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was to try to understand why there are some companies that have earned the trust of their well of everybody but starting with their customers and their suppliers and their employees uh pretty much uh broadly speaking and others are just reviled and hated and not trusted so uh with that as background i picked you know an example of one on each extreme.

And the extreme trusted, loved, just adored company I chose was Costco.

And the one that I think is as reviled as Costco is revered was Uber.

And to test that, I went to a very reliable and trusted, speaking about trust, survey organization called the harris polling company and in conjunction with axios media company every year since 2019 they put out a survey of the reputation on multiple attributes including trustworthiness and ethics and the like of the hundred essentially most well-known companies in america they start the survey by saying you know give us a handful of companies that you think know are on top of mind when you think of companies that are either really good or really bad whatever what just leaps to your mind and they kind of narrow it down every year to the 100 most named yeah i'm dealing with these companies all the time and then they go into a deep dive survey of customers who spend a lot of time with these specific companies and out of that comes what you're looking at here and i i pulled four attributes of the 10 or so attributes that they rate each company on.

And these four have to do with trustworthiness, trust itself, your character, your ethics, your culture, and the like.

And what this is measuring just in the past year, from 2025 to this year, You know, how were these two companies rated on these four attributes? And, you know, Costco this year and the last five, they are top five year after year after year, just a top performer without question.

Decline and recline.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, so, uh, this trilogy you talked about is, I, I've been given a lot of thought to, um, to three questions that dictated the three chapters of the series of articles that came out each of the last three Wednesdays, including today is the third.

The first is very much a kind of general business dilemma that's been debated for all the years I've been teaching in Columbia Business School and years before when I was a consultant.

And it's the kind of – there's two kinds of companies, one can argue.

There's one company that just is completely focused on maximizing shareholder value.

That is the purpose of a business.

University of Chicago was out there back in the 50s saying any CEO who spends one minute not worrying about maximizing shareholder value is wasting their investors' money, and that should be the only thing you focus on.

Yeah.

What's the single most important finding listeners should understand?

Well, I would start by saying that the theme of this show, where tech meets humanity, certainly applies to Uber.

Everyone, I would assume, listening to the show has used Uber or 99 or other ride share companies around the world, but Uber is the undisputed king and leader.

It is a laboratory for us to understand what's going to increasingly happen across multiple parts of the economy where market leading companies who control the data, who control the information about how these marketplaces work and what are in the interest of riders and drivers in this case, are in a position to control setting the price that consumers pay and the pay that drivers receive And they certainly have used that to their advantage, going from a company that initially lost more money than any startup company in history, remarkably, to now being a money-making machine.

And it is largely due to their use of very sophisticated algorithms, massive databases that have remarkable knowledge and insight into the behaviors of both sides of their marketplace, riders and drivers, that they've exploited to full advantage.

And other companies in other sectors are observing this.

And I think we're going to increasingly see across a wide number of sectors, companies turning to algorithm pricing, raising the basic question about who gets to decide what's fair, correct, right for all the constituencies in our economy.

But there are some dynamics with companies like Apple and Ticketmaster that show similar