The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 424: Anson Frericks—Last Call for Bud Light

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

As President of Anheuser-Busch Sales and Distribution, Anson had a front-row seat to witness how and why Bud Light lost its position as the most popular beer in America (as well as $30 billion in market cap) by changing its focus from shareholder profits to stakeholder capitalism and partnering with Dylan Mulvaney. His new book, Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America's Favorite Beer is out today.

Well, when you get a title it works, you stick with it. And the title of the book we're going to be discussing today is Last Call for Bud Light, which means it's also the title of this episode because honestly, man, I've kind of enjoyed in a perverse way. I know I shouldn't say that out loud, but I've kind of enjoyed the unraveling of this brand. Because I think it had to happen, to be honest. Are you rooting for it to come back? Yes. I'm absolutely rooting for Bud Light to recover.

But when we, for the last couple of years, have been talking about the necessity for things to go splat, you know, and in so many different ways, this is what I was talking about with regard to this whole strange bullion base of ESG and DEI and sort of corporate virtue signaling and this awful migration from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism. and our guest today has written a book that just addresses all of it. Basically, the conversation you're about to hear with Anson Frericks, by the way, is an awful lot of fun. Well, it was an awful lot of fun to have. You listened mostly. Did you have an awful lot of fun listening? Yeah, I thought it was really good.

I mean, he told a story. I thought he was a very good storyteller, and he told the story chronologically of the rise and fall of Bud Light. And the things that precipitated it. Oh, totally. Yeah. So Anson was a major executive. He was the president of Anheuser-Busch sales and distribution company.

Right. So he had a front row seat to everything that led up to the whole Dylan Mulvaney. Crazy miscalculation from a marketing standpoint. And this conversation mostly is an attempt to answer the question, how in the world Could so many otherwise smart, experienced people make such a colossal error? Get it so wrong. Right. And why are so many millions of otherwise loyal customers still unwilling to forgive them?

Yeah. So it's a really interesting story about a very specific fail and a very specific company. But there is so much that is relevant. think to so many other companies and so many other relationships and so many other governments. Anson, also full disclosure, is partners with our friend Vivek Ramoswamy, who's been on this podcast. They work together on an asset management company called Strive. Right.

And so that'll come up here as well. It's a lot. And if it sounds a little wonky, it's really not. As Chuck said, it's truly a story. And the real truth is it doesn't have an end yet, which is why it's so much. so much fun to tell. Its last call for Bud Light, the rise, actually, there is no rise, just the fall and future of America's favorite beer. Interesting stuff, and we'll prove it right after this. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to

play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, We need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of the this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers

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slash Mike. I'm talking Skills, U.S. Skills, USA. I'm kind of making it up as I go. Got it. We're doing a good job making it up. Thank you very much. We'll be making it up for the next hour and a half with Anson Frerix, whose last name is difficult to pronounce. What's up? It is. I think it's one of those deals where I was a Fredericks, probably over in Germany. Yeah. And on Ellis Island, there was no spell check back in the day.

Right. So they just dropped the D. And someone tried to say, hey, you know, my, some ancestor said, know it's actually Frederick's and they say, sorry, buddy, you're now a Frerick's deal with it. So you've been trying to buy a vowel for all your life, I can reckon. That's it, exactly. So anyone who has that name is somehow related to me because everyone has kind of the same common ancestor, I think, coming over from Ellis Island back in the day. Thanks for making the time.

Where'd you come from? Cincinnati, Ohio. So I'm very glad to be here because it's been a foot of snow on the ground in 10 degrees in Cincinnati for the last month. So it's nice to have some warm weather, get a little vitamin C. Full disclosure, I wanted to talk to you shortly after you wrote the book. I listened to a conversation you had. I don't know who was with, but it was probably a year ago.

And it was super relevant, but it was a year ago. And now we've had an election. And now all things woke have been put under the microscope again. And I imagine the conversation, the conversation that you've been having, I suspect, have evolved somewhat. And even though we covered this in the preamble, I'll just. remind folks. The book is Last Call for Bud Light. You're a former executive of Anheiser-Busch, and you and our friend Vivek Ramoswamy, went on to found, was it Strive? Strive asset management, that said. Okay. Which was pushing back against a lot of the companies

get involved in politics, whether it was Disney with the whole parental rights issue, it was Coca-Cola trying to overturn the election integrity laws in Georgia. And then, of course, and Delta, as I recall. And Delta is what? Major League Baseball, cancel the All-Star Game over Governor Kemp requiring people to have an ID to vote, which is crazy to think about. Well, you know, I remember when that happened thinking, the only way that the country can be having this conversation with a serious grown-up face is if something even larger and more absurd is happening at the same time, right, for context. And of course it was. Like, we were starting to argue about men and women's sports. And I think a lot of people felt like, well, okay,

Well, that's really crazy. So maybe the voter ID thing is not as crazy as I thought. And therefore, in this weird game of relativism that we're constantly forced to play, we played. And our brains tried to make sense out of the table the way it was set for us. No, you're right. And because it's interesting, there was this long march and we can get into it of how businesses got progressively more involved in political issues. Someone as old as time, there's been this discussion about what is the purpose of a corporation? What's a corporation supposed to do?

You're going back to the 70s. I mean, I'll even go back to the Bible. If you go back to the Bible, I mean, it's Proverbs 168, and it says, better is little with righteousness than a lot with injustice. And then even since then... He who troubledeth his own house shall inherit the wind. There you go. And there's always been a discussion over time about what should business be doing.

It really was the 70s, though, where you had these two schools of thought that were going on. In the U.S., you had Milton Friedman. And Milton Friedman said the purpose of a corporation, is to really make money for its shareholders. It has to do that. It just focuses on great products and services and innovation, hire more people, create more revenue, pay taxes. That's what you do. Then there was this separate school of thought that was going in Europe at the time. And this was the Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum. Stakeholder. Stakeholder capitalism model. And the stakeholder

capital is said that the purpose of a corporation is actually to serve all stakeholders in all society without really defining what that meant. And it was kind of nebulous. But what that sort of pseudo meant that businesses would work with governments and unions and activists trying to create stakeholder value for everybody. It was kind of interesting for the next 40 years, both systems got to operate independent. And both systems said that they were going to create more prosperity and that they were going to create better economic outcomes. I think if you take a look at the last 40 years, to me, it's just objective fact that the U.S. system of this shareholder value produced far superior stock market returns. On average, your broad-based stock market entities in the U.S.

return about 10 percent on average over that 40-year time. period, and Europe returned about 7%. So if you put 10 grand in the U.S. markets in 1977, sat tight for four decades, and you did the same thing with the European index. Yes. So this is the way, make it concrete and simple. So if you had $100,000 and you invested in Europe over that time period, it would have been worth about $1.5 million over the next 40 years. If you invest in the U.S., it would have been worth $4.5 million. That's what compound interest is. So, we'll have been worth $1.5 million. Okay. That's what compound interest is.

So the U.S. system just produced better economic returns. Now, Europe might say, okay, well, that's fine, but did you produce better societal outcomes? And I think every societal outcome in the U.S. was actually better. I mean, you take a look at U.S. trances Europe and GDP growth, per capita income, unemployment rates, inflation rates, you name it. So it seems pretty objective that that U.S. system of kind of American free market shareholder capitalism was just superior to that European model. And yet, I got friends over Davos right while they're coming back right now in real time.

There's still a tremendous appetite for stakeholder capitalism. If in fact capitalism can even be capitalism. It's just the arrogance in trying to be all things for all people. It just seems like such a classic story of overreach. I get why it happened in Europe. You know, there's a certain collective guilty conscience for the sins of the last century, I suppose. But, I mean, did they really think it was going to work? I don't know if people thought it was really going to work in the U.S.

And unfortunately, you started to see this European model really coming to the U.S. really after sort of the great financial crisis, which happened in 2008 and 2009. And as you recall, there was a lot of banks that kind of loaned money to people that probably shouldn't be in loaned money two, the banks collapsed, people lost their homes, but a lot of the banks got bailed out. And then there was all of a sudden this Occupy Wall Street moment that happened. If I could, it feels like one of the things that may have preceded that was like a certain set of ideas, maybe around home ownership would be an interesting notion to riff on because there was a time when there's no shame in renting.

