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Feb. 14, 2025 20:00-21:07 - CSPAN
01:06:42
After Words Anson Frericks, "Last Call for Bud Light"
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo Source
Participants
Main
a
anson frericks
46:48
Appearances
brandon gill
rep/r 00:45
e
emily randall
rep/d 01:17
sarah mcbride
rep/d 01:13

Speaker Time Text
Corporate America's Dilemma 00:15:25
unidentified
I'm one of the last segregated high schools in the state and the country rather in South Carolina.
And I think about all of the opportunities that weren't afforded her, you know, coming out of segregation.
And I bring that perspective to Oregon, saying, you know, my mom was a rural kid that didn't have a lot of opportunities.
But I'm going to make sure that I bring that forth for all of the kids in Oregon.
Watch new members of Congress all next week, starting at 9.30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN.
Here's what's coming up on C-SPAN.
Next, it's Book TV's author interview program afterwards with the former president of Anheuser-Busch, Anson Freyrichs.
Then from the Oval Office, President Trump signs two executive orders, and later, remarks from Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference.
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Now on Book TV's author interview program Afterwards, former Anheuser-Busch executive Anson Freerichs offers his insights into the Bud Light controversy, declining sales, and the future of the company.
He's interviewed by Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Richard Morrison.
Afterwards is a weekly interview program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work.
Thanks for being with us.
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
Thanks for having me this morning.
unidentified
Now, your book covers a lot of territory from 150 years of an iconic American company to 20-some years of your own career and a great deal of changes in corporate America and globalization and some environmental, social, and political themes that have been becoming more dramatic and controversial in America in the past 10 years.
So with all of that, which hopefully we'll get into all of it, the real question is, why did you write this book?
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
Well, I didn't write this book because I think there's been really a lot of things that have gone wrong in corporate America over the last 10 years.
I think corporate America, which used to be a real unifying force here in the United States, where people come together based off of really a mission to try and achieve a mission of a company.
And that's what it came for.
And people, it didn't matter if you were black, white, gay, straight, Democrat, Republican, used to come into the workforce.
That was something that actually brought us together.
We usually had our politics outside of the workforce.
And then really over the last 10 years, really kind of those two factors, they combined together.
You had corporate America getting increasingly politicized.
I think it fractured this country more than it's been fractured in the past.
And I think that we saw a lot of bad things that happen when corporate America got involved in a lot of political issues, whether it was companies advocating to defund the police or overturn election integrity laws or get involved in certain transgender ideology as well.
I think it was frankly bad for business and bad for American free market capitalism, which has created some of the most prosperous and wealthy societies in the history of the world.
But then also I think it was bad for our democracy that we live in.
Instead of individual citizens being able to vote at the ballot box for initiatives that they want to see enacted in their local communities, all of a sudden they had large corporations, CEOs, others opining on a lot of these political issues.
So the book is really about kind of what went wrong in corporate America over the last 10 years, how it led to a more fragmented society.
I think most importantly, what can we do moving forward to get back to a society where we have business focused on business, we have government focused on government, and why that's going to be good for the American experiment moving forward?
unidentified
You know, so it's interesting.
I found it fascinating that although you voiced plenty of concerns and complaints along the way with some of the companies you worked for and the bosses you've had, that I feel like your book is kind of a love letter to corporate America, or at least what it could and should be.
And I think that might maybe surprise some people who think of the corporate world as being boring or drab or that it's not exciting.
It's all about bean counting and things like that.
And so I wonder, how would you talk to a skeptic who sort of has a negative view of life in corporate America and describe how being a corporate executive can be fun and exciting and fulfilling?
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I think most importantly, I think it's a love letter maybe to American capitalism.
And here in the U.S., you can come in, you can create amazing companies.
Each company usually has an amazing entrepreneurial American dream story.
I think Anheuser-Busch is one of those.
Started by a couple of immigrants in the late 1860s, 1870s.
It survived things like prohibition over the years and went on to thrive and they created the world's largest beer company.
And I think from a corporate standpoint, I still think there's something to be said that most people in this country, they continue to work at large companies, large organizations.
Large organizations, they provide a lot of stability.
They provide good income.
They provide a lot of innovation that we like to see in the U.S.
And for a lot of people, it's an opportunity to advance in your career, to move up, to get promotions.
And so there's a lot of things that I think are good about large organizations and good companies.
I think a lot of those things were really lost over the last 10 years.
But again, corporate America sort of lost its focus.
It lost its mission.
It lost what it was supposed to be doing, which is creating great products, services, serve its customers, serve its shareholders.
And we got lost towards this more, we can get a little bit of stakeholder capitalism model where businesses are supposed to be everything to everyone, ultimately earned up and ended up serving nobody.
And the people that really lost were the American consumer.
And I think a lot of employees at companies as well ended up losing their jobs when companies, they lost a lot of customers.
And I think Bud Light became the poster child of this movement, where instead of a marketing campaign that brought people together, alienated millions of customers, company lost billions of dollars of shareholder value.
Thousands of employees lost their jobs across Anheuser-Busch, its suppliers and its wholesalers.
The company's not better off for it.
So that's the bad part of corporate America.
But I think the good part is there's a lot of things companies can do to create jobs, create innovation, create products and services, be parts of communities, provide stability.
And that's, I think, the good part of corporate America that I want to bring back.
unidentified
Yeah, and corporate America is part of it.
But of course, a lot of the biggest companies that we know and that are in the headlines are global international corporations.
And, you know, you joined Anheuser-Busch, an iconic American company, probably one of the most famous brands out there early in your career.
But most of your time, as you describe in the book, was spent working for bosses from Brazil and Belgium since Anheuser-Busch was bought by the larger company InBEV many years ago.
So you talk about, which I thought was very interesting, not always taking the American side, but pointing out that Anheuser-Busch as an American company has its advantages and disadvantages.
And the big conglomerate in BEV had its own pluses and minuses as well.
How did that sort of ferment between a traditional American company and a big international conglomerate, what effect did that have on your career?
And what does it say about American capitalism if some of the most famous American companies aren't really American-owned anymore?
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I think there's a couple issues at this point.
I think where we're heading going forward is we're heading much more towards sort of a company's need to have American values.
We're obviously heading more towards the Donald Trump America First agenda.
And maybe over the last 20 years, when you had organizations that might have been more global organizations, companies were coming in, buying American companies, had part of more of a global agenda, as long as they at least shared somewhat American values, American cultural values, abided by American laws.
At the time, we allowed companies to continue to go on and consolidate and do mergers.
I think where we're heading moving forward, I don't know if that's going to be the case anymore because we've seen a lot of problems over the last 20 years with foreign entities coming in, buying great American institutions or coming into the U.S. and to some degree, almost subverting sort of American values.
You're seeing it playing out right now with what's going on with TikTok, where why is TikTok being potentially banned in the U.S.?
Because TikTok is obviously owned by China.
They're controlled to a large degree by the Chinese Communist Party.
TikTok is collecting a lot of data on American citizens.
They are potentially giving American citizens information or seeing data that might be contradictory to sort of American values and free speech.
