Description: A friendly Southerner.

Transcript:

Sure. My name is Jimmy Wales

Originally I’m from Alabama.

I grew up in a very Southern kind of household. And there are very friendly people there. So I’m a very friendly person, and I think that’s had a big impact on my work because I tend to be pretty good with not trying to always win every argument and things like that. I just sort of try to bring a lot of people together to talk.

Well I went to a very unusual school. My mother and my grandmother ran a small private school. There were only like four kids in my class all the way from Kindergarten up through the eighth grade. And it was a very Montessori influenced school, so that had a pretty big impact because we had a lot of free time at the school to study whatever we wanted. So I spent lots of time reading the encyclopedia and really kind of an eclectic approach to learning things – not very structured.

I don’t know. I mean when I was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, this is where the space and rocket center was. This is where all of the German rocket scientists came after war and started designing rockets for NASA for the moon landing and all that. And so as a kid growing up, the town was really kind of “Rocket City USA” and really into technology. And that, you know, really appealed to me as a kid growing up.

I don’t know. I have no idea. Scientist, I think.