Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everyone. Welcome to the 249th episode of the Atlas Society Asks. My name is Jag. I'm CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm really excited today to have Anson Frerichs come and join us to talk about his book, Last Call for Bud Light, the Fall and Future of America's favorite beer. Anson, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Jack, thank you so much for having me. I've been Ayn Rand fan since I read I want to say Anthem in eighth grade and then of course Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged afterwards. So thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Fantastic. Now you have how many kids?
[00:00:44] Speaker B: I have three kids. So I have a 10 year old son, an eight year old daughter and a six year old son.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Okay, well, the 10 year old is just about ready for Anthem. Maybe a couple of years. So afterwards, perhaps we can get your address because we have recruited a Marvel Comics illustrator to turn some of Rand's works into graphic novels. And so we've done that with Anthem and Red Pawn and, you know, just trying to find ways to get kids to read her books, which is a bit of a tough sell these days when so few young people are reading books.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: No, that's amazing because my son, he reads all the Dogman and Captain Underpants and all these books, but I think we're aging out of those. I actually got him a book on Babe Ruth yesterday when we were at the library. So I would absolutely love. There was a graphic novel on Anthem, but I almost feel like Anthem itself was sort of like to my mind, almost a graphic novel in of itself. This dystopian future and what can go wrong if we lose the word I. But I love that idea and would love to have those books and would love to get my son reading those if you ever come out with those.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And as a matter of fact, we also have created book trailers of Anthem and scenes from the novella. And you know, if young people look, it's a dystopian post apocalyptic love story. What's not to love? Especially for, you know, a teenage boy or girl. So. Well, speaking of books, this was your first one. What was, what was the biggest surprise about the process of writing and publishing your first book?
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it was, I'd say that the, the biggest surprise to me was it actually went very thorough writing the book for myself. It's a little bit of a love letter, I think, to capitalism, but then also to a company that I once loved, Ann Hesser Busch. So a lot of this became very natural to me to write this. It was fun to get the story out. I think the most frustrating part was I actually had this novel probably written in almost in full about a year ago at this point, and Simon Schuster, I was asking them that they should get it out and that they should publish it. And they said, no, no, no, you don't understand, because we have an election going on, and all of the news is going to be geared towards the election, and then you have all these other political novels coming out. You want to wa after the election. So I was really frustrated by that process, but it actually worked out perfectly because a lot of the themes in this book about what went wrong with diversity, equity, inclusion movement, the DEI movement, what I saw at Anheuser Busch, how certain voices were being silenced. I want to do a partnership with Black Rifle Coffee company. It actually played out incredibly well when we released this book in February. And this is really the time when the Trump administration was really complex. You had a lot of companies that had yet to walk away from dei, were reconsidering what DEI had become, which was effectively quota systems and forced equity and the exclusion of a lot of voices. So a lot of companies were working away. So it actually worked out really, really well, the timing wise. But I was sort of frustrated how long it takes to go from an actual book that was ready to be published until it actually gets out there.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Well, as someone who worked for 12 years at Dole Food Company, again, a very large international conglomerate, and to see over time, how just usual HR stuff began to get infected with this kind of thinking. And I like to say that the choice to do one thing is really a choice not to do another thing. And so when you're really focusing, putting the focus on these incredibly divisive political agenda items, you're not focusing on your brand. And so that, to me, was part of the really interesting thing about your book, in which we tend to think of like, whoa, this is just some random thing that happened. Somebody took their eye off the ball and sent a can of beer to Dylan Mulvaney. But you write about how this actually began much, much earlier. And for you, it began much, much earlier.
You were growing up, you were a big fan of Budweiser and the brand. How did that first come about? And how did it manifest when you were in high school and college?
[00:04:53] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Even though I don't think I was supposed to be the target audience for beer commercials, I think maybe unattended. I probably was in the 80s and 90s. I think this Is really sort of the call it Peak beer commercials where Peak beer was involved in culture. And one of my first memories that I that I have was actually I was at. It was the Super bowl in 1988 and it was the Bengals versus the the 49ers. And I was from Cincinnati, Ohio. It was the first world memory I had. My parents threw a big super bowl party and they had a lot of button but light. And then I remember this also because the game people might remember, this was the first was called the Bud bowl commercials. And this is where you had Budweiser versus Bud Light. The company spent $4 million to produce this ad, which at the time was an astronomical amount of money. And it was the first actually commercial produced bowl that ran during the super bowl as well. So they put a bunch of money into this. I really remember those Bud bowl commercials. And then throughout the 90s, the they had kind of bud versus bud light and there's Bud Bowls kind of going on. But they also had the Budweiser Frogs. They had real men of genius. They had the was up guys. I mean that's sort of the commercials that I grew up with and I love. And no surprise at the time, Budweiser and Bud Light became the number one and number two beer brands in the entire country. Because these brands were associated with sport and music and backyard barbecuing and humor. Just things that brought together, didn't divide people. Think the Bush family, which running the company at the time, I thought, I think they really understood the American consumer. I mean, almost better than any entrepreneur that I can really think of. I think part of that was they were really. The company was headquartered the geographic center of the U.S. which is in St. Louis and in St. Louis, Missouri. I think you have a really good understanding of. You have an urban center downtown, you have farms within 50 miles, you have suburbs. And they just did a really good job kind of understanding who that US consumer was. And for myself, I mean, grew up with those commercials and never thought I'd really actually work at a beer company. But it was always kind of in the back of my mind that I did like beer, I enjoyed beer. And it was, I think, a large part of, I think my college and post college experience.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: So I was really impressed by the lengths that Anheuser Busch went to recruit you out of Harvard Business School. Do you think that your early fandom was a factor or were they looking for specific traits in recruiting executives with potential?