And sure, part of the American dream is owning and there are different paths for different people and so forth. But then we had the conversation that said, no, no, it's your right to own a home, and you have to be able to own a home. And we're going to do whatever we can to make it possible for everybody to own a home no matter what. And now you're in that stakeholder world. But it starts with a belief or a statement, right? And then that statement takes hold. And the next thing you know, all kinds of loans are being made to all sorts of folks who are simply in no position to borrow that kind of money. That's right. And way, it's on to weigh and then flat.

Right, exactly. So that kind of happened. And then, of course, there were a lot of people that were upset about this and that the banks got bailed out and people lost their homes. And so we're also listening to this Occupy Wall Street movement that pops up. And this is happening in the 2010, 2011 time frame. And for a lot of the banks to kind of repair their image, they start thinking themselves of, you know, what can we do to be better societal participants? And early on, like a lot of things, I think they probably had good intentions early on. And one of the concepts at the time that was bubbling up, it actually came from the United Nations and from Europe, was in 2005, they had adopted this policy that all companies should adopt ESG or environmental social governance.

And there was a report that the UN did in 2005 really did nothing for about seven, eight years. But it was really picked up in kind of the 2011, 2012, 2013, time. time frame by a lot of European sovereign wealth funds at first, and then it started trickling into the U.S. And it became one of these kind of money grabs where you kind of start following the money on this thing, because what a lot of these European sovereign wealth funds do, which like the state fund of Norway, manages $1.6 trillion. It has a ton of money. And they have a lot of influence. And they're investing in giving that money to large asset managers in the U.S. BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard. Those three organizations control $20 trillion worth of capital.

in the United States. What's our GDP right now? Our GDP in the U.S. is $20 trillion. I mean, it's literally the GDP of the United States. I mean, literally the exact same GDP, which is, you know, amazing to think about. Three companies. Three companies are controlling that amount of wealth. And which means, if I understand it, right, they've also got their thumb on how many pension funds. Well, that's it. And that's it. It's not necessarily their money that they're controlling. It's the money of pension funds, of these sovereign wealth funds that we're speaking about. and then probably your 401k, my 401k, a lot of just everyday folks' money is invested with those three companies. And those three companies, they started getting more and more progressive

in adopting this ESG philosophy. And one of the reasons it really started came to a head in 2016. And the big event in 2016 that came to a head was Trump was first elected. And very similar to what's happening now when Trump was elected for the second time, Trump has pulled out a lot of these international organizations. He's pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords. He's pulling out of the UN Human Rights Coalition. And he's pulling out of him because he thinks the U.S. is getting a raw deal. Well, when that first happened in 2016, there was an allergic reaction that happened in corporate America. Pearls were clutched. That's it. Exactly. Pearls are clutched. And a lot of these large sovereign wealth funds, these progressive pension funds in California, New York, that a lot of

their monies managed by the Black Rock, State Streets, and Vanguard's said, well, if no longer Trump and the U.S. government is going to solve these existential crises of climate change, of systemic racism, now we think corporations and companies, they need to be responsible for solving these issues. So they started putting a lot of pressure on the Black Rock, State, Streets, vanguard, these large asset managers, which are the single largest shareholder in 95% of the S&P 500. On average, They control anywhere from 25 to 35% of the shares of every single corporation in the United States. And to make it relevant and not to belabor the point, but the vast majority of people who are listening to this right now who have a 401k have skin in the game and have a stake, if you will, in the conversation that we're having. So pay attention, guys, because this is not the government of Norway.

It's not some distant sovereign wealth fund. It's not some faceless, giant, you know, edifice on Wall Street filled with, you know, nameless pencil pushers. This is Main Street. This is you. This is Main Street, you. Now, but who are the people that have a lot of money that's exerting the influence? Not only is it the large European sovereign wealth funds, not only is it the progressive pension funds in New York and California, but it's also a lot of the university endowments. The Harvard's, the Yale, who they are investing a lot of money, and also to have a lot of these Wall Street firms,

accrued at their campuses, they're also saying, well, you have to have a commitment to ESG or to DEI at the time. So a lot of this is bubbling up in this 2016, 2017 timeframe. And ESG, I'm obsessed with acronyms, by the way, and it's very rare to find one that everybody can feel good about. I mean, if you think about it, like what, the CIA, FBI, you know, ESG, DEI, you know, I mean, OSHA, EPA, they're all fraught. in some way, shape, or form. But as far as chronology goes, ESG did proceed DEI. Correct. Yes.

Well, to some degree, yes and no. I mean, it actually goes back to really kind of the 1960s in this great society. You have the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which essentially says there's going to be no discrimination based off of race, sex, gender, national origin, ethnicity. And it was even interesting then. There was the Senate floor leader at the time was Hubert Humphreys, who looked at the first. later became Lyndon Johnson's vice president. And it was interesting, he was doing this bill and said,

if this ever leads to quota systems, I will eat my hat. So even in the 1960s, they said this should not lead to quotas, it eliminates racism, period. And that's sort of the beginning of the whole call it DEI movement and what became known as affirmative action as well. If your goal is a colorblind society, how can you possibly embrace an acronym that requires you to not only see color, but acknowledge it?

and account for it. Correct. And to force sort of quota systems, certain percentage of people based off of race, sex, gender, some immutable characteristic that you're born with to have a job or to get a contract or to get a promotion. So a lot of that was bubbling up sort of in this 2016-17 timeframe. And one really interesting thing happened, which was at this time it became getting that you follow the money about why this got so entrenched in companies. So these big three asset management companies, BlackRock State Street Vanguard, they started realizing that if you start putting together so-called ESG funds, you could start charging people more money than you're just regular vanilla standard S&P 500 product. So as opposed to the regular S&P 500, which is the 500 largest

companies in the U.S., one of the biggest ETFs and kind of funds people generally invest into, and they charge very low fees on that. It's three basis points, which, you know, for every $100 you invest, you're charged, you know, 30 cents a year. And they all of a sudden decided that if you actually start ranking companies based off their own arbitrary ESG scores. Scores. On the E, what's your carbon footprint look like? On the S, do you start having certain diversity requirements? All of a sudden, they could exclude an oil and gas company here. They could exclude a firearm company here. They could start making these exclusions. And they were going to start charging people three to four times the amount of money for these ESG funds.

For the right to invest in something that felt virtuous? Virtuous. That's it. And their idea of virtuous became very progressive. And it wasn't necessarily about making money for the company or this didn't necessarily help the companies make money, but it really helped these banks make money. The problem with this was is that there became a legal issue. And it really became what's known as a fiduciary breach. Because if you're managing someone's money. You have to act in their best interest. That's what it means to be a fiduciary. So you have to act in the best interest of that person. And that means that person, they have a right to the shares that they're buying. So they have a right to vote on company shareholder proposals that come up every

year. And they also have a right in the boardroom to have their voice heard about it. What do you want the company to do? Do you want the company to focus on its mission, products, services, hiring the best and brightest? Or do you want some company to have some orthogonal mission to solve climate change, I don't know, overturn election integrity laws, advocate to defund the police. Great word, by the way. Orthogonal? That's it. Some orthogonal mission, not the direct mission. Rooted in orthodoxy. That's it. Okay.

