What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Success with Eric Ries

25:31How pathetic. But anyway, Target and Costco, Bruce, is really natural example. Costco Costco goes all in on anti-DEI, falling over themselves to hop on the hot new trend. And Costco's like, look, we've been doing DEI since back when it was unpopular. Then we did it when it was popular. Now we're doing it when it's unpopular. We do what we do. We don't really care. We're doing our thing. So if you look at the performance of Target and Costco from that moment, it's like you can see the divergence. But the thing I think is so interesting is Costco was forced by a bunch of activists to have a shareholder vote on their DEI program.

26:02and they got 98 % support from their shareholders to keep their DEI program. Now, Costco has millions upon millions of retail shareholders. Think about all the places in America that have a Costco store. You're telling me that 98 % of Costco shareholders are woke? Give me a break. You obviously have people who are like, look, I don't even necessarily agree with DEI. But the question is not, do I agree. The question is whose decision is this to make? And I trust Costco to make this decision. And that trust is what leaders routinely break when they behave in these unprincipled ways. And the negative consequences of loss of trust doesn't show up in that quarter, but you will feel it in the end.

26:43The point is you're saying that Costco is a great example of maintaining their ethos, right? Yes. Yes. All I can say is that the most fascinating story I found in your book, I'm sorry, Eric, is how long the hot dog has been a buck and a half. I had no idea. It was like, right after the birth of Jesus, the hot dog was a dollar half already. Yes. This story is so crazy. And I had vaguely heard of it, but like, it wasn't until I did the research for this book that I was like really dug into the prehistory of it. So for those that don't know, in 1986, Costco started selling a hot dog soda combo outside their store in San Diego where it originates.

27:30And it cost$1.50. Now in 1986, in California, average price of a Big Mac for comparison was about$1.60. So roughly the same. Today in California, price of a Big Mac is coming up on$7 and Costco hot dog and soda combo is still$1.50. So why on earth is this hot dog still$1.50? Like people are so confused about this point. It's like very strange when you think about it because we live in an era of shrinkflation and just like companies raising prices whenever they can get away with it. So the reason this hot dog is still$1.50 is Jim Senegal, the founder of Costco, was just adamant that this was a promise that they had made to customers and they were not going to break that promise no matter what.

28:11So there's this very famous story. This story is so famous. You can get the famous quote from the story on a t-shirt. Okay. That's how famous it is. In 2008, the COO of Costco comes to the CEO, Jim Senegal and says, boss, we're getting our butts kicked on this hot dog. We got to raise the price. And Jim says, well, okay. Yeah. You can raise the price, but you should know that if you do raise the price in this hot dog, I will effing kill you. So figure it out. And I love this story so much because when people hear it for the first time, their mind is blown because they can't imagine how much work Costco has done to defend this price point.

28:51They literally vertically integrated their hot dog supply chain. They actually own and operate hot dog factories. They did these crazy biz dev deals playing the soda vendors off each other to make sure that no matter what, they will always be$1.50. And people ask me these funny questions. They're like, oh, is it a loss leader? No, they try to make money on the hot dog. Do they use high quality ingredients? Do they do this? Do they do that? But the question nobody ever asks is why was the COO trying to raise the price? Because of course he was. We're so indoctrinated to the idea that you raise prices whenever you can.

29:23We view that as natural and the keeping of the promise as unnatural. Jim Sinegal put it to me this way. He said, look, most companies fall into the business equivalent of taking heroin. He literally said, if we took a dollar bottle of ketchup and sold it for a dollar and three cents, nobody would ever notice. If we did that across the whole store, raise prices by 3%, we would literally double our net income. Costco's a big company. Doubling their net income would be a lot of money. So why don't they do it? He said, well, if you do that once, you're gonna have to do it again. It's like taking heroin.

29:59And next thing you know, you're not the low price leader. Next thing you know, you don't stand for anything. And just when he said that to me, I was like, oh, my God, so many modern companies are heroin addicts. That's why their behavior is so erratic and degrading. That's why we pity them. They're as addicted as the people whose products they use who are addicted to the products. They're addicts making other addicts. Whenever I hear somebody say I did this because of my fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, that is an addict talking, right? Oh, it is. I donated a million dollars to the inauguration because I have a responsibility to the shareholders.

