Anson Frericks dissects Bud Light’s $40B market cap collapse after its 2023 Dylan Mulvaney partnership, tracing the fall to InBev’s 2008 cost-cutting shift and 2018–2019 ESG/DEI mandates pushed by BlackRock and McKinsey. CEO Brendan Whitworth’s weak leadership—dodging blame while Mulvaney criticized AB’s inaction—exposed stakeholder capitalism’s failure, with sales plummeting 30–40% as core consumers fled. Frericks contrasts AB’s European board’s socialist policies with Philip Morris’ overt DEI quotas, warning of a "Stakeholder Capital Industrial Complex" prioritizing activism over profits, while Tucker Carlson blames China and elite hostility toward American capitalism, urging a Buffett-led revival to counter corporate overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
If you don't mind, since you've thought about this probably more than any living person, how exactly did a company, an American company like that, that you felt like had a sense of the country that it served, go off in a direction that was so obviously crazy and self-destructive?
So, long story short, the company got so big, and at some point it's owned SeaWorld, it owned Busch Gardens, it owned eight helicopters, ten private jets, and it got a little bit bloated.
So it got taken over by this Belgian company, a European company called InBev.
InBev came in and bought it in 2008.
And the cultures really changed, whereas Anheuser-Busch was all about growing the brands, understood the U.S. consumer, Budweiser, Bud Light, all these things.
InBev has had a different mentality.
They're much more of a, they call it the world's largest private equity firm that happened to sell beer.
A lot of cost cutting that went on, brought a lot of European people into the United States, changed the headquarters from St. Louis, Missouri, which is almost the geographical center of the country.
Wait, you're saying a private equity firm took on too much debt?
Yeah, it wouldn't be the first time.
So, you know, never happened before, right?
Never happened before.
And I think the bigger problem was is that in 2018-19, for a bunch of different reasons, the company to try and grow, they adopted a lot of the ESG, DEI philosophies that we've heard a lot about, stakeholder capitalism, which is this European concept that businesses are supposed to serve all types of purposes.
That pops up.
And then two or three years later, all of a sudden, the company has really changed.
It changed from sort of a great American company based in the Midwest.
Based off meritocracy values.
And then all of a sudden in the kind of post-COVID, post-George Floyd era, Anaheim Bush, they start moving away from being a meritocracy, moving more towards diversity, equity, inclusion, moving more towards getting more involved in political issues.
And unfortunately, with what happened with Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light, that was the product of maybe 10 years of mistakes the company had made.
And now all of a sudden you have a company that's lost 50% of its sales with the biggest beer Okay, so, I mean, you're describing so many American companies, by the way.
But at the end of the story, there was this revealing moment where Anheuser-Busch executives, or one of them, basically just admitted, I hate our consumers.
And you wonder, like, where does that mind...
I mean, people have all kinds of dumb ideas about business and dumb ideas about everything else, but if you're in the retail business, if you're selling products to consumers, and you find yourself in a place where you're like, let's piss them off and humiliate them.
Like, that's so obviously insane.
Like, how could that, how could anybody say something like that?
And I think, like, let's back up, because, I mean, really, I think this story starts almost 40 years beforehand, where you really are starting to talk about what is the purpose of a corporation?
Like, what are businesses in the business of doing?
And in the United States, since the 1970s, you had sort of this view of Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman, famous economist, said the purpose of a corporation was to serve its shareholders, the people who actually own the business.
How do you do that?
Well, you focus on your customers, focus on creating great products and services.
When you do that, you generate more revenue.
You can hire more people.
And business continue to grow and do all the great things businesses do.
There was this other philosophy that was more this European view of the world that says the purpose of a corporation is to serve all stakeholders.
That was started by Klaus Schwab.
This is the World Economic Forum, Davos type of elite, that over in Europe.
But you're supposed to be in the business of maximizing value for all so-called stakeholders, for the greater good of society.
Sounds very European socialism.
And that's effectively what it was.
And both of these systems, they purported to do the same thing 40 years ago.
They said, we're going to make people more money and lead to better societal outcomes.
Problem is, over the last 40 years, I mean, if you just take a look at sort of the U.S.
economic model versus Europe since the 19th century, U.S.
has trounced Europe on both of those premises.