So there's a lot of pressure right now to actually have TikTok sell in the U.S. because it's not helping sort of the American goals and contributing to kind of this America-first agenda.
I think with something like Anheuser-Busch as well, we're in an interesting spot because Anheuser-Busch and a lot of other companies over the last 20 years, they came to the U.S., a company called InBEV, it was owned by a couple of Brazilians.
They had consolidated the South American beer market.
Then they bought this company called Inner Brew, which is over in Europe, which owns Stella Artois and Hogarton Left.
They came in and bought Anheuser-Busch.
This happened in 2008.
And for the 2008 to really the 2000, I'll call it 17-18 time period, actually there was a lot of shared cultural similarities.
Companies believed in meritocracy.
Companies believed in sort of this American dream.
Companies believed in sort of American free market capitalism, being able to grow.
But really in this 2018, 2019 time period, a lot of companies adopted not necessarily American free market shareholder capitalism, as Milton Friedman says was the purpose of a corporation, which is to focus on its shareholders.
But a lot of them adopted this European stakeholder capitalism model.
That was the sort of the Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum, more the Davos sort of crowd that said that the purpose of a corporation is to focus on all of its stakeholders, not just its shareholders.
And that's a model that may have worked in Europe for certain reasons, even though that model has shown versus the U.S. model to have substandard returns and then also less relevance in terms of being able to produce better economic returns, lower inflation rates, lower unemployment.
But all of a sudden, Anheuser-Busch really adopted this stakeholder capitalism model.
ESG, DEI, are really downstream.
So environmental social governance, diversity, equity, inclusion.
A lot of those programs came in in this sort of same timeframe.
I'm getting into all the reasons why that happened.
But I think that that's sort of problematic when all of a sudden that we're subverting sort of this American capitalism model that used to be much more sort of free market-based.
Companies could pursue their own mission.
They could have their own cultures.
They could hire in whatever way they wanted to.
But now you're bringing in these other sort of outside factors.
And certainly, I think the foreign-owned companies were more susceptible than others because they were based in Europe or they're based in China.
And so they have to abide by some of the European and Chinese regulations, which I think come into the U.S.
And that's where I really see things being problematic moving forward if sort of these foreign companies are coming in and putting in foreign values into American companies, subverting sort of the culture of these companies and making their U.S. counterparts less competitive.
That's the big problem that I see going forward with foreign-owned companies owning here in the U.S.
And there might be a reason to start having more U.S. ownership.
Maybe some of these businesses should sell their U.S. business units as we're seeing with what's going on with TikTok right now.
unidentified
So you mentioned the difference between the traditional shareholder-focused approach of capitalism, as famously described by Milton Friedman.
You quote Milton Friedman's famous New York Times article from 1970 that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize its profits and serve its shareholders.
But if we go to, if we look at the, like you said, the sort of the European, the more Klaus Schwab-oriented World Economic Forum-aligned view of stakeholder capitalism, that shareholders are just one of a corporation's many stakeholders with, usually when this is described, someone will say, oh, well, employees will be a stakeholder, suppliers will be a stakeholder, the local community where a corporation offers will be stakeholders.
Those are often suggested, but of course they're not exhaustive.
And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the stakeholderism.
So this idea and who gets to be a stakeholder.
Does anyone who raises their hand and says, I'm interested in this corporation, become a stakeholder?
Or are corporations still able to define for themselves who their stakeholders are, who they consider important?
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, no, that's a great question.
I think that really gets to the heart of this book is ultimately what is the purpose of a corporation and who does it serve?
And I think even more importantly, who does it not serve?
And in the traditional American view, you have Milton Friedman, 1970s, again, famous New York Times op-ed.
So the purpose of a corporation is to serve its shareholders.
How does it, and who are its shareholders?
These are the people that actually own, have an ownership interest in the organization.
And then how does it serve its shareholders?
Well, it makes great products, services.
That creates revenue.
That allows the company to hire more employees.
Those employees, they can create more products, which leads to more revenue, more innovation.
The company can continue to grow.
It can pay taxes and it can do all the great things that a corporation does.
Then that happened in the 1970s.
What's interesting, at the same time, the 1970s, there was this European model that took hold over in Europe.
And this is this stakeholder model.
As put forward by Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, the Davos crowd, which said, no, no, no, actually the purpose of a corporation is to serve all stakeholders.
And those stakeholders, as you said, are not only the shareholders of the organization, but those are employees and those are the government.
They can be activists as well.
They can be community members, people that don't necessarily have ownership interest in the organization, but they are impacted by the company.
And of course, in both models, the shareholder model with Milton Friedman, of course, a company has other stakeholders that are involved in the business, but the one that they hold above all other are the shareholders.
You do what's best by shareholders, and then generally all the other stakeholders will benefit long run.
Whereas the stakeholder model says that all stakeholders are essentially equal.
It doesn't say if shareholders take precedent or employees or the government or activist or community members.
So it's always been somewhat ambiguous and nebulous.
And I think both systems purport to do two things.
And those two things are create better economic returns for the company and create better societal outcomes.
And I just take a look at this and I take a look at both broad-based kind of U.S. versus European systems over the last 40 years.
Let's talk over the last 40 years.
And if you take a look at sort of broad-based U.S. stock market returns over the last 40 years, take the S ⁇ P 500, and you compare that to its equivalent in Europe, the S ⁇ P 500 in the U.S. has increased on average by about 10% a year over the last 40 years, where its European counterparts have increased by 7%.
So that's a big delta.
That's 3%.
That might seem not like a lot to you, but if you had a $100,000 retirement, for example, in 1970 and invested in the U.S., it'd be worth $1.5 million today.
ESG Risks and Recession Impact 00:15:28
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
Whereas if you invested in Europe, it'd be worth $1.5 million today.
That's the difference of the compounding of interest.
So the U.S. system works well there.
And then the second piece is, okay, well, what was better off?
Was the U.S. societally better off than Europe?
I think on almost every single broad-based prosperity metric, whether it's GDP growth, whether it's per capita income, inflation rates, unemployment rates, I think the U.S. has beaten the European stakeholder model on that piece as well.
So in terms of, I think, kind of why is that?
Well, it was this very clear of what companies in the U.S. are focused on, what their mission is.
They're focused on shareholder returns, and then there were a lot of other tangential benefits otherwise.
Whereas in Europe, a lot of companies got distracted.
A lot of companies were trying to do things not necessarily for the mission of the company or to make dollars for their shareholders, but they might have some sort of other piece where they're trying to work with community members, they're trying to work with activists, they're trying to work with governments.
I think that's distracting to a lot of businesses.
And then ultimately, it just shows when they're not as competitive, they're not able to grow as much.
And then also, I don't think the European continent benefited either.
unidentified
You know, and a lot of people have wondered to the extent that there has been a significant shift in American corporate governance towards what you call the European model, the sort of World Economic Forum model, over the past several years.
You know, where did it come from?
And why, if, on one hand, the traditional American view is more than the Milton-Friedman view, why do we seem to have had a move in the other direction?