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it was one of these really things in life that I wasn't Expecting at all. So you mentioned I was at Harvard Business School. So my quick background is I graduated from Yale for undergrad. I was at a private equity firm in Boston for a couple years after undergrad and then went back to business school at Harvard and was actually interning at Citadel, which is a large hedge fund in New York. And I think probably just because of my like for beer, one of my friends was interning at at Anheuser Busch that summer and they invited me to come to a company happy hour. And it was in New York and I was an intern. Anytime I think there's an opportunity for free beer when you're an intern in New York, you go and kind of take it. And I wasn't really expecting much from the company. I had known about Anheuser Busch. I had also known a little bit about this company called Indev. So Indev purchased anheuser Busch in 2008. So InDev was this company that was headquartered in Belgium, but they were kind of run by a group of investment bankers from Brazil, but kind of a European company owned brands like Stellartois, Hogarten left.
The way that they sold it to me when I first met these folks at this happy hour was kind of coincidence was they sold it to me as we're the world's essentially largest private equity firm that happens to sell beer was the way they kind of talked about their company. They kind of consolidated the South American beer market, they consolidated in the European beer market. They just bought an Anheuser Busch in the US and they said why don't we're going to go along and we're going to buy Group of Modelo which owns brands like Modelo and Corona. We're going to go buy S.C.B. miller, who knows, we might buy Coke and Pepsi. And we're looking for essentially sort of American folks who understand sort of the US and US culture and we want you to help us kind of build this brand. And my background was also an athlete. And one of the folks recruiting me was an athlete as well. So just kind of. It kind of worked out early on. But it was funny, I originally said, no, there's no way I'm going to talk. There's no way I'm ever going to work at a large consumer company. Yes, I like beer, but I was always in finance and finance was more where I was heading. My brother had worked at Procter and Gamble, which is another consumer company. He was very frustrated. That was a hierarchy. Took forever to promote it. And really quickly this, this ab inbev and the folks that recruited me, they kind of disarmed a lot of these concerns. They said, no, you don't understand, we're a meritocracy. You can come in here, you can quickly show that you can get results. If you get results, you get promoted. You can manage folks. So originally I said no a bunch of times. They continued to pursue me. And actually the night I got engaged to my wife, I said, hey, by the way, there's a couple, there's these folks that they continue to pursue me and they want us to actually go live over in Belgium. Do you have an interest in living in Europe for a couple of years and seeing that and working this company? And wife said hey, yeah, that sounds great, let's do it. So anyway, that's what eventually got me there. And the whole idea was if it works out, there's this mayor democratic organization that was going to grow and that was going to acquire more and I was going to have opportunities. Great. And if it didn't work out, I could always go back to finance. So that was the how I ended up at AB InBev.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: So one of the things I really enjoyed about your book was the history of the company. Did you know much about the history of Anheuser Busch before you got into writing the books or is that something that you had to research? I was very impressed by how the company really rose to prominence during the Gilded Age of industrialization and all of the innovations that it brought to bear.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it's an amazing company. I think I had just by growing up in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s and again I knew about the company from the commercials and you know, the beer and that was kind of part of culture. And I know about a little bit the Bush family as well. You'd mentioned it's an amazing history to this company where the Anheuser Busch was started in kind of the 1850s, 1860s around the same time you had families like the Carnegie's and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers. And we don't have Vanderbilts or Rockefellers or Carnegie's running businesses anymore in the US but in 2008 you start the Bush family. It was August Bush IV who was running Anheuser Busch. And it was an amazing sort of entrepreneurial American dream story of immigrant coming to the US Finding opportunities to serve a customer base, made a great product and then over time built this sort of incredible organization. I didn't know a lot about that piece of the business when I originally joined. When I originally joined Ana's book or when I accepted my offer. But I started reading a lot before I officially signed my offer. There are a couple good books. One is called Dethroning the King, which is essentially what happened when InBev bought Anheuser Busch in the US and why that happened. But then there was also a book called Bitter Brew, which was an interesting sort of history of the Busch family. And the Bush family has sort of a really interesting illustrious history to it. I think it's, they were, I mean, they epitomized sort of the work hard, play hard mentality of, I think, the beer industry. I mean, the company, when they originally got, when they got bought in 2008, I think they had, I don't know, eight private jets, four helicopters, boats. I mean, the family lived large. They almost lived this rock style type lifestyle, which after four generations, most family businesses struggle to make it to two generations or three, but this one had made it all the way to the fourth. And finally, I think some of those successes of the family caught up with them. But I mean, they, to their credit, they built the world's most valuable and largest beer company along the way.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: Well, talking a little bit about the history of the company, and you'd mentioned Ayn Rand before, she rarely drank alcohol, but during Prohibition, she applauded Americans who broke the law to, quote, begin drinking on principle.
So how did Prohibition affect Anheuser Busch?
[00:12:48] Speaker B: I mean, you think about existential crises that companies face. I mean, like right now everyone's concerned about tariffs and what could happen with tariffs and what's that going to do to a business? I mean, think about if you were a beer company or wine or spirits companies and you're sitting there in sort of the 1910s and heading into the 1920s, when you have the 18th Amendment that's on the horizon, which is essentially government mandating that you will be put out of business. The 18th amendment said you could not produce alcohol and sell alcohol in the United States. And so all of a sudden these businesses all. There were 3,500 breweries in the country at that time. There were a bunch of distilleries, there were a bunch of winemakers, there were wholesalers. And then overnight you were put out of business. And I think this speaks to a little bit of the ingenuity of the Bush family, but of a lot of people and entrepreneurs that all of a sudden on a daily basis you have to figure out, okay, well, this business no longer exists. What am I going to do to innovate? And you give the company A ton of credit at the time. They started going to more non alcoholic products. They made a product called Bevo, which was sort of one of the first big non alcoholic beers that they created at the time. They started making refrigerated rail cars. So they made refrigerated rail cars, which were becoming big at the time to ship a lot of refrigerated products. They started making parts for cars and planes and they did a bunch of different things to survive. And to their credit, Prohibition lasted I think 12, 13 years and they survived over that timeframe. I mean that's a heck of a long cycle to restart and have your business. And then when prohibition ended with the 21st amendment, the repeal of Prohibition, actually Anheuser Busch, it was one of the first times they used the Clydesdale horses and the Hitch and they actually went to FDR at the White House and they actually delivered the first keg of beer that was gonna be commercially sold at the White House. So it was pretty, pretty interesting that history and surviving then over the next really took another 30 years from there. It wasn't until the 1960s, late 1960s, early 1970s, they actually passed Schlitz. Schlitz was the biggest beer brand in the United States. But in the 1970s they passed Schlitz and then became from there have continued to hold onto their spot as the number one brewery in the United Though that's sort of a precarious position that they're now currently in after the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. But since the 1970s it's been the largest brewer in the United States.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: So in Last Call you say you are quote writing this book to show that the decline of AB InBev and Bud Light is not as sudden as everyone thinks. Thousands of decisions and choices over 15 years led to the ill advised partnership with Mulbaney. What were some of those pivotal choices and decisions?
