In this episode, I sit down with Anson Frerich, a former executive at Anheuser-Busch and author of Last Call for Bud Light: The Fallen Future of America s Favorite Beer. Anson and I talk about why we ve seen such a huge cultural shift against diversity and equity initiatives, why companies started these policies in the first place, and why consumers can take back culture through their purchasing power.
00:00:00.000Man, I recorded this podcast with Anson Frerich's former Anheuser-Busch executive about a month ago, even before Trump took office and began putting the final nails in the coffin of the quote-unquote diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative, also known as DEI, at the federal level.
00:00:18.680But even before that, we saw the decline and predicted the ultimate downfall of DEI initiatives with very notable cases such as the Bud Light fiasco and the subsequent boycott.
00:00:32.220Now with Target, Amazon, Harley-Davidson, and more notable companies are all dismantling these dangerous and destructive ideologies.
00:00:42.680Today, Anson and I talk about why we've seen such a huge cultural shift against these policies, why companies truly started these policies in the first place, and believe me, it was not out of the goodness of their hearts, how consumers can take back culture through their purchasing power, and why DEI needs to die once and for all.
00:01:03.800You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest. Embrace your fears and boldly chart your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time, every time.
00:01:14.620You are not easily deterred or defeated, rugged, resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who you are. This is who you will become at the end of the day, and after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man.
00:01:28.860Gentlemen, welcome to the Order of Man podcast. My name is Ryan Michler. I'm the host and the founder of this movement, and of course, this podcast.
00:01:39.000I'm very excited to be joining you today. My goal is to give you the tools and resources and conversations you need to thrive as a husband, father, business owner, and leader in your community.
00:01:49.980Before I get to the conversation with Anson today, I want to mention my good friends over at Montana Knife Company.
00:01:57.320I am looking forward to this weekend. I'm heading to South Carolina to meet with my friends over at Soren X.
00:02:05.080Some people, including Brandon over at Montana Knife Company, are going to be there. We're going to be doing some podcasts.
00:02:12.640I love this company because they are making American-made products, and specifically products I like. Knives. That's it. Knives. I like knives. I like having a tool.
00:02:24.280I think every man needs to have a knife on his person at all times, and if you're looking for something that's made in America from good people doing good things, then look no further than Montana Knife Company.
00:02:36.900I don't care if you're walking around urban environments like downtown Manhattan, or you're out in the sticks in South Carolina, or you're on a hunt in Africa.
00:02:47.320You need a good knife, or maybe you're even in the kitchen making food for your family. A good knife goes a long way.
00:02:53.760Check out my friends over at Montana Knife Company and use the code ORDEROFMAN at checkout.
00:02:59.660You'll save some money, and you'll also be letting them know you heard about them here.
00:03:04.340MontanaKnifeCompany.com. Use the code ORDEROFMAN at checkout.
00:03:08.840All right, guys. Let me introduce you to Anson. He is the founder of Athletic Capital, also the co-founder of Strive Asset Management with Vivek Ramaswamy.
00:03:19.100Prior to finding Strive, he led finance, sales, and marketing operations as president of Anheuser-Busch Sales and Distribution Company.
00:03:27.340And having seen the ins and outs, Anson, excuse me, is well-versed in what makes a successful company and also what breaks it.
00:03:37.680He received his bachelor's from Yale's and his MBA from Harvard and as a newly published author with his first book, Last Call for Bud Light, The Fallen Future of America's Favorite Beer.
00:03:49.140Anson adds to his resume as a man who understands and applies the protect, provide, and preside motto in his life.
00:03:59.860So you were telling me you're a Black Rifle coffee guy.
00:04:06.320You know, what's funny is I tell people it's the one company I believe the most in that I actually do not use their product because I do not drink coffee.
00:04:15.380Well, I'm a decaf coffee guy usually, but, you know, one thing you probably do use in their products is their marketing because I can't think of a better, more authentic company over the last couple of years, which says that, you know, our mission is to serve coffee and culture to such like people who love America.
00:04:33.580And I think their videos and their content and their marketing is probably better than any other company that's almost out there right now.
00:05:18.320I mean, you're a hundred percent right.
00:05:19.340Like, you know, I love the fact, not only, yes, are the veterans and they're in the military, which give them the authenticity to go and, you know, blow things up and put like, I don't know how it's or guns on Tesla's, but they're also like dads and fathers and moms.
00:05:31.140And so, you know, they show what the, how they're using the products and their civilian real lives as well.
