Eric Ries

real judge-made law in the 1980s.

So it's not even that old of an idea.

If you can see a tree right now, probably you're seeing something older than this idea, okay?

It's not some bedrock principle of capitalism.

It's a new idea.

And the key, if you study all the stuff that they did, they never said, look, we think it's better to have ruthlessly exploitative companies.

So we should have two kinds of companies, the old kind, the purposeful based companies and the new exploitative companies.

And therefore we're gonna have a double bottom line.

We're not gonna have two.

They didn't do any of that, never did that.

They just said the purpose of business is to do this thing.

The definition of profit is this narrow thing.

They just created a new business orthodoxy that we mostly have inherited unchallenged.

So I think it doesn't make sense for us to go around creating all this new vocabulary when we can just define things properly in the first place.

And if you take an economics class,

you will learn that the way we define profit, today, most people, if I say, what is a profit?

They say, oh, it's simple.

It's just how much money do I have left over after I pay for all my expenses?

Has these catastrophic conceptual flaws in it.

Because if you create massive deferred liabilities, like in the case of a Ponzi scheme, you can appear to be profitable when you're really not.