If you take a look at our stock market returns in the U.S., taking S&P 500, over the last 40 years, we've generated 10% of your own average.
But then in perspective, you had $100,000 invested in the U.S. in 1970 and $100,000 in Europe.
In the U.S., it'd be worth $4.5 million today.
It'd be worth $1.5 million in Europe.
So that's a huge difference based on the compounding interest in money.
And then separately, if you take a look at the U.S., Europe might say, okay, well, we didn't make as much money, but do we lead to better societal outcomes?
I mean, if you take a look at the U.S., almost every broad-based prosperity metric, GDP growth, per capita income, interest rates, unemployment rates, the U.S.
trounces Europe on all of those.
I mean, like our poorest countries in the United States are generally wealthier than most of the European countries on a per capita basis.
And so over the last sort of 40 years, you kind of had these two systems that were developing.
And the U.S.
model, to me, is just the superior model.
I mean, I believe in American exceptionalism.
I think our American model works.
The problem is with the American model is every once in a while, they're kind of bumps in the system, bumps in the road.
And the last time we had kind of a real economic bump in the road, let's call it, was 2008, 2009.
You had sort of the great financial crisis that happens.
And after the great financial crisis, there's sort of a lot of people that were upset that banks got bailed out.
It seemed like Main Street was the one that sort of lost out.
People lost houses.
And so all of a sudden, business and capitalism kind of has to repair itself and repair its image.
And the way that it did that is, especially if you remember the Occupy Wall Street movement, Occupy Wall Street and everyone else says, okay, well, banks and financers and companies, they need to be a bigger part of the system in making sure that everybody can succeed.
At the same time, then you had Obama was the president, and he came up with diversity, equity, inclusion mandates that were happening within sort of the broader-based government.
And for the next three or four or five years, you see a lot of companies that are trying to repair the image of so-called business and capitalism in the United States.
McKinsey came out with a famous study that says diversity wins, where they said, let's force diversity initiatives on a lot of companies, and those ones would do better.
This study has been thoroughly debunked.
You had a lot of asset management companies, the BlackRock, State Streets, Vanguards of the world.
They started really talking more about environmental social governance issues, which was a term that was coined in 2005.
Really never went anywhere.
The United Nations originally coined it.
If the United Nations coined something, usually be skeptical of it.
Didn't go anywhere.
For the first five or ten years.
But after the Occupy Wall Street movement, a lot of big asset managers kind of picked up this term, started talking about environmental social governance issues.
And really, a lot of these issues picked up tons of steam when Trump was first elected.
And when Trump was first elected, and he pulled out of these supranational organizations, the Paris Climate Accords, pulled out of the human rights sort of campaign coalitions.
All of a sudden, a lot of these more progressive institutions that said, wait a minute, like we thought government was going to solve these existential crises of, you know, climate change and banking systems and systemic racism and you kind of name it.
Now, all of a sudden, they're not.
And we need business to do this.
And by the way, a lot of progressive pension funds, state of California, state of New York, European sovereign wealth funds like Norway and others, they have collectively trillions of dollars of assets.
We wanted them to solve a lot of the existential crises in this country that Trump was not going to do in 2016.
And at that time period, you had a really interesting thing that happened.
You familiar with BlackRock?
Quite, yeah.
The largest asset management company in the world.
Managed about over $10 trillion worth of capital.
And what was interesting is BlackRock was really one of the leaders of this movement, along with State Street, Vanguard.
Those three largest asset managers in this entire country managed about $20 trillion worth of assets.
They're the single largest shareholder in 95% of the S&P 500.
And they wield a lot of influence in terms of telling companies kind of what to do.
And the problem with a lot of these big asset managers is that it's not their own money that they're managing.
You know, this is like George Soros type money or, you know, Bill Gates, like it's their own money.
And they, you know, ask companies to do all types of crazy things.
But the problem was with BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard is they were managing, I mean, a lot of times like your money, my money through 401ks or pension funds or others.
And because of their largest sort of clients, which, again, are more the progressive pension funds than others, are telling them that they want business to get more involved in politics and social issues.
then all of a sudden they're starting to force a new agenda on corporations.