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, a lot of you have this experience jag of working at Dole. I mean you get this that there's not just when a decision is made by a company to go away with, to go in a certain direction with the brand, it's usually not just a sudden decision that some VP makes and they do it with a knee jerk reaction. There tends to be a lot of people that need to sign off. It's legal teams and it's a CEO and it could be the board, depending on how big the decision is. And for a company like Anheuser Busch had Bud Light. Bud Light was the biggest beer brand in the United States. When they did the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. So they have very senior people involved in every single decision that's made. But so it wasn't just sort of a one time bad decision that was made. And the decision itself to partner with Mulvaney, we can get into it wasn't the right one. Obviously they lost millions of consumers, billions of dollars of shareholder value. But even the company, their response afterwards, where they had a lot of opportunities to clearly come out and address consumers and explain what Bud Light as a brand is going to stand for. Is it going to be more like Ben and Jerry's where it's going to be more progressive and it's going to get in politics and they're going to put on their website that they're going to sell use Bud Light to have a progressive agenda. They were more than okay to do that. I mean, it's a free country and you can do that if you want. Ben and Jerry's does that and puts it on their website. They're proud about it. They didn't do that. And they didn't do that because they had getting caught up in really the stakeholder capitalism ESG DEI movement. And that was really goes back almost 15 years. It went when InBev bought Anheuser Busch. InBev, more of a European based company, abides by more of that stakeholder capitalism ESGDI philosophy. Stephen stuck up on the call last week. So I won't go all deep into stakeholder capitalism and repeat all that, but more of a European mentality. But some of the big decisions that were made were I think specifically when the company, they got rid of a lot of American executives and they brought in a lot of European executives to run brands like Bud Light and to run brands like Budweiser. They moved the geographical headquarters of sales and marketing from St. Louis, Missouri, which I think again, just geographically in the US has a real center point. There's always a saying in marketing that if it plays in Peoria, Peoria, Illinois and marketing, it plays for the whole country. Peoria, Illinois is very close to St. Louis. So it's kind of a good sort of just geographical base, but with a mood. That headquarters in New York City in 2016, and when they moved that headquarters in New York in 2016, all of a sudden they started to look at the beer industry through the lens, really a Fifth Avenue. And the lens of Fifth Avenue is obviously very different than the lens of St. Louis, Missouri. They also started hiring a lot of different people. Myself, I come from, I was born in Maineville, Ohio, and you kind of center of the country more Midwestern. I don't know if I would have joined a company that was based in New York City. I just tend to like, I don't know, having more of a yard, a little more freedoms than I think New York City allows. But. And so a lot of people that were hired were from New York City, went to schools on the East Coast. A lot of them had been, hadn't spent a lot of time in the Midwest. A lot of them maybe hadn't even drank a Bud Light or knew people who did. So those were some of the big mistakes that were made. And then I think specifically as well, the company went all in on really the stakeholder capitalism ESG DEI agenda, really leading up to 2020 and kind of the COVID timeframe. But especially in the post Covid world and the post George Floyd's death world, the company really went all in on ESG dei, adopting a lot of quota systems in terms of looking at dashboards and taking a look at how are we going to even abide by what's like. Known as a human rights campaign was a group that has companies put up so much advertisements specifically to communities like the LGBTQ community, which can be not for every single brand. So I saw a lot of problems that were happening. Our marketing team, which used to win the Super Bowl Ad Meter award every year, that was what sort of the North Star was in the US we're now being asked to win these Con Line awards over in Europe and to win the Con Line awards over in Europe, your commercials, they had to meet sort of a DEI checklist and agenda. So these were some of the problems that I saw really, leading up to the Mulvaney campaign. And to some degree, how that Bud Light is somewhat of a microcosm of the capture that we saw that happen across corporate America, where not only companies like Anheuser Busch and Bud Light got caught up in the ESG DEI movement getting their brands involved in politics, but you saw, for example, Coca Cola got involved in the Voting Rights Acts in Georgia. You saw a lot of companies that gave hundreds of millions of dollars to movements like blm, Black Lives Matter without any accountability. And so it was just sort of a microcosm, I think, of what went wrong. And I think one of the reasons, again I kind of wrote this book, is to talk about this chapter, I think, in US Capitalism, where a lot of companies, they lost focus on what their real North Stars was, their shareholders making money for their shareholders. How do you do that you understand your customers, give them great products and services. Don't get involved in social and political issues unless it's really germane to the, to your business, what you're trying to.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: So you touched on this earlier. Back in 2022, you advocated for a distribution deal with Black Rifle Coffee, citing its strong appeal to veterans and law enforcement communities. But this partnership was rejected by higher ups who perceived the brand as politically provoc, which is kind of ironic in retrospect. Was this at the time, or maybe even in retrospect a bit of a turning point for you?