And I think one of the things in your book that really connects to this that may not be obvious to people who are just following the headlines from day to day is the background of the mortgage meltdown and the Great Recession and Occupy movement, Occupy New York, also here in Washington, D.C. There were two different Occupy encampments back then.
I remember them well.
What was the connection between that sort of rising hostility to big business, the corporate response to that, and then this sort of kind of creeping stakeholderism, if you will, in American big business?
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
No, that's right.
So if you take a look, I mean, going over the last hundred years or so, there's been much more of a gradual march towards more free markets, more free trade, more openness, more liberalism in capital markets.
But there's blips along the way.
And some of those blips can happen if there's a Great Recession, which kind of took in FDR's New Deal.
And then there were other blips that have happened along the way, which have led to more government regulation or more tightening.
I think one of the last times there was actually kind of a blip in this march towards more free markets, more capitalism, more interdependence, was really what happened in the Great Recession.
If you recall during the Great Recession of 2008, 2009, you had a lot of the banks that they had lent money, subprime mortgages to a lot of individuals.
A lot of individuals lost their homes, but a lot of banks got bailed out by the government.
And there was a lot of anger and a lot of angst when this happened.
There was a whole Occupy Wall Street movement that happened subsequently, and a lot of banks were trying to look for ways to start repairing their image.
And they started to look to repair their image.
And there was a kind of an easy way to do so.
And there was this new idea that had popped up called ESG, environmental social governance is to how sort of corporations and others should work together.
That term was first coined in the year 2005.
It was a UN initiative to think about how companies and governments could work closer together.
The U.S. generally kind of reflected it, didn't really do anything with it, didn't want anything to touch for the first six, seven, eight years.
But then after the Great Recession, all of a sudden, how can you repair your image?
How can you look better?
This ESG thing looked kind of pretty good initially.
Hey, first, companies need to be good environmental actors.
Of course, that they don't necessarily can't pollute the environment beyond what's tolerated, or you can get fined for that.
If you're an oil company, you just don't want to spill oil and gas.
On the social side, of course, companies can't have child labor.
They don't want to do that.
That would violate a lot of labor laws and governance.
There's a lot of simple governance things.
You want to be audited, for example.
You want to have board members with different viewpoints and diversity of board views.
All those just sounded very good, and they were very benign when this ESG acronym first started up.
But like most things, you start following the money in terms of where did ESG go wrong.
And really where ESG and the stakeholder movement really sort of ramped up in a bigger way, two big events.
I think McKinsey in 2014, they released a state report.
So McKinsey is the big global consulting firm that a lot of corporations use called Diversity Matters, Diversity Wins.
And they were showing that boards and companies that are more diverse are ones that perform better economically.
And they use this to essentially sell a lot of their consulting services on what became DEI policies, diversity, equity, inclusion policies, for them to try and make more money.
Even though they couldn't really replicate the results of this study, but they used it to make more money.
And at the same time, in 2016, there was another big event that happened.
This is when Donald Trump gets elected president.
And Donald Trump getting elected president was a big shock to the system, especially if you're on the international order.
And if you're especially in your Europe and your other organizations that relied on the U.S. to participate in global organizations like the Paris Climate Agreements, like the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Coalition, which Donald Trump pulled out of all of these organizations.
And then all of a sudden, there was a big reaction that said, well, if the U.S. and government is not going to solve existential crises of climate change, of systemic racism, of human rights, et cetera, well, then we now need businesses to do this.
And you had a lot of large progressive organizations with a lot of money.
You had endowments like Harvard, Yale.
You had pension funds like the University, or sorry, the California pension system, New York pension system, European sovereign wealth funds, Norway, et cetera.
They had a lot of money.
And they started taking this money and they invest it with large asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, which manage almost $20 trillion worth of assets on behalf of these institutions and on behalf of kind of everyday folks like you and me with our 401ks.
But these large organizations that had almost a plurality of the assets, they started to say, okay, if you're going to manage our money, we want you to start solving sort of the business or the issues, the big existential crisis issues that the U.S. government is no longer doing.
But if you want us to work with you and invest money in your businesses, you now need to get involved in these issues.
So all of a sudden, in really this 2017, 2018 timeframe, you have Larry Fink, who's the head of BlackRock.
He starts writing letters to organizations telling them they have to earn their social license if they are going to have BlackRock support on voting matters at corporations or within the boardroom of corporations.
And they wield a lot of power in the boardroom because BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, they are the single largest shareholders in every single corporation and almost every single corporation in corporate America.
They own approximately 25 to 30% of almost every single company with their collective voting power.
And since their biggest people, their biggest client dollars come from a lot of these progressive funds, they were putting now a lot of pressure on corporations to act and behave differently.
The big problem with this was that if all of a sudden they were changing the mission of an organization away from shareholder value, which is generally sort of the principle of law in the U.S., that if you are managing someone's money, you're a fiduciary for them.
Most pension funds and most people, you have an obligation to maximize the value of their dollars without inputting any political or social issues in there.
This was somewhat problematic for the ESG promoting asset managers that all of a sudden wanted to put ESG into the corporate governance of every single organization and that also wanted them to be able to now philosophically manage companies differently, more towards the stakeholder capitalism and ESG piece.
So in 2018, Larry Fink was the head of something called the Business Roundtable along with JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon and others.
And they got 200 of the largest companies in the U.S. to evolve the purpose of the corporation away from the Milton-Friedman model more to this European model to appease a lot of more of the progressive pension funds and endowments that they had, but also because now they could start selling ESG labeled funds.
And these ESG-labeled funds, what they would do is they might take out a tobacco company because they would say that that didn't meet certain ESG characteristics of environmentally friendly.
They might take out an oil and gas fund.
They might do some scoring systems for companies that did not meet a certain level of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
They would take these companies out of indices and they would charge investors on average three times, four times more money to put money into a so-called ESG fund as opposed to just a basic S ⁇ P 500 fund.
So there you start following the money.
You follow it from McKinsey that was selling a lot of ESG and DEI services.
You follow the large index funds that all of a sudden were the largest investors in the companies.
They're telling companies to put in these ESG measures so they can put you into an ESG fund that they're going to charge investors three to four times the amount of money from.
And then they changed some of the purpose of the corporation, the U.S., to make it legally able to do so, kind of leading into the 2019-2020 COVID timeframe.
unidentified
Yeah, I remember when the Business Roundtable put out its sort of updated view of the purpose of a corporation in the modern world.
And there's a section in your book that sort of reflects some of the new statements that were going around.
I'll read a brief section here from the late 2010s.
In the first category were things like Anheuser-Busch's pledges to, quote, continue fostering an inclusive workplace so that underrepresented groups across our markets are not only represented but can succeed in business.
The company also promised to, quote, respect human rights in our operations across the value chain, end quote.
The thing I thought was interesting about the BRT update and then specific phrases like that that came out from various corporations was that if you had asked the CEO of that corporation, did you just start respecting human rights today with this new statement?
Did you not respect anyone's human rights yesterday?