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If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers. Now. Hey-haw. So what's interesting is in 2017, 2018, a lot of these banks started to realize that their ESG funds and their ESG advocacy, there were some fiduciary issues because the state of Texas, for example, would have a very different view on oil production than the state of California might. And if the same asset manager is managing money for both Texas and California,

and to some degree, they're asking oil companies to produce less oil and gas to abide by the Paris Climate Accords or some supernational organization, well, that could be a fiduciary breach because Texas doesn't want that to happen because Exxon's headquartered in Texas. A lot of people rely on energy in Texas and gas. But therefore, that might be why Texas should have a different asset manager than Blackrock State Street Banker or someone who's doing ESG. To solve that problem, that fiduciary breach, in 2018, 2019, you had Larry Fink, who's the CEO of BlackRock, started writing letters to companies and saying that we're evolving the purpose of a corporation away from what Milton Friedman says

was about shareholder value to stakeholder value. And companies were going to have to earn their social license to operate in the U.S. and to have BlackRock support them on whatever mission they were on. And he got the Business Roundtable, which is a very influential body in the United States, made up of kind of the 200 of the largest CEOs of the largest kind of publicly traded companies to sign off on this. And the Business Roundtable, they came out with a big dexterity. Declaration 2018 and 2019 to evolve the purpose of a corporation away from shareholder value in the United States to stakeholder value. And again, this is all happening because there is an existential threat, at least one that's being perceived, because there's a lunatic with his hands on the levers

of power and he's making decisions that are fundamentally taking us in a direction that right thinking, rational people don't want to go. That's it. You got it. This is where a lot of this is being driven from. It's really interesting. all these banks that are trying to make more money with ESG funds and there's pressure from a lot of their progressive institutions evolve this idea of stakeholder capitalism. And it sets a lot of the, call it the kindling up for a big event in 2020, which was COVID. And when COVID hit, I mean, you'll remember this and not going to have the politics of COVID, but there was this existential crisis when COVID hit that we need to do everything we can to flatten the curve because hospitals

were going to be overrun and you're going to wipe out tens of millions of people. What was interesting at time period is Trump was under a lot of pressure, mostly from the state of New York and from politicians, to sign what was known as the Defense Production Act. And the Defense Production Act, this is where the government of the U.S., it can compel the private sector to manufacture goods or make things that are for the good of the country, not necessarily for their mission. And he pushed back a lot on it, didn't want to do it. But once New York started getting overrun with their hospital systems, he finally signed the Defense Production Act. which compelled companies like 3M to all of a sudden make mask.

GE was now making ventilators. Delta Airlines was now flying medical equipment around the country. It's basically wartime footing. War time footing. That was it. And he essentially said, I don't want to sign this, but was pressured to do it. And he said, I hope that we don't even have to put this into action, but they had to by the end of March.

And that also is when other corporate America got involved in a lot of things outside of their mission. When I was at Anaza Bush, we were making hand sanitizer at the time. Walmart's all of a sudden doing testing facilities in their parking lots. You have Google, which is changing their homepage to show how many cases of coronavirus. So you have a lot of companies that all of a sudden kind of got off track from their mission. The thing that was interesting was though, is that within a month, the initial thing you were trying to accomplish was flat on the curb happened. Right. Hospitals weren't overrun. That hospitals weren't overrun. You kind of solved this COVID issue from a corporation standpoint. Corporations, therefore, should just gone back to what they were supposed to go back to your business. But very quickly, you have to this second invisible enemy that popped up. And this was when George Floyd gets murdered. I think it was right before Memorial Day weekend of 2020. And now all of a sudden, this next sort of invisible enemy that we now need to fight become systemic racism. And because sort of the stage had been set where companies had gotten off track of their mission and focus with COVID, now the next thing,

there's all these calls of now companies need to figure out how are we going to solve systemic racism in this country. And there were big calls from whether... Not is there systemic racism? Correct. We're going to hop right over that question. Correct. And we're just going to assume it's as real as the masks are that we're being required to wear. We're going to assume it's as real as the ESG is.

All of that stuff is just baked in. There was literally zero conversation. Zero conversation. And you couldn't even have a conversation because if you had a different view, you were immediately labeled with the old Scarlet R, that you're racist. And I remember when I think it was Drew Brees, he refused to say Black Lives Matter Out Live, BLM. And all of a sudden, he's being tarred as a racist and he's being tard as somebody that shouldn't be involved in the NFL anymore. I didn't put a black square on my Twitter feed.

I didn't even know it was a thing. Yeah. And I'm suddenly answering questions, like, why didn't you do that? Right. It's so odd. Suddenly you're not being asked to explain why you did a thing. you're being asked to explain why you didn't do a thing. Correct. And even if you would say, well, a lot of the, if you take a look at the BLM movement,

there were some very politicized and charged positions they had. One of their positions was they wanted to dismantle the nuclear family in the United States. So it's, wait a minute, guys, wait, I don't believe in that. So why do I have to put the square of some organization where I don't believe in a lot of the fundamental tenants of that organization? But there was this massive push and massive pressure that was going on in corporate America at the time. And there was almost. is preference falsification that started up, where people all of a sudden, they could not say

in public what they were saying privately, that they did not believe in whether it was the nuclear family piece, right after sort of the whole systemic racism piece, there became a lot of the gender issues that came up. Try pointing out the fact that over 99% of cops out there don't disrespect the badge. Try pointing out the fact that whatever we're reacting, to whatever it was that happened in Ferguson, whatever happened with Floyd, all that stuff. Where's the proportionality? That's it. And so even if you questioned any of the defund the police initiatives that were going on at the time, all of a sudden you were sort of pushed out of, call it polite society. At corporations,

you couldn't speak up and you couldn't have a different point of view, whether it was on the transgender issues, whether it was on defund the police initiatives, whether it was the election integrity laws, whether it's systemic racism. And, you know, it was the transgender issues. And you And even questioning a lot of the large social media companies that were deplatforming certain conservatives for memes, for misinformation. And you couldn't call this into question at the time. Are you at this point employed by Anheuser-Busch? I am. And what's your business card say at this point?

At this point, so I'm president of Anheuser-Busch, sales and distribution company here in the United States. And I joined Anheuser-Busch in 2011. And we can get into this. You have your whole show, How Boo's Built America. And historically, Anna's an amazing story of a company. Great entrepreneurial story. Immigrants came over here, built the thing from scratch, survived Prohibition for 13 years.

Also, quick digression in my view, I don't know. I spent a lot of time in the world of marketing and persuasion and advertising and so forth. I don't know of a better campaign in the history of television than this buds for you. Agree. I really can't think of a more element.

elegant way to say thanks to pay a tribute to a person who also happens to be your customer and to do so with your product. Great. Brilliant. Brilliant. This buds for you is one of the best campaigns. It's simple. It's consistent.

It's tried and true over time. And it's not only that campaign, but they're just amazing memorable campaigns. The company has won more Super Bowl ad meter awards. The Super Bowl is coming up here shortly than any other company. That's the USA Today that shows when people loved the most. but they haven't won one since 2011, which is somewhat telling, and we can get into that. But when I even grew up, Anheuser-Busch was, I always say one of my first memories was the 1988 Super Bowl.

And that's when you had my Cincinnati Bengals played the 49ers. And that was also the first Bud Bowl. If you remember Bud Bowl, it was Bud versus Bud Light. Yeah. It was the first time that actually a company did a commercial specifically for the Super Bowl that only played in the Super Bowl. And that was it. And at the time, I think it was a $4 million ad of a stop motion. It was amazing.

Then that whole decade afterwards, that's when you really had the Budweiser frogs. You had the real men of genius that went on with spotlight. Here's to you, rough-cut lady. That was good. I love that campaign. Did you do the voice for those back in the day? No, no, I didn't.

But I'll tell you, man, Chuck and I make our living in that space, too. And we envied more than once. Right. When a campaign truly gets it right and it balances that, that mix of entertainment. It still lifts. It still does the work it needs to do. But when it becomes, when all the earned media flocks to it,

remember the black guy on the white horse doing the old spice. Right. Exactly. Okay? That's lightning in a bottle. The difference is, as much as I loved that ad, I was sick of it a week later because they just ran it and nothing else. And there was really nothing under it,

Except I'm on a horse. Right. Okay. Funny, but it had no legs. This buds for you had decades of legs. Decades. And so much of the other stuff you guys were doing around that time. It was just so smart and so effective.

Yeah, so that was a little bit just before my time, but that was when the Bush family was running the business. It's kind of interesting. If you think about these great American sort of dynasties, where it's the Vanderbiltz or the Carnegie's, you don't really have a lot of those folks around, but still in the late 1990s, in the 2000, you still had Bushes running this company.

And they'd been running it for at this point almost 150 years. Yeah. And unfortunately, the fourth generation, most family businesses can't make it to the second generation. They made it to the fourth generation. August Bush to the 4th,

he wasn't really the best person for the job. And unfortunately, kind of ran the business into the ground in the 2005, 2006, 2007 time frame where the stock price wasn't moving. And the company was taken over by a firm called InBev. And InBev is a, it started as a Brazilian company that kind of consolidated the South American

beer market. Then they bought Interbrew over in Europe, which owned brands like Stella Artois, left, Hoagarden. And then they bought Anheuser-Busch in 2008. That was when the, really the beer market kind of peaked in the U.S. That was when Bud Light sales peaked in the U.S. was 2008. And then Inbev had a very different view than Anheuser-Busch. Anheuser-Busch.

