Eric Ries: From Corrupted to Incorruptible - How to Build Mission-First Companies That Last

What will make board meetings far more interesting and fun will make companies far more successful is for them to be mission or purpose-driven. So to write down some purpose, to encode that in the corporate charter, and then to see the board's responsibility, the leader's responsibility, as making sure that the entire organization, all the resources under its command, are directed towards that goal. I know so many founders who have a lofty mission statement that's about how they want to treat their employees well, or they want their customers' lives to be enriched, or they care about product quality or design or whatever. But in their corporate charter, it's just shareholder primacy. And I always tell people, if you have a mission statement, but this is your corporate purpose, then you are lying. You are lying to your customers, you are lying to your employees, and you are lying to yourself about what this company really is. Fix it. Hello, and welcome to One Night In Product, a show where I chat to some of the brightest minds in and around product from across the globe to help you see product management and product companies in a whole new light. If that sounds up your street, don't forget to dive into the back catalog on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube. And of course, follow, share, or drop me a comment or review, all helps keep the lights on. On this episode, I'm speaking to the one and only Eric Ries, multiple-time founder, best-selling author of The Lean Startup and its associated frameworks, and almost certainly the person responsible for your boss using the words MVP and pivot every time they want something done. Eric also founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange, an ecosystem designed to help visionary companies pursue long-term profit and purpose. And very much on that theme, he's written a new book, Incorruptible. And in it, he says that most organizations today operate as sophisticated zombies. So he's here tonight with his metaphorical cowboy hat and shotgun to stop them feasting on short-term incentives and start doing something a bit more intentional instead. Eric, thanks for coming and welcome to the show. Thanks very much. My pleasure. It's good to have you here. I'm looking forward to working out how we can, I don't know if we can uncorrupt companies as well as like get new ones to be not corrupted in the first place, but I guess we'll dig into some of that stuff. That is the idea. That's what we're trying to do. But before we get on to Incorruptible, I wanted to take advantage of speaking to the guy who didn't come up with the term, but certainly popularized it, Minimum Viable Product, MVP, obviously from the Lean Startup, a term that these days seems so poorly understood that the joke is that if you ask five people what it means, you get six answers. So how are you feeling about the humble MVP these days, especially in the kind of age of AI where everyone's being able to build stuff now? I think it's held up real well. I feel really good about it. I mean, look, yeah, a couple of times a year, people reach out and say, hey, you should have called this something else. It should have been Minimum Desirable Product. It should have been Minimum Lovable Product. Oh, God. You know, I always invite people to come up with their own terms and launch those. You know, I do my best. And I think in the age of AI, the mistake that MVP was designed to help correct is now more prevalent than ever because it's easier than ever to create a cool-looking prototype. What used to, you know, you might have got a cool-looking prototype in a month can now be done in a day. Okay, congratulations. But the cool-looking prototype is not valuable in itself. The whole point of an MVP is to help you learn. That's why we call it the build, measure, learn feedback loop. And it is not possible to outsource the learning to some other party, whether that's an outsourced development agency or an AI or whatever. The learning still has to happen here. So given that learning is the rate-limiting step in entrepreneurship, I feel like MVPs are more important than ever. We have to design them in order to test our assumptions, in order to find out what customers actually want. Absolutely. I think actually all the whole vibe coding stuff that's going on these days, the strongest use case for PMs, especially for vibe coding these days, is that kind of learning loop. You know, go and build something, take a prototype out, show people some stuff, come back and do it properly, right? Rather than, you know, expecting all of a sudden that we're all builders now, but that's definitely what a lot of the LinkedIn sphere are talking about these days. So I guess we'll have to just, you know, try and defend it as best we can. I don't know what all these other types of minimum products are lovable and desirable and, you know, feelable and touchable. I don't know what all these other M star P's really are, but yeah, the MVP is the OG. So let's hopefully, you know, well, we should hope that people can, you know, go back to basics, maybe even read the book. They probably never read the book, right? They probably just, you know, heard someone else say it. So they go and read the book and they can find out more, but let's talk about your new book. So you've got a new book called Incorruptible, Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. Obviously you've been working with many, many companies over the last many, many years, but what made now the time to write Incorruptible and kind of get some of your thoughts out to the world? Well, believe me, if I had known that the issue of corruption would be up for so many people at the time that this book came out, I might have written it in a different way. And I'm sorry that it has turned out to be so timely and topical. I of course wish it was otherwise. But I have been around this business a long, long time. And so I've had the chance to see the very best of entrepreneurship and product management. Like I've seen so many entrepreneurs, so many product leaders create billions of dollars of value, no joke, multiple times. And I'm proud of that. I think, I mean, startup has played a role in all that value creation. I think that's really one of the things that makes entrepreneurship as a career really wonderful. So I have a lot of positive feelings about that. But I've also seen the darkness that is in this industry. I've seen the ways in which company building, organization building, product building can go wrong. And the sad truth is we live in an economy now where quite often the thing that began, the engine that was turning, that created all this value is destroyed often in the name of profit. So I'm just sick and tired of it. You know, I just feel like most product people, most leaders, most business people, frankly, most board members are just naive. We are not taught or trained. About the forces that will ultimately determine whether the thing we make turns out to help the world or destroy it, to be supportive of human flourishing or antagonistic to it. And yet, in my research and in my years of grappling with this force, what I discovered is that not only is it possible to do something different, it's well known. In the proper circles, we have extensive evidence that there's a better way to build, to lead, to structure organizations. And so once you see it, you can never unsee it. And I'm excited for more and more builders to take this seriously. Well, there's an interesting question there though, because, you know, on the one hand, you could sit there and say, well, you know, you've seen these things, you wanna go out there and fix these things and you can kind of, you know, go off into a cave and kind of create your own new thing, like a new framework or kind of a new mental model or something like that. But you've just kind of implied there that maybe some of these things are already kind of known already, but maybe forgotten along the way. And it was really your job to kind of go and find them and bring them together and maybe apply a little bit of special sauce to stick them together. But yeah, there were no secrets. You've just kind of brought them back into the light. Is that fair enough? Or how much of it is you versus- Yeah, it's a little bit like archeology, like I was recovering lost knowledge. And it's very strange, actually. The book has been out for a few months now and I've been traveling around. I do a lot of events with entrepreneurs. And, you know, I've been teaching these ideas for a long time now, but now I'm doing it in a bigger way. Obviously, in a more public audience, people are encountering it for the first time. And I've had quite a few events where people are like, wait a minute, how come none of my lawyers, bankers, advisors have told me any of this stuff? Like, it's