Surely they would have said that they had been doing that all along, which makes me wonder how much of a change these new statements really were.
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, some of it was definitely performative because you're absolutely right.
If you just think about it, whether it's ESG or DEI, really these are just risk that companies have been managing for, I mean, centuries.
Every company has tons of risk that they have to manage.
I mean, there's hundreds of risks that every company manages on a daily basis.
Banks have to manage interest rate risk.
You have social media companies that have to manage risk related to legally allowable content online.
You can't have pornography online in certain ways, for example.
But what was interesting about this, how ESG was packaged, the complete focus was just on the environmental risk, the social risk, and the governance risk, as if no other risk really mattered over this time period.
And it was interesting is this whole cottage industry of consultants and lawyers and then also asset managers really honed in on this ESG piece.
This became the massive focus for every single organization, almost to the point where you didn't focus on a lot of other risk.
If you think about companies that have had a lot of issues over the last couple of years, we'll get into the whole Bud Light piece, but Bud Light's biggest Risk, it's not really environmental, social governance.
Its biggest risk is brand risk because no one can really tell the difference between Bud Light, Miller Light, Cora's Light.
It tastes the same to 95% of the people.
How it distinguishes itself is really its brand.
Other companies, Silicon Valley Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, they collapsed two years ago, as you might recall.
And what's interesting, if you were a bank, I mean, your biggest risk are essentially your interest rate risk and your liquidity risk.
That's the biggest risk that you have.
Yet, Silicon Valley Bank, they had, I believe, it was eight different committees that were dedicated to climate risk and green transition risk and DEI risk and you name it risk.
So it was too much of a focus, I would think, on risks that had always kind of been there, but now all of a sudden there was more performative that you have to tell, again, your BlackRock, State Streets, Vanguards, you tell all of them about what you were doing specifically on all these risks and heightening those risks relative to anything else.
And the same way we talk about this, you know, shareholder versus stakeholder piece, you know, your shareholders always used to be the people that you would hold above everybody else.
Of course, you have to have employees and treat them well.
Of course, you have to have suppliers and treat them well.
Of course, you have to have community members and be part of that.
But you always look through the lens of what's best for shareholders.
This is sort of the other piece of what happened from this stakeholder model: the biggest risk they were talking about, they almost elevated these ESG risk above all the other risk when a lot of companies have been managing hundreds of risk for years.
And each company is unique.
Each company has its own mission.
Each company should look at its own risk it needs to manage through its own lens, not necessarily through this peanut butter spread approach of ESG that was foisted on all companies in corporate America.
unidentified
Well, you said something there, which I think is very fascinating, which you mentioned in the book a couple of times, which is that most Americans can't tell the difference between Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Light if you take it out of the bottle and put it in an unlabeled red solo cup.
That might be surprising to some people, to some viewers, that someone who spent so much of their time selling Bud Light would make a point of saying that.
But I think there's some sort of a deeper question here, which is what exactly does it say about consumer capitalism and American market forces that so much of what makes a product distinct is in fact its packaging, its marketing, its history, rather than the product itself.
It is.
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
I mean, if you take a look at almost every single consumer product, I don't care if it's shoes, beverages, food, clothes, et cetera.
Most of it, they're almost the ultimate commodities.
But what they really, a brand does, it makes you feel something, makes you feel different.
And that's what we've done an amazing job at marketing here in the United States about being able to export what a lot of brands feel like.
If you think about a company like Nike, for example, it makes you feel like you're an athlete.
You feel fit.
That's what Nike's brand is, Budweiser.
It was always the American dream.
And it's actually interesting to me that we sell, or that Anheuser-Busch, they sell more Budweiser in China than they do in the United States because it's that feeling that they export a freedom of the American dream.
And I think a lot of people, especially over in China, would prefer to be here in the U.S. versus over there.
So they do a really amazing job of building brands and building sort of a feeling that connects with consumers.
And when consumers are drinking that product or eating that product or wearing that product, it says something about them.
And it's sort of an emotional connection that you need to build over time.
And it takes a long time to build that emotional connection.
And then it takes a lot of time.
You're building a lot of trust with the consumer about who you are as a brand.
And unfortunately, I think it's, you know, Warren Buffett has the great quote: it takes a lifetime to build a reputation in a second to ruin it.
And I think, especially for brands, so to speak, that are in commoditized industries and there's other products that most American consumers can't distinguish from.
Kid Rock Returns: Rebranding Anheuser-Busch 00:15:59
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
I would like to think of myself, I can distinguish between a Bud Light, a Miller Light, and a Cora's Light.
And I think of that brand as uniquely tasting different, but a lot of people just can't.
And unfortunately, then when a brand loses sort of its essence, what it was, who it was targeting, the emotional feeling it had, then all of a sudden people will go elsewhere very, very quickly.
unidentified
You know, and I wonder also if you could talk about the challenge of managing a portfolio of brands.
Because of course, we talk about people are sort of loyal to or have positive ideas about companies like Nike, but that's an entire giant global corporation.
Anything with the swoosh can be Nike.
But if you look at Anheuser-Busch, AB Inbev, they have dozens, if not hundreds of brands in different categories.
How do you sort of square the circle of saying we're one company and our company has certain values and stands for certain things, but each one of our products has this different range of emotional associations we're trying to get customers to connect with?
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, definitely.
I talk about this in the book a lot.
And I use the example of Netflix.
I think they do the best job of being an organization that has a very clear mission as Netflix, which they want to entertain the world.
That is their mission.
We want to entertain the world.
And then when they do that, they have tons of different shows.
And Netflix is pretty interesting that a couple of years ago, there were a lot of calls for Netflix to be canceled because they were going to show a Dave Chappelle special where Dave Chappelle, the comedian, was making jokes that people in the LGBTQ community did not like.
But Netflix held its ground and it said, listen, we are not going to censor content.
We're not going to censor speech at the Netflix level because again, our mission is to entertain the world.
But what we're going to do is we're going to put out a lot of content that people in the LGBTQ community might like.
People more on the conservative side might like.
Christians might like.
Atheists might like.
We're going to put out a ton of different content, but we're going to let the consumer choose.
And that's how we think that we are going to authentically be able to carry out our mission.
That's how we're going to be able to rebuild trust.
And they came out with this excellence document as well that they said, we want excellent individuals working here, and we want people that are okay to work on things that they might not be comfortable with because you need to sign up for the Netflix mission.
And if that's not you, there might be better places to be.
And I think even for a company like Anheuser-Busch, the same rules and same logic apply.
Just like Netflix, they serve a bunch of different customers.
They have a ton of different content, a big portfolio.
Anheuser-Busch is the same way.
And that their broader mission is they dream big to create a future with more cheers.
That's their global mission.
That's what they're going for right now.
So great.
Well, if you're going to create a future with more cheers, you have to be able to make people cheersing that are in maybe more red states, that are in more blue states, people that are black, white, Asian, gay, straight, you name it.
And so they should have a whole different group of brands that supports those types of customers.
And if you take a look at their portfolio, they can have brands like Bud Light, which this is using the Bud Light VP of marketing, their words, used to be more fratty and maybe it was out of touch.