They built brands. They understood sort of the culture here in the U.S. they were a real leader in terms of marketing. InBeb was much more of a cost management company, so to speak. It was the world's largest private equity from the happen to sell beer. And I'm not here to opine on what models better, because if you're a business and you have sort of a strategy, whether that is growing via brands and marketing or it's growing via acquisition cost. I'm not necessarily here to apply on either one. I'm here to apply on this. Beyond the balance sheets, the cognitive dissonance that arises in a consumer's mind when a brand that is so unapologetically American on Wednesday is owned on Thursday by a multinational concern, that's jarring.

And it might not show up in sales, you know, that quarter. But eventually, that cognitive dissonance is going to leave a mark. That's it. That's essentially what happened. For the first couple of years when InBe bought Anahebusch, a lot of the, I'd say the Anahebusch executives were still around. They were still running marketing. That's why they were still winning Super Bowl AdMeed Awards in 2011.

A lot of that changed throughout sort of the 2015-16 timeframe. One of the big events that really led to the downfall of Anheuser-Busch, they actually moved their sales and marketing organization. out of St. Louis, Missouri, which is sort of the heartland, middle of the country, high market share, and they moved it to New York City. And they moved it to New York City because now all of a sudden, you had a lot of foreign executives. You had folks from Europe, folks from Brazil. They didn't necessarily like St. Louis, Missouri. What did they like? Well, New York. And New York is- And where's State Street? And where's Vanguard? All in New York. Well, that's it. Black Rock's in

New York. And not only is that in New York, but a lot of these marketing organizations, more progressive marketing organizations are in New York. A lot of the nonprofits that become now stakeholders in organizations, one's called the Human Rights Campaign, which sounds benign enough. But the Human Rights Campaign is one of these organizations that said, now we're going to score all corporate America. And we're going to score corporate America on things, like, are you doing gender affirmation care for your employees?

Do you do so much advertising for the LGBTQ plus community for all of your brands? And it started in kind of the year 2000. It was just, hey, don't make fun of people and make sure you have benefits for people that are LGBT. Fine. But then it expanded over time where every year it became more and more aggressive in terms of what you needed to do

to achieve 100% score with the age of stage. So that's another problem with the company. Wait a minute, but also people should know and tell me if I'm wrong, but if I'm running a company and my board is, scoring me on maybe my ESG impact, maybe my dual, whatever it is, my comp is going to be tied to that score, like my personal comp.

That's it. This happened across corporate America. So going back to sort of this 21, 2021, 2021, 2022 timeframe where all of a sudden the post-George Floyd, Leah Thomas, who was the transgender swimmer. Will, as I recall. Sorry? Will. Will.

Will. That's it. Yes, Will. I know what you mean. Yeah, you know what I mean. Good looking girl. Weird bulge. That's it.

But again, if you said that in 2021, have you even questions. I did. Yeah. Didn't go well. It didn't go well. Broke a few eggs. I survived, but I get it. You get it.

That's what I meant early on. When you talk about the voter ID conversation, yes. It could have only happened contemporaneous with something even more patently absurd. Yes. And the absurdity at that moment, was a straight-faced appeal to ignore the bulge. Yes.

Ignore the bulge. She's standing, he's standing on a podium, and we can all see at a glance. Yeah, what is going on? Right. But thou shalt not acknowledge that. Thou shalt not acknowledge. And if you get acknowledged,

there are people that got fired from certain sports teams for saying, I don't want to compete against transgendered athletes. People got fired for that. People lost jobs over that. Riley Gaines sat right there. the way. Actually, no, she didn't. She was virtual. Yeah, that was Riverside. I met Riley a couple times. And she's great. And she was the one who stood up and said, listen, I literally

tied this person down to the last second. And they told me that I had to stand off the podium. And this person was on the podium. She was the kid in the crowd and the emperor's new clothes who said, hey, man, I, this is not right. Don't tell me, I can't see that. Don't tell me you don't see that. By the way, and I saw it in the locker room. I saw it without the bathing suit. So to be clear. I saw it all. I saw everything more than you did. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time. Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle. The poop is out of the goose, I'm afraid.

AI is here to stay. And every business in the country is asking themselves the same. question. How do we make it work for us? Well, the answer to that question varies, but you'll find it in a free guide that you can get right now at net suite.com slash Mike. It's called demystifying AI. It's totally free. It's essential reading for anybody trying to make sense of a future that appears to have arrived yesterday. NetSuite, of course, is the number one AI enterprise resource planning software out there, trusted by over 43,000. businesses with NetSuite, you can use the AI of your choice, GROC or Claude or chat, GPT, whatever else is out there to connect to your actual business data, all of it, and automate

all of those tiresome, time-sucking, soul-deaddening manual processes. This is AI built into the system that's currently running your business. Learn more at netsuite.com slash Mike. And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mike. That's net suite.com. Anyway, so, yeah, so this is a really interesting time frame.

And corporate America at large, but then particularly at Ann has pushed at the time, Anna Zer Bush had started adopting this ESG philosophy, really, in sort of the 2019, 20, 2020, time frame that a lot of other companies did. And part of it was is that the organization, ran out of abilities about how do you grow the business? Over time, they had really grown really by financial engineering. They bought Anna's a Bush. They bought Group of Modelo. They bought SAB Miller. There was nothing left to buy. And now a sudden you have this European-based company that's trying to figure out, how do I grow now organically? How do I grow brands? How am I relevant? That's

it. And they adopted this ESG philosophy because all these large asset managers told them, well, if you just do the right environmental things and social things and incorporate that into all of your marketing, then you're going to grow. and by the way, you're going to be included in our indexes, so we'll invest more money into you. And so you saw a lot of this happening in this kind of 2020, 2020, 2021 timeframe. Even for myself, going back to whether it's Riley Gaines or others, you start seeing things that are no longer truer as to why you joined a company. When I joined Anheuser-Busch, the number one word that I heard about how we promote people,

how we attract it was meritocracy. We were a meritocracy. We want to track the best and brightest, and you get promoted based off the results that you get. And that was true for the first 10 plus years that I was there. And then all of a sudden, in 2020 and 2021, during our annual performance review cycle, we start implementing diversity dashboards where all of a sudden as a manager, you're supposed to manage your team based off of the immutable characteristics of the team. And by the way, as part of this, you're, we've even changed one of the principles of the company, away from we essentially promote people based off their

talents do we now promote people based off the quality and diversity, which was bolded and diversity of the team? So you see this happening. You see internally at the company, we have an annual survey that we do. And the annual survey would ask a bunch of questions. Do you believe in the company's mission? Do you intend to stay at the company for the next year or so? How do you think we're doing on our DEI commitments? And there would be start having these one year, this is in 2020 or 2021, there was, I don't know, and it score of 88% on, yeah, we think DEI, it's fine and fine. But this during the great resignation where there was, I don't know, the number was probably 50 plus percent of the people that said they were thinking about leaving the company.

There was sort of a top-down approach to not figure out how we're going to retain 50% of the company that's about to leave, but it was how are we going to get our DEI score to go from an 88% to a 90. And that's where the focus was in the efforts. And then everyone has to come up with plans. There's now weekly meetings to figure out how we're going to become more diverse and more equitable and more inclusive. Does anybody at this point just raise their hand and go, guys, we're the frog in the boiling water.

Can you feel it? It's just being turned up more and more and more. And by the way, just to restate it again, everything we've talked about so far and everything we're, I think, about to get to, is an answer to a question. And the question is, how can otherwise smart, intuitive, intelligent people in positions of real, influence and control in billion-dollar companies be so freaking stupid. Yep. So, and I think it comes down to its fear, it's fear more than anything. And this is the fear we were living in.

