424: Anson Frericks—Last Call for Bud Light

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 https://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Bud-Light-Americas/dp/1668070901/ref=sr_1_1?adgrpid=1343605685116540&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.lQ6sIkKGstQ1hNDR6kF_7zFMKD9q0EEWHB9LNqnMttVmmpDSnkyVDrEt2YkjKK2uI4Z7jZSFjBjMlrSUaN1a3f3HrP7GEfhHD6HigWOJl66_STpO_xXoQ6t3fTM658vwosSX87lPkyUT2rX8biGqiukpxRZw_zlSshKZXtTSUOeG2RPn4rmieam216aedH4PAYgaxwzOvVHSwY24QtjCkqozrtd5iSHP_ixNCUcqkZQ.6SixPOI8lywxUkoFdOfvfib_Vbzcc7u0Y4po4fonVVs&dib_tag=se&hvadid=83975629614206&hvbmt=bp&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=44152&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=p&hvtargid=kwd-83976477786818%3Aloc-190&hydadcr=22563_13494424&keywords=last+call+for+bud+light&mcid=4d17f181bc9431859e5a9e2a8445173c&msclkid=70794266bd9c16bbe1bd25c7e8e83fb1&qid=1738630514&sr=8-1 is out today.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Mike Rowe?

  Well, when you get a title that 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, and 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, in so many different ways, this is what I was talking about with regard to this whole strange

• 0:48Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:33Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 2:18Mike Rowe?

  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, I 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 Ramaswamy, 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. Right. Which is why it's so much fun to tell.

• 3:01Mike Rowe?

  It's 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. Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period?

• 3:45Mike Rowe?

  Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately. I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website.

• 4:25Mike Rowe?

  I first announced this program a few months ago and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you or your spouse or your kid or your grandkid are looking for a straight path into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com slash Americas Workforce Academy. That's meta.com Americas Workforce Academy.

• 5:01Mike Rowe?

  You know, I'm kind of making it up as I go.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Got it. We're doing a good job making it up.

• 5:05Mike Rowe?

  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 with that?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  It is. I think it's one of those deals where I was a Fredericks probably over in Germany.

• 5:16Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And on Ellis Island, there was no spell check back in the day.

• 5:18Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  They just dropped the D and you know, someone's tried to say, hey, you know, my some ancestor said, no, it's actually Fredericks. And they say, sorry buddy, you're now a Frerix. Deal with it.

• 5:27Mike Rowe?

  So you've been trying to buy a vowel for all your life, I can reckon?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  That's it. Exactly. So anyone who has that name is somehow related to me because everyone has had the same common ancestor, I think, coming over from Ellis Island back in the day.

• 5:37Mike Rowe?

  Thanks for making the time. Where'd you come from?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Cincinnati, Ohio. So I'm very glad to be here because it's been, it's been a foot of snow on the ground and 10 degrees in Cincinnati for the last month. So it's nice to have some warm weather, get a little vitamin C.

• 5:50Mike Rowe?

  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 it was with, but it was probably a year ago. And it was a 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 conversations 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 Anheuser-Busch and you and our friend Vivek Ramaswamy went on to found, was it Strive?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Strive Asset Management, that's it.

• 6:36Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Which was pushing back against a lot of the companies getting 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-

• 6:49Mike Rowe?

  And Delta, as I recall.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  And Delta's what, Major League Baseball canceled the All-Star game over Governor Kemp requiring people to have an ID to vote, which is crazy to think about.

• 6:56Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  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. Somewhat as old as time, there's been this discussion about what is the purpose of a corporation? What's a corporation supposed to do?

• 7:51Mike Rowe?

  You're going back to the 70s.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I'll even go back to the Bible. If you go back to the Bible, I mean, it's Proverbs 16:8, and it says, "Better is little with righteousness than a lot with injustice." And then, even since then-

• 8:02Mike Rowe?

  "He who troubled his own house shall inherit the wind."

• 8:06Speaker 01

  There you go. So, 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 US. 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 on in Europe at the time, and this was the Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum-

• 8:36Mike Rowe?

  Stakeholder.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Stakeholder capitalism model. And the stakeholder capitalism model 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 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 US system of this shareholder value produced far superior stock market returns. On average, your broad-based stock market indices in the US returned about 10% on average over that 40-year time period, and Europe returned about 7%.