very strange. When we start a company, we ask our lawyers, give us the options. And they'll be like, well, you pretty much have to follow these best practices. This is it. They don't say, hey, there's this alternative. They don't say, hey, did you know that, you know, for 100 years, the John Lewis Partnership has been 100% employee-owned? Would you like to be like that? They don't say, did you know that for almost 70 years, the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain has been a network of independently-owned employee cooperatives. I mean, they don't say to you, did you know about Nova Nordisk and Ikea and Patagonia and Vanguard and REI? There's all these companies that are protected by what I call a governance fortress that utterly defy our modern best practices about how companies are supposed to be structured. Yet most founders, most leaders, most board members have never ever heard, or if they've heard of the company, like people have shopped at Ikea, they don't realize that that company is embodied in a completely different theory of corporate governance than the one we are all taught as the best practice. So I think it's very telling that there is, frankly, a conspiracy of silence that is preventing people from learning these facts. So I kind of feel like, well, I understand why it exists. Like the people who are part of this gravitational field have every professional incentive to push founders in a certain direction. And it's funny, I just got an email today. People ask me for help starting companies literally every day of my life. That's the privilege of being the Lean Startup Guide. Someone I gave a copy of the book to and walked them through the whole argument. They just sent me an email this morning. They sat down with their lawyers, very good lawyers here in Silicon Valley, and the lawyer's like, I don't know, doesn't seem like you're special enough to want to do it this way. We don't think this is the best way. Our counsel, I'll read this to you. Counsel believe that embedding the five layers of protection, da-da-da-da-da, is not only strongly uncommon, but also not the way to protect the mission of the company. If an outside entity, like a mission guardian entity, we call it, holds any power, they are removed from the day-to-day operations of the company, which sounds nice in theory, but in practice it can lead to uninformed decisions. And even if it was the best way to protect the mission, the market only gives these things to the most attractive startups, like Facebook, Anthropica, Google, and so those provisions will be hard to get, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what's really fascinating about this whole argument is it's like, it's not gonna work, but even if it did work, you're not special enough to get it. And it's like, okay, even if we grant everything this lawyer is saying, how do you know that this isn't a special company? Maybe what made those companies special is that they had a certain philosophy or ethos about the mission. Hmm. So this person's writing to me to say, what do I do? But I wanna write back, I didn't write back to him this way, but I kinda wanted to write back to him and say, listen, the lawyer works for you. Why are you taking your marching orders from your own vendor? So I just think we have gotten this so backwards, so, we're so confused about these points, and then we act surprised. This lawyer is making a tacit argument to this founder that his mission is expendable. If investors want to take over this company, to destroy it, to redirect it at any time, they should be permitted to do so. And he's dressed it up in this nice, fancy-sounding language. I don't personally believe that that's such a good idea. And I really want founders especially, and leaders more broadly, to be empowered to push back when they see this nonsense. Enough, enough. But that's an interesting point, because obviously you've got a book now that talks about some of this stuff, and obviously we'll talk about some of those sims in a second, but kind of suggests then that maybe the audience for this book could be the founders and the CEOs of these companies, but is it also fair to say that maybe some of these lawyers and advisors and consultants should be reading this book as well and maybe trying to change the way they think? Or is that impossible? If they wanna make a lot of money, sure. Yeah, because listen, the next generation of founders is livid about this stuff. They want partners and advisors who are going to help them build a company they can be proud of, not one where they're gonna have regrets on their deathbed about what kind of monster they became. Look around. Even the so-called winners of our current system, all these billionaires, are like literally melting down on social media before our eyes. Those people seem happy to you. I know a lot of them personally, I can tell you. They are not. They're living their life under siege. They are miserable, and the core problem, now, I mean, I'm not a psychologist, but psychoanalyze a little bit. I really think the core problem is that these people have made all this money, and they need to be the hero of their own story. But because of the moral compromise this system has forced them to make, at some level, they know they're the villain. They're not gonna be remembered as history's heroes. They're gonna remember as the villains that had to be overcome for us to get to a new and better place as a civilization. And I think that's very psychologically devastating to have that realization. It doesn't have to be this way. It is not necessary to sacrifice worldly or financial success if you want to build a mission-driven company. In fact, the data shows the opposite, that mission-driven companies, statistically speaking, outperform their mercenary counterparts. It's an interesting point about the people kind of maybe laying in bed at night, looking at the ceiling, wondering what they've done, but being almost unable to kind of work a way out of it, almost feels like a supervillain arc in a Marvel movie or something like that. Are you then gonna say that maybe if they were to follow some of the kind of prescriptions from your book, which obviously, again, we'll talk about in a second, that that's a way to start down that arc? Or do you feel that there are some companies out there, or some situations out there that are maybe too far gone, and actually it would be an incredible effort to try and shift them back onto a different track? You know, there clearly is a point of no return, after which it's too late, okay? I wanna be honest. Bankruptcy, obviously, but apart from that. Yeah, yeah, but even before bankruptcy, we have those companies where the level of corruption is so high, the good people leave. Like I quote a person writing an essay about leaving a company, a mission-driven company, and they said, look, at a certain point, this place will not be able to recover its moral compass because the kind of people you need to develop a moral compass are not gonna come work in a place with no moral compass. So once you lose it, it can be very hard to recover it. However, the most important idea in the whole book, this idea I call it's always too early until it's too late. Most of the time, when people think about or ask advice about implementing these kinds of protections, they're told it's too early, don't worry about that, you can always do it later. But then later comes around, and it turns out to be too late. They try to do it, and the same people who before told them it was too early are like, oh, you were serious about that? Well, now it's too late, buddy, sorry, you can't do it anymore. The problem is that until you try, you will never know if it's too late. So my general advice to leaders of all kinds who are inspired by these ideas is just to take the first step right now, as soon as possible. Go find out if you are, in fact, capable of doing this. And look, if it's too late, okay, go start over, start a new company, it's okay, don't be an intentioned servant, let it go. But if it's not too late, you might surprise yourself. And we have examples, I just, if you look at a long-term chart of the stock price performance of Viva Systems, they became a public benefit corp after their IPO. And yet, it's been nothing but up and to the right ever since, so people always say, well, once you go public, now it's too late. Well, it wasn't too late for them. I just feel like there's a lot more possibilities than we're generally taught to acknowledge. Yeah, and the other option just feels safer, right? Because everyone's doing it, so if everyone's doing it, then what's the worst that can happen, I guess, but. Yeah, so I hope this book will help people see what the worst that can happen is. Literally, the first part of the book is called The Shape of the Abyss, so. Yes. I think this is quite a dark phenomenon and something we really do have