And they even changed the purpose of a corporation in the 2018-2019 time period.
There was a famous letter that Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, wrote in 2018 essentially telling companies that we want them to now earn their social license.
And you're going to do that because we have evolved the purpose of a corporation with a group known as the Business Roundtable in the United States to be more focused on your stakeholders.
So you're no longer focused on shareholders.
We want you to focus on stakeholders.
And that is now who you are now going to focus on for maximizing value without defining, again, who those stakeholders are.
And so this becomes very, very problematic in this sort of 2018, 2019 timeframe because companies are frankly confused.
And it set up really a lot of, I'll call it kindling for an event that happened in 2020, which was COVID.
And all of a sudden, companies are being told they need to earn their social license.
They're being told that now no longer are your shareholders, your kind of primary person that you're serving, but you're now serving all stakeholders without defining what that is.
And in the 2020 time period, now all of a sudden you have this event of COVID.
And when COVID happens, this is a crazy time period.
We don't need to go through all of it, but...
Companies, frankly, like, lost their sense of direction about who were they serving, what their mission is.
I mean, you remember we all had to flatten the curve and, you know, the so-called flatten the curve in early 2020.
Correct. But, you know, that's obviously after this.
But, you know, in March of 2020— I mean, almost every company lost what its mission was.
What do I mean by that?
Well, let's go back to what, at Anheuser-Busch, we were making hand sanitizer in 2020 all of a sudden because we need to flatten this curve and we were all in this existential crisis of COVID.
You had Delta Airlines, no longer flying passengers, but it's now flying medical supplies all around.
You had General Motors, which is now making ventilators for the country.
Walmart, setting up COVID testing facilities.
So all of these companies all of a sudden were told to focus on a lot of different initiatives besides just their typical products and services.
And frankly, like a lot of these efforts, like you think about, like the curve has flattened very quickly.
You know, there was no real existential crisis like we thought there was.
But the problem was that since all these companies had kind of been pushed off their mission, then we had this next issue, which was the George Floyd issue that pops up in May of 2020.
And George Floyd dies.
And now the next existential crisis that every single company in the United States is looking to solve is systemic racism.
Because their largest so-called shareholders in the BlackRock, State Streets, Vanguards of the world, who had told them that now we want you focused on solving more of these stakeholder and societal issues, we need you to now solve these issues.
I mean, you went down the list.
I mean, it was crazy.
after George Floyd was murdered, you had 70 different companies in the United States here donated over $200 billion to Black Lives Matter in the United States.
That's like more than the GDP of Portugal, which is crazy in terms of the amount of money that was donated to these causes.
And banking donations just wasn't enough.
I mean, even Zuckerberg and Facebook at the time donated some eight-figure sum to it.
But then when that summer, Trump had the famous tweet about when the looting starts, the shooting starts, then everybody wanted him to now, all of a sudden, take Trump off of Facebook.
Because it just wasn't enough just to donate.
You actually had to silence folks as well.
On top of that, in 2020, 2021, you had the BlackRock's and StatesViews Vanguard the world as well.
Not only are they, this is where the big problem comes in, is because they are controlled, the largest percentage of companies in the United States, they have disproportionate power.
they can vote on.
And what was crazy is in...
2020, 2021, you had a lot of these activists that because the purpose of this corporation had changed in the United States, away from shareholder value to this European stakeholder model, said, okay, now businesses, again, they have to maximize value for me.
So you saw there's a group called Color of Change, and it's a nonprofit group, and their mission is to stamp out systemic racism in the country.
They bought $25,000 worth of shares at Apple, and they put up this shareholder proposal that Hey, you Apple, we want you guys to do a racial equity audit to figure out how you've contributed to systemic racism and white supremacy in the country.
And Apple, which is, you know, pretty liberal leftist company, Tim Cook is the CEO and very liberal board.
They said, Guys, thanks, but no thanks.
Because Apple's mission is to make magical devices at unbelievable prices.
That's what we just do.
That's our thing.
These are important issues, but we're going to recommend against this proposal because we don't want to spend tens of millions of dollars hiring Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch to go and do a racial equity audit.
But this passed.
By 52 to 48%.