[00:20:49] Speaker B: This is a real turning point for myself. I was having some, some issues with Anheuser Busch as a company before this. I think the company turning away from meritocracy, really going all in on dei, having sort of diversity dashboards, going down a route in terms of giving people jobs and opportunities that maybe we're not qualified for those jobs, but to meet certain, to check a box, all of a sudden people were getting more opportunities. That didn't make any sense to me at all. But then I think the really the straw that broke the camel's back for me was I was president of Anheuser Busch Sales and Distribution in the US And I was trying to do, yes, this distribution agreement with Black Rifle Coffee company For the folks on the line that don't know Black Rifle Coffee, they're a veteran owned business in the United States. Their whole mission is to serve coffee and culture to people who love America, including firefighters, military, police, first responders. The company was growing incredibly fast at the time. And for me it made a lot of sense. The people that were drinking Budweiser at night, we had a lot of studies that showed a lot of them were drinking Black Rifle Coffee company or Black Rifle Coffee in the morning. So to me it made a ton of sense to do a distribution deal where we would put Black Rifle Coffee on the same trucks that were delivering Budweiser and Bud Light to grocery stores and convenience stores and Walmart and Kroger and 7 11. And a lot of these products were already being sold in their stores and it would be a good way for us to make incremental money and serve and serve customers. And I was effectively told by our legal department team in New York that you cannot do this partnership. And I said, why? What do you mean? And it was essentially because we were in the post kind of George Floyd era where anything that was involved with supporting military, supporting the police and corporate America was almost canceled. Like those views became very exclusionary and they became very exclusionary.
You know, especially any. Anything that wasn't pro defunding the police or police reform all of a sudden became just very controversial. And I said, guys, this is crazy. You know, I mean, again, we sell at the time of Anne as a Bush, we were selling, I don't know, like malt liquor brands like king cobra, 40 ounce bottles. I was like, you know, these brands aren't really, you know, beneficial to society. I mean, you know, serves a certain person. We haven't. But like you're telling me that Black Rifle Coffee Company who's trying just to serve coffee and culture to people who love America, firefighters, first responders, et cetera, all of a sudden that's more controversial than some of these other brands that we're selling. This makes no sense. And it was essentially this political decision where I saw there was just going to be no way that this company was going to be able to really grow if we had this New York City mindset. And we're looking at the country through this lens of New York when we're almost missing an opportunity to better serve half the country, at least half the country would love to drink. Black Rifle Coffee company and all the brands that we have at Anheuser Busch, we had a portfolio of them. We had brands at the time like Bush, which was essentially for hunters and fishermen. And then we also owned a bunch of craft breweries. We own Goose island and, and Elysian that had craft brands that were more progressive and I mean even had names like, you know, sounds queer, I mean ipa, like great, they serve those customers also. But this is really where I think corporate America got captured, where they were not doing deals with companies that even had sort of a slight conservative bet to them because they were afraid that it was going to be looked poorly upon by your large asset managers, BlackRock State Street Vanguard, that were asking for, you have DEI commitments and what are you doing to become more diverse and more equitable and more inclusive? Or could this endanger your Human Rights Campaign score? The Human Rights Campaign score was. That was again the organization I mentioned earlier that said you need to do so many advertisements to the LGBTQ + community, otherwise we'll ding your score. And if that score is dinged, it's almost like a social credit score, then you won't be included in certain ESG index funds that BlackRock State Street Vanguard, the large asset managers, are putting you into. So that to me was sort of the moment that broke the camel's back. And unfortunately the company had changed in one way. But again, fortunately enough for me, that's when I was thinking about other opportunities and decided it would be time to leave the company.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Well, we're going to get into that, but we've got quite a few questions that are rolling in from the audience, so I'm going to pop in and grab a couple of those. My modern Gault asks, how did government lockdowns and restrictions affect Anheuser Busch? Was there an increased demand and did production suffer?
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Yeah, so great question. So if you're close to Anheuser Busch InBev, it's a global company, so the U.S. is about, call it 25% of its revenue. And outside of the U.S. they have, they operate in Europe, they operate in China, they operate in South America and in Mexico, et cetera. So across the globe, it depended where you were, where alcohol sales were could be very restrictive. So in places like Mexico, when the COVID lockdowns hit, the government of Mexico actually forbid the sale of alcohol. Same thing happened in South Africa. So they forbid the sale of Africa or, sorry, the sale of Africa, thinking that it would just be bad if people at their house and just drinking all the time. So in those countries, like the sale of alcohol literally went to zero. In the US Initially, Covid was a positive for total alcohol sales. You might recall when you were locked down here in the US a lot of people were no longer taking their kids to sports. A lot of people all of a sudden had 5:00 happy hours. Every day people are sitting in their cul de sacs. So in the US initially, alcohol sales increased in terms of one of the things that we had to manage a lot from a supply chain standpoint. Bars and restaurants were all shut down where you sell a lot of keg beer and you sell bottled beer and all of a sudden people were just buying 24 packs of canned beer. And so we really had to change all of our production to make sure that we could fulfill that demand of beer. In the US the lockdowns really happened in 2020 was very good for the beer industry. 2021 was. But then in 2022, actually the industry started to decline again. And then in 23 and 24 and 25, there's been a decline of the beer market in the United States, mostly as Gen Z is not drinking nearly as much as Millennials, Gen X and Boomers did. So I'm part of the millennial generation. And when the millennials were in that 21 to 29 year old cohort, you had 80% of them drinking alcohol. What's interesting now is Gen Z, which is kind of in that 21 to 29 cohort, only 60% of them are drinking alcohol. As people just became more focused on health and wellness. So a lot of people aren't drinking nearly as much. And sales have now started to decline from an industry standpoint in the U.S.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: Another question here from Jackson Sinclair on YouTube. He asks, do you think the current situation for Anheuser Busch would be different if Biden had gotten a second term instead of Trump? Especially with Trump, how Trump is going after dei?