to grapple with. Yeah, and it's something that you see a lot of, and you talk about it in the book, this kind of idea of the golden goose. You've kind of already talked about some of the kind of characteristics. Some founders start a company built around some kind of vision as product people, product person. I'm definitely all about vision. We talk about, we're always talking about trying to get companies to be more vision-led and trying to be more customer-focused and trying to solve real problems rather than just whatever can grease the numbers for the next quarter or whatever. And of course, a lot of founders start out like that as well, but then later on, the company gets to a point of success and they want to raise a bit more money, or as you kind of mentioned, they go public. They end up maybe getting new owners installed by a private equity firm, or you're kind of getting booted out or booted upstairs, put up on the roof. And like, obviously we all know these stories and it's obviously a shame when a good person ends up kind of almost ostracized from their own company. But we also all probably, and you definitely from your experience, are going to know a bunch of founders that maybe weren't the people to take it past a point. Like, you know, they were the one with the vision, they had the kind of the passion and the kind of the ethos and the mentality to get it to a point, but then it got to a size where they didn't even like running it anymore. They maybe weren't even the best person to run it. Maybe they're just not good at working in that size of company. They wanted to get out themselves. They needed to get someone in to kind of take on, you know, sort of take the mission over and take the company forward. So how do we kind of distinguish or kind of think about the kind of, there's kind of a necessary kind of professionalization of the company? Like let's make it better and work better and take it on from the initial seed. How do we sort of balance that against not just killing the damn thing in the first place? Look, I want to be really honest. in the first place? Look, I want to be really honest about this. Most companies fail the test of succession. Sometimes because the founder dies and there just isn't the right person who's been groomed to take over from them. And sometimes because when the founder wants to leave, they cannot. Or because the founder gets pushed out. I've seen all three of those scenarios. So I think once people get to product market fit, they should be much more concerned with longevity, institutional longevity. And in order to do that, they really do have to follow this blueprint. Now the blueprint has two components. The first question is the inner component, the ethos of the company. What does it stand for? We can't have longevity if the company is fundamentally just a cult of personality, because personalities shift and fade. Companies that have longevity have a structure that allows them to be committed to certain principles over long periods of time. And the principles can be different, you know. Anthropic is about AI safety. Novonortis is about scientific research. Costco is about being a fiduciary to the customer. Patagonia is about environmentalism and outdoor living. Like there's so many different principles that we can be committed to, but we have to have one that we're willing to sacrifice for. So that's the first ingredient you see in these long-term companies. And the reason that this enables succession is because being committed to principles enables you to stockpile the most underrated and valuable asset in the whole world, trustworthiness. When a company is trusted by its employees and its customers, and yes, even its investors by its community, that creates an asset that can be used to transmit values from generation to generation and keep that constancy. The problem is that most founders who build a trustworthy company, who build a mission-driven company, it's like they are scattering this asset. They're like piling it up on the floor. No vault, no windows, no doors, no locks, no nothing. Guess what? In this world, especially in our modern financial system, if you stockpile an asset, people are gonna try to steal it from you. So suit up, man, be ready. You gotta protect that asset. So although ethos is the first part of the blueprint, integrity, structural integrity is the second part. Like a suit of armor, a shield, a spaceship, a hull. Pick your metaphor. Something that contains this trustworthiness and prevents it from being forcibly acquired. And there are so many stories in this book of companies being taken over, being corrupted from the inside, being bullied from the outside, just aimlessly drifting away from their mission where that asset is lost, and once it's lost, collapse very often follows. Yeah, it's kind of interesting because one of the things you talk about in the book is this kind of idea that organizations get to a size where they almost become kind of living entities or organisms in their own right. That's right. They become more than just the initial kind of thoughts and feelings of the founder who had the idea and they kind of become, as I sometimes put it, like the sum total of all of the different experiences and biases and PTSD of every single person that they hire. And of course, as you get bigger and bigger and bigger, everything just starts to become very confusing because I guess different things average out in different ways and cancel each other out in different ways. And it kind of leads you to the question, like whether or not people even have these kind of missions and ethos and kind of structural integrity is all baked in from the off. Like how much control does your average CEO even have over the company that they run? Yeah, I've worked with a bunch of CEOs and they'll be like, they'll come to me and say, Jason, I really want the team to be X, Y, Z, faster or more innovative or take more ownership or do this or do that. And they don't do it. And you're like, but you're the boss. Like you could tell them to do it. Okay, some of them might not be able to do it, but like you can set the direction. It seems very often that CEOs in this sort of situation, they kind of aren't in control. And I know you talk about the then kind of organizational gravity as well, this idea that everything's kind of being dragged back to kind of almost what no one wants because it's kind of not one person wants that thing, but kind of you add it all up and that kind of drags them in a direction that no one actually individually wanted. So like how much control do people really have over companies? Yeah, far less than they think. But on the other hand, people sometimes say, oh, you're absolving them of accountability. No, no, no, no, no, okay. And here's how I would think about it. Imagine, you know, you meet a college student, you know, a 20 year old. How many of us when we were 20 years old had a conversation with someone one day where they said, wait a minute, am I in a body or I am a body? You know, like what am I really? Is my brain in charge of my body or like who's in charge, who's running the show here? And we've of course had plenty of people in their youth who decide, ah, I know I'm in charge. How do you know? Well, I think the thought, my arm should go up and it does. The mind commands, the body obeys, therefore I'm in charge, right? And if you ever met someone such a person, you had a late night philosophy conversation with them, you might be like, oh yeah, you're in charge, huh? Can you command your body to heal a wound? Can you think the thought that you should be healthy and slim and fit and attractive? No, so who's in charge, right? So you realize that there are certain processes that are under the control of your voluntary nervous system but there are others that are more character attributes that can be cultivated but not commanded. Now, some people late at night in a philosophy conversation like this enter into a kind of existential despair. Oh, I guess nothing I do matters. I'm not in control, I'm not in charge. And some people even go into total gluttony. Well, I guess I can eat all the Cheetos I want because it doesn't matter what I do and then they get unhealthy and they're like, well, it's not my fault, my body wanted to eat the Cheetos. Come on, man, Aristotle worked this out 2,000 years ago. You have to cultivate your character if you want to become virtuous, if you wanna be healthy over time. So keep that in mind. Attributes which can be cultivated but not commanded. Now, you meet a manager in a modern company like one of your CEOs and he says, I'm in charge. How do you know? Well, I give commands and they are obeyed. Oh, good, congratulations. Your organization has a functioning nervous system. But the CEOs you're talking about who have a little more wisdom start to say, gosh, if I can't get my organization to do something, who's in charge? If