Because you had firms like BlackRock, which is the second largest shareholder of the company, voted for it.
Vanguard, State Street, everyone else are voting for these issues and forcing corporate America to now get involved in social and political issues.
And this went the same thing for election integrity law issues that people were asking companies to get involved in, defund the police initiatives, help PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
They put up a proposal telling Starbucks we don't use cow milk anymore because we don't think you should use cow milk at Starbucks.
I mean, it's crazy.
All these proposals that popped up in this post-COVID George Floyd era, and companies were essentially forced by these large asset managers to get involved in a lot of political and social So, can I just give you my theory on this?
So when he started talking a lot about ESG, environmental social governance, in 2018, 2019, all of a sudden they started a scoring system.
You know, it's almost like a social credit system you'd have in China or somewhere else.
Scoring companies on how little carbon that they use.
or scoring companies on how did they do gender affirmation care for their employees.
And these scores were used to essentially pick and choose companies that could be included in indices that Larry Fink and BlackRock and others, they could charge investors three to four times the amount of money for these ESG funds versus the regular funds.
And the funny thing was these ESG funds underperformed.
So you ended up with less money, but you were charged more for doing it, which is crazy.
So do you think it would, since you've studied this much more than I have, do you think it would be a mistake to think that there was any sincerity behind this?
Like, do you think there was ever a moment where, like, Larry Finker, for that matter, Tim Cook, or anybody at State Street or Vanguard thought, you know, we're going to solve systemic racism by attacking the white working class.
Yeah, so, I mean, but the other piece is that on their website, and this is a company that makes Marlboro cigarettes and Zin and other things, is, so they're, like, one of their big partners for Pride Month that's coming up is the Stonewall Org.
And Stonewall Org is one of these LGBTQ plus organizations, and, you know, fine, you can do that, but, like, They are advocating for biological men to compete against women in sports.
So, but, like, this is the problem of, I think, like, where you're seeing trying to serve multiple masters.
I'm not making this up.
You can literally go on their website literally today and see all of this.
And I think this is the problem we're seeing, is that you have these more, like, European-based companies that I think might sincerely probably believe a lot of this, or the European mindset, which is very distinct from sort of the American capitalist model.
And if you are sort of operation philosophically, sort of a European based company, but you have operations in another country and you're imposing those values in another country, I think that's problematic.
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It does feel like one of these, like in 10 years.
We're going to look back and be like, you know, they were major consumer products companies that felt empowered to talk about your sex life and the sex lives of your children.
The last four or five years, yes, we were going more towards this quasi-European socialism, government intervention and free speech and everything else.
And we have now rejected that.
as a country.
But I think what's difficult is that yes, we've rejected it politically, but again, corporately, there's all these tethers from around the world because of effects of globalization over the last 20 years that you have a lot of these companies that frankly might not hold sort of those same American values.
And really, I think the eye-opening moment, even for me, where how companies have been co-opped is, I don't know if you meant to have the Black Rifle Coffee Company.
Yeah, yeah, I love Evan.
So, I mean, you'll appreciate this story, and I write about this in my book, Last Call for Bud Light, but one of the opening chapters I have is, so I was president of Anheuser-Busch in the U.S., and I tried to do a distribution agreement with Black Rifle Coffee Company, because a lot of times the same people that were drinking a six-pack of Bud Light, you know, Budweiser at night, were drinking six Black Rifle coffees in the morning.
And so we were going to put the Black Rifle coffee, their kind of 16-ounce drinks, on the same trucks that carry Bud and Bud Light.
Yeah. I was like, what do you mean? Controversial. I was like, you know, the company, like, their mission is to serve coffee and culture to firefighters, police officers, law enforcement, people who love America.
and that exact same, because it was too controversial of a brand, yet a year later, that exact same department based in New York City now that killed the Black Rifle coffee deal, they greenlit the Dylan Mulvaney partnership.
And the Dylan Mulvaney partnership, like it was incredibly puzzling if you're a Bud Light drinker Again, like, man, I don't care how people identify or what they want to do with their lives.
But like one of the reasons that Bud Light became the biggest, most popular beer brand in the United States is because it was remarkably apolitical.
Like it was a brand that was enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans alike because it was about like fun and it was humor.