00:05:35.660And they bring sort of a lot of the, I'd say probably some of the, the, the military inside jokes or military slang into civilian life as well.
00:05:44.760And I don't know, Ryan, like I'm one of these guys that probably my biggest regret in life is that I never served time in the military.
00:05:51.420So I don't know, sometimes when I drink a black rifle coffee company, at least, you know, allows me to have, I don't know, maybe a little bit of stolen valor.
00:05:57.320I don't know that, you know, I feel like I could have done it, but anyway, it's a, yeah, great company.
00:06:04.220I mean, Evan's done an amazing job giving back to veterans, making the pledge to hire 10,000 veterans when Starbucks was trying to hire 10,000, you know, immigrants or whatever the deal was.
00:06:14.480Um, so they've just, they've just done an amazing job of connecting to that loyal base and being authentic to it.
00:06:20.120And especially the last couple of years, I mean, when like the wins, especially the political wins, you know, we're asking to defund the police and not support the military.
00:06:27.360And, you know, these guys just, you know, they doubled down and they said, guys, this is what we do.
00:06:31.020We believe in this and we don't believe in this sort of short term or like, you know, that the current thing is, um, is to, you know, be against some of these, these, these, you know, force that made the U S wonderful in what it is.
00:06:42.460But I think long-term the wins will blow back.
00:06:45.840And, uh, you know, now people want to get and support the military and police and others.
00:06:48.880And I think they will for generations to come, because it's one of the things that allowed this, uh, this country to thrive over the last, you know, 250 years.
00:06:55.900And hopefully have another, at least 250 years out of us.
00:07:01.980We got a lot to talk about today, but I'm really curious what you have to say as a, uh, the president of a, of a major, major corporation in America.
00:07:11.500Uh, I'm very curious what you have to say on that same vein about Mark Zuckerberg's latest comments regarding censorship and how he, I'm, I'm trying not to preface the question too much, but he literally said that the only reason he's doing it is because there's a cultural tipping point.
00:07:41.120You know, I think that, um, a lot of companies lost their way over the last 10 years and a lot of companies lost their way because they didn't have solid values and solid foundations.
00:07:50.560And I think that if Mark Zuckerberg was really committed to free speech from the beginning, then we wouldn't have had this issue where he had to issue this massive mea culpa where he essentially said that we censored America, that we hired these people.
00:08:02.680And we put, they were from San Francisco and they were, had more of a leftist bias tent to them.
00:08:07.660And we had them going out there and censoring content on the internet.
00:08:11.040And if you were, if it just never should have happened in the first place, I think that's where we're going to get this longer with corporate America just going wrong.
00:08:17.500Like a lot of companies didn't have solid foundations, solid values that they could go back to with their customers and their employees and their suppliers and say, we believe in X and this is why we're not, you know, doing Y.
00:08:29.300I think specifically, um, think about all the political issues that companies got involved with over the last couple of years.
00:08:35.560Certain companies were asking to defund the police.
00:08:38.000Certain companies were asking to do racial equity audits.
00:08:40.880Certain companies were asking to overturn election integrity laws.
00:08:44.220I mean, think about the number of CEOs when Roe v. Wade was overturned and all of a sudden they were talking about, you know, how bad this was.
00:08:50.780And I think a lot of people were confused.
00:08:52.280Like, wait a minute, why are all these companies getting involved in a lot of these social and political issues?
00:09:18.720And I think it's just because there weren't core values, solid values, and time-tested values as well.
00:09:23.960And when you don't have sort of like time-tested values to stand on, it's the old saying, you know, if you don't stand for anything, you'll fall for nothing.
00:09:31.860And I think a lot of companies, they fell for, call it like the current thing or the current political wins.
00:09:37.060And whether you have Democrats or Republicans in office, like, you know, there are certain values that should just be timeless and lasting.
00:09:43.620I think free speech, meritocracy, capitalism, open debate, dialogue.
00:09:49.560These are just time-tested classic virtues that regardless of who's in office and who's in power, we should stand behind it.
00:09:55.720And so you don't have to offer an embarrassing, you know, apology that your company, you know, wasn't as committed to free speech as you thought it was or didn't protect openness in the internet as much as you thought it was.
00:10:06.520But I think we learned a big corporate lesson.
00:10:08.020I mean, that's, you know, frankly, the book that I just wrote, you know, talks a lot about these classic timeless virtues that we need to be bringing back in America and not necessarily blowing in the political winds every, you know, four or eight years.
00:10:41.500So I pulled in the gas station and it was during pride month.