This was really sort of the, I'll call it the straw that broke the back for me or maybe be a red pill type moment was, you know, I mentioned I was actually living in Atlanta during COVID at this time period. And there was, I was seeing all the things going on in Georgia, we mentioned earlier. But then the real issue from. me was I was running Anheasbush Sales and Distribution Company, which deals with all the distribution of products across the country. And we were trying to do partnerships with a lot of non-alcohol brands to expand sort of our market share and expand our products. And on the same

trucks, they're delivering Bud Light and Budweiser and everything else. If we could put on there, brands like Heritos, there was an energy drink brand called Ghost. And one of the partnerships that I wanted to do was with Black Rifle Coffee Company. And it was going to be an incredibly profitable partnership, made sense on paper. The same people that drink Budweiser at night, a lot of them are drinking Black Rifle Coffee Company in the morning. In Black Rifle Coffee, their mission was great. It was, we want to serve coffee and culture to people who love America and particularly military, first responders, law enforcement. So to me, this was a match made in Heaven makes total sense. Evan's a friend. Oh, Evan is. Okay, great. So Evan probably remembers

all of this. And so I have a whole partnership. This all lined up. We're going to do a deal with these guys. could be very profitable for both the companies. And they were already selling it at Walmart and Kroger and 7-Eleven. And then our external affairs team, which is based in New York City, kills the deal. And I said, why'd we kill this deal?

This makes no sense. Well, because of the time, they supported police, military, the law enforcement first responders. In this 2021 timeframe, anything that was seen as supporting police was very controversial. And I can assure you,

there was no diversity dashboard at BRC? There was no diversity dashboard at BRC. This is the problem is that this is where you didn't have any intellectual diversity. And there was only one way of actually looking at partnerships, marketing. And it was through this lens, unfortunately, since the company had moved a lot of its folks to New York City, this lens was you looked at, you looked at your customer base, you looked at marketing, you looked at partnerships through the lens of Fifth Avenue in New York. And that was not representative of the rest.

of the country. Yeah. And that for me was really problematic because we're trying to grow as a company we're getting back to growth. Our customer, and Azerbaijan's customer, is the Black Rifle Coffee Company customer.

That's the Budweiser customer. That is who drinks those products. And if we're not doing partnerships with them, that's fear. And that means we're not going to be doing interesting partnerships with this buds for you or the real men of genius, things that might have been edgy.

They might have been so-called, I don't know, fratty or out of touch, which was a word, that the head of Bud, Delightfully subversive is what I look for, really in anything. You know, I mean, Dirty Jobs was subversive in a way for its time, and most things that cut through, whether it's advertorial or editorial. There's usually a contrarian component to it. And to me, what vanished in this whole spasm of virtue was irreverence, subversive.

version, humor. Humor. Humor was dead at the time. You remember Dave Chappelle was getting pressure on Netflix, where Netflix saying don't air this Dave Chappelle special because he had jokes about the, I think, LGBTQ community. Rogan on Spotify. Rogan on Spotify. That's it.

You could not speak up at all. There was pressure and people were trying to cancel in a big way. When do you leave? So the thing I was pushed with Black Rifle Coffee had happened in, I think it was around February. of 2022. And then Vivek and I, we're buddies since high school. So we've known each other for 25 years. And we were mock trial partners in high school together. What a kick to watch last couple of years for him, huh? Yeah. It was, that was not expected. Wasn't part of the original business plan when we got together in the summer of 2021. And started thinking about actually

this problem that was happening in broader corporate America, whether it was at the time, Coca-Cola, Major League Baseball. Twitter at the time was deplatforming, a lot of viewpoints. And we started saying, well, isn't this interesting? As I saw living in Atlanta, people throwing out Coca-Cola, not flying Delta, people canceling Twitter accounts. Vivick and I were talking about this. He just left his company, Royvent. We said, what if we just start a group of companies that are going to better serve at least the 150 million Americans that just want companies in business to focus on their products and their mission and not get involved in the ESG, DEI, stakeholder capital, politicized agenda. And so we started brainstorming a couple of companies. Some of the first ideas

we had where we were going to start a new airline, just called Merit Airlines. And we're just going to hire the top 5% of pilots. I don't care what your skin color is, your gender, who you sleep with. And we're just going to charge $100 more than a Delta flight because Delta was making all these DEI commitments about pilots. And, you know, I don't care what my pilot looks like. I just want my pilot to be able to, I don't know, like Cap and Soli land a plane and a river if it gets hit by a goose. That's what I want. It's like with a surgeon, you're putting in a new kidney. Right.

Don't care. Are you good at this? You're good at it. That's it. I just want someone qualified. So that was one of the original ideas. We thought about creating an alternative to Twitter at the time because Elon Musk hadn't bought it yet. We thought about creating, giving my beverage background, a company called Pop without politics to go after Coke.

So we ended up with all these ideas. We ended up at the time raising money from folks like Peter Thiel, Bill Ackman, Founders Fund to create actually this company called Stride. because the bigger problem that we saw is there was this company BlackRock, which was forcing and foisting this agenda on all corporate America for all of these firms who had gotten involved in political issues to get involved in them essentially. So we said, what if we just be going back to this legal term fiduciary, why don't we be a better fiduciary to the vast majority of Americans that just want an asset management company via your 401k to take your money, invest into businesses, ask those businesses to focus on their mission, stay true to that mission. that'll be better for their businesses and long-term stock market returns. And then I think it'll be better for society as well if we don't have companies getting involved in every single political issue that pops up. That became the idea of what we started was strive.

And we were going to launch with a group of index funds. So again, low-fee, passive index funds, essentially replicate all the same funds you can get at BlackRock, S&P 500 funds, energy funds, semiconductor funds, growth funds. But we would differentiate ourselves about how we voted proxy statements. and how we do proxy votes. And what those are is companies, if you had $25,000 of a share of a $25,000 of any company, you actually have the right to put up a shareholder proposal.

And before 2019, when this business roundtable of all of the purpose of corporation, people would put up shareholder proposals that were politicized PETA, people for the ethical treatment of animals. They put one up every year that says, we want Starbucks to stop using animal milk. And there are things like that would get shut down in a big way.

But in 2020, 2020, 2020, because of this adoption of ESG and DEI, you had all of these activist organizations buying $25,000 with a shares of companies like Apple, Home Depot, Lowe's, and they start putting up shareholder resolutions asking Apple to do, for example, a racial equity audit. And we want you Apple to figure out how you contributed to systemic racism historically and what you're going to do about it. Well, even Apple CEO, Tim Cook, and their board recommended against this. They said, guys, this is important stuff, but we make magical devices at unbelievable prices. That's kind of our mission. That's what we do. This is our lane. It's a good one. Maybe we stay in it. It's a good lane.

And it's been successful for us and profitable. And by the way, we have all these Chinese competitors coming in and they're not doing any of these things. So we recommend against this. But BlackRock was actually the deciding vote that voted for it. And then all of a sudden Apple had to spend tens of millions of dollars going out and hiring Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch and other folks to get a hundred point bullet. about how they've contributed systemic racism, and now all the quota systems they need to put into place, all the certain suppliers that they need to hire via quota systems to absolve themselves. And that was going on across corporate America. And the same thing is going with energy companies voting off the board of Exxon. Three folks just wanted Exxon to drill from oil and gas because an oil and gas company.

And they had climate activists put on who wanted them to drill less. And this was happening in 2020, 2020. I mean, silly things happening. So our whole thing was we were in a different interest of us that we're not going to vote for any of these more politicized agendas that don't actually add value to a company. And then we're also going to advocate for companies just to stay in their lane, do business. And three years ago, I wouldn't even say that was contrarian. That was almost a subversive idea.

That's right. Where we were. Subversive. And we always said that fear was contagious. We talked about this. People were afraid to speak up. There was almost an arbitrage in this preference falsification because we figured that if we were the first to speak up and say we believe in American free market shareholder capitalism,

as Milton Friedman says, we believe in the freedom of speech. We still believe in the American dream and that's alive and well. We thought that a lot of people would follow behind us. And lucky for us, they did. It wasn't the current thing to do at the time, but I think it was the right thing to do. And so we started a company strive and we launched our first fund, I think, in August of 2022, it was the most successful new launch at the time. It was actually an energy fund called Dr.LL. If you remember, in that summer of 22, this is when gas prices in California you were probably hitting $7, $8 a gallon. Across the country, it was $5 a gallon.