30:38You can kind of justify any dumbass thing. You can justify anything that way. Yeah, no, it's sad. And the thing that I think you have to understand about Costco is they see themselves as having a fiduciary duty to the customer. And Saul Price, the legendary father of modern retail, did develop the Costco ethos. His story is in the book too. He said that the order of battle should be customers first, employees second, shareholders last. The great Peter Drucker said, no, that's wrong. It should be employees first, customers second, shareholders last. The famous Johnson & Johnson, our credo is doctors, patients, and nurses first, employees second, communities third, shareholders last.

31:11Are you noticing a pattern? Yet we live in the era of shareholder primacy that says, no, an organization is not a beautiful, living, vital thing trying to create a great product. No. Oh, no. Instead, it is merely a financial instrument to enrich its shareholders. This is one of the worst ideas in the world, that it's time has definitely come and gone. I had no idea there's such a history that in order to start a company, you had to get the legislature to agree to the product offering. And I had no idea. But I have to tell you, one of the most interesting stories I read is that often people say, well, of course, our responsibility is to the shareholders, because without their money, this company would not exist.

31:53And then you brought up the very brilliant point that without the customer, this company wouldn't exist. So why isn't our fiduciary responsibility to the customer? Duh. Duh. I actually go through all the arguments in favor of shareholder primacy in the book and walk through them one-on-one. Because I wanted to take this idea really seriously. First of all, it's the idea that dominates our lives. So we needed to understand the history where it came from. And why do people think it like people obviously thought this was a good idea at some time. We need to understand why. And I think in practice, it just hasn't worked out the way people thought it would.

32:28By elevating shareholders to the top, we create this tremendous incentive to just extract value from companies and to think short term. But that's not even really good for shareholders. So if you talk to long term shareholders, they feel like they're trapped in this system that's like a prisoner's dilemma. Where since they think everybody else is going to try to squeeze all the value out of a company, you got to get in there first and make sure you get your cut too. And so it's actually a self-fulfilling prophecy that extraction begets more extraction. The flip side is, if we build organizations that are incorruptible, we say that we interrupt that dynamic.

33:04We say this company can never be forced to become extractive because it has the strength, the structural integrity to say no. Okay, so this is a very good segue, which is what is a good structure? What is structural integrity? So in order to have a good structure, we have to have two things. I call them ethos and integrity. Okay. That's the simple formula of the book is ethos plus integrity equals incorruptible. That's all you have to remember. Ethos is the inner alignment. I call it making something worth protecting in the first place. This is like, I was talking about Saul Price. He built the company FedMart.

33:43That's like the predecessor company to Costco. He built it with fiduciary duty to the customer, capped margins at 14%, above market wages, all the usual stuff. But his own investors betrayed him. And after he built that company and taken it public and made it huge after 20 years, they fired him, just like what happened to Steve and happened to so many founders. He was fired for no particularly good reason because they wanted to make the company conform to best practices. They did. And within seven years, they had driven it bankrupt. Because once you acknowledge the superiority of investors, then any other value is subordinate, including quality, health, safety, any value, never mind the high concept values.

34:20of misinformation, opposing misinformation, or commitment to the truth, or environmental protection, doesn't matter. If your aspiration is as simple as I want to build a high quality product, you are a business revolutionary, whether you know it or not. So that betrayal, we see over and over and over in our economy. So we have to have the ethos that says that we're trying to do something good, something aligned with human flourishing. And then we have to find the structure to protect it the reason costco is a 400 billion dollar public company today is because it is structurally protected from wall street who constantly tries to get it to abandon that ethos and it constantly has to say no thank you i quote in the book a wall street analyst who criticized costco like this said costco takes money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and invests it in improving the customer experience.

35:11As if that's a criticism. But it is. Under shareholder primacy, customers and employees are resources to be mined, not long-term partners. So what's the solution? Can I tell you another story? Of course you can tell. It's your freaking episode. All right. Because I think sometimes it's easier to see these things in a story than it is in an abstract concept. Okay. So I'm going to take you back to 1920. There's a woman named Marie Krog. She was living in Denmark, one of the first female doctors in Denmark, actually. Really cool lady, advocate for women's medical education and a bunch of other cool stuff.

