker 2)
And this is a pretty wide phenomenon. There are a few exceptions to it, but broadly it’s a trend that you can’t avoid. And meanwhile, Wikipedia has gone from being kind of a joke in the early days, I mean, people didn’t think much of it, to being one of the few things people trust. And that doesn’t mean because Wikipedia is perfect or that you get everything right, but just because people know we’re transparent, we’re honest, we’re trying to do the right thing, we’re trying to build something of value for the long term. And I just thought, you know what, there’s some lessons I’ve learned over the years about trust that I think could be useful for people to hear about. And I also really just want to open that conversation to say, look, we really need to insist upon people behaving in a trustworthy manner, because the lack of trust is

(Speaker 3)
leading to all kinds of bad consequences in the world that aren’t really helpful to us in the long run. Now, I want to go back to the Wikipedia founding and growing it and scaling it for a second. How did you go from, okay, I started this thing, I’m 32, I’m 33 -ish, I’m in San Diego. How did you scale it or how did you gain traction? How did you go from what you were building yourself to something that now, I mean, literally every single person watching this show right now is using Wikipedia on almost a daily basis. So how did you go from something that every, there’s not a lot of products, by the way, folks, that everybody uses every day.

(Speaker 3)
You’ve got what, Google, Wikipedia, The Wheel. Some people out there are using the wheel every day. I mean, it’s one of these few things that everybody’s using.

(Speaker 2)
How did you go from this infancy into where everyone’s using it? Yeah, well, you know, I mean, it’s very interesting. So before Wikipedia, I had the project Newpedia, which was the same vision of free encyclopedia for everyone. But I didn’t really know how to go about it. I didn’t know how to build an online community and so forth. So there’s a lot I had to learn.

(Speaker 2)
And, you know, one of the things, one of the lessons that I did learn, so the With Newpedia, we designed a seven -stage review process to get anything published. And so, as somebody said to me the other day, oh, so it was founded on the seven rules of distrust. In other words, Newpedia, you didn’t get the sense that we trusted you. We would say, oh, well, send in your CV so you can prove you’re qualified, and then we’re going to send your paper out for review by the most prestigious academics we can find. It was a very hard process to get through, and I knew it wouldn’t work when I tried. to write an article about, I was going to write about Robert Merton, who had recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, and I had published a paper

(Speaker 2)
in the same area he worked in, which was option pricing theory. And I’d been an option trader in Chicago. And I said, oh, OK, I can write this. But then when I started, I was like, wow, even though I’ve read all his work, it’s been several years since I was in academia, they’re going to send it out to these professors. It was very nerve wracking. It wasn’t fun.

(Speaker 2)
And that’s when I realized, OK, actually, this isn’t going to work. This needs to be fun, needs to be a lot easier to do. And so one of my employees, a guy called Jeremy Rosenfeld, showed me the wiki idea. And a couple of weeks later, after my daughter was born, there was a bit in the hospital when she was born, I launched Wikipedia. And we actually got more work done in the first two weeks than we had in almost two years. And what was interesting is that because we had that community, we had a couple hundred people active on the mailing list talking about an encyclopedia, thinking about what does it mean to be an encyclopedia?

(Speaker 2)
What is neutrality? What are the kinds of things we could do differently because it’s online? What are the kinds of things we’d want to do the same, even though it is online, et cetera, et cetera. That community immediately came in and started started working. And then the other fun, interesting thing in those early days was I used to, I did it a few times. I would sometimes look through the server logs and see where people were coming from, what searches they were conducting to find us.

(Speaker 2)
And I made a page where I would rank those and I would say what Google likes. And I would say, like, here are the 20 pages that received the most traffic from Google in the last week. And I just did it because I was interested and it was fun. But the community looked at that and said, OK, great, like that’s super interesting. This is the stuff that people are wanting to see. Let’s write more like that.

(Speaker 2)
And so, you know, it just as a simple example, they might see, oh, look, World War Two history. That seems to be a popular topic. Well, we only have a few articles. Let’s make more. Let’s make an article about the battle. the Bulge and an article about, you know, whatever, different offenses and aftermath of the war and this and that.