But if that's Bud Light and that's what Bud Light is and that's why customers love Bud Light, let Bud Light be Bud Light.
And then if there are other brands, and Bud Light was never got into political issues, never really touched controversial issues before.
People loved Bud Light because it was remarkably apolitical.
It served Democrats and Republicans alike.
And it did that because it united folks around sports and music and beer.
That's what Bud Light was.
Let Bud Light be that.
Whereas there's a lot of more progressive beers in the Anheuser-Busch portfolio.
They own a lot of craft breweries in places like Seattle or places like Chicago.
And those breweries, they put out more progressive beers.
I think that they want to have, I think it was Goose Island that they put out, I think it was called a gay IPA.
And they sold that in Chicago and nobody cared because that's what Chicago is and what their customer wants.
So I think they just have to be clear again about the broader mission of the company.
They serve other folks, but they do it through individual unique brands.
Let those brands be unique.
Let them serve certain people.
I think that will be best for Bud Light.
I think that will also be best for broader corporate America as well.
And if you take even a look at stock price performance, Netflix came out with this culture of excellence document two or three years ago.
Their stock has been up two or three X since then, and they just reported record subscriber and subscriber growth as well.
Whereas over that same time period, Anheuser-Busch is down almost 50% from its stock price and is still losing volume and still losing customers.
unidentified
Well, yeah, we would be remiss, of course, if we did not talk about the most high-profile Anheuser-Busch event of recent history, which is the now infamous marketing collaboration between Bud Light and Trans Influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
And that promotion turned out to be what I think everyone could agree to be sort of a PR disaster for the brand.
Although I thought it was interesting that in the book, when you describe this, you mentioned that while you think Dylan Mulvaney was not a great brand ambassador for Bud Light, she might have been perfectly fine for any number of other brands having to do with cosmetics or women's clothes, for example.
And that it was more about the fit with the brand than it was a disagreement with this particular individual or what she represented.
But I think, you know, feel free to talk about how you think all of that went and give your top takeaways.
But I would say also, after all the drama of the past couple years, and the controversy has sort of been recurring in the news multiple times since then, what do you think the final takeaways are for other brand managers?
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, definitely.
There are certain brands, and I'll use the example, I use Ben ⁇ Jerry's a lot in the book.
Ben ⁇ Jerry's, they're very clear about what they are as a brand, and it's very different than Bud Light.
Ben and Jerry says, we are going to use ice cream to advance a socially progressive mission.
And so they come up with different ice creams, empowerment, which is to support women empowerment causes.
They had a pecan resist brand, which was supposed to be against Donald Trump when Donald Trump first won.
It was a Pecon Resist.
And they have a bunch of other different brands that they use.
And right on their website, they're very clear that we are going to use this to fight for things like overturning election integrity laws, defunding the police.
Recently, they wanted to give back land that's owned by Americans to Native American tribes.
And so for something like Ben ⁇ Jerry's, Dylan Mulvaney could be a perfect person and a perfect brand ambassador because Dylan Mulvaney was at the Biden White House advocating for gender affirmation care, Advocating for biological men to compete against women in sports.
So, on those socially progressive causes, Dylan and BEN AND Jerry's would have been a great sort of partnership.
For something like BUD Light, which, again, never had any sort of controversial folks that were really associated with BUD Light, whenever there was controversy with BUD Light, historically, they would usually kind of sort of put down the controversy really quickly and say there was an apology and a mistake.
This happened actually as recently as 2015, 2014, 2015 timeframe, where the company, they had a lot of these labels on BUD Light and the campaign of the time was being up for whatever.
So when you're drinking BUD Light, you're up for whatever.
You're up for hanging out with your buddies, You're hanging out and going to a game, But they put a lot of these labels on their beer brands.
And those labels would say, again, the perfect beer when you're up for whatever, or the perfect beer for hanging out with your buddies for the night, the perfect beer for busting out a couple of your dance moves. But they had one label on there that said the perfect beer for removing no from your vocabulary for the night. And at the time, this was even kind of before the Me Too movement,
but it was seen as kind of promoting removing no from your vocabulary, which wasn't seen right. It kind of got into a little bit of promoting rape culture. And so there was a lot of controversy around it. The company very quickly, they actually apologized, said, hey, we screwed up. This shouldn't have happened. And they removed that beer and the labels from the market very quickly. And quickly, then everybody moved on. They didn't fight it. They didn't run from it. And that was very different than the approach they took this time with Dylan Mulvaney,
where the company got themselves into a big issue and where the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney probably wasn't the right partnership. That was damaging in and of itself because a lot of the loyal customers that just wanted Bud Light to focus on football and sports and music were all of a sudden confused about now all of a sudden they had a biological male dressed as Audrey Hepburn in a bathtub,
not even knowing what March Madness was, which was this event happened during March Madness timeframe. And they were just confused about the marketing partnership. But then I even think more so, the company's response was just as damaging. And I think for whether it's brand marketers or companies, One of the biggest takeaways is how you actually do manage when you're in a PR crisis.
And I think the biggest piece is you have to take accountability.
And this is something that the company never took at all.
They tried three times to issue responses to the controversy with Dylan Mulvaney.
Never once did they actually address the controversy by name.
They never once addressed Dylan Mulvaney.
And they were never clear about what BUD Light was going to be or who it was going to serve moving forward.
So they lost a lot of control and they lost a lot of the narrative.
And I think a lot as to why the company is still down 30, almost 40% on BUD Light.
They haven't recovered any of their share.
They continue to lose beer volume.
They continue to lose customers.
I think the biggest piece is, if you ever want the path to really redemption is it goes through forgiveness.
And I think there's a lot of people that would love to see Anheuser-Busch and BUD Light have a great American comeback.
But for that to happen, they have to be forgiven. And to be forgiven, you have to admit that there was a mistake. And the company never admitted there was a mistake, never admitted there was a controversy. And I think until that happens, they're never going to get that redemption and they're never going to be able to tell sort of this great American comeback story. So even this week,
it's Super Bowl week, the company's going to spend almost $50 million this week on Super Bowl. Super Bowl ads are $7 to $8 million for 30 seconds. Anheuser-Busch bought three minutes worth of commercials. And I think that this is all going to go down the drain because still a lot of the consumers are not coming back. They're not drinking Bud Light. They're not drinking the other brands because they want the company to be clear about who they're going to be,
who they're going to serve, say that we made a mistake because the Bud Light campaign with Dylan Mulvaney was a mistake based off of who the brand was and who the existing customer was. But again, until that happens, a lot of this money is just going to be kind of thrown down the drain. So to your question about what are the big takeaways for brand marketers and teams is one, know your brand, know your customer, give the customer what they want. And then separately, if you do make a mistake,
own up to it. Be accountable about it. Don't hide from it. Don't run from it because that's the biggest problem you can do when you're facing a tough decision. And there's a great Teddy Roosevelt quote about this: well, the best thing to do is the right decision. The second best is the wrong decision. But the worst thing you can do is make no decision at all. And so I think that's the piece: you got to take accountability. The path to redemption goes through forgiveness. Admit why you were wrong,
unidentified
and people will come back and we'll give you a second chance. Well, yeah, I thought it was very interesting. You mentioned how much of a reservoir of goodwill there still is for brands like Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch, even among the people who were maybe most confused or even upset about that particular marketing campaign. Like Kid Rock, for example, who was famously seen on video firing a weapon,
Shooting up a case of BUD Light.