00:10:44.900I don't know what month is pride month, but it was, it was that time of year.
00:10:48.140And I pulled in and I went to pump gas and there was this huge banner, this rainbow banner about why gay pride and LGBTQ and all that kind of stuff.
00:10:59.240And I'm like, I don't need my gas to be gay.
00:11:01.440I just need it to give me gas mileage and keep my engine clean.
00:11:05.680That's, that's literally all that I need.
00:11:08.780But it seems like these major corporations up until there's obviously a huge cultural shift in the past, even 30 to 60 days.
00:11:18.960These corporations feel like they need to interject themselves.
00:11:43.120You know, I think the COVID time period for a lot of corporations, like, you know, really ignited this view that they had to be more expansive beyond, you know,
00:11:51.940selling gas or selling beer or selling, you know, Coca-Cola or whatever it is, and now have to have opinions on every single social or political issue.
00:12:00.900We can get into a lot of the reasons what that is.
00:12:03.500But I think most importantly is now over the last couple of years, like we've seen what was wrong, what went wrong when this happened.
00:12:09.260Because one, it alienated a lot of customers like yourself, because especially specifically something like gas and gas is a commodity.
00:12:15.640And, you know, if there's a dip, there's a choice between, you know, on one street, you have a gas station that's, you know, whether, and I don't care what it is,
00:12:21.780whether it's gay rights, whether it's abortion issues, whether it's, you know, immigration, whatever it is, like, you don't care.
00:12:27.660You don't want that from your gas station.
00:12:29.100And if there's a gas station across the street that says we just buy gas, I bet that station that just does gas is going to do a lot better because that's why people are there.
00:12:36.740That's what they trust that company to do is to sell you gas, not necessarily a social agenda.
00:12:41.700So I think that getting involved in politics is going to be bad for those individual businesses.
00:12:45.160But then, you know, it's also a lot of times like bad for the country that we live in, because a lot of these very politicized issues, we tend to solve them through the democratic process.
00:12:54.920Like each individual should have a vote, but especially in large, major corporations with billions of dollars in either assets or funding.
00:13:03.060If those CEOs of these businesses are really like advancing an issue, not necessarily like, you know, using their own money, because a lot of times the CEOs, they own, you know, an infinitesimal amount of the business.
00:13:16.020But I'm going to give a good example, like, you know, Mark Benioff, a guy who's the CEO of Salesforce, and he was using hundreds of millions of dollars of the company's capital, of investors' capital, of shareholder capital to advocate to like defund the police and overturn election integrity laws.
00:13:31.140You're like, what are you doing? And then all of a sudden, like, you know, you almost feel like you're living in this, like, I don't know, like European monarchical society where it's like, wait a minute, why is this like the CEOs, you know, that represent all types of employees and customers and others?
00:13:45.140Why are they just imparting their view onto everyone and then using, you know, really shareholder money and shareholder capital to be able to like advance these views?
00:13:55.300That's not good for their business. And also, it's just not good for democracy that we live in.
00:13:58.800So anyway, it's been it's been a weird couple of years. But to your point, you know, I think the last 60, 90 days, things are swinging back.
00:14:05.880But I really, I mean, put this back to like what happened with Bud Light, because that's when for everybody, I mean, everyone's eyes were wide open.
00:14:12.800It wasn't just like your gas station, but it's like, wait a minute, Bud Light, like the most like working class, like American beer, is now all of a sudden getting involved with like very, you know, radical,
00:14:23.780controversial, controversial, transgender advocates that are at the Biden White House advocating for gender affirmation care with for young kids.
00:14:31.440Like, wait a minute, like what is going on here? Like, you know, I drink Bud Light because, man, they were about football and sports and backyard barbecues.
00:14:38.480Like, that's what I trusted. It was like great times, good beer, hanging out with my buddies.
00:14:42.480But now it's like the Ben and Jerry's of beer where, you know, what's next? Like, you know, just like Ben and Jerry's, are they going to be, you know, also given money to try and reclaim Native American lands?
00:14:53.020Like, like, what am I getting into here? You know? Yeah. I mean, that's it's it is a good point.
00:14:59.140You you left Anheuser-Busch, what, in 2022, right before the whole Dylan Mavaney fiasco.
00:15:07.000And you talked about gender affirming care and everything. Let's just call it what it is.
00:15:10.440A guy, a man who thinks he's a woman and not only a woman, a minor, like a prepubescent female, like that's repulsive.