(Speaker 3)
So the community was quite entrepreneurial and quite eager to grow because we had a really strong belief in what we were doing and we had a really strong sense of purpose to have a free encyclopedia for everyone in the world. Now, again, as we’re building trust, we’re on the topic of trust, and I’m going to get back into your book. But as we’re building trust, for anybody out there that doesn’t know, I’ve never talked to Jimmy offline. And so this is a cold interview. Jimmy might get off this and say, this is the worst interview I’ve ever had. So I’m not setting up for gotcha questions, but it may feel like that.

(Speaker 3)
So I’m just making sure. Wikipedia, I’m not asking you how much money you make. I’m not asking how much money you’ve made. But how does Wikipedia make money? Like, how is it financially solvent? Curious minds want to know.

(Speaker 3)
We have a business show here.

(Speaker 2)
So how does Wikipedia sustain itself? you know, large billionaires. I mean, we do have some major donors, we appreciate them. But the vast majority of the money comes from the general public, the small donations. So 10 bucks is a very typical donation. And I think that’s really great.

(Speaker 2)
It keeps us intellectually independent, like no one person can sort of threaten us. It keeps us beholden to the readers, to the general public to say, okay, if people don’t think it’s valuable, they’re going to donate money. So that’s a great thing. I am a volunteer. I don’t have a salary. I’ve never had a salary from Wikipedia.

(Speaker 2)
I have my for -profit company, Fandom, Fandom . com, which, again, as soon as I possibly could, I got a CEO to run that because I’m a terrible manager. And, you know, that company’s done very, very well, you know, we’re, I don’t know, around the number 20 website, couple hundred million in revenue every year. You know, it’s a it’s a great project. But, you know, that Getting the support for Wikipedia, we’ve been very successful with it. And over the years, you know, people say to me, oh, well, why are you always just putting up a banner and begging for money?

(Speaker 2)
And I’m like, you know, they’re like, oh, you should just get Google and Microsoft and Facebook to pay for it. And I’m like, think about that. Maybe that might not be so great if we relied on a handful of big companies to fund us, because then we’d be beholden to them.

(Speaker 3)
And that wouldn’t be good for anybody. Again, not a gotcha question, just a question that I want to pull up on the screen here. This is a friend of mine. He’s a publicist, very good friend of mine. And this is his Wikipedia page, Michael Levine, who’s represented 58 Academy Award winners and 34 Grammy Award winners and 43 New York Times bestsellers. And there it is.

(Speaker 3)
How does somebody who’s watching this show get a Wikipedia listing? Like, if somebody says, I’ve achieved some things or built some things, and I want a Wikipedia listing, is there a way Process for that, is it like step one, send Jimmy an email, just send Jimmy a text? Or what’s the process for somebody? Because again, Michael, being a buddy of mine, has a wonderful Wikipedia profile. And so many friends of mine who have had some success will tell me, they’ll say, Clay, how come Michael has this great PR profile or this great Wikipedia profile that documents his PR career, and yet the guy who invented this product or the guy who started this can’t have one?

(Speaker 2)
Or walk us through, is there a process for that? Yeah, there is. So, I mean, I think the first thing to know is that what we’re really looking for is high quality neutral sort of third party sources. And so, you know, I think a lot of people. you know, they’ve got their PR biography. And by the way, everybody’s PR biography is a little bit different from their actual biography because some things you want to highlight and maybe, you know, they’re not part of history you wouldn’t put out there up front.

(Speaker 2)
And, you know, the community makes these decisions. There’s a page you can go where you can request a page and people will discuss that. If someone is doesn’t have a conflict of interest. That’s something that we think is really important. And of course, anybody can start a page, but we discourage people with a conflict of interest. You shouldn’t start a page about yourself, you know, things like that, because it’s very hard to be neutral about yourself.

(Speaker 2)
And then, you know, the truth is, when we look at it, what I would say is, overall, you know, I see that, you know, Michael, Michael Levine, Grammy Award winner, 43 New York Times bestsellers. Wow, that’s amazing. People who are in the movie industry and the media, musicians and so on, they have lots of fans, so they have a lot of people supporting a lot. And for companies, what I find is, companies that are consumer facing, like, I don’t know, Apple, you know, lots of news about Apple. But there are actually companies, I remember this, I gave a talk once at the Flexible Packaging Association, so it’s a trade group. We had a conference out in the desert somewhere.