[00:27:24] Speaker B: No, I mean, I don't think the situation would be different for Anheuser Busch because, remember, their partnership with Dylan Mulvaney had happened under the Biden administration, you might recall. I mean, why did Dylan Mulvaney become a very controversial transgender figure? Well, Dylan, not only did Dylan do this 365 days of girlhood, of documenting Dylan's transition from a biological male to saying that Dylan is female, but also during that time period, Dylan was at the White House with Joe Biden, and Dylan was advocating for gender affirmation care for people under the age of 18. Dylan was advocating for biological men to compete against women in sports. So almost became the face of this very controversial movement. And if you go back in time two years ago when this partnership happened, so this was 2023, you had at the state level, you had half the states in this country that they had bills to ban gender affirmation care for people under the age of 18 and to ban biological males from competing in sports. And so you saw an immediate sales hit when there was the partnership with Dylan and Bud Light because of this controversy. And sales immediately dropped 10%, 20%, 30% in the year of 2023. Last year, in Biden's second term, you saw sales continue to decline.
And now this year, sales are down almost 50% from where they were two years ago on Bud Light, which is unbelievable to see. And I think because of this, I think a lot of companies did not want to be, did not want to be Bud Lighted. I mean, Bud Lighted almost became a verb. And they did not want to lose all these sales. So even before you saw Biden lose to Trump, a lot of companies started walking back their DEI commitments. You saw Walmart, Tractor Supply, Harley Davidson, a lot of companies that were saying, wait a minute, we adopted all these DEI policies and ESG policies, and we adopted them under this guise that they were supposed to make us more money and bring in more customers and make us a better company and make us a better earn A social license was what blackrock was telling these companies they would earn. And they were saying, it really hasn't helped us. It's actually been worse for us when we've been forced to take positions on whether it was defund the police initiatives, whether it was on Roe v. Wade over the last couple of years, whether it was when the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action, or whether it's been on LGBTQ + issues. For us individual companies, a lot of these things just don't make sense. If we're Walmart and our whole mission is to pay less, save better, why are we getting involved in all these other issues that we're getting involved in? And even when you compare Walmart to Target, Target stock is off almost 50% over the last couple of years since they got involved with having tuck friendly bathing suits and putting all of their prime real estate. When you walk into Target to promote Pride Month instead of promoting whether it was July 4th or promoting memorial Day, and their stock's been hit big time, whereas Walmart hasn't, because they did not get as involved in a lot of these political issues, a lot of companies have started to roll back their support of these programs because, again, it didn't help their bottom line. And I don't think it helps society either. So even if Biden was in a second term right now, I think you would have a lot of companies rolling back their DEI and ESG commitments. Maybe not as many as we've seen, but definitely, I think that snowball has already started and that train had left the station even before Trump beat Biden last year.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: So you advance an interesting argument that I hadn't heard before. Therefore, to explain Wall Street's embrace of ESG and dei, how in the wake of Occupy Wall street, which demanded economic redistribution, they instead promised to champion fighting climate change and gender and racial disparities. So let's explore that a little bit.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I think if you recall going Back to the 2008 time frame, the bank were essentially the big boogeyman that had come out of this, that they had lent all this money to a bunch of people with subprime mortgages that couldn't afford the mortgages. They end up foreclosing on a lot of the people who lose their houses, and then the banks end up getting bailed out of this. And when that big bailout happened, what happened next is then you had the rise of Occupy Wall street and it was all about we are the 99%. And the banks came out of this with a bad eye. And so all of a sudden kind of try and redo their image and try and get banks to a better spot. It was much easier to all of a sudden pick up the, this program of esg, Environmental Social Governance, which this term was first coined in 2005, it was by the UN it was the Europe was starting to push ESG and then banks really in this sort of 2011, 2012, 2013 time frame in the US they started picking up as well because it seemed like an easy way to get moved beyond the Occupy Wall Street. If you could say, oh, now all of a sudden we're using capital for so called societal, societal good. And so BlackRock was one of the first big companies that picked this up in a meaningful way. You also had consulting companies like McKinsey. McKinsey wanted to start selling more consultative services on ESG and DI. So they came out with this big report in 2014 that was called Diversity Matters, Diversity Wins. This study has been debunked numerous times subsequently as it didn't make sense. But they essentially looked at a bunch of, of tech companies that were performing well, said that they had all this diversity, these tech companies. And if you were a maybe you know, a manufacturer of airplane parts in Des Moines, Iowa, you should have sort of the same DEI standards that a Silicon Valley firm has in San Francisco. They started then selling these services to companies. BlackRock at the time they started coming out and Larry Fink, their CEO, was writing letters to companies about how they need to earn their social license and how they were going to start forcing behaviors at companies if they were not going to abide by the environmental social governance policies that BlackRock was pushing. What they didn't tell you is that Larry Fink was pushing a lot of companies to adopt his ESG funds which were essentially him charging three times the amount of money for a fund that had worse performance than just a broad based S&P 500 fund or a growth fund or a dividend growth fund. And, and one of the ways that they were starting to tell companies that these ESG funds weren't performing, they essentially said like we're just going to pick an oil and gas company and take that out, we're going to take a timber company, pick that out. If you don't like some of the defense companies, we're going to pick those out and we're going to package this up and sell you an ESG fund. So actually some of the most susceptible companies to ESG actually became some of the so called SIN companies, oil and gas companies, alcohol Companies, tobacco companies, these were the ones as well, that it was almost as if Wall street passed the buck and said, no, no, Wall Street's not the problem. You know, don't look at Wall street, we didn't do anything wrong. It's all the alcohol, tobacco, the defense companies, oil and gas companies. Those are all the boogeymen. Those are the bad ones. And we now at Wall street because BlackRock states United, they manage $20 trillion of capital. They manage a lot of that on behalf of European sovereign wealth funds, which like the ESG agenda, they manage a lot on behalf of the state of California's pension fund, New York's pension fund. All of a sudden it was essentially passing the buck and passing the blame downstream. And now all of a sudden it was, you know, don't look over here at us, we're not the bad people. Look at everybody else. And now they wanted to force an agenda again of climate change and of racial justice and of equity on every single company using the capital that they did. And that's essentially what they did throughout sort of the late 2015-2020 time period. And then during COVID everything really got turbocharged at that point where they really had an opportunity in the post Covid world to try and solve all these so called existential crises. And that's when that 2122 timeframe, we especially saw a lot of companies getting involved in social and political.