• 9:22Mike Rowe?

  So if you put 10 grand in the US markets in 1977, and sat tight for four decades, and you did the same thing with the European index?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  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 US, it would have been worth $4.5 million. That's what compound interest is. So the US 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 US was actually better. I mean, you take a look at US transits, you're up in GDP growth, per capita income, unemployment rates, inflation rates, you name it. So it seems pretty objective that that US system of kind of American free-market shareholder capitalism was just superior to that European model.

• 10:15Mike Rowe?

  And yet, I got friends over at Davos, right, well, 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 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 gonna work?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  I don't know if people thought it was really going to work in the US. And unfortunately, you started to see this European model really coming to the US, 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 have been loaned money to. 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.

• 11:22Mike Rowe?

  If I could.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:23Mike Rowe?

  It feels like one of the things that may have preceded that was like a certain set of ideas, maybe around homeownership 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

• 12:06Mike Rowe?

  being made to all sorts of folks who are simply in no position to borrow that kind of money.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 12:12Mike Rowe?

  And way leads on to way and then it's flat.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  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 all of a sudden you have this Occupy Wall Street movement that pops up. And this is happening in the 2010, 2011 timeframe. And for a lot of the banks to kind of repair their image, they start thinking to 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.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  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 timeframe by a lot of European sovereign wealth funds at first, and then it started trickling into the US. 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, has a ton of money, and they have a lot of influence. And they're investing and giving that money to large asset managers in the US. BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard. Those three organizations control $20 trillion worth of capital in the United States.

• 13:38Mike Rowe?

  What's our GDP right now?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Our GDP in the US is $20 trillion. I mean, it's literally the GDP of the United States. Literally the exact same GDP, which is, you know, amazing to think about.

• 13:47Mike Rowe?

  Three companies.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Three companies.

• 13:49Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Well, that's it. And that's the thing, 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,

• 14:44Speaker 01

  and he's pulling out of them because he thinks the US is getting a raw deal. Well, when that first happened in 2016, there was an allergic reaction that happened in corporate America.

• 14:53Mike Rowe?

  Pearls were clutched.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  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 money is managed by the BlackRock, State Streets, and Vanguard, said, well, if no longer Trump and the US 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 BlackRock, State Streets, Vanguard, these large asset managers, which are the single largest shareholder in 95% of the S and P 500. On average, they control anywhere from 25 to 35% of the shares of every single corporation in the United States.

• 15:39Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  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 Harvards, the Yales, who they're investing a lot of money. And also to have a lot of these Wall Street firms recruit 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.

• 16:39Mike Rowe?

  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, ooh, 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 precede DEI.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Correct. Yes. Well, to some degree, yes and no. I mean, DEI, 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, nationality.

• 17:22Mike Rowe?

  Ethnicity.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Ethnicity. And it was even interesting then, there was the Senate floor leader at the time was Hubert Humphreys, who 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.

• 17:47Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  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, 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 your just regular vanilla, standard S&P 500 product.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  So, as opposed to the regular S&P 500, which is the 500 largest companies in the US, 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 hundred dollars 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.

• 19:04Mike Rowe?

  Scores.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:25Mike Rowe?

  For the right to invest in something that felt virtuous?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  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?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Or do you want some company to have some orthogonal mission to solve climate change, overturn election integrity laws, advocate to defund the police?

• 20:23Mike Rowe?

  Great word, by the way. Orthogonal?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Orthogonal, that's it. Yeah, some orthogonal mission.

• 20:26Mike Rowe?

  Rooted in orthodoxy.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 20:29Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:34Mike Rowe?

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• 21:19Mike Rowe?

  So you meet the right people faster. And then your candidates can tell you in their own words, also important, why they're excited about your job. For instance, when Chuck first said to me, "Mike, I've always wanted to work with a glazed ham." I had no choice but to hire him. And that was over 10 years ago. And look, he's still here impersonating a podcast producer. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles. Try them for free today at ziprecruiter.com/row. That's ziprecruiter.com/row. Meet your match at ZipRecruiter.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  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 supranational 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's might be why Texas should have a different asset manager than

• 22:48Speaker 01

  BlackRock, State Street Bank, or someone who's doing ESG. To solve that problem, that fiduciary breach, in 2018, 2019, you had Larry Fink, who was 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 publicly traded companies, to sign off on this. And the Business Roundtable, they came out with a big declaration in 2018 and 2019 to

• 23:32Speaker 01

  evolve the purpose of a corporation away from shareholder value in the United States to stakeholder value.

