The Ledger, every show

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“They sent a lean startup team in, I think, from the United States Digital Service at the White House, and You know, they partnered. It wasn't just IT people coming and telling everybody what to do, but they had real partnership, real user centered design, real…”

“I met the Anthropik team when they first left OpenAI, and they, you know, they left over a dispute With OpenAI over you know, exactly how to pursue the question of AI safety.”

“Huge chunks of Anthropic stock were sold at auction to any investor who wanted them, including people who are super, super unaligned.”

“The point that I was trying to make in this book is not so much that we need to copy Mondragon or any particular company, but rather collectively, these are called alternative structures. Control something like five percent of world GDP.”

“If you look at the 19th century, like companies that were created and you read their charter, none of them say maximize shareholder value. That would have been considered a crime.”

“I think it was a series C when they finally established this thing called the long-term benefit trust, which is not a nonprofit foundation. It's actually what's called a perpetual purpose trust, which is a different legal category, but the same idea outside tr…”

“People used to tell me Costco was an example that wasn't protected so much so that like, I was surprised to learn that it was embodied in a governance fortress.”

“Steve Jobs very famously would host, have skip level meetings. He wanted to meet not with his direct subordinates. He didn't care. He wanted to meet with the torch bearers throughout the organization.”

“You see a lot more involvement of corporate venture firms which You didn't see before.”

“In, in, in certain European countries, it's actually like, 20 or 25% of the companies like public companies are all structured that way.”

“Most organizations today are built to a blueprint that was perfected really in the 19 twenties by Alfred Sloan when he was the CEO of General Motors.”

“Costco was repeatedly attacked over its decades of life by activist campaigns that have accused them of having bad governance.”

“Average holding time of stocks is like dramatically down. Lifespan of companies is dramatically down. Average tenure of executives is dramatically down.”

“In branch A, FedMart's investors got what they wanted. They got Saul out of the way. They converted FedMart to traditional business practices. It was bankrupt within seven years.”

“They didn't actually implement what's called now the long-term benefit trust until their Series C. But they had the right and the intention to do it in all their legal documents from inception.”

“Dario does not have dual class shares the way that Mark Zuckerberg or Larry and Sergey had.”

“The Novo Nordisk foundation is the largest charitable foundation in the world. Because it owns a big chunk of Nova Nordisk, and that's worked out pretty well.”