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: There's another great question from my modern Gault. He's asking, aside from a focus on more progressive marketing, were there other policies that changed things in ways that are not as easily noticeable to the public? So es g farming practices or electric vehicles to ship the beer or what have you.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: I mean, there were so many of these. And this is sort of, you know, really got turbocharged in the this post George Floyd era. And the way that I talk about this a lot. So companies, they were, they were having this more of ESG di agenda kind of imparted on them and forced on in the 2018, 2019 timeframe. But really in 2020, when you had a lot of companies that adopted stakeholder capitalism, a lot of them were forced when Covid first came out to get off their mission and get off track about what they were doing at Anheuser Busch, we were all sudden making hand sanitizer. You had Walmart that was having COVID testing facilities in their parking lots. You had Delta that was flying ventilators all around the country instead of just domestic passengers. A lot of companies got pushed off their mission because the so called existential threat of, of COVID And then all of a sudden Covid by sort of like April and May of 2020 starts to dissipate as an issue. But a lot of companies all of a sudden were kind of geared up, hey, great, we helped solve this crisis. Flatten the so called curve was I think the famous thing everyone said. But then once George Floyd dies at the end of May of 2020, now all of a sudden the next thing to solve is systemic racism. That's the so called next existential crisis that everybody has to to solve. And what was really interesting about the number of things that weren't just explicit outward marketing and putting like a black square, you might remember this, when BLM came out, you had to put a black square on your Instagram page. And then a lot of other companies were tithing money to beat the BLM movement, other movements, but there were a lot of things that were not easily accessible to public. For example, Target for a lot of their suppliers, they were asking their suppliers to go and buy, for example, cotton for their T shirts they were making. And they said, we want you to buy so much cotton from black farmers and we want you to pay more to the black farmers for this commodity, for commodity cotton than you're paying to white farmers. Because we want to have so much from black farmers.
The state of Arkansas called us on this and they got called in before State of Arkansas to explain this policy, which was just honestly, you know, racist. You're paying somebody based off the color of their skin, more money for a commodity cotton, even if it was inferior quality, didn't make any sense. You had Coca Cola which said we need to have 30, a third of our billable hours come from black lawyers. So they were going to all the law firms that they had and they said, we only want to work with essentially, you know, black lawyers. And a third of the billable hours have to come from black lawyers. Target again, they were allocating shelf space, Costco as well, not based off which products were selling and what people wanted to buy, but they were allocating shelf space at retail to based off the owners, essentially like the color of your skin, some immutable characteristic, based off gender, based off sex, based off race. So they were allocating shelf space. So a lot of these things were going on that weren't a marketing piece, but they were policies internally that were happening at companies. I think the, one of the biggest pieces also was the number of companies that try to get a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign, scoring system that comes out, the Human Rights Campaign. It was an LGBTQ organization that 20 years ago, they came out, they said companies like, hey, don't make fun of lesbian gay people in your advertising. Make sure you're hiring them. You're not discriminating. You're abiding with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. You don't discriminate based off race, sex, gender, et cetera. But in time, this Human Rights Campaign, they told companies, if you still want to have 100% index score, and the score was used by companies like BlackRock as a social credit score to be included in the ESG funds. It was kind of the s of a lot of the ESG funds. But to do that, you had to again, advertise so many LGBTQ+ commercials a year, even it didn't make sense for your brand. You had to start doing policies internally, healthcare policies. Would you do gender affirmation, care for your employees or for their. Or for their kids? So a lot of those policies started to come in as well, which was problematic. And so there were many, many policies that the public didn't see. And then I think for my book talks about a lot of these where I think for the first time, people are starting to have their eyes open, just not theoretically or conceptually talking about whether it's woke capitalism or woke companies. But actually, I've tried to get into the details about what really went wrong. I think when companies got involved and sort of taking political or social views on issues that were completely orthogonal to their mission and what they were doing, why that happened, why it was bad for the businesses. I think most importantly, where we go from here and how we get back on track of keeping business focused on shareholders, shareholder returns. That's sort of the greatest social good that a company can do, not necessarily trying to work with governments to social engineer.
[00:40:08] Speaker A: So I think one of the most destructive effects of DEI is to cast doubt on the professional merit of the very people, women and minorities, that it's supposed to help. And in that light, it's impossible to say whether the hiring of Alyssa Heinerscheid was as the vice president of marketing at Bud Light, whether that was because of dei. But certainly the company didn't hesitate to try to score points touting her as the first female VP in the brand's history, while she is the kind of the public face of the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. Is. Is that entirely fair?
[00:40:53] Speaker B: No. I mean, I don't think it's entirely fair at all, because Alyssa and I knew Alyssa well. At the company. I worked with her for a number of years. And yes, Alyssa was on record. There was a whole New Yorker article about her in 2021 where she was talking more about her progressive politics and everything she was doing during COVID to, you know, to empower certain groups and women, etc, you know, that's fine if she's doing that in her personal life. I think when you take some of those personal beliefs to your professional life and to especially a brand, that's where things become problematic. I think to Alyssa's credit, I've spoken with her boss, Daniel Blake, who's a good friend of mine, who was also let go in this. You know, he essentially said, he said, you know, Alyssa basically had the blessing from the CEO to the head of North America on down, that she was going to take Bud Light in a more progressive, more progressive direction. She said, this is what I'm going to do with the brand. This is where I think it needs to go. And she even said so as much on the, on the podcast that famously came out a couple days before the, the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, where she referred to Bud Light marketing as fratty and out of touch, obviously was, I think, a little bit disconnected from the Bud Light consumer. And so she had sort of a lot of people that had kind of blessed the decision. And I think this is where the company all of a sudden, you know, it really showed that they were caught between this rock and a hard place. When after the partnership with Dylan happened, they were in New York and I think to them it was like, I don't understand, like what the big deal is. Like we did a partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, but they have millions of consumers that are, that are leaving the brand. You know, Kid Rock famously took an AR15 and shot up a bunch of cases of Bud Light. You had a bunch of country music stars and others said, I'm not for partnerships with Dylan Mulvaney with Bud Light, which was the brand that historically did partnerships with Peyton Manning and the real men of genius guys.