they're not obeying me, who are they obeying? And the truth, the honest truth is that organizations are a instance in our world of something called an emergent intelligence. That is, they have an intelligence, a will, a drive all their own which is not contained within the mind of any individual person that makes them up. It's why certain organizational dysfunctions are very difficult to eradicate and are durable even if you swap out the whole management team. How is this possible? Because the thing is alive. And once you recognize that an organization is alive, that opens up new avenues of inquiry because just like with a human being, just like a human character or human health, organizations have attributes that can be cultivated but not commanded. Kind of what you've just described kind of makes it feel like, for example, trying to shift that from pointing in that direction to pointing in that direction. Yeah. That's not like a one day workshop on the edict from the CEO and move on. No, not at all. Yeah. But that's a long-term multi-step change to try and nudge people almost in the right direction then versus the kind of what often happens after a takeover, for example, which is like, hey folks, we're doing this now. Project Zeus, go. And it's like, okay, great, brilliant. But how does any of that work? And they don't even really kind of align the people. Everyone's kind of got different motivations and kind of some people are sabotaging it and some people are kind of on board and bring some new people in. So like on the one hand, and maybe this is part of the kind of the gravity thing as well, there's this kind of idea of like something must be done, especially when new ownership comes in. Something must be done. They come in for a reason to achieve something. And obviously some of that stuff is purely financial. We're going to talk about that in a second. But some of that could be cultural. Some of that could be kind of strategic if they're lucky enough to even have a strategy in the first place. So like how much of it is kind of getting used to almost like a lean startup, kind of measure, learn, iterate, kind of just keep going, keep nudging things in the right direction versus trying to do some kind of bold all in one stroke? Well, I've seen it work many different ways. I've seen the gradual and I've seen the urgent transformation. You know, I wrote a book called The Startup Way that was all about corporate transformation and the mechanisms by which it can be accomplished. So I'm actually very bullish on the possibility of transformation. The reason why most people believe transformation is difficult or impossible is that transformation requires a certain energy to happen. We need a crisis of some kind to motivate the change. People always say that human beings are resistant to change, but that's not true. They're resistant to humiliation. And they think the change is going to cause the humiliation that has to be somehow worth the risk. Most managers that I meet frankly don't, they're not really committed to the change. They put their toe in the water, they dabble in it, they think about it, they muse. They're like, my people didn't do it. Well, how many times a day did you tell them to do it? Well, and I always ask them, compare your change initiative, your transformation initiative, compare it to your CFO, okay? Imagine your CFO went after financial compliance the way you're going after innovation or ethics or whatever the thing you care about is. And it's like your CFO has a massive apparatus designed to make sure every single person knows the rules and complies with them. What do you got? A manual? You did a rousing speech one time. Can you imagine if the CFO got up on stage, everybody, yeah, let's be really financially responsible. And that was it, that was the whole plan. You'd fire that person in a second. So all I'm asking when we talk transformation is people bring the same level of rigor, intensity and resources to the transformation as they do to the other things that they truly care about, like finance. It always goes to the CFO at the end of the day, but finance is a big part of what kind of leads to some of the behaviors that you talk about in the book. And one of the things that you seem to take certain issue with is kind of the concept of sort of shareholder primacy. The idea that basically the only thing that matters for any company is to maximize shareholder returns. And if they don't do that, they're not doing their job. And of course, these boards have fiduciary responsibility. Like they have to steer the ship in the right direction for the financial benefit of the shareholders, which leads to ridiculous things happening like Twitter being sold to Elon Musk, even though probably he didn't even want it by the time they actually sold it to him. And certainly the Twitter board didn't really seem to want to sell it to him. They thought it was a terrible idea, but they had to recommend it anyway. Just simply because- Yeah, look what's happened since. Well, yeah, exactly. But you look at it and you go, well, if that was a well-functioning kind of corporate governance structure, they would just be like, well, Twitter's about this. This guy seems that he's gonna be taking it some different way. Therefore, we can't do that, even though maybe it's gonna cost our shareholders a little bit of money. But of course, they couldn't do that because they will be put in prison or fined or whatever. So is this kind of idea of shareholder primacy and kind of fiduciary responsibility kind of one of the biggest levers or kind of anchors that kind of hold people back from maybe making some better non-corruptible decisions? Like is that a big part of the problem? Yeah, yeah, it's an idea that is not that old, frankly. I mean, people treat shareholder primacy like it's some pillar of capitalism, but we're talking about something that became a fad and swept the world of corporate governance thinking like mostly in the 1980s. So this is not ancient history by any means. I think the core problem with shareholder primacy, like among its many, empirically speaking, it's an idea that has utterly failed, both on its own stated purposes and obviously the side effects it's had for our civilization have been catastrophic. But I think it also like is deeply, deeply, deeply at odds with the intuition that most builders have. Think about that person who wrote me the email about their lawyers, like according to shareholder primacy, the very second you take in any investment at all, your company is no longer a vital living thing with a mission and a purpose to make quality products or make people's lives better. It is now only a financial instrument designed to enrich its shareholders. So the coherence of the organization is immediately shattered the moment you take in any investment. And now investors are like, gosh, how come we're always the bad guys now in popular media? Hello, why are there all these great companies? I feature many companies in the book that have refused to take on outside capital for fear of this fracturing happening to them. I think it's been a deeply problematic idea. Now, the story you tell about Elon and Twitter, it's very important to realize how in the vast majority of the hundreds of years there have been joint dot corporations on this earth, that story would have been impossible. This is a very recent thing that we've come to believe in the words of the Revlon doctrine, the Revlon finding in Delaware, that in the case of a change of control, like a bid to acquire a company, the board of directors, their responsibility is to become auctioneers, getting the highest price. People love the simplicity of that, but most founders I know are shocked by the betrayal of it. Keep in mind that in the 19th century in America, if you tried to do what Elon did to Twitter, you borrowed a bunch of money from some banks, got you and your shareholder buddies tried to take over some company and change its purpose from making a railroad or digging a canal to enriching you and your shareholder buddies, that conversion of purpose would have been considered a crime. And the courts would void your corporate charter. That didn't change in Delaware until 1899. This is not ancient history. This is a very real life thing. And yet this change to shareholder primacy is not an idea that has ever in the history of the world never once been subject to any referendum or legislative action. It is an idea with no democratic legitimacy. So I refuse to give it the deference as if it was some pillar of our economy and simply my view, and I have the data to back this up. It's all in the book. My view is this is just a wrong turn that we took in the world of corporate governance and we should restore some, we should be already talking about what is the successor idea to shareholder primacy. I suggest mission primacy. Was there, and I've read the book, so maybe