He was so angry.
And that viral video clip got reposted many times on social media immediately after that.
And him firing that rifle at the BUD Light in the field became sort of a visual shorthand for people who are angry at the brand.
But you mentioned that even Kid Rock himself later said that he would love to bury the hatchet and Endorse BUD Light or be associated with BUD Light and would want to see the company make a comeback.
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
No, you're right.
But the reason that is, which is interesting, is that Kid Rock himself basically got an apology and acknowledgement from the company that they screwed up.
So Kid Rock goes on Joe Rogan's podcast and tells a story where he's at a UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship event.
And the CEO of Anheuser-Busch happened to be there.
And so they ended up meeting and getting together.
And Kid Rock was kind of going hard at this Anheuser-Busch CEO.
Talent Hey, screwed up, telling him how he made the wrong decisions, telling him how he needed to stay out of politics.
The Anheuser-Busch CEO was kind of groveling, said, Yeah, I know, I get it.
But can we maybe grab a beer sometime and get together?
And then so two or three weeks later, Kid Rock, the Anheuser-Busch CEO and some other folks, flew out, met Kid Rock, they had some beers, they got together. And Kid Rock essentially said these guys said that they screwed up and they apologized and that they were unable. The CEO of North America was unable to give a real answer and to give a real mea culpa and to say,
I'm sorry, basically because of the DEI, the ESG, because of all of that pressure, he was really coached into saying certain things and was not able to say other things. So Kid Rock kind of got that apology. And Kid Rock felt that now all of a sudden,
okay, he gets it. He understands that the company here in the U.S. was under pressure, especially from its European owners and others, to not really get involved in the transgender communications and really put something out to make a statement either way. And so that's why Kid Rock is back. I think other people,
maybe Dana White at the Ultimate Fighting Championship, he was given $100 million. So when you're given $100 million, that's maybe why he's back as well. But I think just the American population is just looking for just an admittance of that they screwed up. And I don't think that maybe the current executives and the people at Anheuser-Busch can authentically do it because they've had two years to do it and they haven't. So at this point,
I don't think it looks very genuine, especially as some of the political wins have shifted. They would just look like they're shifting in the political winds. But I think there's a real opportunity for someone to come in. In my mind, I think actually the U.S. is better off. This U.S. business unit here is better off being sold. I think the Europeans and others who own it should sell the U.S. who knows,
maybe sell it to Berkshire Hathaway, somebody like Warren Buffett, who's sitting on a couple hundred million dollars of cash, buy that U.S. business unit, get somebody back in here to talk about now this is back in U.S. hands, how it's back owned by Americans. We have American values once again. The company screwed up,
the past of the past, but now we're going to write the next chapter of this great American success story, a company that's been around for 150 years. It survived Prohibition. It's going to survive the whole Dylan Mulvaney issue, but now it's got to get back to growth. So I think that's the path forward. And that's how the rest of the country can come around and see Anheuser-Busch in the same way that Kid Rock can,
unidentified
because you have to give them an authentic kind of apology and may culpa. Well, speaking of pivoting and turning over a new leaf, you, of course, eventually left ABMBEV and started a new career of your own. And again,
like we said, the book is a bit of like a love letter to living in that world and working in that world. So that no doubt was a difficult choice for you and your family. But talk to us about when and why you made that choice to leave Anheuser-Busch and move into your own new entrepreneurial world. Definitely,
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
it was a very difficult decision. So I worked at Anheuser-Busch for over 10 years. I worked there from 2011 through 2022. So I left actually a year before the Dylan Mulvaney incident. And when I joined Anheuser-Busch, I joined them because the company that they, the word they use more than any other one in the recruiting process were word meritocracy. Is that you can come in here, you can get results. It doesn't matter how long you've been here, what your national origin is, race, gender, sex, et cetera. Don't care. come in here, get results,
Unleashing Innovation: Five Years On 00:14:06
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
and then you can move up the organization very, very quickly. And it was a really interesting firm. I thought they managed a business generally pretty well in terms of reinvesting profits that they generated by managing their costs well into top-line growth. And that was for the first six, seven, eight years was kind of the experience that I had. But really starting in that sort of 2018, 19, 20 timeframe, and especially after COVID, the company really changed. And I think it changed a lot with corporate America also. I think there's a real seminal moment in this country,
and it was really COVID and then after George Floyd, where all of a sudden a lot of companies got pushed off mission. We spoke earlier about this shift from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism. And that really set sort of a lot of kindling up. And remember, that shift happened in that 2018, 2019 timeframe. All of a sudden, COVID happens, and every company got blown off their mission for COVID because there was this so-called real existential threat. I think even at the time,
President Trump at the time said that he was fighting an invisible enemy and even signed something called the Defense Production Act that had companies like GE were making ventilators. You had 3M making masks. You had Delta Airlines flying medical supplies. Anheuser-Busch is doing hand sanitizer. And so all of a sudden,
a lot of corporate America got off track. COVID quickly kind of kind of at least flattening the curve and keeping people out of hospitals. That was solved within a month or two. But then all of a sudden, you have the George Floyd incident that happens. George Floyd gets murdered going into Memorial Day weekend of 2020. And then the next big sort of existential threat and an invisible enemy that corporate America is being called on to address by politicians,
by the BlackRock, state streets, et cetera, was this systemic racism piece. And there's a lot of things happened afterwards where whether it was the BLM movement, whether it was a lot of the DEI complexes came in, chief diversity officers came in. But there was this progressive march to essentially have all companies all of a sudden putting in quota systems, putting in supplier quotas. And DEI got really entrenched in the corporate America at this time. And even things at Anheuser-Busch started to change,
whereas I was recruited to a meritocracy. One of the principles of the company changed from we would promote people basically based off their talents and contributions. It got all of a sudden promoted based off the diversity of your teams. Diversity dashboards started to be introduced at the company. So if you were a manager,
you had to see what the diversity of your team was. And then during the annual performance reviews, you had to talk about the diversity of your team. There were issues as well that I saw at the company as being able even to do partnerships with certain potential suppliers. I was president of Anheuser-Busch in 2022 when I tried to do a partnership with Black Rifle Coffee Company. And Black Rifle Coffee Company,
whose mission was to serve coffee and culture to people who love America, including first responders, military, police. That was an organization that we could not do a partnership with because it wasn't deemed to be DEI appropriate, because it wasn't inclusive enough, because it was against sort of the called the defund the police regime that was going on at the time. And so these are things that didn't make any sense to me. And then broadly, I was also living in Atlanta, Georgia at this time period. And you might recall in 2021,
there was this whole Georgia voting rights initiative that happened. And this is when Governor Kemp signed a law that says you need to have an ID to vote. That didn't seem that crazy to me. I think there's 30 states that have that law. But corporate America's response to this was very eye-opening. You had BlackRock, again,
was the very first company that came out and said, we're against this law. We're going to push back on it. People in Georgia are essentially wrong. Coca-Cola and then Delta, which were headquartered in Atlanta. Then all of a sudden they spoke up against this law and said we're against this law. Major League Baseball that year. The All-Star game was in Atlanta. They canceled the All-Star game that year and moved it to Denver. I was going to sell a lot of beer at the All-Star game in Atlanta,
but then they moved it to Corus Field in Denver. And at Corus Field, our biggest competitor, we weren't going to sell any. So anyway, I saw a lot of changes that were happening broadly in corporate America. A lot of that was being reflected at Anheuser-Busch. And so I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine from high school, A guy named Vivek Ramaswamy, who I've known him for 25 plus years.