So the blame on Alyssa, yes, she took it in direction, but it went much higher than that. The only reason that went the direction it did was because of the ESG DEI agenda that we were in. And this is something sort of. My, my problem also is that Alyssa was actually never fired from the company. I mean, she probably should have been for losing that many customers and then also for some of the comments she made about the customer base, but she was placed on leave. And this is one of the big issues with the where the company's face. Yes, the partnership is wrong, but the company's response was just as bad. People, you might recall, it was the partnership with Dylan happened on April 1st. It was April Fool's Day. And then three or four days later, there was a lot of uproar about Kid Rock. Sales were starting to climb. The company released sort of a bland PR statement says, you know, we do partnerships with influencers all the time. The one with Dylan was to celebrate a milestone. Sales continued to tank. And then two weeks later, there was, on April 15, was the first real corporate response from the CEO of Anheuser Busch. And it was this guy, Brandon Whitworth, who I, who I knew well, reported when I was president of Anheuser Busch and essentially never acknowledged the situation nor never took responsibility for it, but just said a big bland statement about how Anheuser Busch brews a bunch of beer. We have a heritage, we have a legacy, and we want to serve beer to everybody and then release some video with some Clydesdale's going across the US and it was actually really interesting because then not only were conservatives frustrated or their traditional loyal beer drinkers, because they wanted sort of either an apology or an acknowledgment of like, hey, this is not what Bud Light's about. But then they lost a lot of liberal drinkers as well. And Bud Light was one of these beer brands that was equally enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans alike because it didn't touch politics. And that's how it became the biggest beer brand in the US and then all of a sudden, they ended up losing even more customers. So sales continued to climb more and more and more after that first piece. And that's what I don't necessarily blame, sort of Alyssa. I think that if the company had come out in that initially they kind of gone two directions. And if their CEO either said, yes, Bud Light is going to be like Ben and Jerry's, this is the brand, this is what we can do, then, okay, people would have understood that they would have lost a lot of customers, maybe they would have picked up some more, but they couldn't do that. The other decision that they could have made, which I think would have been the right one, would have said, you know what? We screwed up. Bud Light shouldn't have been involved with this partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. It was never a political brand. Dylan's obviously a political person. We made a mistake. You know, we fired our VP of Bud Light, and then we're going to go back to Bud Light regularly. Scheduled program. I think if they had done that, they would have been in a much better spot. I was like a famous Teddy Roosevelt quote that says, when you're faced with a tough decision, you know the best decision is the right decision, the second best decision is the wrong decision, and the worst decision is no decision at all. And that's essentially what the, the route the company took. And that's why two years later, sales are down now 50%. Things are getting worse, not better. The company's fired thousands of people and they become sort of the face of what went wrong with the whole DEI and ESG movement in the US and nobody wants to be. Wants to be bud lighted in this, in this day and age.
[00:45:37] Speaker A: Tell us about your decision to leave Anheuser Busch after so many years and how you and Vivek Ramaswamy came up with the idea for Strive Capital.
[00:45:50] Speaker B: Yeah, so it was a tough decision. I'd been there for a number of years. I had tons of friends in the business. The beer industry is a fun industry.
I was at the last five Super Bowls and then went to the Masters and did all these fun things that were part of the beer industry. I had a ton of friends there. Wholesalers were great. But saw just the company again changing. I just knew it just wasn't the right fit for me anymore. And so I saw, not only was Anheuser Bush changing because again, I left a year before the Dylan Mulvaney partnership, but I also saw a lot of other companies that were changing. I was living in Atlanta, Georgia during COVID I mentioned Coca Cola earlier when, after Governor Kemp at the time in Georgia signed this voting Georgia Voting Rights act, said, you need an ID to vote. They were one of the very first companies, along with BlackRock and others that said, man, we're against this law. We're pushing back on this ID voter law. Delta Airlines did Major League Baseball, canceled the all star game in 2021. And it was interesting. I was seeing a lot of my friends in Atlanta, Georgia throwing out their major League baseball tickets, throwing out Coca Cola, frustrated with companies getting involved in politics. And so I had a phone call with one of my buddies from high school, Vivek Ramaswamy. So we go back to high school. We were on the same mock trial team in high school. School always kind of kept together when we were in the same sort of schools. And he was saying, you know, I'm seeing the exact same thing. I'm at this biotech company that I started, and all of a sudden my employees and board members and others are asking me to take views on Black Lives Matter and on defund the police. And I said, and he's like, man, I'm just, I'm trying to make life saving drugs and medicines makes no sense. So that sort of got the ball rolling where we said, hey, why is this happening? Why are so many companies getting involved in political issues? Then we started talking about this evolution of away from what Milton Friedman says was the purpose of corporation, which was a focus on shareholders and the stakeholder capitalism movement that had started over the last really four or five years in the U.S. it was led by BlackRock, which was really forcing change at all these different companies. And so we originally started talking about ideas of hey, how do we end up maybe better serving at least half the country, probably more, that just wants politics out of business. So we actually originally thought about starting a bunch of different companies. We thought about creating a new airline. We were going to call it Merit airline. Whereas Delta was getting involved in, you know, voting rights issues and DEI issues. We said, we're just going to start an airline, we're going to hire the best pilots. I don't care what you look like, what your skin color is, who you sleep with. We're going to test with your top 5% of the pilot, we're going to hire you and we're going to charge $100 more than every Delta flight and we're going to have the safest airlines. We thought about creating alternative to Coca Cola be called like just Pop without politics and it was just going to serve Pop and not get involved in politics. We ended up with the idea of going of creating a company called Strive. And we