(Speaker 2)
It wasn’t in Vegas. It was maybe in Palm Springs, but anyway, they did a conference. I gave a speech there, and I was just doing research on, okay, who are these people? I found a couple of companies. One of them had 11 ,000 employees. I don’t remember exactly what they did, but a lot of these companies were doing things like making cans for Campbell’s Soup.

(Speaker 2)
We’ll have an article about Campbell’s Soup. That’s a consumer brand.

(Speaker 18)
We didn’t have an article about this company, 11 ,000 employees.

(Speaker 2)
Clearly, an important company. You’ve got whatever amount of revenue and so on. But there’s very little sources about that company, very little news, and also, frankly, very little interest. I mean, to their benefit, the company is quite boring. It just seems like a good company.

(Speaker 2)
They won a local award as a good place to work, so great. And so there is that. I think oftentimes business people who aren’t the big celebrity business people might have a much smaller profile, but that’s generally for a good reason, which is we try not to write biographies of people if we can’t do it in a responsible way. So we try to avoid, I mean, we have a very firm sort of set of guidelines around, we call it BLP1E, we’ve got a lot of jargon, biography of a living person notable for only one event. So this would be, for example, a victim of a crime, like typically a private person whose name gets in the media because they’re a victim of a crime, we would say, you know what, actually, can’t really write a biography of that person. We know a few facts that the media mentioned, you know, around that, like, you know, all the people who died on September 11th would be an example.

(Speaker 2)
You kind of want to have a you know, there’s an emotional thing of like, oh, you should have a Wikipedia page, but it’s really hard to do if there’s not much known about them. So that’s one of the main things.

(Speaker 3)
But the process would be, you know, bring your sources, send an email, not to me, but to, you know, OTRS, there’s just info at Wikipedia, and somebody will get back to you. Info at, I’m taking notes here folks, info at wikipedia .

(Speaker 2)
com, okay, that’s where you go.

(Speaker 3)
Dot org, dot org. Dot org, because it’s not a commercial business, it’s a non -profit, got it. I want to get back into your book here, and I’ve got a stack of stuff here, and for anybody out there that doesn’t know what I’m doing, to my right I’ve got my stack of stuff, and then over here I’ve got my main interview going on. So I promise I’m not playing Oregon Trail right now or Pong. So here’s my questions I’ve got for you about the new book, again, The Seven Rules of Trust. These are my questions.

(Speaker 3)
You see great companies like Uber. Airbnb. You see these companies that have scaled. But at the end of the day, Uber is a trust organization. You don’t want to get in a car driven by a rando who may take you to some undisclosed location and drop you off. You don’t want to stay at a home via Airbnb where you end up staying the night with a disturbed individual.

(Speaker 3)
So there’s got to be a way to establish trust to convince the potential vacation renter to use Uber. Airbnb or to use to convince a traveler to New York. You know, I’ll be in New York here soon. When I’m in New York, I will use Uber all the time. And so you’re in a trust building organization. I kind of group you, Wikipedia, Uber, Wikipedia, Airbnb.

(Speaker 3)
I kind of group you in that trust organization there.

(Speaker 2)
Are there any common practices for establishing trust that you teach in your new book, sir? Yeah, yeah, quite a few. And in fact, those two, Uber and Airbnb, are case studies in the book that I go into in some detail. One of the people we interviewed for the book was Frances Fry, and she’s a Harvard professor, but with business experience. So she went into Uber at a moment of crisis to help them work on their issues with trust. They were at a complete breakdown of trust.

(Speaker 2)
They had lost trust with their investors. the drivers inside the company, there was very low trust between the different departments. Customers were starting to not trust. It was a real disaster for something that clearly is built on trust. I’m going to go, I mean, it’s so funny, we all do it these days if you use Uber, but boy, I remember when it first started, it’s like, oh, you mean some random car is going to pull up and I’m just going to grab the door handle and get in.

(Speaker 2)
You know, it’s like, gee, like what if I get in? And in fact, you know, I would say at that time, if you pulled up to a red light in your, let’s say a Prius, a very popular car for Uber, And somebody opened the door you would think I’m being carjacked like what the heck somebody’s jumping in my car after a year or two people like oh no I’m not an uber you know like don’t jump in my car but you know so they had to build trust and they had a lot of things that had broken down and you know I think. You know, the seven rules of trust and Francis Fry’s model for trust, which is about authenticity, empathy, logic, was a great framework to help me sort of shape my own thinking, but also to bring some of these rules to life. So just as an example, one that I think very clearly applies in the case of Wikipedia, is create a clear purpose. And so that clear purpose for Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia for everyone. And by sticking to that clear purpose, what that does for the organization, for the community, it makes us predictable.