35:44But today she's - Novo, here comes Novo. You know the Novo story is coming. Yeah, of course it is. Can we talk about this episode without talking about Novo Nordisk? So she's mostly famous today because her husband, August, won the Nobel Prize. But it was really interesting. Around the time he won the Nobel Prize, she was diagnosed with diabetes, a fatal illness that had no known cure at that time. And I'll make a long story short. she agrees to accompany him to North America to go on a lecture tour despite her fatal illness. And while she's there, she meets a scientist who's working on the isolation of insulin.

36:16She and August go to Canada, meet these scientists. They figure out the technology is going to work and they ask them if they can license the technology and bring it back to Denmark. Now, if you read their writing from that time, they had a real, very particular concern. What if one day in the future, a Martin Screlly type character shows up and says, wait a minute, why should I charge a fair price for a lifesaving medicine when you owe me everything? I can charge you whatever I want, right? So they anticipated this problem and they created a structure that today is called the industrial foundation structure, where they created a nonprofit foundation, which protects it overseas a for-profit subsidiary.

36:55The for-profit subsidiary has investors. Novo Nordisk is one of the world's largest companies. It is publicly traded. I think the New York Stock Exchange trades a million shares a day of Nova Nordisk. So it's not like some niche do-gooder company. This is one of the biggest companies in the world. And I tell the story in the book of a time when the nonprofit trustees had to intervene to stop the for-profit board from doing something stupid. And because they did this intervention, I'm not exaggerating. This is going to sound like an exaggeration, but I promise this is the God's own truth. You could read the book and see.

37:26They created by this Act,$500 billion of shareholder value, even though they're the nonprofit trustees. So we have these structures that are old, like they're known. Novotis has been around for more than 100 years. The person who makes most of the optics lenses in the world, Zeiss, had this structure in the 1880s. And yet most founders, most leaders, most board members have never heard of this stuff. And if you talk to most lawyers or most VCs and say, hey, I'm thinking about replicating the incredible success of Dover Nordest, they'll be like, oh, that's nice child. But no, that's not how we do things anymore.

38:04The modern way is Delaware C Corp fiduciary duty to shareholders. Well, that's the serious way of business. And so part of what I want to do with this book is just be like, look, this is ridiculous. We have all this evidence and a lot of academic research to show that these so-called alternatives are better than the mainstream. Why aren't we using them? Eric, your book is going to be banned in Silicon Valley. I don't know. I think a lot of Silicon Valley people are pretty sick and tired of how things have trended and are excited to be part of the backlash. With the Novo Nordisk example, I flashback to when OpenAI was a not-for-profit.

38:40Is that an opportunity loss? And now we see Sam and Elon fighting it out. Oh, that's a crazy situation. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very hesitant. I always caution people not to take too many lessons from OpenAI because that's a crazy, weird situation. Very unprecedented in history. You got big ego people like Sam and Elon duking it out so it's complicated. But this is a big source of confusion because superficially, OpenAI seems like it has the Novo Nordisk structure, but it never did. The critical thing that makes the Novo structure work, and this is true not just for Novo Nordisk, but Patagonia, REI, Hershey, John Lewis Partnership in the UK, IKEA, there's a lot of companies that have this multi-tier ownership structure.

39:18where you have a second set of trustees who are overseeing the for-profit board. In political science, this is not some breakthrough new idea. The idea of having checks and balances has worked out pretty well. And whenever you lose your checks and balances, things go haywire. You not believe me, read the newspaper. This is obviously a very important idea. But unfortunately, OpenAI never had that. OpenAI only ever had the one board that orbited around SAM. And so I actually don't think, I mean, obviously it is an opportunity lost. I think if they had adopted that two-tiered structure, they'd be in better shape today.

39:49And if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a computer science student at Stanford, two guys, two gals in a garage, and I'm listening to this podcast, I'm thinking, yeah, man, this guy, Eric, he has it all right. And so these two guys, they go to their law firm, they go to OREC, and they tell OREC, I want you to do this. I want you to make this structure like Novo, Nordisk and all. What does the Wilson Sonsini OREG partner say to them today? Well, I have a whole section in the book called How to Talk to Your Lawyer about these things. So yes, actually, I've been writing this book for years. So during the whole time I was writing it, I kept a running list of every objection, no matter how stupid, somebody said to one of the founders that I was coaching through this.

40:31I've had a lot of people set the structure up now. And I just wrote all the objections down there, every single one of those in the book, and exactly how we answered it. and yes it's true that some law firm partners are difficult with this i actually started my own law firm because i got so sick and tired of it you could check it out it's called virgil mostly what it does is ai powered back office but it also does the legal side of things and because i was involved i was like you guys need to be up to speed on these things so that when you talk to a founder you don't just say oh that's nice but honey we're going to do the best practices no enough of that condescending bs but listen wilson cincini just to give them credit for a second.