It was sort of this like, you know, somewhat, you know, countercultural, you know, type of brand.
It was about sports and music and, you know, backyard barbecues.
And all of a sudden the Bud Light had just hired its first, you know, female head of Bud Light in the history of the brand.
You know, no problem with that.
I'm sure there are a lot of people that, a lot of The problem with it was, the person they hired was a lady who had grown up in New York City, went to Harvard for undergrad, Wharton for grad school, had only lived in the base of the Northeast her entire life.
I don't know if she'd ever drank a Bud Light in her life, and I don't know if she ever knew anybody who had as well.
Almost 50%, so obviously wasn't the right person for the company.
But in this broader kind of narrative, in 2021, 2022, this is when I was deciding to kind of like leave Anheuser-Busch.
I'd mentioned the black rifle thing was kind of the final sort of last straw for me.
But even before that, the principles of the company changed.
My joint was the meritocracy.
It was like, we want to hire the best and brightest and we want to reward them based off their results and pay them accordingly.
Great. But in 21, 22, all of a sudden that principle, there were 10 principles of the company that went around really hiring the best price change towards we now reward people based off the quality and diversity, which was bolded by the company and diversity of your teams.
Well, I think it was just more so the head-scratching piece of, like, you know, it doesn't matter if you're, again, like, white or black or gay or shit, like, don't care.
So the first thing was the whole pronoun police comes in.
Well, let's be more inclusive of all the pronoun piece.
And then, hey, let's put in quota systems that we're going to put in place so we hire a certain number of people with a submutable characteristic or that of characters.
But in the media, though, he was called bigoted, and he was called racist, and he was called you name it, all in the media, because of him just having a view that says, I'm just not going to do this, because that's not important to the company.
And I want people to come here and work for our mission, not necessarily for all these orthogonal things that have nothing to do with being heard to the masses.
Things have definitely swung back, but as I mentioned earlier, it's almost as if we're going into, I would say it's almost three camps with the purpose of business in this country and business getting involved in social, political, ESGDI topics.
You have the people that have backed off because they've said, you know what?
Getting involved in a lot of these political and social issues, it wasn't good for my company from the stock standpoint.
It wasn't because I lost money or divided my customer base.
It wasn't really good for the country either.
You've seen Meta and McDonald's and Walmart and Google.
A lot of people have rolled back a lot of those policies.
You have a second group of companies that are trying to kind of rebrand the whole sort of DEI narrative.
They haven't realized it's become a pejorative term to the majority of Americans.
They're calling it inclusivity, inclusivity and belonging.
Or I don't know, all these other words they're trying to mash together.
I would put probably more of the JP Morgans and I don't know, those folks in that boat.
But then you have the real adherence.
And these are the people that Philip Morris Internationals.
Even today, I mean, Anheuser-Busch InBev on their website for the UK, big DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion piece.
That place has doubled down massively, talking about that we're going to continue to have quota systems about who we actually give preferential treatment to, to who gets their products in store based off race or sex or gender.
Yeah, they've been doubling down on this.
So they're one of the companies that has kind of dug their heels in.
Yeah, and I don't think we can say that the United States is civil rights law.
At that point.
If you're openly discriminating against people on the basis of their race, then all the Civil Rights Act, it's all bullshit.
None of that means anything.
And so, like, let's just stop pretending, okay?
So if Costco wants to continue with racist policies, then I guess everyone gets to have racist policies if they want, on whatever basis of any race they want.
Like, you know what I mean?
It's a principle.
So either you're against and, in fact, banning through federal law discrimination on the basis of race, or you're not.
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So, just back to Anheuser-Busch.
This disaster happens, and it seems to be, I mean, according to the video that everybody saw, it really is a product of this one decision.
Well, it's the end of a chain of a lot of decisions, as you so ably described.
But the key decision in the fall of Bud Light was by this Alyssa Schneinhauser, whatever her name was, who went to Harvard.
And there's this famous video where she's saying, you know, basically, I think the old white guys who drink our beer could used to be shaken up a little bit.
But that's what's crazy, is that she literally called the customer base, you know, the fratty, out of touch, and, like, you know, immediately lost trust with the whole entire customer base.