I should remember this, but was there like one company, like the kind of the beachhead company that did this for the first time or did it just kind of come up from the masses? No, the history is very interesting. There isn't, there really isn't any precedent for this. Like if you look, if you ask people where does this come from, they'll cite certain court cases. Like there's a very famous court case. You may have heard that Henry Ford was an asshole. And so Henry Ford got into a big fight with the Dodge brothers when he took over their company and they had a big fight about whether he was obligated to spend the company's money on his various personal theories of what would create enterprise value or whether he was supposed to, as a for-profit company, give some money to the Dodge brothers. He was such a jerk that he lost this court case and established this precedent that for-profit companies are supposed to enrich their shareholders. Like it was just this quirky case from the early 20th century that is like very thin gruel to build a legal doctrine out of. It really wasn't until the 80s that these new cases started to be developed. But this was not done by companies. It was not done by founders. It was done by a tiny cadre of legal scholars, judges, academics, and economists who felt that, in their defense, they felt that this would be a simpler and easier way to adjudicate conflicts. If you just focus on the returns to the shareholder, you kind of take the judgment and the messiness out of this very human thing. It makes directors into auctioneers. It's much easier to conduct an auction than to ask yourself what is the action that is most conducive to the mission. But the simplicity that that created has unleashed this modern extractive economy that is just horrifically damaging. And I think that when people complain about private equity or they complain about the loss of control or really just the loss of what makes companies special, I was, you know, I've been traveling around. So when I go to audiences, I'll ask people, raise your hand if you can think of a favorite product or brand where you loved that company and then they got taken over by private equity or they went public or they got acquired by a public company. Anyone have any examples like that they can tell me about? Every person in the room raise their hand. I say, great. Anyone have a story to tell me about thanks to the massive financial injection of that transaction? financial injection of that transaction, the product got better? Nobody has a story like that. And every case, the product got worse. In many cases, that was the beginning of the end of that brand at all. Why are we tolerating this? We're so used to it, we don't even know what to call it. It's happening left, right. I was joking with people that people, you know, since the book came out, people have been sending me their horror stories. And it's a lot of food stories. You know, it's people's favorite restaurant got taken over by private equity, their favorite food brand. You know, and just in the last few days, people have sent me a tortilla story, a bakery, eggs, meat. It's like, I was like, I could bake a really awesome cake out of all, you know, the ingredients of all these companies that have been in shitified. And I just think, it's sad. I don't think this is actually a good way to build an economy. On top of the human costs, you also have the fact that these transactions are very often value destroying. I think it is fundamentally corrupt for people to find ways to make money without creating value. That is a violation of the moral premise of our entire economic system. Yeah, it kind of just reminds me of kind of like arbitrage betting, where, you know, everyone's just kind of, you know, I actually did this a few years ago, you know, for my sins. Do some kind of back and forth, you know, bet in both sides, bet in exchange, bet at bookmakers and do like basically, you know, lay and bet the same bet and kind of work off of the differences in blah, blah, blah. But, you know, like I was betting on things I had no interest in, like, you know, check basketball and stuff like that, just to, because those were the best kind of, you know, like the best kind of differences between the odds and stuff. And you just sit there and think, it's kind of just that, but for companies, like, oh yeah, I want to put my money there until all of a sudden I can put my money there now. Or like I've had friends that work in like high frequency trading and stuff, which is almost like the very definition of like basically just sort of playing the different percentages off of each other just to try and get your return quickly as possible. And like, not even really understanding what the companies were that you even invested in. But on the other hand, like you have this idea that like this idea that basically, as you've just described, like maybe the kind of what you might call the private equity model where they come in, they take a majority stake in the business or they buy the whole business. They install new management because they want to take it in a different direction. Maybe they want to reduce costs, which is, you know, often very, very common. Very rarely, as you put it, do they kind of, you know, come up with a fantastic new product off the back of it, but who knows, maybe there are some examples. But they come in, they do all of that stuff. They want to make a change. The new CEO kind of does the webinar. They get pointed in the right direction. Off they go. Three years later, the CEO has been kicked out because it didn't work. And yeah, the results of the company are worse than they were before. Plus also all the goodwill that the company's had from all of its previous customers has kind of evaporated and they've either kind of just hanging on because they don't have any alternative or they've gone to a competitor now instead. And you sit there and you think, well, shouldn't investors, the people that are investing in these companies, start kind of getting wise to the fact that this happens or doesn't happen so often? And you're like, they're not dumb people, right? They should be able to see the patterns from the past and all of the failed takeover and kind of restructures and stuff. Yeah. Why do they keep doing it? I mean, this has very much to do with the incentives of the people who are making the decisions. Quite a number of the, like we from the outside, we perceive these private equity disasters as failures. But if you look under the hood, you will often find that the people who made the decisions on both sides of the corporate wall made a lot of money. Like are paid, yeah. Yeah, so look to the incentives. I mean, I give a bunch of examples in the book of people who, where the company was destroyed but the decision maker profited. I think that's like a famous example of Sears. The guy who took over Sears managed to extract, like I can't remember the number now, but like something like $4 billion in fees for his company out of Sears. You know, at the time when Sears was losing $11 billion, something like that. So basically drove the company into bankruptcy but he personally profited handsomely from that destruction. And in general, I would say we have built an economy now that increasingly rewards transaction volume rather than long-term value creation. So that's really the situation you're watching here is people who are transacting and they found ways to profit from the volume or the volatility inherent in those transactions without much concern to the long-term consequences of doing so. Yeah, absolutely. Well, again, we've probably all got our favorite examples of times it's happened to companies we care about. And hopefully again, these people will start reading your books and maybe doing things differently instead. But you talk in the book, of course, yeah, we've kind of talked about some of the problems. You've now obviously talked in the book about some of the ways to maybe mitigate or kind of fight back effectively and start to either design a company that isn't like that or to maybe switch a company that is like that to try and get it again onto a different set of tracks. You talk about a new type of corporate governance. You talk about to summarize, create something worth protecting, then build it with structural integrity. Obviously we could probably do hours on the specifics of that, but kind of as an overview, like what are some of the things that people need to either build in, bake in, or I guess also interestingly shift if they're in that situation? So I'm hesitant to do too many specifics, but I also want people to know that this is a very practical blueprint. So it's a new governance. So at the heart of the book is a new theory of corporate governance. I call the new governance, which has three new dimensions that I think historically governance has neglected. One purpose, two coherence, third