• 23:39Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  That's it. You got it. This is where a lot of this is being driven from. It's really interesting. So all these banks that are trying to make more money with ESG funds, and there's pressure from a lot of the progressive institutions, evolve this idea of stakeholder capitalism. It sets a lot of the, call it the kindling up, for a big event in 2020, which was COVID. And when COVID hit, and you'll remember this, and not getting into 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 that 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.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  And the Defense Production Act, this is where the government of the US, 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 masks. GE was now making ventilators. Delta Airlines was now flying medical equipment around the country.

• 25:10Mike Rowe?

  It's basically wartime footing.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Wartime 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 Anheuser-Busch, 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 really the initial thing you were trying to accomplish was flatten the curb happened.

• 25:48Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Hospitals weren't overrun. That hospitals weren't overrun. You kind of solved this COVID issue from a corporation standpoint. Corporations therefore should have just gone back to what they were supposed to do. Go back to your business. But very quickly, you had this second invisible enemy that popped up. And this was when George Floyd gets murdered. The, 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 becomes 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-

• 26:30Mike Rowe?

  Not is there systemic racism.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 26:33Mike Rowe?

  We're going to hop right over that question.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 26:35Mike Rowe?

  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 conversations.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  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 is being tarred as a racist and he's being tarred as somebody that shouldn't be involved in the NFL anymore.

• 27:10Mike Rowe?

  I didn't put a black square on my Twitter feed. I didn't even know it was a thing.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:16Mike Rowe?

  And I'm suddenly answering questions, why, like, why didn't you do that?

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:23Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  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, we don't have to, 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 tenets 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 this 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.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Right after sort of the whole systemic racism piece, there became a lot of the gender issues that came up.

• 28:17Mike Rowe?

  Try pointing out the fact that over 99% of the 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?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  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 even questioning a lot of the large social media companies that were deplatforming.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Certain conservatives for memes, for misinformation, and you couldn't call this into question at the time.

• 29:10Mike Rowe?

  Are you, at this point, employed by Anheuser-Busch?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I am, so...

• 29:14Mike Rowe?

  And what's your business card say, at this point?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  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 it, you have your whole show, How Booze Built America. And historically, Anheuser-Busch, it's an amazing story of a company. Great entrepreneurial story, immigrants came over here, built the thing from scratch, survived prohibition for 13 years.

• 29:38Mike Rowe?

  Also, a quick digression, in my view, I don't know, I spend 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 Bud's For You.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Agree.

• 29:55Mike Rowe?

  I really can't think of a more 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.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Agree.

• 30:07Mike Rowe?

  Brilliant.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Brilliant. This Bud's For You is one of the best campaigns, well, it's simple, it's consistent, it's tried and true over time, and it's not only that campaign, but, I mean, they're just amazing, memorable campaigns. The company has won more Super Bowl ad meter awards, the Super Bowl's coming up here shortly, than any other company. That's the USA Today that shows when people loved it 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 play the 49ers, and that was also the first Bud Bowl, if you remember Bud Bowl, it was Bud vs Bud Light.

• 30:45Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  It was the first time that actually a company did a commercial specifically for the Super Bowl, but only played in the Super Bowl. And that was it. And at the time, I think it was a $4 million ad, it was stop motion, it was amazing, and that whole decade afterwards, that's when you really had the Budweiser Frogs, you had the Real Men of Genius that went on with Bud Light, and the company-

• 31:05Mike Rowe?

  Here's to you, rough cut lady.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 31:09Mike Rowe?

  I love that.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Did you do the voice for those back in the day?

• 31:11Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:20Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 31:41Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:56Mike Rowe?

  Okay, funny, but it had no legs. This Bud's for you had decades of legs.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Decades.

• 32:03Mike Rowe?