What? And what's crazy about this, so the timeline of events was, because we're coming up on actually two years when this happened, so this partnership that Bud Light did with Dylan Mulvaney and controversial transgender actors happened on April Fool's Day of 2023.
And a lot of people originally thought this was a joke of like, oh, this is like Bud Light must be joking about this because there's no way that they would ever do a partnership with somebody who was literally just at Joe Biden's White House advocating for gender affirmation care and biological men to compete against women in sports.
But this is all of a sudden Bud Light's doing a partnership.
With this?
I don't understand this.
Then two or three days later, that video comes out of Alyssa essentially being like, Bud Light is fratty and out of touch.
This is how out of touch I think a lot of the people in New York became.
Where all of a sudden they're saying, no, no, no, our customers are out of touch.
We need new customers and the new customers are going to be whoever follows Dylan Mulvaney on Instagram, which I think was actually mostly underage girls.
Because there were literally all of these now investigations going on saying, Wait a minute.
You guys sponsor the Mulvaney who just has a bunch of underage followers?
So therefore, the only thing you actually did have was your brand itself, which Bud Lights was funny, humorous, and apolitical.
The other reason that boycotts work is that if you actually feel like you're having an impact and having an effect, and the other thing that happens, which is interesting in the beer industry, is every week, You get data that's reported by Walmart and Kroger and 7-Eleven and all these big retailers about what sales look like.
And that's just reported every week.
Usually people don't care about that at all.
I mean, you know, no one ever cares what the real sales are.
But in this instance, all of a sudden the media was reporting every single week that Bud Light sales were down 10%, 20%, 30%.
Well, because the problem was, again, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, who are technically these large shareholders of your business, they have adopted ESG and DI. And they're saying, if you want to get included in our ESG indexes, or Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg has a gender equality index.
If you want to get included in these, you guys need to have a perfect score on the human rights campaign.
I call it the Stakeholder Capital Industrial Complex.
And everybody was just trying to make money.
McKinsey, they were the big consulting firm.
I mean, they had this, again, this Diversity Matters, Diversity Wins report to sell consulting services for DEI.
BlackRock had a whole DEI component to put people into certain funds to charge investors more money.
You had a lot of activists that they wanted to show that they could get more money from Soros or whoever else, that they're making progress by putting up actually activist proposals at companies that shareholders would then vote on.
So it was this big, almost like industrial complex just kept feeding on itself.
But it's like the path to, like, I always say, like, redemption, it goes through forgiveness.
Amen. But the only way you're going to be forgiven is if you admit you made a mistake.
Exactly. And then what you say is, like, hey, this was obviously a mistake that this person made, and so we've moved on from this person because we made a mistake hiring this person, putting them in.
And then separately also, we made a mistake as Bud Light.
We made a mistake because Bud Light was never supposed to be involved in controversial political issues.
And Dylan Mulvaney was not the right choice of a person to get involved with because there are things, if you recall as well, the week this partnership happened.
So there were, I think, 25 bills across the country to ban biological men from playing against women in sports.
There was a bunch of bills banning gender information care.
And also leading up to this week, that was the week that you had the transgender shooter in the Christian school in Tennessee.
The problem is they couldn't do that because they've made all these other commitments to the Human Rights Campaign, who they highlighted every single year in their annual ESG report that they had a perfect score on it.
Your customer became sort of the lowest priority, which is the problem.
This made no sense.
It made zero sense.
And then so, again, this partnership originally happened on April 1st.
On April 15th, that's when you have the CEO for the first time, a guy named Brendan Whitworth, who I know very well.
he made a first public, essentially, response.
And it's almost this comical letter.
I think it was called like Our Letter to America or something.
We never acknowledged the situation they were in.
They never acknowledged the controversy, never mentioned Dylan by name.
It was just a, hey, we're going to get back to brewing beer, and here's a video of some Clydesdale riding across America.
But then now you have all these people on the left that are saying, wait a minute, I wanted you guys to say you're going to become like Ben and Jerry's.
I want you guys to be doing more of the Dylan campaign.
And so all of a sudden, the company actually, its sales declined even more.
Most CEOs I've met, and particularly the more disconnected from manufacturing they are, the more finance-oriented they are, the better physical condition they're in.