Went to high school together, always kept in contact.
This was before he ran for president and co-founded, I guess, co-led DOGE with Elon Musk for a period of time.
We noticed all these changes going on in corporate America.
We thought this evolvement from this shareholder capitalism model to stakeholder capitalism model was causing a lot of companies to get involved in political and social issues that they otherwise wouldn't.
We thought that those political and social issues were going to be bad for business.
It was going to fracture a lot of the company's customer bases.
And it was going to be bad for, more broadly democracy, because instead of against citizens deciding if they want elected officials to put in election integrity laws, instead of having that model, we thought it was a worse model to have CEOs and large corporations opining on these laws. So anyway, at this time period, we went out, we raised money from folks like Peter Thiel, Bill Ackman, Founders Fund,
and we created a new company called Strive Asset Management. And what Strive does is it was actually going to be, it is an alternative to BlackRock, whereas that company wants companies focused on stakeholders and stakeholder capitalism. Strive was created to just be unapologetic about our support of American free market shareholder capitalism,
as Milton Friedman says, was going to be the real purpose of an organization. So in 2022, I left Anheuser-Busch to go and co-found Strive. Strive now manages a couple billion dollars worth of capital and just has a very different sort of message and mission for corporate America,
refocusing them on their business, refocusing them on their products and services, refocusing them on their customers. And so that's where the Strive story is still ongoing. But then a year after I left Anheuser-Busch, that was the time period that the Dylan Mulvaney partnership happened. And sort of it was a colliding of both of my worlds of where I had been at Anheuser-Busch for 10 plus years. I'd been president of Anheuser-Busch sales and distribution company. But then I had co-founded this company called Strive,
unidentified
which was essentially advocating for companies to not do what Anheuser-Busch had just done. Right. And so with all of these controversial policies, whether they're the environmental, social and governance, ESG policies, or diversity,
equity, and inclusion, DEI policies, we've seen some dramatic changes just in the past six to 12 months. And you've mentioned a few companies in your book. I feel like you and your editors must have been editing it up to the last minute before publication because there's some very recent news in there about companies that have reversed or walked back or changed corporate DEI policies in particular. And of course,
anson frericks ▲ ● ▼
with the election of President Trump, that means we get new heads of the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission and things like that. So when it comes to the threats that you describe in the book, are a lot of these trends already on their way out the door? Well, I think that we're starting to see the pendulum swing, but they're definitely not on their way out the door. I think that really Anheuser-Busch, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And that was an eye-opening moment for,
I think, most of corporate America, because prior to this, you saw companies that were getting involved in more social and political issues. You saw the NFL had gotten involved and sort of the players were kneeling and the BLM movement was big for the NFL. But when you're the NFL, company or customers don't really have anywhere else to go. You can say you're going to boycott the NFL, but if it's Sunday afternoon and you want to watch football, you don't really have any other alternative. So last year, the Super Bowl was at an all-time record high. Whereas on the,
and even in Disney was another one. Disney got involved in the print rights issues down in Florida. But to some degree, yes, they were somewhat hit with their stock, but still there's only one Disney World. And a lot of people are still going to take their kids to Disney World. I think with Bud Light, this became the issue where all of a sudden a lot of corporations opened their eyes and said, wow, I don't want to become the next Bud Light because this company just definitively lost millions of customers, billions of dollars of shareholder value. And it was a company that was, again,
remarkably undifferentiated with their products. So that was the company that broke the straw or the straw that broke the camel's back. That's when you saw a lot of other businesses starting to retreat a little bit,
really using Bud Light as the cover to say that maybe there's certain people that don't want companies getting involved in these controversial policies. And fear is contagious. So I think there was a lot of fear in corporate America and people were afraid to speak up. And there was almost this preference falsification where I don't think a lot of companies even wanted to get involved in the ESG,
the DEI mandates. They're really told by, again, BlackRock State Streets, Vanguards, a lot of businesses, it wasn't authentic to them to put in either quota systems from a hiring standpoint or have to advertise to every single affinity group in the world. So it was almost a relief, I think, also with the Bud Light provided cover to say, hey, we're going to step back. And so you started to see companies like Tractor Supply Company, Walmart, McDonald's, others that were kind of the first companies, take a step back, Harley-Davidson,
other Heartland type of companies were the first ones to kind of take a step back and say, hey, we need to pause maybe some of the initiatives that we have going on as we're getting too involved in politics and not close to our mission. But what's I think been interesting is you've started to see a lot of other companies more on the coast even. You have Meta and Facebook. They took steps back from a lot of ESG and DEI policies also because they saw that these policies,
they really started to infringe on their mission. If Mark Zuckerberg and Meta were going to be a free speech platform and have people be able to open their minds, well, then they should not have to start censoring speech or censoring information at the behest of either the Biden administration or at the behest of certain groups. The Human Rights Campaign is a group,
for example, that tries to censor a lot of speech as it relates to LGBTQ commentary. So a lot of them started walking back. I think what's interesting is where we are now is that that system, that whole DEI pushback, I think that was to a large degree actually helped Trump win this election. You're seeing him speak to DEI a lot and pushing back on it. But you still have other companies that haven't taken a step back. Costco and JPMorgan are two of the more vocal ones that have said, no,
we're leaning into DEI. We believe in DEI. I think the big problem is that the word DEI has just become a bad word. And even if they try and reframe DEI to be about merit or be about excellence, just trying to be about finding the best and brightest people, I think that that narrative has been lost and that they're going to have to come up with something else to explain what their hiring policies are, what their supplier policies are. Maybe they move towards, I don't know, merit, excellence, and intelligence. That's one that's coming up, MEI, merit, excellence, and intelligence,
or just brand it something else. But I think you need to be explicit about who you are as a company. You need to be explicit about your policies because otherwise people are just getting confused. So I see the companies that still haven't come around probably will, but it's going to take a little bit of time. And I think we're still going to see some ups and downs and starts on the DEI narrative over the next year or two. Well, yeah, I'm curious, you know, where you think we'll be in, say, maybe five years. You know, over the past several years,
there have been, you know, quite a few interesting books about this topic. We've had The Dictatorship of Woke Capital by Steve Stilkup and Woke Incorporated by your friend Vivek Ramaswamy. And now your own book with your own particular perspective on it. But I wonder five years from now,
what will the books about, the big popular books about corporate America and the trends they're in, what will those books be about? So one of the reasons I wrote this book, because I hope that the next trends in corporate America are getting back to being mission-focused companies that are going to unleash an incredible amount of technology and innovation that are going to continue to improve the living standards of the folks we have in the U.S. If you think about this country,
we're the wealthiest, the most prosperous country on earth. And I think we could have headed down a direction that was more like Europe if we had adopted the stakeholder capitalism model of companies getting more involved in politics, being off mission, people at the companies getting involved in a lot of social political issues, not necessarily getting involved in work and advancing the mission of the company. But I think where we're heading now is that we should have not only tons of innovation, new startups, but I even think that you're existing,
your legacy companies. Think of what Facebook and Twitter and X and everybody else can do if you actually are allowing the number of voices to speak and number of ideas to flow freely. I think we have an amazing opportunity over the next five years to unleash more innovation, More good ideas, more free speech, more debate, more open dialogue.