41:02Wilson Sanzini worked on the Anthropic long-term benefit trust. So Anthropic has this two-tiered structure and they had, they used Wilson Sanzini to get it. And I think a lot of the problem is actually not the law firms themselves. What happens is the founder forgets that the lawyer works for you. You're the client. And so I once had a founder who was really excited to do these things. They went and talked to their lawyer about it and the lawyer talked them out of it. And they came back to me, dejected and said, my lawyer said, I can't do it. I was like, really? They said, you can't do it. Is that literally what they said?

41:33They're like, no, but they were just saying there's all these issues and people might not like it and it's not worth it and whatever. I said, listen, just call your lawyer back. Do me a favor. Ask them to walk you through the pros and cons of this particular technique. Don't ask about the idea in general, but just say, I want to know the pros and cons of doing X. Okay. Call us their lawyer. And the lawyer goes like this. Oh, the pros are this might protect you. It might make you like billions of dollars personally, because you'll be protected in a situation where someone tries to steal the company from you, it might help you sleep better at night because your company stays true to its mission.

42:06And you know, and they're like, what are the cons are though? It's a couple extra thousand dollars of legal work that you don't need to pay for. And some investors might not like it. And the founder was like, this pros and cons seems pretty lopsided in favor of the pros. Why did you try to talk me out of it before? The lawyer was like, I wasn't trying to talk you out of it. I was just trying to tell you the pros and cons. That's my job. So a lot of founders forget who works for who. Just say, what are the pros and cons? And then if the lawyer is like, I really don't think this is a good idea. The other trick is ask your lawyer, are there other companies?

42:38Are there precedents? Are there other ways to achieve what I want to achieve that I don't know about? You'd be shocked how many times your lawyer is like, yeah, well, there's the Novo Nordisk precedent. And you're like, why didn't you mention that before? You didn't ask. You asked me what the best practice is. Nobody does it that way anymore. But like, can I do it that way? if you want to, you're the client. You're the client. Do it the way you want. Build the company you want to have. That's my most important advice to any founder. Up next on Remarkable People. For a founder, this is a very profound loss.

43:07It's like someone took your child from you. It's very painful.

43:19Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. Okay, so that's how to talk to a lawyer. But, you know, in Silicon Valley, we have the golden rule, which is he who has the gold makes the rules. So now you're telling your venture capitalist, I want to be Norval Nordisk and I want to do this. saying your venture capitalist is no can do. My partners will never go for this. Yeah, I'll be embarrassed. The funniest objection is I'll be embarrassed in front of my partner for being too different.

44:00I'm like, what? You and your bold contrarian partners, really? Are we afraid of being too different? Give me a break. Give me a break. Okay. I don't want to sugarcoat this. There are investors who will push back on these things. But the good news for better for worse is that most VCs actually have no opinion about this. They just inherited this orthodoxy that they've been told to parrot. And I think it's actually kind of sad. Like a lot of VCs, when they're getting founders to raise money from them, are like very founder friendly, very mission oriented, very missionaries versus mercenaries is an old trope in the venture world.

44:31I think we're going to have to come up with a new phrase for it because it's a little bit racist if you think about it too hard. But even still, they're really into that. They don't want mercenary companies. They have companies that have a vision, there's a long term, okay. But then as soon as they become board members, they are trained to treat mission like it's the dessert topping you get to do at the end after you've eaten your vegetables of running a serious business. Wasn't that the reason you invested in the first place? So a lot of this is about educating investors and helping them realize that this way of working produces superior returns.

45:02So the magic formula, I always tell founders to practice this in front of the mirror, just practice this sentence. It is my judgment as the founder of this company that in order to be successful, we need to be a trustworthy counterparty to blank. it's like a matlib fill it in with whoever you need to be trustworthy to and in order to do that we need to adopt technique x okay and what's amazing about this sentence is it forces the vc who's objecting to object to something specific which is it i'm not the leader it's not my call to make trust is not important this is not an essential part of our strategy this technique doesn't work which is it and then whichever thing it is you can then address that thing and the reason this is so powerful is founders are so naive, frankly, about this.