(Speaker 2)
Like people can say, OK, I know what Wikipedia is going to do next, because the only thing they ever do is work on building an encyclopedia. So we don’t shock you with things. We stay true to a very clear purpose. And that just helps us in all kinds of decision making. And I think in a lot of businesses, that’s true. to be a good purpose, but it doesn’t have to be super high -minded.

(Speaker 2)
If you’re talking about Airbnb, the purpose is clearly to provide a platform for people to rent houses and apartments and all of the things that that entails.

(Speaker 3)
And staying simple to that purpose is very, very helpful. I think people know what you said, and I think happens is I think what you said resonates is true. OK, now you know my purpose. However, Drifting is a common thing, and Napoleon Hill wrote a lot about it in his book, Think and Grow Rich. He talked about drifting.

(Speaker 3)
There’s another book called Outwitting the Devil, written by Sharon Lecter and Napoleon Hill. Talks about drifting. I think a lot of people, they read a book like yours, and they go, yes, I have a vision. I have a purpose. I’m going to stay focused. And then they run into some adversity, someone that doesn’t like them, a negative comment, a bad review, a little pushback.

(Speaker 3)
And then all of a sudden, they’re off. the reservation, they’re no longer following their proven path. Could you talk about that for a second?

(Speaker 2)
How have you stayed or how haven’t you stayed on the course of your purpose over the years at Wikipedia? Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s simple because It was very successful from the early time. I mean, I knew I had hit on something that resonated with people. And so that sort of continuing to double down on that is always a good thing. But there’s some other things like be independent rule six in the book. Being independent, it means a lot of different things in a lot of different contexts, but broadly, that intellectual independence is really important.

(Speaker 2)
So you can sort of say, okay, like I’ve gotten some criticism or someone doesn’t like what I’m doing, but I’m not just going to be knocked flat on my back by that. I’m going to say, okay, hold on. I need to grapple with this. Is this criticism valid? Is there anything I should tweak? What are we not getting right here?

(Speaker 2)
And sometimes you go, actually, they’re just wrong. They’re mistaken. And sometimes you’re like, oh, no, actually, there’s something valuable to learn here. But you approach it with an independent mindset. You don’t just drift with the wind with whoever’s coming by and whatever the last thing you heard is. I mean, there was an argument that Francis Fry put forward that one of the problems inside Uber was that Travis, the former CEO, he, what, They fell into a bad dynamic in the company when one person would come to Travis, make their case, Travis would make a decision in agreement with that person.

(Speaker 2)
The next day, somebody else would come and make a different case and Travis would agree with them and then change the decision overnight. And it caused complete chaos and anger and animosity within the community. Whereas maybe Travis could have been a little more independent minded and said, hold on, actually, I’m not going to make any firm decisions until I’ve got lots of buy in from lots of people. But I’m not just going to be swayed by the last thing that I heard.

(Speaker 3)
So there’s a lot of things like that that I think we can all do to try and maintain the purpose. Now, there’s a lot of really crappy books on Amazon right now, folks. If you want to find some really crappy books, I mean, there’s a lot of crappy books up there. I mean, Mein Kampf is an example. Hitler’s book, that’s a piece of crap, but you can buy that right now. There’s a lot of crappy books, but there’s also some things that are, you know, good books.

(Speaker 3)
There’s some good things that people could buy things on Amazon right now. We’ve got holiday gifts. We’ve got same day delivery. We got today’s deals. There’s a lot of ways, this just in, a lot of ways to spend $17 .94. However, we could buy a copy of your book and somebody else there’s thinking about, you know, I might want to buy the book or I might want to buy some random crap that I don’t need.

(Speaker 3)
Why should everybody buy? Why would everybody benefit by buying your book as opposed to, you know, any of the other books that are online or products? I mean, what is the value exchange?