And I think that's going to be good for sort of the American experiment and what America has been on this path on over the next 250 years, as we celebrate our 250th anniversary in 2026, to unleash more of what American capitalism has produced.
And hopefully there's going to be, in five years from now, new amazing companies that are new, the new AI leaders that are the new technology leaders that were going to Mars and that were focused on more of those missions, as opposed to having business get involved in a lot of controversial issues that are unrelated to the company, that are distractions that make us less competitive versus China or versus Russia or versus other countries and other companies that really didn't go down this ESG and DEI path.
unidentified
All right, Anson. This has been a fascinating discussion and congratulations on the new book. Last call for Bud Light. Thanks for being with us. Thank you very much. Starting next week, watch C-SPAN's new members of Congress series, where we talk to both Republicans and Democrats about their early lives, previous careers, families, and why they decided to run for office. Watch new members of Congress all next week,
brandon gill ▲ ● ▼
beginning Monday at 9:30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. Here's a preview. I grew up on a thousand-acre cattle ranch in West Texas outside of Abilene. We raised Angus and Brandus beef cows. So I've been ever since I can remember,
Rural Roots and Resilience 00:05:15
brandon gill ▲ ● ▼
working cows, building fences, driving tractors and backhoes, doing everything you would expect to do on a thousand-acre cattle ranch. I really can't remember a time in my life when I didn't have a job growing up. So grew up in a very different environment, very unique environment, I think, in rural West Texas, but it's God's country out there. What did those experiences teach you? You know, you learn the value of a dollar immediately. You know, like I said,
emily randall ▲ ● ▼
I was getting paid $6 an hour in kindergarten whenever I was working on the ranch, and I was helping my dad do whatever he needed to do on the ranch. But you learn the value of a dollar and you learn how to work hard and work long. You know, the fact that I was one of the first two women, Claire Wilson and I, were elected the same year, you know, I think is a testament to the fact that there were some gaps in knowledge among the caucus before we joined. You know, folks had had a lot of different experiences in the caucus, but they hadn't, you know,
grown up as a queer woman in Washington State. And, you know, it matters that we bring our voices and our neighbors' voices with us into the halls of power because, you know, we get to shape legislation, whether through amendment or just educating our colleagues about the way we talk about community that makes folks in community feel more seen and heard and respected. You know,
we've passed a lot of LGBTQ protections in the legislature in Washington during the first Trump administration in advance of this one. And now I'm bringing those neighbors' voices with me, those experiences, to keep fighting for all of our communities. And that big family is a huge advantage to covering a big state because I have siblings living in pretty much all corners of the state. So everywhere I go,
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I have a free place to stay. So that's a huge advantage. But I really am a product of my state. I was born in the western part of North Dakota. My parents were children of the Great Depression. They nearly starved to death out in the prairies of western North Dakota in the dirty 30s when there was literally no rain for a decade. And as farmers,
that's a tough thing to get through, but they did. Their persistence, their families persisted and they got through that and got educated and resettled in that area after college. My mom and dad back in Williston, North Dakota, which is in the far western part of the state, had their eight kids all in that part of the state and then started to raise them there. Then when I was fairly young, I was about five,
we moved all the way across the state to the eastern part of the state in Fargo and I spent my formative years there and lived there until I got into high school when we moved and planted right in the middle of the state. And so I literally have covered all parts of the state just in growing up. And, you know, being one of eight kids, you know, it's pretty tough to spoil that many kids. We had a lot of expectations for us brought on by my parents,
who again were very conservative-minded folks. As the first Latina woman ever elected in the state of New Jersey to represent a congressional district, I'm truly proud. I'm truly proud not only of my roots and where I come from, but I'm also proud to be able to be a voice for those that really didn't have a voice. So I'm happy to be able to represent,
But it also comes with a huge amount of responsibility, because I want to make sure that when you use your voice, you're using it to ensure that it is one that helps to create the opportunity for so many people.
I do not just believe that any one person represent any one group.
I represent the entire New Jersey 9th congressional district.
But I am truly proud of my roots and my upbringing and being a Latina, being Puerto Rican is something that I'm very proud of.
sarah mcbride ▲ ● ▼
The most formative experience in my own life was serving as the caregiver to the person who would become my husband, Andy, during his battle with cancer. And for anyone who's been diagnosed with cancer, particularly if you've been diagnosed in your 20s, as Andy was, you know it is like a punch in the gut unlike anything you've ever experienced. You never expect to hear that word at such a young age. But from those first moments after his diagnosis,
Andy and I knew how lucky we were. We knew how lucky Andy was to have health insurance that would allow him to get care that would hopefully save his life. And we both knew how lucky we were to have flexibility with our jobs that allowed him to focus on the full-time job of trying to get better and me to focus on the full-time job of caring for him,
of loving him, of marrying him. And eventually when he found out that his cancer was terminal to walk him to his passing and I decided to run for office because I do not believe that in Delaware, our state of neighbors, or here in the United States in the wealthiest, most developed nation on earth, that that time and that ability to get care should be a matter of luck. I believe it should be the law of the land. Starting next week, watch C-SPAN's new Members of Congress series,
First African-American Congresswoman 00:00:56
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where we speak with both Republicans and Democrats about their early lives, previous careers, families, and why they decided to run for office. On Monday, at 9.30 p.m. Eastern, our interviews include Democratic Congresswoman Janelle Bynum, the first African-American ever elected to Congress from Oregon. My mother graduated in 1970 from one of the last segregated high schools in the state, in the country, rather, in South Carolina. And I think about all of the opportunities that weren't afforded her,
you know, coming out of segregation. And I bring that perspective to Oregon, saying, you know, my mom was a rural kid that didn't have a lot of opportunities, but I'm going to make sure that I bring that forth for all of the kids in Oregon. Watch new members of Congress all next week, starting at 9.30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. Saturdays, watch American History TV's 10-week series,
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