  And so much of the other stuff you guys were doing around that time, it was just so smart and so effective.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  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 Vanderbilts or the Carnegie's, you don't really have a lot of those folks around. But still in the late 1990s, early 2000s, you still had Bushes running this company. And they'd been running it for, at this point, almost 150 years.

• 32:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  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 the fourth, 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 timeframe 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, Leff, Hoegarden. And then they bought Anheuser-Busch in 2008. That was when the, really the beer market kind of peaked in the US. That was when Bud Light sales peaked in the US was 2008.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  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 US. They were a real leader in terms of marketing. Inbev was much more of a cost management company, so to speak. It was the world's largest private equity firm that happened to sell beer. And I'm not here to opine on what model's 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 opine on either one.

• 33:48Mike Rowe?

  You know, I'm here to opine on this.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:50Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  That's it. That's essentially what happened. For the first couple of years when Inbev bought Anheuser-Busch, a lot of the, I'd say the Anheuser-Busch executives were still around. They were still running marketing. That's why they were still winning Super Bowl ad meter 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-

• 35:04Mike Rowe?

  And where's State Street? And where's Vanguard?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  All in New York.

• 35:07Mike Rowe?

  And where's BlackRock?

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Well, that's it. BlackRock'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 LGBTQ, fine. But then it expanded over time where every year it became more and more aggressive in

• 35:52Speaker 01

  terms of what you needed to do to achieve 100% score with the HTE. So that's another problem with companies.

• 35:59Mike Rowe?

  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, whatever it is, my comp is going to be tied to that score, like my personal comp.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  That's it. This happened across corporate America. So going back to sort of this 21, 2021, 2022 timeframe, where all of a sudden the post George Floyd, Leah Thomas, who was the transgendered swimmer.

• 36:35Mike Rowe?

  Will, as I recall.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Sorry?

• 36:37Mike Rowe?

  Will.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Will, will, that's it, yes, will.

• 36:39Mike Rowe?

  I know what you mean.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, you know what I mean.

• 36:41Mike Rowe?

  Good looking girl, weird bulge.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  That's it. But again, if you said that in 2021, have you even questioned?

• 36:48Mike Rowe?

  I did. Didn't go well.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  It didn't go well.

• 36:50Mike Rowe?

  Broke a few eggs, I survived, but I get it.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  You get it.

• 36:53Mike Rowe?

  That's what I meant early on, when you talk about the voter ID conversation.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:59Mike Rowe?

  It could have only happened contemporaneous with something even more patently absurd.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:06Mike Rowe?

  And the absurdity at that moment was a straight faced appeal to ignore the bulge.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:14Mike Rowe?

  Ignore the bulge. She's standing, he's standing on a podium, and we can all see at a glance.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, what is going on?

• 37:23Mike Rowe?

  Right, but thou shalt not acknowledge that.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:37Mike Rowe?

  Riley Gaines sat right there, by the way. Actually, no, she didn't, she was virtual.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was River. I met Riley a couple of times, and she's, 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.

• 37:53Mike Rowe?

  She was the kid in the crowd, in the emperor's new clothes, who said, hey, man.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  This is not right.

• 37:59Mike Rowe?

  Don't tell me I can't see that. Don't tell me you don't see that.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  By the way, and I saw it in the locker room.

• 38:03Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  I saw it without the bathing suit, so to be clear, I saw it all. I saw everything, more than you did.

• 38:14Mike Rowe?

  Can't believe it's been 15 years since that headline first appeared in Slate Magazine, the one that said "The Greatest Hoodie Ever Made." That's the headline that put American Giant on the map. And that's the same year their CEO sent me one of these hoodies unsolicited in the mail. I didn't know Byrd Winthrop back then, but he was a fan of Dirty Jobs. He and his kids watched it, and he wanted me to have one of his sweatshirts, so I beat the hell out of it. I mean, I wore it, I don't know, on dozens of different Dirty Jobs. I just saw an old episode last week of me castrating lambs wearing this hoodie. No garment in the history of the world, in my opinion, has ever been bespectacled with a more curious

• 38:58Mike Rowe?