ended up creating Strive to be an alternative to BlackRock. Whereas BlackRock was pushing stakeholder capitalism, ESG and DEI. Our whole idea was why don't we just be sort of the defenders of American free market shareholder capitalism and why don't we just be the one that's going to invest in the companies and has them to be authentic to their mission, whatever that mission is. If you're an oil and gas company, drill for oil and gas. If you're a company that's creating pop or soda, sell that. If you're in the business of major league baseball, just do major league Baseball, don't necessarily get involved in all these political issues. So it was interesting because at the time that should have been a simple idea. If we come up with that 10 or 15 years ago people would have said so what is that what asset managers do? But three years ago that Wasn't even a contrarian view, that was almost a subversive view that you were going to have sort of an asset management firm just asking companies to be great and excellent at what their mission is, stay in that lane, don't try and solve all these other social and political issues with the government. But I think because we were doing something that might not have been the current thing at the time, but I think it was the right thing to do because of that. There were a lot of people that when we had, I think the courage to stand up and start fighting back against the blackrocks and others. We always say fear is contagious, but courage is contagious too. And a lot of people all of a sudden felt they could speak up. And I think we were making a lot of sense about how we were being a better fiduciary, which is really a legal term to the vast majority of Americans, whether it's via their 401ks or their investment funds that they just want companies to focus on the bottom line, focus on making money, focus on creating great products and services, innovating and then using those shareholder profits, send those to their investors. Then the investors can donate to whatever cause they see fit. So that's how we came up with strive. We've got investors like Bill Ackman, Peter Thiel, Howard Lutnick to help fund. And then we launched in 2022 with our first fund which was an energy fund called Drill drl. And the whole idea with that was whereas the energy industry had been cudgelled over the last couple of years and being asked to pump less oil and gas, our whole thing was like no, no, we need more energy in this company. And at that time that summer, that's when gas was five, six, seven dollars a gallon. So we set was our first fund. Then we had energy funds and a bunch of other funds that we've created. And that's been been a lot of fun creating now a multibillion dollar asset management company. There's a lot of people that share sort of the same philosophy that really exciting.
[00:50:51] Speaker A: So we're coming to the end of the hour. Any feedback from your former colleagues at AB InBed? Whether firsthand or maybe secondhand, how they receive the publication of your book?
[00:51:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's funny, I've been, I've been told that, you know, the higher ups at Anheuser Busch have essentially said no one's allowed to chat with me or you know, share their view, but I still have tons of friends in the industry. Who, for everyone that reaches out, says, I mean, you basically nailed it in terms of, you know, what went wrong over the last 10 years of the company, the changes that happened, why it was bad for the business. And then I've been pretty consistent, I think, for the last two years about what the company really needs to do to get back on track. And I think the thing that most excites current employees at Anheuser Busch, but also there's a whole distributor network as well of Anheuser Busch holsters their family owned businesses across the country. They really reach out to me because I've been pretty vociferous in saying that I think it's time that InBev, the parent company of Anheuser Busch, that they actually sell the Anheuser Busch business unit, which is based in the US Back to US Investors. I think that's the only way that you can have somebody credibly say that they screwed up, that the company is no longer going to get involved in political and social issues. We're not attached to a European parent that is more progressive with ESG and dei. And I think that if you come out and I don't know, I mean, the US citizens tend to be more forgiving folks. And I always say, like the path to redemption, it really goes through forgiveness. But to be forgiven, you need to admit that there was a mistake and that mistake still hasn't been admitted. The best way to do that is sell the US Business unit back, sell it to either the Bush family, sell it to Warren Buffett, sell it to somebody, and then have folks that can clearly articulate to the American public that business is back, owned by Americans. Americans are going to run it. We're going to run this to sell beer and we're going to sell a portfolio of beers. By the way, we have beers for runners, like for Mick, that's Mick Ultram. We have beers for hunters and fishermen like Bush. We have Bud Light. Is going to be for everyone in terms of this, that likes humor in sports and football, but we're not touching politics. But hey, if you want to be more LGBTQ and progressive, we have craft beer brands in Seattle. We have something called Elysian. And yes, they do a big, you know, transgender day every single year. That's that. But I, that's the way that I think that the company needs to move forward. Is it being clear about this portfolio of brands that, that serve different people? And that's the only way to get it back? And when I have that message out there, I think people get pretty excited. And a lot of people here in the US would wish that InBev would sell the US back to America.
[00:53:23] Speaker A: They will sell it to you and Vivek. Who knows. So anyway, wonderful, wonderful book. Last Call for Bud Light, the Fall and Future of America's Favorite Beer also has a wonderful audio version. So highly recommend. Really appreciate you, Anson, and looking forward to getting some graphic novel to your kids.
[00:53:45] Speaker B: No, I can't wait. That's great. Thank you so much for having me. This is a. This is a dream. Ayn Rand was one of the biggest influences in my life. I still, on an annual basis, tend to read the courtroom scene from the Fountainhead. I think it's the best speech of any book that I've ever read. So thank you so much for having me on. Really appreciate it. And I can't wait for this graphic novel.
[00:54:03] Speaker A: Absolutely. And also a special thanks to everybody who joined us today, all of your great questions.
I will not be here next week. I'm going to be giving the microphone to our senior scholar, Stephen Hicks, as well as Rob Trzynski. They're going to be talking about the tension between academic freedom and what is government's role in all of that. So very timely. Of course. Remember that the Atlas Society is a nonprofit, and if you like this kind of content and programming and all of the ways that we are innovatively trying to connect young people with Ayn Rand's ideas, go ahead and head over to atlasssociety.comorg donate thanks so much, everybody.