integrity. It's very simple. I think instead of seeing boards as responsible only for kind of compliance and shareholder primacy, instead what will make board meetings far more interesting and fun will make companies far more successful is for them to be mission or purpose driven. So to write down some purpose, to encode that in the corporate charter, and then to see the board's responsibility, the leader's responsibility as making sure that the entire organization, all the resources under its command are directed towards that goal. We call that coherence. And this point of integrity, structural integrity, like when pressures come from the outside, we have the power or the strength to resist. So in the United States, we have a model called the Public Benefit Corp. I know something similar is being debated in the UK right now. A specific way to encode corporate purpose into the charter the way it used to be before the rise of shareholder primacy. In coherence is a lot of operational techniques for companies to make fiduciary commitments to people other than shareholders. I know so many founders who have a lofty mission statement that's about how they want to treat their employees well, or they want their customers' lives to be enriched, or they care about product quality or design or whatever. But in their corporate charter, it's just shareholder primacy. And I always tell people, if you have a mission statement, but this is your corporate purpose, then you are lying. You are lying to your customers, you are lying to your employees, and you are lying to yourself about what this company really is. Fix it. And then from the integrity side, here's the really wild part. It's not like we have to invent new models. We have new models. If you take Costco and Novo Nordisk and Patagonia and Vanguard and REI and Grundfos and so many, Mondragon, all these companies that control collectively trillions of dollars of economic value, and say, what do they all have in common? They've all had tremendous longevity. Many of the companies I named are now more than 100 years old. But they don't have much else in common. They don't have common values, their brands are very different, they come from different countries, different eras, different products, different industries. What they have in common is that they defy our modern best practices about how companies should be structured. They always have what I call a mission guardian or a governance fortress, like some mechanism to defend their decision making from outside pressure. That's what I mean by structural integrity. Those models have been well studied. Companies have the industrial foundation structure, just to pick one. This is companies like Nova Nordisk or Patagonia, companies like Hershey Chocolate, companies where there's a non-profit foundation that has governance oversight over the for-profit subsidiary. Companies that have that structure are five times more likely to live to year 50 than companies with a conventional structure and they have superior financial performance on a whole bunch of dimensions. So the fact that there's enough of them, that they have a data set, that there's academics who study this, why are we reinventing the wheel? Why don't we use what we know works? And so it's time for a new set of best practices that have institutional longevity as the default goal of company building. But as an interesting point, that kind of start to think about, because the kind of the danger when you write a book like yours, and obviously there's books like Good to Great and other kind of books that talk about points in the industry where there are some companies that are great examples and people should be doing like what they do. And then you sit there and you think to your point, okay, there's a lot of evidence that companies that have done that are the ones that are gonna last for 50 years and they're gonna have better performance and stuff like that. On the other hand, there could be an even bigger pool of companies that tried to do something like that, but actually it didn't work out for them at all. And actually they fell to pieces because whatever they tried to do, their mission took, they were almost like immune to proper governance or didn't make good decisions and it all fell apart. And there's this kind of idea of like survivorship bias. Is that something that you're worried about or do you think that the data set that you have is kind of strong enough? I think the data set's pretty robust. I went looking for it because I got that, a lot of people have suggested that to me, like, oh no, what about the trade-offs? What about the companies that were mission driven and then failed, where the mission protection got in the way? And there just aren't very many of those case studies in the literature. It just hasn't happened very much yet. So yes, I'm sure as we do this more, we will learn new things about how to choose good trustees, how to encode the mission in a better way. But so far, I just think people are overthinking this. Long-term stewardship is actually the natural human emotion. Human beings like very naturally care, like think about all the civilizations that have come and gone on this planet that build cathedrals or temples or even like in ancient times, megalithic structures, like conceiving of and tending to long-term projects like is a very human instinct. So I don't think this is like some really complex, like our current system is fragile and unnatural. So it requires constant checking and incentives and correction and punishments and it's a mess because we're asking people to do something unnatural. When we align people around a more long-term stewardship approach, we're aligning more with the human universals. And so we don't need all that superstructure. It can kind of fall away. And I think it's really interesting that if you look at the case studies, they just, this hasn't been a problem. And there's enough of those case studies that I think it's a pretty robust finding. Well, fair enough. But again, I guess as you say, maybe as we start to get more examples, maybe we'll start to see some more exciting examples of it going well, and also maybe of it going wrong because of course, the more companies you get doing stuff. If you push it to the unknown, of course new things are gonna happen, new things are gonna go wrong. But I hope people take heart from the fact that the things we're asking people to do in this book, every single thing is well-studied, has clear evidence that it's superior from a value creation point of view, and has at least one case study of a real life company that has led us alive to this day that you can study and learn from. So that's a pretty unusual combination. No, absolutely. And again, we'll keep an eye on these things and hopefully they'll continue to flourish into the future. I mean, it seems based on what you said that they kind of got the track record. So hopefully they will continue to do so. But that value creation thing is interesting because you talk in the book about redefining the very concept of profit. You know, again, profit is a thing that everyone's chasing. Greed is good. All of the kind of Wall Street stuff going on there. But you define profit in a different way, or you would like to define profit in a different way. You define it as the maximization of human flourishing, which is obviously a great thing. We all want humans, or most of us, almost all of us want humans to flourish. But some people might ask if they can spend that. So I just feel that there's gonna be some need for a link between maximizing human flourishing and good old-fashioned profit that people can bank, right? So I guess you're gonna say there's a causal link between the two. But what is that causal? Is it simply that by doing that, you make more money? Or is it literally just that simple? Yeah, I feel dumb. Like, you know, sometimes I feel like my job is to advance for like complicated and intricate ideas. And sometimes I'm like, am I just the dumbest person on the planet? Yeah, I think companies that promote human flourishing in the long run make more money. I think the evidence for this is very clear. I cite dozens and dozens and dozens of studies in the book that have looked at this from many different angles. And the fact that we have so many examples of mission-driven companies that are not profitable and are not successful, if you just look at the case studies, it's not because they were soft-hearted do-gooders. It's because our current economic system finds and destroys companies like that. Why? Why would you wanna have an economic system that destroys the companies most committed to human flourishing? So yes, I guess in the very narrow sense, if someone says to me, I don't care about anything other than making a quick payday taking advantage of the worst excesses of our current economic system, okay. You wanna go do prediction markets or