  array of unholy fluids than my American Giant sweatshirt, and it's still standing. Honestly, at this point, I'm less concerned about replacing it than I am deciding who gets it when I'm gone. But what made American Giant famous, of course, was not just a sweatshirt that refused to die. It was making that sweatshirt right here in America with skilled people doing good work. That's something I'm happy to support, especially when I can support it while wearing something comfortable. If you're looking for a gift that might outlast your relationship with the recipient, consider the hoodie that started it all. Go to American-Giant.com/mike. You'll save 20% when you drop my name at American-Giant.com/mike.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Anyway, so yeah, so this is a really interesting timeframe and corporate America at large, but then particularly at Anheuser-Busch at the time, Anheuser-Busch had started adopting this ESG philosophy really in sort of the 2019, 2020 timeframe that a lot of other companies did. And part of it was is that the organization, they ran out of abilities about how do you grow the business. Over time, they had really grown really by financial engineering, they bought Anheuser-Busch, they bought Grupo Modelo, they bought SABMiller. There was nothing left to buy. And now all of 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?

• 40:24Mike Rowe?

  How am I relevant?

• 40:24Speaker 01

  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, 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 the 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 attract the best and brightest, and you get promoted based off the results that you get. And that was

• 41:06Speaker 01

  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, to 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.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  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 they would be start having these, one year, this is in 2020 or 2021. There was, I don't know, and it scored 88% on, yeah, we think DEI, it's fine and fine. But this during the great resignation where there was, I don't know, then the number was probably 50 plus percent of the people 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.

• 42:33Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yep, so, and I think it comes down to it's fear, it's fear more than anything. And this is the fear we're living in. This was really sort of the, I'll call it the straw that broke the back for me, or maybe a red pill type moment was, I had mentioned I was, 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 for me was, I was running Anheuser-Busch 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.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  And on the same trucks that are delivering Bud Light and Budweiser and everything else, if we could put on there, brands like Horritos, 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. And 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.

• 44:19Mike Rowe?

  Evan's a friend.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  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, going to be very profitable for both 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 did 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.

• 44:56Mike Rowe?

  And I can assure you, there was no diversity dashboard at BRC.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  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 look at partnerships through the lens of Fifth Avenue in New York. And that was not representative of the rest of the country.

• 45:28Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  And that for me was really problematic because as we're trying to grow as a company, we're getting back to growth. Our customer, Anheuser-Busch's customer, is the Black Rifle Coffee Company customer. That's the Budweiser customer, that's the Bud Light 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 Bud's for You, or the Real Men of Genius, things that might have been edgy, it might have been so-called, I don't know, fratty or out of touch, which was a word, that the head of Bud Light.

• 45:57Mike Rowe?

  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...

• 46:25Mike Rowe?

  Irreverence, subversion, humor.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Humor was dead at the time.

• 46:30Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  You remember, Dave Chappelle was getting pressure on Netflix, where Netflix saying, "Don't air this Dave Chappelle special," because he had jokes about, I think, LGBTQ community.

• 46:41Mike Rowe?

  Rogan on Spotify.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Rogan on Spotify, that's it. You could not speak up at all, or there was pressure and people were trying to cancel in a big way.

• 46:50Mike Rowe?

  When do you leave?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  So, the thing I was pushing 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.

• 47:08Mike Rowe?

  What a tick to watch the last couple of years for him, huh?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, that was not expected. It 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, Delta, 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. Vivek and I were talking about this. He had 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

• 47:55Speaker 01

  capitalism politicized agenda?" And so, we started brainstorming a couple of companies. Some of the first ideas we had were we were going to start a new airline, just called Merritt Airlines. And we was 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 Captain Sully, land a plane in a river if it gets hit by a goose. That's what I want.

• 48:25Mike Rowe?

  It's like with a surgeon, you're putting in a new kidney.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Right. Don't care.

• 48:30Mike Rowe?

  Are you good at this?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  You're good at it. That's it. I just want someone qualified. So, that was 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, given 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 Strive. 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

• 49:14Speaker 01

  an asset management company via your 401k to take your money, invest it 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 did proxy votes. And what those are is companies,

• 49:57Speaker 01

  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 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 went to Starbucks to stop using animal milk. And those things like that would get shut down in a big way. But in 2020, 2021, because of this adoption of ESG and DEI, you had all of these activist organizations buying $25,000 worth of 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.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:57Mike Rowe?