And one of the reasons was because the whole Biden administration, but then a lot of asset managers, are taking a cudgel to the oil and gas industry. Exxon, the biggest oil and gas producer, they were these climate activists put on the board in 2020, 2021. They weren't producing as much oil as they should. So our whole point was, if you're an oil and gas company, drove oil and gas.

That's your mission. Stay in your lane, do that. But also, if you're a wind company, great. Do wind. If you're solar, do nuclear, do nuclear. But don't necessarily have this large asset manager coming in. in and telling you to adopt different policies of your business to satisfy some, going back in another word, orthogonal objective, whether it might be Paris Climate Accords or whatever else is

happening. So that happened in 2022. Okay. So you leave maybe to do this in 2022. But they didn't truly crap the bed with Mulvaney. No, so this is interesting. So you weren't there, actually. So I wasn't there actually. And so I mentioned the reasons that I left Anheuser-Busch. And one of the other reasons, I left is even from a marketing standpoint, the company instead of trying to win the Super Bowl AdMeter Award every year, and that was always the pinnacle of marketing success in the United States, because you kind of got the pulse of the U.S., all of a sudden they started shifting their marketing to win these European awards, called the Conline Awards. And to win the Conline Awards, you have to have your DEI commitment, and you have to have

so many people that look this way or believe this thing or identify this way in your advertising campaign. So I started seeing the marketing change and it was not going to necessarily be remarkable. It just seemed like we weren't focused on the right people in the U.S. And so I leave and it was kind of interesting. So about a year after I had left Anheuser-Busch and we had Strive up and running and Strive was going well, I actually had a letter that I was about to write to Anheuser-Busch. We'd written letters to, we'd have a Bob Chapick at Disney.

He was the one who got Disney involved in the whole printer rights issues. We had written letters to Mark Benioff at Salesforce, who, He was donating a lot of sales force dollars to defund the police initiatives. And that's how we sort of did a lot of our marketing is we called out the hypocrisy of a lot of these companies saying, you guys are using shareholder money for all these other issues that aren't creating shareholder value. They're very divisive and it's very politicized. Get back to your business.

You made all sorts of friends. All sorts of friends. That's it. And it's funny now because, again, at the time, it was very contrarian. But now all these folks have walked back a lot of the policies, which we were asking them to do. This was in March of 23. but I had this letter ready to go. And then it was really interesting.

That last week of March, the Dylan Mulvaney partnership happened April 1st of 2023. What a perfect date for that. Everyone thought it was April Fools. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments.

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as well as the MicroWorks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. Literally people thought it was an April Fool's joke. And they couldn't have dropped that at a worse time because culturally in the U.S. At the time, most states, they do their legislative session in kind of the March, April time frame.

and there were 25 bills in the United States at that time asking for only biological men to compete against biological men in sports. There were other bills that were trying to ban gender affirmation care for people under the age of 18. So it was a very sort of politicized topic around sort of the transgender issues in the United States. And there was that transgender shooter that shot up a Christian school in Tennessee that last week of March as well. Yeah. This was a very politicized issue in the United States at this time. And, Bud Light as a brand, it's always mission was easy to drink, easy to enjoy. Again, it was funny.

It was interesting. It was real men of genius. What's up? What's up? I mean, it's dilly, dilly. If you remember dilly, dilly, that's what it was. And it became the biggest beer brand in the United States because it was remarkably apolitical.

It was about football and sports and backyard barbecues and funny and humor. It was actually a lot of the studies we did. It was enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans alike. It cut across all types of demographics. More women drank Bud Light than any other beer brand as well. So all of a sudden, when this ad with Dylan Mulvaney drops, and it is with Dylan Mulvaney's face is on a can of Bud Light. And Dylan Mulvaney did this March Madness sweepstakes for them saying, I didn't even know what March Madness was. I just thought it was a crazy month.

But look at this amazing can that Bud Light gave me to celebrate my 365 days of womanhood. The Bud Light consumer was caught off guard. And this was, to them, complete... It's the cognitive dissonance we're talking about. Well, the cognitive distance, but it was a complete departure from what Bud Light had always been. Right. And so immediately there was a massive backlash from the original Bud Light consumer that just wanted Bud Light to be funny, never talked with politics.

And that's why all of a sudden you started to see the Kid Rock shooting up Bud Light with ARs. You started to see a lot of country music stars throwing it out of their vans. You started to see people on Bud Light getting all upset, just saying, guys, what's going on? I've had enough of companies, whether it was Disney getting involved in the proprone rights issues, I've had enough of the target issues that were going on. But now with Bud Light, Bud Light was the quintessential sort of blue-collar, all-American type of beer.

And now Bud Light is getting involved in these political issues. What is going on? Well, and it's not just that. If you're a family and you've got kids, it's a hard ask to not go to Disney, right? I mean, if you're an investor and you want a diversified portfolio, it's a hard ask to say,

keep your money out of State Street, Black Rock, and Vanguard. But if you're getting annoyed and this lands in the beer section, it's not that hard to ask to say maybe Miller, right? That's it. You got it exact. Maybe it's an affordable. It's an inconsequential decision to me to not get in the Bud Light line at my favorite concert and to simply get in the champagne of beers line. That's it. This company was uniquely susceptible to this boycott.

Yeah. And here's the reason why. For boycotts to be susceptible, there have to be sort of other alternatives that are readily available. And you actually have to see the impact of the boycott as well. So there were other calls to boycott.

You remember the NFL when all of a sudden people are kneeling. Everyone said, I'm going to boycott the NFL, but what are you going to do? There's nothing other than the NFL. It's a lot to ask. And last year it had the highest ratings

of all time. This year it'll probably surpass that again. Same thing with Disney World. There's kind of one Disney world. And okay, you can kind of bite your tongue and not be happy with Disney. But you're probably going to take your kids to Disney World.

What do you put Target in there? Well, so Target, because you can go to other places because you have Amazon. You can go, Walmart's picked up a lot of people over time. But Bud Light specifically, to your point, everywhere you have Bud Light, you also have Miller Light and you have Coors Light to 95% of the population. Those beers are indistinguishable from one another. They taste the same, kind of look the same, and they're priced the same as well. So it is just as easy to go and pick up that six pack of Bud Light as it is Coors Light and

Miller Light. And that's exactly what people did. And they said, this is enough's enough. And that's all of a sudden why this boycott was very successful. Also, you can't starve the media of data because every week, Walmart, Kroger, 7-Eleven, they're publishing data to certain news organizations about how much beer they sold. So every week, you could see the sales go from down 10% to 20% to 30% week over week over week. And the most interesting part of this is this is where the, if you talk about the emperor's new clothes situation,

this is where the company was really caught between rock and a hard, I mean, black rock and a hard place, for lack of a better word. Because they had also that exact same week had released their 2022 ESG report. And they started releasing these in 2019. And originally had your annual shareholder report, which was 100-some-odd pages long, talked about the business, how the business was doing. They started releasing an annual report, which was their ESG report.

And it started as 60 pages in 2019. Then it was 100 pages in 2020. And then 120 pages in 21, and I think it got up to 140-somewhat pages in 2022, talking about all the progress they had made on their ESG and DEI initiatives and everything they're doing. And so all of a sudden, when they have their customers with this massive backlash, the company's caught because now all of a sudden they could not go back and either, A, apologize to their existing loyal customer base, just wanted Bud Light to stay out of politics, political issues, nor could they go to call more progressive customers that wanted them to become the next Ben and Jerry.

and say, well, of course you should be doing more of these partnerships to advocate for the LGBTQ rights and the next thing will be defund the police and overturning election integrity laws because that's what we want brands to do. So they're caught in this rock and hard place of what should the company do. And really the response that they had was just as bad as the original marketing campaign itself. The marketing campaign was bad. They had sort of a new lady. It was the first.

They rolled her out too, didn't they? I mean, they let her public. She started popping up and explaining about the immaturity and the frat culture. Well, this was tough because that happened also the week before this partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. Oh, boy. So it was the week before she was talking about, I have this new job with Bud Light. It's a fratty and out-of-touch brand. I need to evolve the brand and make it more modern and make it more everything else.