45:47I was too. We get seduced by the marketing and the sizzle and the excitement of VCs. And we forget to ask the hard questions. This really comes into play. It's very important if you have multiple options. And most founders that raise venture capital, in order to raise venture capital, you have to have multiple bidders. Very few VCs are contrarian enough to be the only bidder into a company. It actually takes real guts to do that. Kudos to those firms that can do it. So if you have multiple bidders, if you have three different VCs that are all telling you they love you, they love your vision, they love you, whatever, this is a great way to figure out who's serious.

46:24Because the person who's like, I believe in your vision, I will back you to the hilt, but I do need the ability to fire you anytime I want in a moment's notice. It's very different from the person who's like, listen, I believe in this mission so much, I want it to be structurally protected. Choose accordingly. Okay, I'll take your word for it that such VCs exist. I've done it. I've seen it. Listen, people used to say to me all the time, companies won't be able to raise money if they have this structure, but Anthropic seems to have been able to raise a little money. Those investors have done pretty well.

46:52Can I just ask you a question about Anthropic? Because I know it's held up as they stood up to the Pentagon and blah, blah, blah. But it seems to me that, like, why did Anthropic, based on the whole history of Donald Trump not paying contractors and screwing all these things up and all these casinos going out of business and all that, like what got into their brain to think that, yeah, we can enter a legal agreement with the Pentagon and everything will be fine, everything will be protected. How could they have concluded that? This is an example of elite brain damage that's not unique to Anthropic at all.

47:30So many, so many of our institutions, law firms, universities, all these big companies, I think if you want to be sympathetic to them, you have to understand that they are surrounded by a whole elite class of people. I call them the governance class of our society that has immense groupthink and that decides that certain things are the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. And they exert tremendous pressure to conform to their ideas. Did they get caught up in that? Probably. To be the record, I have no inside knowledge about it. I think people are trying as hard as they can to pretend like everything's normal right now.

48:04We live in a normal time and do the things that under normal circumstances would be seen as patriotic. And I think that's actually very difficult for most people to reason about what's happening right now because they are not familiar with the historical precedents and they're not paying attention to history. Okay. So now my last two questions. My last to question. First is, who is in the Eric Ries Hall of Fame of incorruptibility? There's kind of two categories of people that you want to put in the Hall of Fame. One is, of course, the historical legends who you have their whole life, so you can judge, right?

48:36People like Steve Jobs or people like Saul Price, who I mentioned before, the great Robert Owen. He's a 19th century example that is in the book. And then, of course, you have the modern examples where you've had a chance to be around them and see them personally operate. And of course, the modern examples of the dangerous ones because you don't know what will happen to them in the future you can only say what you see in the book i talk a lot about todd park the founder of devoted healthy someone i really admire as an entrepreneur i talk about matthew prince at cloudflare there's people who i've had the privilege to be around who i just really feel like their heart is in the right place and they're trying to do the right thing and that's what we should be as entrepreneurs that's what we should all aspire to okay okay now this may be a slightly harder question and it's going going to be harder for most people to identify, but you really rip on boards.

49:23Yeah, it's true. It's true. Boards are coming for a hard time. Yeah, yeah. So is there anybody, God forbid, Eric, that is in the Eric Ries Hall of Fame as a board member? Not some scumbag private equity guy. No, no. Yeah, of course. Look, I'm very critical of boards, but again, not because the people on boards are bad people, just because we've taught a very particular set of practices that they think it's their job to do this liquidation. But like the great Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime partner, he was on the board of Costco for many years, for decades, I think. And Costco's board sees its job very differently than other boards.

49:59And actually, I think what we need to develop, like I've been thinking about a founder who read the book came to me and said, look, what we need to create is a white knight board member as a service. Find the people who are irrationally committed to the company's mission and who don't see the board's responsibility as primarily gutting the mission, but rather protecting the mission, not as a breach of their fiduciary duty to investors, by the way, but as a fulfillment of it. Because in the long run, this is the path of superior economic returns. It's not some soft-hearted thing that's going to cost them money.

50:31So Charlie Bunker, that's it. Yeah. I don't know who else to put in that category. You're guiding me on the spot, But yeah, certainly there's people like him. And I think a lot of startups have board members who are true partners, you know, to that. I've had people in my life where just they've always had my back. They've always been there for me. They understand their job is to see that the mission of the company endures. That's the thing. That's the thing we should look for. And don't be like the Enron board, who, by the way, was named one of the five best boards in America right before the collapse.

