The Ledger, every show

“Like this, the vibe coding era is gonna be remembered for a Chernobyl style disaster is my prediction. People are vibe coding software that they do not understand. And it's only a matter of time with all the hype that's being poured into this right now. It is …”

“Again, if you think I'm exaggerating, the product managers at Johnson & Johnson put asbestos in the baby powder. And covered it up because although they said their purpose, their mission statement was patient health, their actual mission had become growth opti…”

“I think in the long run, people who invest now in craftsmanship, in the understanding of software principles, architectural principles, artistic principles, whatever the thing is, are going to be so much better off. They're going to wind up being like incredib…”

“So we actually know the valuation consequences of quarterly reporting, and it's roughly a five percent loss of total equity value. Companies are five percent less valuable when they report quarterly than semiannual. So the academic research on this is pretty g…”

“They created something called the long-term benefit trust. Which is like a multi-branch government, right? So you have the for-profit PPC, and then you have the board of directors accountable to a second entity, this outside trust, and the data shows that comp…”

“It's only a matter of time before someone vibe codes their way into a massive mission critical disaster. When they deploy code they think they understand, but they don't.”

“In fact, if you've noticed, I don't know if you've noticed the headlines in recent months that the SEC is considering eliminating quarterly reporting for the first time in 40 years. That's our petition.”

“Data says that tobacco companies make about 6000 dollars per death.”

“They have something like eight billion dollars a year in net income. But there's been all these studies. They create six hundred billion dollars a year in costs just in the U.S. That have to be borne by others. I think it's three hundred billion in direct heal…”

“In the history of the world. Shareholder primacy has never been subject to any referendum, any legislative action, nothing. So it's weird. If you learned in school, how a bill becomes a law, There's no law for shareholder primacy.”

“Companies with this structure are six times more likely to live to year 50. 10% versus 60% probability.”

“According to Harvard Law School, among venture-backed companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, ok? Only 20% of founders are still the CEO three years after going public.”

“The trustees of the nonprofit foundation once had to intervene to protect the for-profit from this exact temptation to want to sell it out. And I won't get into the whole story. They did the right thing in this case because they had the legal power to do so. T…”

“According to the legal documents, you yourself signed your company's literal charter that you have right now, and this is not some hypothetical future thing you've already put in motion. A rule that says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in this situation.”

“For the vast majority of the time, for hundreds of years, we have had joint stock corporations. Only the last 40 have we had this idea. Before the eighties, it was considered obvious. Our grandparents thought it was obvious. Our great grandparents thought it w…”

“Most of the best companies today are using this structure. Like all the major AI labs are incorporated as BBC's Anthropic most famously of all.”

“They turned down a two hundred million dollar contract and bore the wrath of the world's largest army and government.”

“Facebook even commissioned the scientific research to find out if their product makes people depressed. And then they found out that it does. And they were like, oh, better bury that. Instead of take it seriously and do something about it.”

“So it's actually be really easy, you know, not in the not too distant future. It'd be very easy for someone to just be like, summarize for me, everything my company is doing. And You won't need, like, tons of middle managers to do that for you or just, you'll …”

“We're gonna have a new wave of founders who take that seriously, who are gonna just, they're gonna steamroll.”

“Believe it or not, if you got, if you went to a fancy law firm and they filed for you the standard articles of incorporation that are used in Silicon Valley, most governance experts upon reading those documents would say you have a fiduciary duty to say yes.”

“I was reading a research paper the other day that studied some of these, I think it was in Denmark, foundation controlled companies versus a level matched public companies that are not foundation controlled. And they found the foundation controlled companies o…”

“I ask these CEOs that I meet with all the time, who's in charge of making sure that that happens? And they don't know. There's not, there's nobody in the organization they can point to for accountability on that score.”

“Facebook recently famously was revealed that they bought a VPN company so that they could watch The traffic to emerging apps and figure out who to copy.”

“Their company is governed by something called the long-term benefit trust, which is an outside set of trustees that are not like a vague advisory board or like remember the trust And safety counsel that that Facebook famously had and The totally ignored. The L…”

“And if you look at the coauthors of that paper has a ton of coauthors, not a single one commercialized the transformer at Google. They all, every single one had to leave and do it elsewhere.”

“And in fact, in the 19th century, to convert a company from a mission of doing any specific thing to just, I'm just going to enrich my shareholders, would have been seen as a crime. And your corporate charter would be voided.”

“There was a big meta study of like 55,000 companies with various levels of employee ownership, and they found that employee ownership exhibits dose response. Like, 10% ownership is better than 50% is better than 10, a hundred percent is better than 50. Not jus…”

“So I think you're going to see a lot of companies who actually sincerely believe in this possibility, realize that we have to enlist our employees in it. It's essential for our business. We're going out of business. If we don't do it, we need to be allies with…”

“Costco is so big that its house brand, Kirkland Signature, if that was a standalone company, it would be bigger than United Airlines, Procter & Gamble, or Coca-Cola.”

“So at the time he was fired, the stock was down like 80% from the peak. And it's like, oh, well case closed. But if you measure from the IPO or even from the pandemic peak, revenue was up. It's like, did the business go down? Was revenue down? Was there some k…”

“Polaroid used to be an R&D powerhouse, had like, 1500 research scientists on staff. Steve Jobs, like, loved that company, admired them so much. When Edwin Land was fired, he called it the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. Yeah. And like, they never invented anoth…”

“Costco came under attack in the early 2000 for having these non-standard governance practices. In fact, Costco routinely gets the worst possible governance rating from governance rating people.”

“Apparently the stake that the bankruptcy has of those shares is worth more than the whole, than all of the entire fraud by a lot.”

“There's a whole branch of academic research that has shown, for example, companies with that structure like Novo and Zeiss, they are six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to their conventional counterparts.”

“We, they have superior return on invested capital. They make more money for investors.”

“Philip Morris spent 1.1 billion pounds to buy Vectora. Within three years, they had taken a nine hundred million dollar write down and disposed of the company for peace parts. It doesn't exist anymore”

“Google has been sued twice now for breaking the don't be evil pledge and they've had to settle both lawsuits.”

“Anthropic has directors on its for-profit board who are appointed by and are accountable to an outside group of trustees who are AI safety experts who do not have equity in Anthropic. So they do not have a financial incentive in its growth.”

“So you see like a number of the leading AI firms are not funded by the leading venture firms from the SaaS or social media eras.”

“And you also see just, it's a difference in the kind of founders that are doing this. They tend to be older. They tend to be a little bit more sophisticated.”

“I don't think we're gonna have an uncanny valley problem here. I think these things are actually gonna feel very good when it praises you. You're actually gonna feel good. You're gonna want to get it right.”

“Lean is opposed to having a vision. You know, if you have, if you were really visionary, you wouldn't do experimentation. Experimentation leads to local maxima and, you know, it, whatever. It's just like, I'm, I read it in somebody's book that, that they're li…”

“Philip Morris has actually great ESG scores. It's absurd.”

“And people are like, well, Jeff Bezos thinks long-term. I'm like, ok, but then you study the history of Amazon. That's a very unusual, singular situation that's unlikely to ever be repeated in history.”

“In the short term, I don't expect that most passive investors will do this registration that we're talking about, because they don't care about the governance side of companies.”

“Our allies, the people we spend the most time with, are asset owners, even more than asset managers, who are absolutely left out of the roadshow process, the IPO. I mean, I, the people we talk to, who I think are the best investors on the planet, the most long…”

“The idea that you're going to act like a startup or have internal startups is like almost to the point of cliche here. And yet most of the companies that I meet that have that as a plan, there's no plan. They don't actually know how to make it happen.”