00:15:20.240That's disgusting. And it's actually completely antithetical to the bulk majority of not only Bud Light, but Anheuser-Busch's customer base.
00:15:31.580I don't understand the complete lunacy and ignorance of making a decision like that.
00:15:39.980Yeah. I mean, there there was there was no thought behind it whatsoever.
00:15:43.260And I think there was, though. I think there was. Tell me if I'm wrong.
00:15:46.480But I think there was because you can't say there was no thought behind it at all.
00:15:50.140Like it was calculated, right? Well, and I think what this is kind of like part of the problem with what happened with Anheuser-Busch and corporate America at large,
00:15:57.600where they got very politicized. And for most brands, they were asked to be doing things like DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, ESG, environmental, social governance.
00:16:09.360These movements became very politicized. And what was like, you know, like all things here, Ryan, it's like, you know, you trace like what was the cause of these.
00:16:16.240It all comes back to money. And, you know, if you take a look at some of the largest shareholders in Anheuser-Busch and corporate America at large,
00:16:22.500you have these large asset management firms, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard. They control 20 trillion dollars worth of capital.
00:16:28.940It's the bigger than the GDP of the entire United States. They're the single largest investor in 95 percent of the companies in the United States.
00:16:35.920And they're using, I mean, frankly, like your money, my money via your 401ks, your investment savings to invest into the largest companies in the U.S.,
00:16:43.860usually via index funds, S&P 500 funds, you know, large cap value funds, growth funds and all of those funds,
00:16:50.500all those big firms I just mentioned, a lot of their capital comes from very progressive European sovereign wealth funds,
00:16:56.900like the sovereign wealth fund in Norway. It comes from progressive states like California and New York,
00:17:01.440which have some of the largest pension funds. And those organizations have really pushed these large asset managers in the United States
00:17:09.060to say, hey, companies now need to get involved and do what they perceived was the failure of government to get involved in existential crises,
00:17:18.560whether these were things like climate change, systemic racism, COVID was one of these things.
00:17:25.840And they said, you know, companies now need to solve all these issues, not governments.
00:17:29.480The problem with it is that this became just like a very progressive ideology where companies were now being forced to insolve all of these sort of like invisible enemies.
00:17:38.260I can get back to a little bit of the rationale as to what happened.
00:17:40.760And it's like Anheuser-Busch every year to make these large asset managers happy.
00:17:45.320And they have these funds called ESG funds, environmental social governance funds, that they would sell to investors.
00:17:50.400These funds, what they would do was they would you would only get included in these funds if you had sort of a certain amount of your advertising that was representing.
00:17:58.980It was like a score, right? There was some sort of a score, a calculation or something like that.
00:18:02.760It was an index. It's called the human rights campaign.
00:18:05.300And of course, like, you know, that sounds like, you know, nice, fun, but like what this was is like they would say, OK, to get a perfect 100 percent score from this organization,
00:18:13.340you have to do so many advertisements to support the LGBTQ plus plus plus community.
00:18:19.700Hey, for your employees, you have to offer access to abortion care.
00:18:24.080Hey, for your employees that are transgendered, you have to offer them transgender surgery care or for their kids.
00:18:30.420And so it became like a very aggressive and progressive organization.
00:18:34.540But this organization, like they would basically, you know, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't.
00:18:38.760If you didn't sign up for these things, you wouldn't have 100 percent score for the human rights campaign index.
00:18:43.980Well, if you didn't have 100 percent score, you couldn't have a good ESG score or a good DEI score from BlackRock, who was one of your biggest investors.
00:18:52.460And if you didn't have that 100 percent score, they wouldn't include you in funds.
00:18:55.380And therefore, you would sort of like lose investors and lose lose dollars.
00:18:58.520And also those funds, by the way, they would usually charge people two to three times the amount of money of a regular non-ESG fund.
00:19:06.580So that's why they were pushing companies to get more involved in this progressive piece.
00:19:10.680And because they controlled a lot of money from, again, European sovereign wealth funds, state of New York, state of California,
00:19:16.020that were all pushing this very aggressive, progressive agenda into corporate America.
00:19:21.580And, you know, this it kind of goes back like a real philosophical difference.
00:19:25.500I mean, you know, you ask the question of, you know, why did Anna's Bush act the way they did?
00:19:30.300Well, there's really like two schools of thought about what a company should do.
00:19:58.020You give them great products and services that allows you to bring in more customers.
00:20:01.540It allows you to hire more people, generate more revenue, pay more taxes, all the things that corporations do.