  This is our lane. It's a good one. Maybe we stay in it.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  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 100-point bulletin about how they've contributed to 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 is going on with energy companies, voting off the board of Exxon. Three folks just wanted Exxon to drill from oil and gas because it's 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.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  I mean, silly things happening. So our whole thing was, we're in a different interest, so 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.

• 52:03Mike Rowe?

  That's right.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  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 Drill, D-R-L-L. If you remember, In that summer of 22, this is when gas prices in California were probably hitting

• 52:47Speaker 01

  seven, eight dollars a gallon.

• 52:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Across the country, it was five dollars a gallon. And one of the reasons was because the whole Biden administration, but then a lot of asset managers had taken 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, drive for 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 it's solar, do solar. If you're nuclear, do nuclear. But don't necessarily have this large asset manager coming in and telling you to adopt different policies of your business to satisfy some, going back to another word, orthogonal objective.

• 53:24Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Whether it might be the Paris Climate Accords or whatever else is happening. So that happened in 2022.

• 53:30Mike Rowe?

  Okay, so you leave AB to do this in 2022, but they didn't truly crap the bed with Mulvaney.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  No, so this is interesting.

• 53:41Mike Rowe?

  So you weren't there, actually.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  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 ad meter 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 US, all of a sudden, they started shifting their marketing to win these European awards called the ConLion Awards. And to win the ConLion 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 US. And so I leave, and it was kind of interesting.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  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. Because we'd written letters to, you know, Bob Chapek at Disney, who he was the one who got Disney involved in the whole parental rights issues. We had written letters to Marc Benioff at Salesforce, who he was donating a lot of Salesforce 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.

• 55:00Mike Rowe?

  You made all sorts of friends, didn't you?

• 55:01Speaker 01

  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 locked back a lot of the policies, which we were asking them to do. This was in March of 23, when 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.

• 55:23Mike Rowe?

  What a perfect date for that.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Everyone thought it was April Fools.

• 55:30Mike Rowe?

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• 56:13Mike Rowe?

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• 56:56Speaker 01

  Literally, people thought it was an April Fools joke. And they couldn't have dropped that at a worse time, because culturally in the US, at the time, most states, they do their legislative session in kind of the March-April timeframe. 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 politicized topic around 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.

• 57:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  This was a very politicized issue in the United States at this time. And Bud Light as a brand, its always mission was easy to drink, easy to enjoy. Again, it was funny, it was interesting, it was real men of genius.

• 57:44Mike Rowe?

  What's up?

• 57:44Speaker 01

  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."

• 58:29Speaker 01

  The Bud Light consumer was caught off guard. And this was, to them, complete, um...

• 58:37Mike Rowe?

  It's the cognitive dissonance we're talking about.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Well, the cognitive dissonance, but it was a complete departure from what Bud Light had always been.

• 58:41Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  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 mean, I've had enough of companies, whether it was Disney getting involved in the pronoun 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?

• 59:15Mike Rowe?

  Well, and it's not just that. It's, if you're a family and you got kids, it's a hard ask to not go to Disney. Right? I mean, if you're, um, 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, BlackRock, 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?

• 59:44Speaker 01

  That's it. You got it exactly.

• 59:46Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  That's it. This company was uniquely susceptible to this boycott.

• 1:00:02Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:19Mike Rowe?

  It's a lot to ask.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:31Mike Rowe?

  Where do you put Target in there?

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  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 Lite 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 Lite. 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.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  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, you talk about the emperor's new clothes situation. This is where the company was really caught between rock and 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 you 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. Then 120 pages in 21.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  And I think it got up to 140 some odd 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 that 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's 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?

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  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...

• 1:02:54Mike Rowe?

  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 and...

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Well, this was tough because that happened also the week before this partnership with Dylan Mulvaney.

• 1:03:07Mike Rowe?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  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, that she was on this podcast. So the situation looks terrible where you're essentially denigrating half your customer base, calling them fratty, out of touch, which frankly, who drinks a lot of Bud Light? It tends to be fratty.

• 1:03:32Mike Rowe?

  Fratty, out of touch dudes.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe that's a lot of people that drink Bud Light. And those people are great and 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. 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, hire Shane Gillis, whatever we're going to do. That's what we're going to do."

• 1:04:08Mike Rowe?

  They couldn't.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:17Mike Rowe?