So that came out right after this ad drops. She was on this podcast. So the situation looks terrible where you're essentially denigrating half your customer base. calling them Friday out of touch, which frankly, who drinks a lot of butt light? It tends to be Friday out of touch dudes. Maybe that's a lot of people who drink bud light. And those people are great. Those are great customers, as are the other people that are maybe more hip and modern, whatever else. But you don't want to necessarily just tell half your customer base to go away. So this is all happening.

And the company, they don't make a decision because at this point, they really have to make a decision where they could have shut this down, I think, in the first week or two. And I think the right decision would have been is to say, hey, guys, this whole campaign was a mistake. They fired our marketing team. Bud Light was never about getting involved in political issues. Wrong deal. We're going to go back to sports, music. We hire Shane Gillis, whatever we're going to do.

That's what we're going to do. They couldn't. But they couldn't. And that was the problem of where they were. And because they couldn't do that, because then it would be against all of the ESG, DEI commitments and agenda and everything else. And they're European masters. And all the inertia that comes from that giant top heavy corporate structure.

That's it. And who could have made the call? I mean, it would have had to have gone all the way up. I guarantee, I don't guarantee anything. I don't know anything, but I would wager that somewhere in Europe, there's some guy who spends time in like castles and like really great cocktail parties. This happens in media. This happens in my world all of the time.

Like the amount of decisions that get made ultimately by people, men oftentimes, sometimes women, sometimes on behalf of their spouse, either way, you're going to a cocktail party this week. You're going to see the other people in the most rarefied air there is. And you don't want that stink on you. That's it. You're 100% right.

So you're probably right. There's a bunch of Belgian families and these old Belgian families that have owned it forever that are... Hapsburgs or whatever. I think it's one of them is the Van Damns, not John Claude Van Damme, but I think probably some distant cousin or something.

But anyway, you're I think probably absolutely right. They did not want to be kicked out of polite society or nice society by all the sudden having this bud light issue looking bad for them where they had said, oh yeah, hey, this was a mistake and we didn't want to do this. And so therefore, they kind of took this middle of the road approach. And when you put yourself in the middle of a cultural war and you kind of walk to the middle of it, you end up getting shot at from both sides. And so that's exactly what happened to this company, whereas they kind of went dark for about

two weeks. So the partnership happened on April 1st. And then it wasn't until April 15th. the company released this statement, which was a very middle of the road, middle and didn't say anything. It was kind of a nothing-go-her statement. It was a mush of where this great company and we tried to serve everybody, but they never acknowledged the controversy in the first place. Never acknowledged there was anything wrong with it. And then Bud Light, they had this tweet for the first time in two weeks that just said TGIF because it was Friday.

And it got 30,000 comments of which 99.9% were negative on this. And they usually only get a couple hundred. And so they were in a bad spot. Not ready to joke about this yet. No, not ready to joke about. And I don't know. I mean, I think that the American population is a lot more forgiving. I got a theory.

I didn't see this in your book. And forgive me if I missed it, but what if in that exact same time period, what if it really wasn't Bud Light's decision to make, even though they didn't make it, even though they didn't do it right in hindsight, what if they had unleashed the cracken and put the conversation out into the zeitgeist that millions and millions of people were already waiting to have? So the lines, in other words, had already been drawn up. And the progressives on the one side rallied behind Dylan and congratulated Budlite.

And on the other side, you know, the barbarians were at the gate. And they came out and said, oh, crap. And so I don't know. I just wonder if it's fantastical thinking or maybe wishful thinking to believe that Bud Light could have done anything at all once the genie was out. It's a bit like, you know, when Nolan Ryan let go, the 108 mile an hour, it's out of his hands. There's nothing to be done at this point. Well, that problem is that then they start blaming kind of outside forces. But you've got to take accountability. And there's a great Teddy Roosevelt quote that says,

when you're facing difficult decisions, the best decision's the right one, the second best is the wrong one, and the worst decision is no decision at all. And Churchill, I think, said when you're marching through hell, keep going. Yeah, that's it. And you've got to keep going,

but the company kept making these non-statement statements. And if you want to actually get, I always say, the path to redemption goes through forgiveness. And so if you want to get redeemed in the light of your customer base, your customer base has to forgive you at some point, but be forgiven, you have to forgive you have to forgive you you have to admit that there was a mistake or that you were aired or there was something wrong about what you did. And so this company released the first statement on April 15th where they said nothing

about the situation self, why they were in it, apologies. There was another one they did a month later at the end of May or early June. And in this third time, the CEO of North America, this guy named Brendan Whitworth, who I know incredibly well, worked with him for a number of years, he went on CBS morning show. And this was the first time that an Anaheuser-Bush employee was going to publicly discuss the situation and what happened. And this was going into July 4th weekend, where this is the biggest beer weekend sale of the year. And he was trying to save sort of the business

because it had been down 30%, 40%, for now two months. No pressure, Brendan. Yeah, no pressure. So it goes on CBS. And so the host first, welcome, hey, thanks for coming. Most other CEOs would be running for the hills. They wouldn't come to you in this situation.

But they said, they asked the question. First off, hey, knowing what you know now, was this a mistake? And would you do this again? And he gives an absolute nothing burger answer of, well, there's a lot of things going on and other companies and we don't really know. And so the host comes back and says, to be clear, you are in the situation you are in because of the answer you just gave. So let me ask it again, knowing what you know now with sales being down 30% was this partnership a mistake and would you do

it again? And again, gave just a wishy-washy nothing answer whatsoever. And they moved on. And that's sort of one of the lessons to learn here is that you have to take command and control the situation. If you're going through hell, that's fine. But you at least have to take accountability for why you're in hell and then what the plan is to get out of it. Is he still with the company? He is, which is crazy to me. What? And this goes back to, I don't know if, and I, to some degree, I almost feel bad for Brendan at this point because I work for Brendan for a number of years. He's actually a former in the military. But I think the forces of the European folks and the influence of there's a global CEO who's more European and Brazilian.

And they are very much on the ESG stakeholder capitalism, more economic form view of the world. There's one view and you have to put ESG DEI everywhere. He was essentially coached to say what he had to say. Kid Rock was on Joe Rogan at some point. And Kid Rock was asked about the whole Bud Light incident and why he shot up the Bud Light. And Rogan ends up asking,

did you ever actually talk to the CEO of North America? And he said, yeah, I did. We got together at a UFC fight or something. And he said, and did you ever ask him why he did that disaster CBS interview? And Kid Rock at least said that he told him that he was coached to say what he had to say and he had to do it. And I think that's sad for the company. It's sad for him and it's sad for the viewers. It's sad for everyone.

It's sad for everybody because this is really a great American company or was a great American company. And I think at this point with the value destruction that's happened. And if you think about it, when the Villan Mulvaney partnership hit, the stock was trading on around 75. bucks a share. Today, it's at $50 a share. I mean, it's at a 15-year low. The broader stock market over that time has been up 30, 40 percent, and that stock has been down 30, 40 percent. Thousands of people have lost their jobs. There's a lot of independent and Heiserbush wholesalers, their family-owned business across the country. They've had to lay people off or have had to sell. A lot of suppliers have to shut down factories. It's been a lot of bad things that have

happened. This book, it's about the fall of Bud Light. But in a way, I can't believe I'm going to say that's a micro example because it's such a big company and it was such a big story. But it's relatively micro if you make the argument to say, this is why Donald Trump is the president today. Because Brendan Whitfield? Whitworth. Whitworth.

Brendan Whitworth goes on CBS and it becomes apparent to all of the viewers. And then later, it's confirmed that he was coached. he was handled. He was probably focus grouped. They probably brought in some crisis management people and they sat down and they probably workshopped a couple of scenarios. All of that happened and everybody knew it. And the other thing that I think was happening in our country around the same time is the exhaustion that came with all the acronyms and all the pressure to comport and comply was the exhaustion with focus grouped messages. Whether it's advertising, or TV or scripted or unscripted or medical professionals or scientists or politicians. And so what is Donald Trump at base? Well, he's a lot of things, but one thing he isn't is scripted or focus grouped. Right.