(Speaker 2)
If someone gets this book, The Seven Rules of Trust, your new book, your first book, what kind of value do you think every reader is going to get out of that book, sir? Yeah, well, I mean, I tried to write the book in such a way to be to be a bit timeless. You know, it’s not a book about the trust crisis of today. It’s not a book about politics, although we talk a little bit about politics in the book and the importance of trust in creating a healthy political discussion. But it’s really it’s meant to be a practical book where you can think about these rules.

(Speaker 2)
I mean, some people, it’s interesting talking to people who read it, some people come away thinking, you know what, actually, what I got out of it most was about building trust in personal relationships. You know, there’s things about be positive with people, make it personal. Other people come away saying, actually, what I got from it is it’s about my business, about my organization. You know, we have a, you know, oftentimes, people do have in companies, they’ll have a real problem with trust between, you know, partners, like a business partner. I don’t mean inside the company, I mean, another business, you know, business to business, where you say, okay, like, we’ve got this contract, we’re supposed to deliver these things in two weeks time. We’re not going to meet the deadline.

(Speaker 2)
What do we do? And it’s a real, like, it’s a painful thing, because now you need to be transparent. As I say, you know, be transparent, especially when you have something to hide, because you need to know, like, actually, that business partner, if you’re transparent with them, it’s all going to go a lot better than if you just bluff your way through it and either deliver something shoddy that you’re not proud of, Or just miss the deadline and then they get angry. Like, yeah, open up early and say, you know what? Hey, actually, we’re having trouble hitting the deadline. Here’s the problems that have happened.

(Speaker 2)
Here’s the things we might be able to do to make up for it. Here’s the things you could do to help us. And people really respond well to that. They really say, you know what? These people are straight shooters. You know, it’s great.

(Speaker 2)
I mean, I’m having some work done on my house. Uh, and you know, one of the people came to me with some, a little bit of bad news the other day. And he’s like, I wasn’t sure if I should tell you this, but da, da, da, da. And I’m like, you know what? It’s actually not that bad. It’ll be fine.

(Speaker 2)
Uh, if we miss that and it doesn’t get done by Christmas, it’ll be fine. I’ve just got family coming.

(Speaker 17)
So don’t worry about it.

(Speaker 2)
Great. What a relief. But

(Speaker 3)
But also, I trust this person more than I would have had they slapped something together and then they left and like, oh, I got it done by Christmas, but they didn’t do a good job. So it’s that kind of thing that people take away from the book that I think would provide value in a lot of different contexts.

(Speaker 16)
Now, I want to get your thoughts on this.

(Speaker 3)
And again, folks, I’m pulling up the book cover, because I want everyone to really look at this book and obsessively look at the book, folks, until your brain explodes. Here we go. I’m looking at the book. There it is. Orange kind of yellow cover. The Seven Rules of Trust.

(Speaker 3)
If you’re a business owner and you’re watching today’s show, you know what, folks? You’re going to get a bad review. This just in, you’re going to get a bad review. If you run a haircut chain, in my case, I have a haircut chain. I’m involved in the wood flooring business. I’m involved in a lot of small businesses.

(Speaker 3)
You’re going to get a bad review. It’s going to happen. No matter how hard you work, you’re going to have somebody that blasts you. Oh, yeah. And I find a lot of people love to leave one stars or five stars. Not a lot of middle stars there.

(Speaker 3)
What is your advice or maybe what advice does your book share about how to establish trust or maintain trust with customers and consumers in a world where, frankly, anybody, I mean, I could go online, buy your book, and trash it and have never read it with a bad review.

(Speaker 2)
So what’s your response or what’s your advice you might give? Or does your book even talk about the idea of how to build trust with the marketplace? Yeah, I mean, it does, it does. And I mean, I think there’s a lot of different elements to that. One that immediately comes to mind would be about be civil. Like, how do you respond to those criticisms?

(Speaker 2)
Because oftentimes, particularly if it’s a review, on a lot of sites, I don’t know if Amazon does this, I’ve never really thought about it, but on a lot of sites where you get a review of a business, there’s the chance for the business owner to respond. And sometimes if you see a business owner that’s respond by blasting back, you think, I don’t know, this guy seems like kind of a jerk, you know, but by being very gracious and saying, I’m sorry, you had a bad experience. Here’s what we usually do. Not sure what went wrong here. I mean, sometimes you go like, okay, like that sounds like somebody had a bad experience or they’re just a nut, you know, sometimes people are. And you just have to, you have to carry on with it.