  And their European masters.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  And their European masters.

• 1:04:19Mike Rowe?

  And all the inertia that comes from that giant, top-heavy corporate structure.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:04:24Mike Rowe?

  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 rarified air there is, and you don't want that stink on you.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  That's it. You're 100% right. So you're probably right. It was the, uh, there's a bunch of Belgian families and these old Belgian families that have owned it forever that are-

• 1:05:13Mike Rowe?

  The Habsburgs or whatever.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think it's the, one of them is the Van Damms, not Jean-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 of a 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 culture war and you kind of walk in 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, the partnership happened on April 1st. And then it wasn't until April 15th, the company released this statement, which was a very, um, middle of the road, middling, didn't say anything. It was, it was kind of

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  a nothing burger statement. It was a mush of, we're this great company and we try 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 and-

• 1:06:25Mike Rowe?

  Not ready to joke about this yet.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  No, not ready to joke about. And I don't know. I mean, I think that the American population is a lot more forgiving than-

• 1:06:32Mike Rowe?

  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-

• 1:06:41Mike Rowe?

  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 Kraken 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 Bud Light. And on the other side, you know, the barbarians were at the gate and they came out and said, "Bullcrap, enough."

• 1:07:20Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Well, the 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."

• 1:07:57Mike Rowe?

  And Churchill, I think, said, "When you're marching through hell, keep going."

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  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 to be forgiven, you have to admit that there was a mistake, or that you were erred, or there was something wrong about what you did. And so this company released a first statement on April 15th, where they said nothing about the situation itself, why they're in it, apologies. There was another one they did a month later, at the end of May or early June. And then 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.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  And this was the first time that an Anheuser-Busch 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.

• 1:08:59Mike Rowe?

  No pressure Brendan.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, no pressure. So it goes on CBS and so the host first welcomed, 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 in 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.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  And they moved on and that's sort of the, one of the lessons to learn here is that you have to take command and control of 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.

• 1:09:55Mike Rowe?

  Is he still with the company?

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  He is, which is crazy to me.

• 1:09:58Mike Rowe?

  What?

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  And this goes back to, I don't know if, and to some degree, I almost feel bad for Brendan at this point. Because I worked 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. There's more European and Brazilian and they are very much on the ESG stakeholder capitalism, world economic forum 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 actually said, yeah, I did. We got together at a UFC fight or something.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  And he said, and did you ever ask him why he did that disastrous 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.

• 1:10:57Mike Rowe?

  It's sad for him and it's sad for the viewers. It's sad for everyone.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  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 Dylan Mulvaney partnership hit, the stock was trading at 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% and that stock has been down 30, 40%. Or thousands of people have lost their jobs. There's a lot of independent Anheuser-Busch wholesalers, they're family-owned businesses across the country. They've had to lay people off or have had to sell. A lot of suppliers have to shut down factories. There's been a lot of bad things that have happened.

• 1:11:38Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Whitworth.

• 1:12:02Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:24Mike Rowe?

  A couple of scenarios, right?

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  100%.

• 1:12:26Mike Rowe?

  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 this 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.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:05Mike Rowe?

  There is no sense among anybody, whether his supporters or his detractors, that

• 1:13:12Mike Rowe?

  That he's been coached.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Right. He is authentic as it comes.

• 1:13:16Mike Rowe?

  For, for better or worse. And we had just had enough.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:20Mike Rowe?

  Of Brendan Whitworth and focus groups.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  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 solve that weren't really.

• 1:13:45Mike Rowe?

  So I remember that. But what was the date roughly?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  This was going into July 4th of 2023.

• 1:13:51Mike Rowe?

  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, 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, um, and they're in my hometown. And so I was, I was glad to come and speak to their people. And have a chat unscripted on stage with their CEO, which I did.

• 1:14:32Mike Rowe?

  And I put my usual amount of preparation in 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, 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, social governance. I'm like, well, what's that mean?

• 1:15:14Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Was he able to articulate what it was or what they were trying to do?

• 1:15:40Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  That's it, which is tough.

• 1:15:50Mike Rowe?

  And my initial reaction was this sounds like a horrible idea. What does this have to do with the product that you make?

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:56Mike Rowe?

  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, but 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, etc.?