Alyssa was placed on leave at some point along this.
She's... Not really.
I swear to God.
I feel like you can't make this up.
Actually? I swear to God.
Yeah, I swear to God.
So it's at least under LinkedIn.
It's working for the Live Society Golf Tour.
So anyway, we can get to that in a second.
Whoa!
We'll get to that in a second.
So going to July 4th, the week of 2023, for the first time, Brendan goes on national TV and he goes on CBS and he has this live interview where he's going to try and get this back on track because he's now missed twice with a response and it's only antagonized people and things have gotten worse.
So he goes on CBS and one of the hosts first off says, hey, thank you for being here because most people in your seat, they would have run for the hills.
I mean, after what we've seen with millions of customers losing, leaving you billions of dollars being lost.
But they say, hey, the question everyone wants to know is, was this partnership a mistake?
And would you do it again?
And he gives some real wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed answer.
Well, there's a lot of things going on in the world and culture and this and that.
And after 30 seconds of kind of wavering around, the host comes back and says, to be clear, you do realize the answer you just gave is the reason why millions of people have left, billions of dollars have been erased.
Let me ask again, was this campaign a mistake?
And would you do it again?
And again, he gives a completely evasive $40 billion loss.
And what's crazy is that literally that exact same week, Dylan, and I feel bad for Dylan in this whole thing because Dylan essentially comes out and says, hey, if you can't stand by a transgender person, then don't do the campaign.
Don't do it.
That's worse than not hiring somebody at all, but just don't do it.
And so Dylan essentially said it was a mistake because they couldn't stand by it.
Larry Fink that week at the Aspen Ideas Festival says, I'm not using the term ESG anymore because it's become too controversial and it's lost its meaning.
And you have this now CEO of one of the most iconic companies in the United States, Anheuser-Busch, can't make a direct response about a campaign that has cost this company billions of dollars, millions of customers.
They had to fire thousands of employees after this.
And that's where I almost think that for a lot of companies, I think, and especially specifically, I think their company's actually better off probably selling its U.S. business unit at this point.
Because I don't think you can serve this European system.
But to make that story, you have to admit again that there was a mistake and that you screwed up and that you've taken accountability for it and that we now have a different plan.
It doesn't matter how much money the company has subsequently spent on, I mean, it's $100 million for Dana White and the UFC.
They've hired Shane Gillis.
They've hired Peyton Manning.
They've done all these things to try and get their customer back.
But all the customer wants is like, guys, let's say you screwed up.
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He, and this may be true today, you know, he's an older man, mid-80s anyway, but he was still tasting Budweiser beer every single week.
They send him every single U.S. product, and he tastes it.
He's one of six or seven.
You know this because you work there.
And the people who founded that company, that family, you could say a lot of things about the family, and it's a big, fractious family with all kinds of stories, but they all love beer.
And I think that's one of the problems that we have is that even here, and there's a bunch of other brands as well.
I mean, Jeep's another great one.
Jeep's owned by now Stellantis, which is based over in the Netherlands.
And you're talking about, man, if you're going to have an American brand like Jeep, should that really be owned by the Europeans if they just have a completely different philosophical system?
Well, a lot of other people wanted to cancel Dave Chappelle because he had jokes about the LGBTQ community and a million other communities, by the way.
I mean, Dave Chappelle doesn't leave anybody unscathed.
The thing I at least give Netflix credit for is when all of this was going on, they were told to cancel Chappelle, they came out with this Culture of Excellence document.
And this Culture of Excellence document essentially said, we are not going to censor artists at Netflix.
We are going to put out content for liberals, conservatives, whatever you kind of name it, and people will watch whatever they want to watch.
But we are not going to censor it at Netflix.
And if you have an issue with that, then go work somewhere else.
And I actually give Netflix a lot of credit for that, because they're based in California and everything else.
By the way, I haven't had a beer in almost 25 years, but someone, the head of the Athletic Brewing Company, which is not a sponsor of the show, by the way.
Yes. I mean, there's been a massive drop-off in the number of people drinking alcohol.
And then across all cohorts, Gen Z, millennial, Gen X, boomers, everyone's generally drinking less also because people are just becoming more health conscious.
