And so one of my employees, Jeremy Rosenfeld, showed me the idea of a wiki.

And I was like, this is very interesting.

Wiki, like, people can just edit and get started.

And we were afraid that the academics and people who we had brought in, you know, as volunteers to work on Wikipedia, would find this crazy and offensive to have

like wide open page, anybody can edit. So we like, oh, we won't open it as Newpedia. We'll do it as

a side project and just call it Wikipedia and it'll be a scratch pad where people can then

as articles get good, they can maybe put them into Newpedia. But it was really evident very,

very quickly. Like we had more work done in a month than we had in almost two years. And I was like,

okay, hold on. This is actually the way forward. Jimmy Wales, thanks for coming on to talk to us today.

Thanks for having me.

Well, we are here because you have a book out called The Seven Rules of Trust, a blueprint

for building things that last.

I want to start with rule number five.

Your mother was right, because I have a suspicion that maybe this is a motivation

for why the book now. Your mother was right is essentially the argument that you feel like

maybe we've lost that sense of basic politeness in these days. Was that a motivation for the book and for doing it now?

Yeah, definitely. Although, I guess I should say, I don't think we've forgotten it universally.

I think people are still people and basically everybody's pretty nice. Not everybody, but mostly. But yet our public discourse

has deteriorated. It become quite toxic. So even though people, you know, if you get into an

elevator with lots of people, you're going to find they're all basically decent, nice people. Online, there's a lot of

hostility and in politics and so forth. So, yeah, let's remind ourselves. As someone that has

dealt with the difference between how people behave online versus how they behave one-on-one for decades now.

...