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That's kind of conversation to your soul. Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome to I'm Danny.

Here, as always, with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson.

And we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today. Sean Delahante. Sean is an independent historian and author of the recently released company men, the invention of shareholder value and the splintering of the American economy. So, Sean, thank you very much for joining us. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. And I just want to say, man, thank you so much for writing this book. I mean, this is, I think, one of the most important transformations in the history of American capitalism, and it's something that people always reference. And, like, I know Derek and I would both personally die for shareholder value, but I think this is the exact type of work that really does need to be done. I mean, I would prefer that somebody else died for my shareholder value, quite frankly.

No, dude, I would die.

I will die on the shores of Greenland for the shareholder value of Americans' corporate stakeholders.

But that's just me.

I believe in things.

But, Sean, I don't always ask this, but I think it is important for this one.

What made you want to write about shareholder value?

And it might be useful to begin the conversation with just an explicit definition of what

precisely shareholder value is, because it's a term that is thrown around a lot.

But what does it precisely mean?

Sure. So the term itself, shareholder value, as you said, it can mean lots of different things.

In the case of the book, and especially the theorists I'm writing about, they actually meant it

pretty simply in terms of just pushing your stock price up, maximizing the economic value of your

company, so making it the most valuable thing that an investor could put their money in, as

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