So he's doing a great job of picking up a lot of those people that still like the taste of beer or the occasion of beer, but they just don't want to drink a six-pack of beer and feel like trash.
Have you ever seen Alyssa Schopenhauer, or whatever her name is, Alyssa, German name, from Harvard, and then CIA guy, CEO, have you ever seen them drink beer at lunch?
Oh, you say like, okay, he's a puppet, he's clearly a puppet, and he's terrified, and I, again, I don't mean to attack him personally, though, of course I am, but I'm sure he's not a bad guy, I'm sure his wife and kids like him, but it does seem like...
The people pulling his puppet strings, that's obviously true, they have an interest in making money.
Like, I don't understand the total lack of accountability in corporate America.
Again, when you control this European corporation, they think they're doing a good thing by trying to get involved and pushing more of the political issues.
Also, I think there's something to be said is that when you reach a certain level of wealth and money in your billionaire-type class, you want to be part of the right social circle.
That's it.
And I think that's part of it because Because the whole company is more controlled by these Belgian families and a couple Brazilian families as well.
Because, I mean, if you almost think about it, I mentioned this earlier, but the U.S. was always exceptional.
It's always been this city upon a hill that people want to go to.
It's always been unique and distinct and different.
And there have been, you know, it's always been radical ideas in the United States to have free speech and American capitalism and freedom of religion.
These have all been radical ideas for a long time.
And that's allowed us to become the most successful, prosperous, you name a country.
And I think that there's been ways that sort of the Europeans, the Chinese, others, they've been able to infiltrate that and try and rebalance.
I mean, going into a, you know, the so-called like oppressor versus oppressed framework, like for the rest of the world, this U.S. was always this, you know, oppressor type country.
Yeah, I mean, so I think that is what's going on, is that you have, obviously, you know, governments that are antagonists towards the United States are trying to, I mean, China, Europe, et cetera, trying to kind of pull us back, tear us down.
But even a lot of these other, you know, companies as well, unfortunately, just have a different view of what business should be.
And I don't think it's going to be good for the...
I was with someone the other day who knows Larry Fink really well, and I said, boy, I think Larry Fink has really been damaging to the country, to the world.
And this person said, you know, I feel sorry for Larry Fink.
Why? Why do you feel sorry for Larry Fink?
Because he's the single unhappiest person I've ever met.
But here's the thing, because he doesn't have any principles.
Because if you take a look at BlackRock, it's just been blowing in the wind over the last couple of years.
When it was all about the ESG and stakeholder capitalism, we're going to hold that flag and we're going to carry it.
But then as soon as people just with principles think about saying, guys, you're violating your fiduciary obligation because I just asked you to make money for me, not do social engineering policies that are losing money for me.
And so when all of a sudden people started pulling their money from them, they got pulled in front of Congress by a bunch of politicians.
But I think, especially when you're in New York, if you want to go to the right schools and go to the right parties and get your kids into this and that, you can't be patriotic in a lot of cases.
And so, I mean, more Brawley, and I know a lot of the wholesalers, and they're all upset about what happened the last couple years because they lost tons of their business.
So this year he tried to, you know how beer on menus usually says domestic or import?
So he tried to reframe domestic beer as American beer, which sounds like a great idea, but if you're not an American-owned company, then where do you put Anheuser-Busch?
Do you put them on the American beer or on the import beer?
A lot of times it's import, and I think that's one of the reasons they should actually either sell it back to the Bush family or sell it back to Warren Buffett.
At some point, just nepotism just doesn't work and there's going to be somebody outside better.
But I think that you can have actually U.S. ownership, again, of the business.
And whereas, excuse me, Anaheim Bush InBev, it's a global company.
They have operations in China and Africa and South America and everywhere.
The U.S. at this point is only about, I think, 20% of their revenue and maybe a quarter of their profits.
So it actually, to me, it makes tons of sense.
And the company this year will do, I don't know, four and a half billion of called profits.
So I think there's somebody like, Warren Buffett could come, and maybe he buys the thing for $30 to $40 billion when he's sitting on $300 billion of cash.
And maybe all of a sudden you give actual real authority to U.S. leadership.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.