(Speaker 3)
Again, that’s another one about being independent, being transparent, you know, and, you know, of course, yeah, there’s always going to be jibes and this and that. But I think if you just are sticking to what you do well and you’re, Doing everything you can to please customers, it’s going to shine through in the long run. The final question I have here for you. There’s a lot of shows that you’re going to be on talking about this book. And I appreciate you agreeing to be on our show here. But you had to be present.

(Speaker 3)
I mean, you had to be physically and mentally present to be here. You had to make a decision and say, I’m going to do this. I’m not going to do this. With somebody like in your case, you’ve built Wikipedia. Your net worth is whatever it is. But we could just say you’re doing well.

(Speaker 3)
And you could probably be doing anything today. Why is it that or how is it that you go about organizing your day? How do you today decide, okay, I am going to write a book. No, I’m not. I am going to be on that podcast.

(Speaker 2)
No, I’m not. How do you organize your day there, sir? Yeah, I mean, so there’s a lot that goes into that. I mean, one of the things I do feel is, as I think I already said, I’m lucky to be successful because I always just get up and do whatever I think is interesting that day. In this case, actually, one of the things that drew me to this show is I always call myself a pathological optimist. And when I use the word pathological, What I’m acknowledging there is that it’s not completely rational.

(Speaker 2)
It’s just how I am. I always think everything’s going to be great. And I read in your biography that you call yourself a delusional optimist. And I think it’s kind of the same thing. And I’m like, oh, I’m going to get on with this guy. And you have to acknowledge the negatives in the world.

(Speaker 2)
But I’m like, you know what? Actually, there’s so much great stuff out there that if we focus on the positive, we can do that. So that’s, that’s how I ended up here, because I was figuring out what I wanted to do. And then, you know, in general, I try to really play to my own strengths and to not have too much of an inflated ego about stuff. This is one of the reasons I’m not the CEO of anything, and I’ve said a couple times here, I know I’m not a good manager.

(Speaker 2)
A lot of founders have a hard time accepting that, that management is actually a very important skill, and it’s not for everybody. And for me, you know, my style of management is very wiki. I’m just like, you know what, we’ve got a great purpose. Everybody go do stuff and do good. And that works as a high level coaching technique. It doesn’t really work about organizing work and getting things done.

(Speaker 2)
And so by recognizing that about myself, I say, you know what, I shouldn’t be the person being the manager. Nobody should report directly to me, and I don’t report to anybody. It just works better for me. And I think all of us will have different things. Some people may say, yeah, but you know what? Actually, I really enjoy managing other people.

(Speaker 2)
I enjoy encouraging them, helping them grow. I enjoy sort of delivering things on time and maybe, you know, cracking the whip on people in a positive way to get things done. That’s what I’m really good at. But what I’m not really good at is maybe I’m not a computer scientist or I’m a terrible programmer. So I can manage a team of programmers. I’ve got enough technical competence to keep an eye on things.

(Speaker 2)
But actually, I respect that the people under me are actually better coders than me. There’s all kinds of cases like this. And I think everybody will have strengths and weaknesses.

(Speaker 3)
So one of the things I would say is do the things you’re good at, but even more importantly, do the things that you enjoy. Because if you don’t really enjoy it, you might be sort of good at it, but you’re not really going to be great at it. All right. Final question for you, sir. I’m going to give you the final word here. The final, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s your essentially your podcast for the remainder.

(Speaker 3)
You can be done whenever you want.

(Speaker 2)
You can, I just want to give you the floor to share whatever’s on your heart, whatever’s on your mind, whatever’s in your soul. What is the message that you want to communicate to our listeners out there that are definitely eagerly taking notes here? Well, you know what? I think we’ve seen this big. decline in trust across society. But if we look around us in our personal lives, you see there’s so many great people.

(Speaker 2)
The way we treat other people in our personal lives is we do trust people. If you meet people in an elevator, random people, six people get in an elevator, the elevator stops halfway between floors and you’re stuck. You don’t immediately think, oh, these people are going to rob me. You think, oh, look at this. Oh, look, we’re all stuck. Yeah, well, OK.

(Speaker 2)
And you’re going to chat for an hour and you’re going to find they’re perfectly fine people. That’s what the reality is.