sports betting or crypto or whatever? Or you wanna just be a calculator? God bless you. You know, who am I to tell anybody what to do? This book is not designed to convince anybody not to be a sociopath. I don't think that works. Instead, my goal is that if you're the kind of person who has what I call the builder's intuition, that the best way to prosper is to create more value than you capture and leave the world better than you found it. That's one of the most ancient spiritual teachings on this planet. If that resonates with you, I want you to have the tools you need to defend that intuition against all this BS, all the people that'll try to convince you that that's not serious, that you gotta give up, you gotta compromise, you gotta this and enough. No, you're gonna have a machete and you're gonna take those arguments, like when someone brings that argument to you, you are gonna dismantle them and leave them begging you to stop. That's my goal. Interesting point, though, because I know, for example, you'll call out in the book, Philip Morris is an example of a company that you don't personally support. It's definitely not a company I support as well. Having seen the impact of smoking, and I know that they'll come out these days and say that they're trying to stop people smoking, so you'll make fewer cigarettes and stuff, and they've got their whole new mission. It's like, well, yeah, the best way to not make money from cigarettes is to just not make any cigarettes, and then they'll come up with those other arguments about, oh, well, if they don't sell them, then someone else will, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it kind of gives me this kind of thought of like, well, if you've got companies who are certainly by your or my moral standards doing something that you would rather not be done, for example, making cigarettes or phosphor bombs for wars and stuff like that, like, is it, what do we do with them? Because their mission is something that we fundamentally disagree with, whether they're passionate about it or not. If they are using financial mechanisms to try and eke more money out of that, then like, yeah, maybe they could stop doing that, but then to follow your approach, they're gonna be doubling down on the mission that we don't. It's like, are there just some companies that we just have to just pretend don't exist, or how do we make peace with that? Because people could use your type of processes or mindsets or books and advice. Is there any of that sort of stuff? I think this is a common problem in the business genre, so I don't blame you for asking the question. I'm not here to tell you that the good guys always win, okay? This is not a Disney movie, and I'm not a purveyor of fairy tales. I'm not here to comfort you or to make you feel good about the fact that our world is literally on fire right now and we're dealing with a tide of rising fascism all over the planet. Like, I'm not gonna say that that's good. I'm not gonna say that a deeply unjust system is not gonna do its very best to rip your heart out and stomp on your remains. Like, you are up against significant, powerful forces that if you enter into that world naive and do not arm yourself appropriately, do not defend yourself appropriately, they will destroy you. Yes, that is all true, and in fact, there are many, many ways to make money in really evil ways like we've seen with Philip Morris. I'm not here to say that that's never gonna happen, but just because this is inevitable if you're naive doesn't mean there's not a better way. And although, yes, I hope and pray for the sake of my children and grandchildren that we will solve the political problems, we will solve the macro problems that are facing us. And some people who are listening to this, maybe you, that are facing us. And some people who are listening to this, maybe you feel called to become an activist or a politician or a leader in some other civic domain. Good, God bless you, excellent. But if you're just sitting there being like, look, I just want to build a great company, is that possible? Is it possible to build an incorruptible company in the face of all this corruption? My answer to you is yes, if you are willing to walk the road less traveled, yes, it is possible, but you have to get started right now. You cannot put this off until later. Well, there's an interesting takeaway as well, because like one of the things that you say towards the end of the book is this idea that companies like incorruptible companies can themselves kind of benefit or they can reward other companies by dealing with other companies, working through their supply chain to make sure that they work with mission-driven ethical companies, but also that we as people, as individuals can kind of reward the right types of companies, certainly as we define them, by giving them our custom and not giving our custom to maybe the types of companies that we don't believe in. And of course, that's a fantastic kind of moral high ground, I guess you could put it, which I believe in, but at the same time, some people might sit there and say, well, yeah, but I've got barely any money and I need to get food on the table and this, that, and the other. So there is this kind of balancing act between kind of trying to live your own values and just realizing that, again, we live in that system that's trying to kill us. Like you've just described this idea that sometimes you kind of have to hold your nose, but is it your kind of dream, I guess, that the amount of nose-holding has to, that we have to do maybe kind of goes down over time as more companies start to do this and people get choices around who they can go to and they can choose maybe some of these more ethical alternatives? Yeah, I wanna, you know, I hate to end an interview like this in a way that people will be like, oh, God, not someone who's like, we can solve climate change by recycling. Like, please, you know, I feel like when we start talking about individual power, it can kind of sound very kumbaya and I'm always very cautious about that. But a huge part of the sense of inevitability that this system enjoys is the feeling, is the fact that most people feel like they don't have any agency over it. What's interesting to me is that the people who are on TV and on social media every day telling you that your choices don't matter, that you have, that everything is the, that we live in the best of all possible worlds, there's nothing you can do to change it, this is just how it is, you're powerless. Like, you can't imagine how many billions of dollars are being spent every day to try to convince you that things are inevitable. Think about that. If they actually were inevitable, ha, why do they have to spend this money? Why is it necessary for you to feel hopeless and despair if Armageddon is coming and there's nothing you can do about it? Why do we have, why are we talking about it? No, this inevitability, this lack of agency is a form of manufactured consent. So you have to be willing to grasp your own power in this system. It gives you a lot. For example, we live in the age of surveillance capitalism, right? In previous centuries, most of people's private economic activity was not tracked or recorded anywhere. Now, every click, swipe, step you take is leaving a digital fingerprint, and that's quite sad. Privacy is at a great premium today. But this bad thing, surveillance capitalism, has a positive silver lining. It's this. There is no decision you can make in your life, literally none, that is not some middle manager's OKR. Okay? Everything you do, even if you never tell another soul, it's somebody's job to get you to do it, and it's probably somebody else's job is to get you not to do it. Every choice you make resounds through our entire economy in gravitational waves, causing change you cannot fathom. So at a minimum, wield this power. You don't need to engage in collective action. You don't have to learn the secret handshake. You don't have to go to a special meeting. Just choose in accordance with your own values in where you choose to work and play and buy and invest. And just that little thing is actually what creates the gravitational pressure that the rest of the book is about, and especially in the era of social media. It's not just your purchasing power, but your attention. Stop giving your attention to the worst people and give it to the best instead. That's a choice. It's definitely, you say, maybe it's a bit of a heavy message, but I think it's also an inspirational message as well, right, where people do have more power than they think, and people do care about maybe not what individually people do, but specifically as they start to become clusters, then they don't, as you say, it's always someone's okay, I won't. Well, my last guest on the podcast was your friend of mine, Barry O'Reilly, who I know that you, he's part of the kind of the lean