This project may take decades, and yet leaders need guidance and useful mental models in the meantime. So, to me, the much more useful data is the literally thousands of founders (and other leaders) who have reported that they have found the framework useful in their own lives and companies. They may all be deluded, of course, but at some point I think we have to acknowledge that _something_ useful is going on here.

In any event, I don't give it that much thought. If a new theory emerges that proves more useful, or if new research gives entrepreneurs new and better tools, I'd be delighted. My only loyalty is to the truth.

In terms of good uses for AI to figure out what people want, I really think the best advice is to focus on your own skills and agency. In other words, never ask the AI to make an artifact for you. Instead, ask it to teach you how to make the same artifact.

If you do this over and over again, if you do it step-by-step, having the AI as a teaching companion, critiquing mistakes that you make, breaking the problem down into smaller sub-problems, making sure you've mastered each step before moving on to the next, pretty soon you'll be able to create some really awesome artifacts.

Is this approach, in some sense, "slower" compared to vibe coding everything? Yes. But I think, at least in my experience, this is a go slow to go fast kind of situation. Now I had the benefit of being able to use a completely custom AI rig made by the company I help co-found, Answer.ai (with Jeremy Howard). If you want to learn more about that, you can access it at solve.it.com.

Here are some things that seem to me unequivocally true if we look at the historical record and the data available to us: 1. These kind of value-destroying actions in the name of profit have been going on for a very long time, at least 200 years. 2. The problem seems to be getting worse in recent decades. 3. The problem seems to be highly correlated with the increased financialization of our economies and the advent of a relatively recent set of so-called best practices about how companies should be built, run, and governed. 4. Companies seem to vary widely in the degree to which they are vulnerable to these forces. 5. I think to be learned by studying the companies that have been able to resist-- as a collective set

Most of all, I want to restore people's sense of agency to do something about this. We are not helpless in the face of these forces. In fact, we are the originators of them.

It's a really complicated and confusing company to draw lessons from, partly because there are such big ego, larger-than-life people involved doing crazy stuff. A lot of the inner details have not yet been made public, so I don't think we really, really know what was going on behind the scenes. There have been quite a few factional struggles there, and I'm sure you can find bad behavior on all sides. That's not that uncommon when so much money is at stake.

In the book, I try to get into the structure that seems to be stable over long periods of time, which, because I know more about the details, I felt more comfortable illustrating by telling the story of Anthropic. I had to pick one difference that seems to really matter in these so-called complicated structures. It's whether there is one central point of control or more than one, i.e., if there are checks and balances. That when an outside board of trustees has the power to hold the for-profit board accountable to the mission, that seems to produce more stable results.

Check out the research of Steve Thompson at the Copenhagen Business School, who has been a pioneer in developing the data from which these conclusions are drawn.

So, to the extent the book is getting attention at all, it's being driven primarily by word of mouth. People who read the book are inspired to become evangelists for it, far more than my prior books. I think this one is more emotionally resonant for folks, and has applicability way beyond founders or even product people. So I'm extremely grateful for all that support.

I've also done a metric ton of podcast interviews, many of which you can watch here: https://howisincorruptiblegoing.com/

But if you look at the view counts on YouTube, you'll see that they are all also suffering from the algorithm's fickle attention. Most have very few views (with a few notable exceptions).

I was talking the other day to a Silicon Valley OG and he expressed total disgust to me about the "mercenaries" who have overrun the valley right now and who are destroying the very things that made it great in the first place.