(Speaker 3)
And if you spend too much time on social media, you’ll think people are so horrible, so toxic and not realizing actually that’s a really distorted view of things. And so if you can take that positivity, that trust that we naturally have in each other, and apply it to your organizations, to your relationships, to politics, to journalism, to all of these things, we can build a much better world. Jimmy Wales, thank you so much for being on the Thrive Time Show. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you. I want to respect your time. I also want to make sure everybody out there, if you have a brain that works, and I know you do because that’s how you found the show, I want you to go check out the book, The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint for building things that last.

(Speaker 2)
It’s the first book written by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Sir, thank you so much for your time and hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Great for being here.

(Speaker 11)
Thanks for having me on. It was great fun. Thank you, brother.

(Speaker 6)
Take care. Bye bye.

(Speaker 10)
Yeah, Clay Clark, man. He is one character.

(Speaker 6)
It’s a good word for character. Yeah, that is it. Good, driven, smart. And I’ve never met a guy who was so hyper all the time. He’s doing so much good. And then I met his mother and she just says, she just lets him be Clay Clark.

(Speaker 6)
I mean, so he’s endorsed by his mother and he’s doing magnificent work.

(Speaker 10)
So it was great meeting you out there and all the people that he surrounds himself with. Clay Clark starts his days at five o ‘clock in the morning. It’s incredible.

(Speaker 6)
Yeah. He’s a machine.

(Speaker 15)
He’s a machine.

(Speaker 6)
But I have problems with my company starting at nine o ‘clock. He has hundreds of people showing up at 5 a . m.

(Speaker 14)
in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

(Speaker 7)
Man, he’s a leader of a leader. He’s a fantastic young man. No, he is. My name is Kevin Thomas and the name of our company is MultiClean. We are a commercial janitorial service and we serve the entire state of Oklahoma and Kansas and soon to be Arkansas. We have probably grown Probably five times.

(Speaker 4)
We’ve added, I think when we first started with you, we had 60 to 65 employees, and now we have a little over 300 employees. Before we got involved with Thrive Time, we didn’t really have any systems or processes in place. I’ve probably been to, oh, in six, seven years, I’ve probably been to 12 to 13 business conferences and Amazingly, each time I go, I learn something new, and I’m so excited to bring it back and show the team. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year.

(Speaker 4)
One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients. in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42 % increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense, starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers.

(Speaker 1)
Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth -to -mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proof and turnkey marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry, graduated in 1983, and then I did my pediatric dental residency at Baylor College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark.

(Speaker 1)
Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry.

(Speaker 1)
He’s written books with like Lee Crockrell, head of Disney with the 40 ,000 cast members. He’s friends with like Mike Lindell. He does reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10 ,000 or more people show up to some of these tours on the day Today he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers. and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week.

(Speaker 1)
So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks, he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks, he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up, and he teaches people a 13 -step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires, grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi -millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business.

(Speaker 1)
Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, like Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about, where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go.

(Speaker 1)
And that’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. And Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends.

(Speaker 1)
I was really most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. And when we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal. And they were super excited about working with him. And he told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it.

(Speaker 1)
I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. And the guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, he doesn’t, his highest desire was to do what’s right, and anyways, just an amazing day. So anyways, impacted me a lot.

(Speaker 8)
He’s helped navigate any time I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or, you know.

(Speaker 5)
navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs were all closed for… I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic.

(Speaker 5)
We love you guys, we appreciate you, and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us.

(Speaker 13)
This is our old house.

(Speaker 9)
This is where we used to live a few years ago.

(Speaker 5)
This is our old neighborhood. As you can see, it’s nice. Right?

(Speaker 12)
So this is my old van and our old school marketing.

(Speaker 8)
And this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing, and this is our new team. We went from four to 14, and I took this beautiful photo.

(Speaker 5)
We worked with several different business coaches in the past, and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd.

(Speaker 5)
We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month.

(Speaker 3)
we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you times a thousand. The Thrive Time Show, two day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13 -point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website.

(Speaker 3)
We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two -day, 15 -hour workshop. It’s all here for you.

(Speaker 3)
You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because, as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop.

(Speaker 3)
And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big, get rich quick, walk on hot coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. And I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room.

(Speaker 3)
Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses, or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever, and we’ll even give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it.

Transcribed with Cockatoo