movement, did Lean Enterprise, and now you did a cover quote for his new book, Artificial Organizations. I mentioned you were coming on, and he asked me to first say hello, but also to ask you about Tony Cioccoloni. He didn't give any context, so I dread to think what happened at Tony Cioccoloni, but I do have to ask on Barry's behalf. Sure, sure, sure. What happened with Tony Cioccoloni? Yeah, so Tony Cioccoloni is a chocolate company. There's bizarrely a lot of chocolate in this book. It was not my conscious decision. I realized only at the end when I was reading the audio book, I'm like, man, this book is making me hungry. A lot of chocolate in it. Anyway, one of the chocolate companies featured in the book is Tony's. Tony's was started in the Netherlands by a TV journalist, and he had just done a big expose about child slavery in the cocoa supply chain. So he was really horrified by what he found. He tried to get the broad public in the Netherlands, they eat a lot of chocolate, get them upset about child slavery, and his perception was nobody did anything about it. Nobody cared. And he's like, I don't get it. And so he tried to get the Dutch authorities to arrest him. He turned himself in a police station as a big publicity stunt. He tried to get himself arrested for eating chocolate. He says if child slavery was used to make this bar and child slavery is illegal, then why isn't eating it illegal? And of course, the authorities refused to prosecute him. They're like, look, if we did this, we'd have to arrest everybody in the Netherlands. He's like, that's my point. Yes, exactly. So he kind of felt like he had exhausted his options as a journalist, as an activist, and he decided, and I think a very funny twist, to just try making his own chocolate bars. He told everybody he was going to create 5,000 ethical chocolate bars that involve no child slavery, and he sold like 15,000, you know, instantly. And he's like, oh, I'm onto something. And so he actually created this company called Tony's Chocolate Only. Tony's his name, the Anglicized version of his name. And he's like, he felt so alone in combating this issue. He wanted to build a chocolate company whose mission, his purpose, is to eradicate child slavery. It happens to make a chocolate bar that's quite delicious as its strategy for accomplishing this goal. And as a result, it's been able to attract incredible talent, it's been able to build this incredible brand, very quickly became the number one chocolate brand in the Netherlands. It is rising the global charts. I see it in the UK and the US now everywhere I go. Now that I've mentioned it to you, you're gonna start to see it everywhere. And many people who buy Tony's Chocolate have no idea that it's about child slavery. They're just like, oh, the bars are like 15% larger on average, the chocolate is delicious. They pay a huge premium to the growers to make sure that their principles are followed. And in fact, they've licensed their ethical chocolate production facilities to other brands. So if you've ever eaten the chocolate of the YouTube star, Mr. Beast, his chocolate is actually Tony's Chocolate only under the hood. They don't take any credit for it. He doesn't ever mention that. But the key is, if you wanna license their technology, you have to commit to their principles across your entire chocolate production. So they punch way above their weight in terms of eradicating child slavery. Anyway, the company embodies both the ethos we've been talking about. It stands for something specific. And also the governance reforms we've been talking about. It's protected by something called Tony's Mission Lock. They've actually open sourced all the documents. You can go see how this works. But I think it's part of a new breed of companies that see purpose as a major source of competitive advantage and have tied their economic future to this goal of maximizing human flourishing. I think it's pretty cool. No, it's obviously a very inspiring story. I've been to the Tony Chocoloni shop in Amsterdam and got the looks of the kind of Willy Wonka style stuff that's all around the place. But I do also have this feeling in my head now that if in case I have any kind of pro-child slavery listeners on the podcast, that they're not gonna be throwing their Tony Chocoloni bars on the floor now. So hopefully we've not ruined anyone's celebrations. Well, we really want, my hope, my sincere hope for you is that the next time you eat a non-Tony Chocoloni bar, you'll have a sour taste in your mouth, realizing the human costs that were required to produce it. And once you can no longer enjoy something because you see how it's intrinsically connected to the suffering of others, that is the first step towards a kind of wisdom that can lead to a much better life. But it is interesting, this idea. I mean, of course, I support the mission, but almost delivered through the unusual medium of almost not saying that you're doing it on the bars. I mean, maybe they have it written on the back or something. Well, they're on the bars. It's just most people ignore it. But that's the thing. So most people that buy it, as you say, they buy it for a very specific reason. It's tasty chocolate, big and chunky, loads of flavors, and they're contributing to a mission that they almost certainly themselves believe in as well, but almost without knowing it. And I guess, like you say, it's written on the back or it's written on the bars so that they could know it, but people are time poor and they don't read stuff. And it's just an interesting kind of way of, it's an interesting way of doing it in a way that doesn't feel, because we talked earlier about this idea of like, oh yeah, great, they're getting all preachy and stuff. Because some people, they don't wanna be thinking about moral issues while they're eating their chocolate, but they're still helping to solve the problem anyway. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. I think there's a very delicate balance to be had in these things. And listen, when Tony started the company, people told him it wouldn't work because the public doesn't care. Yeah, yeah. But when given the opportunity to vote with their wallet, the public does care. Of course. People are more values driven, I think, than our very cynical business and legal cultures will admit. People are still people and most of us empathize with someone. But if people wanna come and empathize with you after this, find out more about the book, check out your incorruptible community, or find out more about your work in general, where can they come and find you? Yeah, yeah, we do have a really awesome community that is gelling around these ideas at community.incorruptible.co. You can, of course, learn more about the book itself at incorruptible.co. If you wanna follow along, I'll be in the UK in a few weeks for the UK launch of the book. Those events are all listed on howisincorruptiblegoing.com. And for those that are early stage founders that actually want to put these ideas into practice, you can reach out. I helped start a law firm called Virgil. You can go to tryvirgil.com. And for larger companies that are looking to implement this and want help on the operational or leadership side, there's also a company I helped start called Escape Velocity, so escapevelocity.co. Lots of resources we have for you that are available. And if you do get a copy of the physical book, please, of course, if you can, buy it at your local independent bookstore or online, of course, is fine. You'll find in the book a number of QR codes you can scan to much more detailed resources, kind of how-to resources, for those that want to engage in implementation here. So really welcome you to engage with all that, all those different communities and all those different sources of support if you're aligned with these ideas. Well, hopefully people are, and if not, then we'll persuade them one QR code at a time. Well, I'll make sure to link all that into the show notes. Feels like it might take me a little while, but I'll get it all typed out in the end or get AI to do it. Thank you very much. Hopefully you'll have some people heading in your general direction to find out more. Well, Eric, it's been a pleasure to chat about some deep and meaningful issues and sort of burrow deep into how we could maybe create different types of company in the future. Hopefully we'll inspire some leaders out there to at least think about doing things a different way. Obviously wish you ongoing success with the book, but as for now, thanks for taking the time. Hey, congrats on so many episodes. Yeah, this will be a six-year anniversary. Happy birthday to me, but nice. Happy birthday to you. Congratulations. Listen, there's very few people who have the stamina to sustain something like this for even one year, let alone six years, so congratulations. I guess that's my mission. Thanks for coming. All right, take care.