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:33Mike Rowe?

  They're not backing off.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  They're not backing off. They're saying that we are going to be more committed to DEI. Other companies have have shed some of the DEI label. I think the the bigger piece is for, well, at least separated. I think there's American-based companies and I think there are foreign-owned companies and the foreign-owned companies that are in a really tough spot. And it's not just Anheuser-Busch and with InBev, but it's also you see what's going with TikTok right now.

• 1:16:56Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  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 US. 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 US go from $6 billion to $4 billion.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  They've lost $2 billion over the last two years. At this point, I would almost sell that US business unit that they have. And what I would do is maybe retain a minority stake of it. But I think they should sell it to Berkshire Hathaway or somebody here in the US, 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, earned media is what you want these days. This company can't do earned media because they won't let Brendan Whitworth go out and talk about it.

• 1:18:07Mike Rowe?

  Does private equity do it? Does KKR or Leonard Green or TPG?

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  They could. I mean, Warren Buffett's sitting on $300 billion of cash. This seems a great, it's good cash flow business. And even though people are drinking less, they still drink. So I think it'll still be around.

• 1:18:21Mike Rowe?

  Do you think they'd sell it? Because I, 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. It, I wonder, if that plane lands here, Chuck, that's going to be exciting, 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.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  It was about the family selling the business and...

• 1:18:50Mike Rowe?

  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 dissonance that occurred when it stopped being an American company. You have to go right back to the 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 Bud's 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.

• 1:19:34Mike Rowe?

  And everything we've discussed really is how to fix it. I don't think you can unless you go right back to where you were in 1986.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  I agree. So that's why I think that the company is better off selling that US business unit. Somebody buys it. I think that you could have an amazing, great American comeback story. I think the US 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 spokesperson, but they're 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.

• 1:20:23Mike Rowe?

  No. Look, I'm fans of all those guys.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Mike Rowe?

  Right? But.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Unless they do it themselves.

• 1:20:29Mike Rowe?

  It's not primal.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:30Mike Rowe?

  Who's got to make the decision on the InBev side to sell?

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  The problem is there's Brazilian and European families, and they're the controlling shareholders of Anheuser-Busch.

• 1:20:39Mike Rowe?

  Van Damme.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  Van Damme, 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.

• 1:20:48Mike Rowe?

  Who's the most likely buyer on this side? Is it Buffett? Is it KKR? Is it?

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  I think it's the Buffetts of the world, but then I also think that you could have the KKRs or Blackstones that could do it. Blackstone is getting to 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 some large family offices.

• 1:21:05Mike Rowe?

  I like Blackstone.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Blackstone, not BlackRock.

• 1:21:07Mike Rowe?

  Not, it's different.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Very different.

• 1:21:08Mike Rowe?

  They're adjacent.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Adjacent.

• 1:21:10Mike Rowe?

  Okay, so here's my offer. Van Damme, Mr. Van Damme. And who's in charge of Blackstone?

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Steve Schwartzman.

• 1:21:18Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:21:30Mike Rowe?

  Representing a uniquely American beer. 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 here. I'm just looking for my next gig.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  Just looking for your next gig. So that's all right. Shameless plug.

• 1:21:46Mike Rowe?

  Shameless plug.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:21:48Mike Rowe?

  Oh, man.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  No, that's great.

• 1:21:49Mike Rowe?

  Well, you got anything smart to say before I plug your book?

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  No, I think that you covered it all. So I appreciate you having me on the show today. Thank you very much.

• 1:21:57Mike Rowe?

  Anson Ferrerix, 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.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  That's it. So it's gonna be interesting to see you 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 as being easy to drink, easy to enjoy, and everybody else does as well. And I think the Costcos of the world that are still holding on to DEI and the other device of policies, they'll eventually come in line as well.

• 1:22:38Mike Rowe?

  Hey, man, thanks for making the time.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  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 online and leave us a review.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  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 line or two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Not four.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  And not three.

• 1:23:34Speaker 02

  All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Definitely not two.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  We need five.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  All you've got to do is leave a quick.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Even if you hate it.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  Five-star review.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

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• 1:24:22Speaker 04

  What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce? Fresh meat? Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:24:37Speaker 04

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 1:24:39Speaker 05

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.