There is no sense among anybody, whether his supporters or his detractors, that he's been coached. Right. He is authentic as it comes. For better or worse. And we had just had enough of Brendan Whitworth and focus groups. That's it. People had enough. And it's actually really funny, that same week of that disastrous CBS interview, Larry Fink,

the head of BlackRock, he said he was no longer going to use the term ESG anymore because it had become too politicized. And because it was not about actually creating shareholder value anymore. And it was all about these other issues that companies were trying to. trying to solve that weren't really. So I remember that. But what was the date roughly? This was going into July 4th of 2023.

Okay. Just a quick sidebar, apropos of nothing. But in 2016, I came face to face with ESG for the first time. I had never heard the acronym. I didn't know what it stood for. And what was interesting for me was I had been hired by a good-sized company,

big mobile office company, right? They make offices or trailers. essentially, and they put them on construction sites all over the world. They're big. And they're in my hometown. And so I was glad to come and speak to their people and have a chat unscripted on stage with their CEO, which I did. And I put my usual amount of preparation of this thing, which is 0.0. I knew who they were, and I knew basically what I was going to say. And I like having conversations with CEOs in front of their people. It's always fun. But as I'm sitting there, talking to this guy, all around the arena are these big signs

that say ESG. ESG. And I'm not saying the name of the company out of respect, but it was their name and then some like equal sign, ESG, our commitment to ESG. So I finally just asked the guy. I'm like, what the hell is this? He goes, well, it's an environment and social governance. I'm like, well, what's that mean? And he gave me an answer, and the conversation got super awkward before I realized it was getting awkward. I'm the guy they brought in to have a conversation, and I'm realizing the conversation they want to have

is adjacent to or related to ESG. I don't know what it is. So I learned what ESG was in front of about 4,000 people in a live event. Was he able to articulate what it was or what they were trying to do? Yes, he did. in a way that I understood it. But then I was put in the doubly awkward position of pretending that I agreed with it.

That's it, which is tough. And my initial reaction was, this sounds like a horrible idea. What does this have to do with the product that you make? Right. And I might have even asked that question. But this is way back in 2016. So my question to you now is where,

not necessarily just Bud Light, or BlackRock, for that matter, but where's corporate America? with regard to all these acronyms, there's been an election since I last heard you speak on this. What has changed? Are you hopeful, et cetera? I'm definitely more hopeful that corporate America is getting back to business and getting back to focused on its mission, being more authentic. But there's still a big debate. You're seeing even this week, Costco is at the middle of this DEI controversy. They're not backing off.

They're not backing off. They're saying that we are going to be more committed to DEI. Other companies have shed some of the DEI label. I think the, the bigger, pieces for, at least separated. I think there's American-based companies and I think there are foreign-owned companies. And the foreign-owned companies, they're in a really tough spot. And it's not just Anheuser-Busch and with InBab, but it's also you see what's going with TikTok right now. Yeah. If you have a company that is owned by a foreign, essentially either foreign entity or foreign government, and they are potentially coming in and they are doing things that could harm American culture, American values, or might not be in the American interest, I think it's going to be

very challenging for those businesses to operate both and serve sort of two masters, one, their home country, but then also sort of the American, let's say, the swing back to American free market shareholder capitalism. So I think to some degree, I think you're going to be seeing what is happening with TikTok, which might get sold in the U.S. I actually think the same thing should happen to Anheuser-Busch. I actually think if I was the Belgians or Brazilians or others, you've seen the Anheuser-Busch profits in the U.S. go from $6 billion to $4 billion. They've lost $2 billion over the last two years. At this point, I would almost sell,

I would sell that U.S. business unit that they have. And what I would do is maybe you retain a minority stake of it, but I think they should sell it to a Berkshire Hathaway or somebody here in the U.S., where all of a sudden you could have somebody come in with a new CEO, a new ownership group, and just go on, you know, and earn media is what you want these days.

This company can't do earning media because they won't let Brendan Whitworth go out. Just private equity doing it? Does KKR or Leonard Green or TPG? They could. I mean, Warren Buffett's sitting on $300 billion of cash. This seems a great. It's a good cash flow business.

And even though people are drinking less, they still drink. So I think it will still be around. Do you think they'd sell it? Because I mean, the idea, that's the kind of capitulation that I think has to happen. It's not about Dylan. It's not about transgender. I wonder, if that plane lands here, Chuck, that's going to be exciting, man. Right on a plane.

Which is a great metaphor because I'm landing the plane now. I know you've got places to be. But crap, what was my point? It was going to be a good one. It was about the family selling the business. Yes, yes, yes. The level of capitulation that has to happen, in my view, to get bud light back where it was

is to eliminate the aforementioned cognitive dissidents that occurred when it stopped being an American company. You have to go right back to the very, very, very, Betrayal is maybe too strong a word, but that was the first betrayal to the consumer. Like all of a sudden, where we started, this buds for you, a uniquely American campaign, a wonderfully patriotic sentiment rooted in gratitude and celebration, somehow gets to, thank you for helping me celebrate 365 days of my womanhood. That happened.

And everything we've discussed, really, is how to feel. fix it. I don't think you can unless you go right back to where you were in 1986. I agree. So that's why I think that the company is better off selling that U.S. business unit, somebody buys. And I think that you could have an amazing great American comeback story. I think the U.S. consumer is actually more forgiving than people give them credit for also. And if you had somebody come in charismatic, say it's American owned, American values, and they've tried to do everything they can to get Bud Light back. They've hired Shane Gillis, who was canceled. He's actually the perfect spokesman. But they're not. not going to come back because they haven't seen the authenticity of the company say,

hey, we screwed up and here's why, but here's what Bud Light is moving forward. They're trying to pay all these other people, Dana White to do it, Shane Gillis, they do it into a Trump deal and Trump tweeted about Bud Light, but no one's coming back. No. Look, I'm fans of all those guys. Yeah. Right. But unless they do it themselves. It's not primal. Right. Who's got to make the decision on the InBev side to sell? The problem is there's Brazilian and European families, and they're the controlling shareholders of Anheuser-Busch. Van Dam. Van Dam, those folks. And so I think that as time goes on, they'll be more likely to sell it. But to your point, they don't want to capitulate and say that they've been defeated. Who's the most likely buyer on this side? Is it Buffett? Is it

KKR? Is it? I think it's the Buffett's of the world, but then I also think that you could have the KKRs or Blackstone's that could do it. Blackstone is getting the point where they have the capacity to do it. I think Schwartzman would be a great steward of this business and this brand. You could also have I like Blackstone. Blackstone. Blackstone, not Black Rock. Not very different. They're adjacent.

Adjacent. Okay, so here's my offer. Van Dam. Mr. Van Dam. And who's in charge of Blackstone? Steve Schwartzman. Steve Schwartzman. Right.

You guys get together, make a deal, get this thing uniquely American. And with all due respect to Shane Gillis and Dana White and President Trump, hire me. I'd be super comfortable representing a uniquely American beer. I'd be very comfortable.

I'd be very comfortable. I'm already in the liquor business. I'm your friend. But if there's anything I can do to help make this happen. I buried the lead. That's why I got you. I'm just looking for my next gig. Just looking for your next gig. So that's all right. Shamedous blood. I love it. That's great. Oh, man. No, that's great. You got anything smart to say before I plug your book? No, I think that you covered it all. So I appreciate you have me on the show today. Thank you very much. Anson Frericks. His last name is still hard to say. But the book is easy to read and it's

important. It's the fall and future of America's favorite beer. Last call for Bud Light. It's also a metaphor for a thousand other companies and countless other adjacent conversations that are happening and have to keep being had in my humble estimation. That's it. So it's going to be interesting to see you in the next four years. It's good to see companies, Facebook and Amazon and others, recommitting just to their original mission, free speech. I hope Bud Light commits to their mission. It's being easy to drink, easy to enjoy, and everybody else does as well. And I think the Costco's of the world that are still holding on to DEI and the other device of policies, they'll eventually come in line as well. Hey, man, thanks for making the time. Thanks for having me.

Really appreciate it. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry, it went on so long, but if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on a lot and leave us a review. I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge, but in this world the advertisers really like to judge, you don't need to write a bunch, just a lighter two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Not four.

All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. And not three. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Definitely not three. All you've got to do is leave a quick, five-star review. All you got to do is leave a quick, even if you hate it. Five-star, star, free, video. Thank you.

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