51:00And then, of course, we have the Terranosis board, right? Sure. Luminaries on board is always a big mistake. get people who are going to roll up their sleeves and actually do the work. Yeah, yeah. And I want to issue one piece of clarification. I think that you made it very clear that you're not necessarily calling out all these people as immoral. You're saying the system is corrupt. Yes, thank you for that. That is one of the big problems with how we talk about this today. We tend to like the drama, like it's a reality show, right? The drama, who's up, who's down, who wins, who loses. And so the dramatics obscure the systems.

51:35And in fact, I know a lot of founders, I'm sure you do too, have had this experience where they've been betrayed and screwed over and they're lost the thing that they created. Like for a founder, this is a very profound loss. It's like someone took your child from you. It's very painful. And you talk to them about what happened. They've almost always blamed themselves. If only I trusted better people. I quote in the book, the founder of SAIC, he was betrayed by his board late in his life And like it was practically his deathbed statement was that he trusted the wrong people. You see the same thing with John Mackey and Whole Foods.

52:06Just he blames himself. He should have been stronger. He should have been smarter. He should have been savvier. Maybe. But when you're following all the best practices that everyone tells you are the very best, and then you get betrayed, as I say in the book, if the actors change, but the play remains the same, there's something deeper at work. And so I think we have to start getting under the hood and looking at what are these fundamental forces that are causing this to happen. Eric, I got to tell you that from this point forward, every time I hear some McKinsey guy or McKinsey gal saying best practices, it's going to have a whole different meaning to me, man.

52:44Best practices is a bad concept, man. Oh, my God. That is very much the idea. Ah, Eric, for the upteenth time, let me just say that, man, I never expected this book. This book came out of left field, and I thought it's going to be another book about, yeah, look at all the innovation of Elon Musk, and look at all the value creation of Tim Cook, and look at blah, blah, blah. And Peter Thiel says you don't need a college education and all that. And then bada bing, bada bang, here comes Incorruptible by Eric Ries. And it is going to make your head explode if you're into best practices in Silicon Valley tradition.

53:25I highly recommend this book. Oh, thank you. In fact, I will tell you, Eric, as soon as I read this book, I sent the link for Amazon to Melanie Perkins, Cliff Oberg, and Cameron Adams. They are the three founders of Canva. And I said, you got to read this book. This is required reading for you. Thank you for saying that. I really appreciate it. That's the highest form of praise. That is truly the very tip top of praise. I appreciate what you're saying so much. And I feel so seen by you in this interview. I can't tell you how grateful I am. And you know, the great Dan Heath, I'm sure you know, the business author, he also sent out this like unsolicited, just unbelievable review of the book, his mailing list.

54:05And he said a lot of nice things and I was really embarrassed. But the thing he said that really hit me like this, and it's just like what you're saying, he said, I was expecting, frankly, Eric could eat out his whole life on Lean Startup. You could just keep doing the same thing and the same thing and the same thing forever, but he chose the harder road. And I just thought of the people that I really admire, that's the thing I try to emulate is to try to do new things, to break new ground, to have the courage to speak up about what's right. And you've done that too. And I just, I wanted to say thank you to you for being an inspiration in that way.

54:35Just remember, make, validate, protect. Make the MVP 2.0. I can't believe it. That's such a great idea. Eric, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for writing this book. I want to thank you for appearing on my podcast and making my head explode. And just let me thank my team. There's, of course, Madison Nismar, co-producer, Jeff C., co-producer, Shannon Hernandez, sound editor, Tessa Nismar, researcher. I have some pretty incorruptible people working with me. So they keep me on the straight and narrow and they keep me on the harder road. There's not a lot of traffic on the harder road. So, yeah.

55:14Eric, I wish you the greatest luck. And I hope that this book has as much impact as the lean startup. Thank you for saying that. I really appreciate it. This is an incredible interview. I appreciate you and all that you do. This book literally could help save the world. No shit. Wow. Oh, man. Yes. That's what I'm talking about. That is my goal. First, there was the Bible. And then there was incorruptible. That's human issue. Now you're getting me in trouble. We were doing really good. we were on a roll and now you're getting us into danger territory thank you eric all the best to you thanks so much everybody like and subscribe you know the drill

55:57this is remarkable people