00:20:07.760Separately in Europe, there was Klaus Schwab.
00:20:10.660He was an economist in Europe who runs the World Economic Forum,
00:20:13.740which has become like a very globalist organization that tries to impose sort of its, you know, a little bit of like its own world order across the globe.
00:20:21.240And he said that we believe in Europe that we should follow this idea of stakeholder capitalism.
00:20:27.200And the purpose of a corporation is to serve all stakeholders equally without really defining who those stakeholders are, who you should put first.
00:20:34.860I mean, think about in the way it's like, you know, the U.S. basically said, you know, corporations have one God, shareholders.
00:20:41.900The stakeholder piece is like you have tons of gods and all the gods are equal.
00:20:45.600And we're not going to tell you which ones to serve or how to serve them.
00:20:48.400But corporations should work with society and all of these stakeholders to maximize value.
00:20:53.500And then over the next sort of 40 years, I mean, you kind of saw how these two systems played out.
00:20:57.560In the U.S., we created the most, you know, incredible economic growth.
00:21:01.340We had our stock markets outperformed Europe by 200 to 300 basis points per year on average.
00:21:06.040In terms of every single broad-based prosperity metric of GDP growth, per capita income, unemployment rates, inflation rates.
00:21:12.640The U.S. trounced Europe on all of these metrics by adopting sort of this American free market shareholder capitalism system.
00:21:20.780Yet, you had a lot of folks kind of after the Great Recession and the financial crisis and kind of the 2008, 2009 timeframe, Occupy Wall Street.
00:21:30.380All of a sudden, they decided like, well, you know, maybe that system didn't necessarily work.
00:21:33.900So maybe we'll try this European model, even though the European model didn't really work.
00:21:38.080And all of a sudden, like this is what sort of led to this philosophy over the last really 10 years of businesses supposed to be getting more involved in politics, social issues.
00:21:49.680Anheuser-Busch, for many reasons that we can get into, kind of more adopted this stakeholder capitalism philosophy at a very, very high level.
00:21:57.640And then they started putting in a lot of these ESG, DEI initiatives into their corporate governance.
00:22:07.360Like they moved their headquarters from St. Louis, Missouri, which was, you know, heartland, center of the country, understood their business, to New York City.
00:22:14.980Started hiring people, you know, from the coast.
00:22:17.320Worked a lot of agencies in New York City.
00:22:19.060Started looking at the lens of the United States.
00:22:21.360I mean, literally through like, you know, Chelsea and New York, which is not how the U.S. really operates.
00:22:25.880And even the girl, Alyssa Heinerschnite, who was running Bud Light at the time, you know, I mean, she's from New York City, went to, I think, Harvard for undergrad, Wharton for business school.
00:22:36.200Had probably never drank a Bud Light in her life.
00:22:37.880Like, didn't really know anybody, you know, either.
00:22:40.800And but she had more of a philosophy of like, oh, Bud Light's now mission is to, you know, become more involved in politics, become like Ben and Jerry's because we need to solve all these other societal issues.
00:22:50.040And we need to like make our, you know, the Black Rocks of the world happy.
00:22:53.620So it's just like a fundamental difference.
00:22:55.920And I think it was a flawed difference.
00:22:57.340It was what we got back to the beginning.
00:23:08.580And unfortunately, because Anheuser-Busch wasn't built on like really strong, solid foundations, they kind of allowed those foundations to get shaky over the last couple of years.
00:23:16.460It ended up becoming the poster child of what went wrong with this whole stakeholder capitalism movement.
00:23:21.140And now hopefully we're swinging back to, you know, kind of American free market shareholder capitalism, like folks and shareholders do what's right.
00:23:27.020And hopefully that's where the company gets to moving forward.
00:23:31.700Yeah, at this point and not even at this point, we knew all along if you're in if you're buying into this, you're either malicious or dumb.
00:23:39.320And both of those are meant as an insult, like there's there's no way around it.
00:23:43.240You know, this woman who went to Harvard and Wharton Business School or whatever, I'd run circles around her when it comes to business.
00:23:50.840And I went to one semester of college because I've been in the trenches working on my business.
00:23:57.040She couldn't run a small business to save her life.
00:24:00.140The only reason she was in the position she was in is because she had the degree that she had and she had the financial capital to absorb some of her idiot ideas.
00:24:14.400You know, these people that that don't understand, for example, this shareholder ideology, what they think is that, oh, if we're just supporting shareholders returns, then that comes at the expense of their customers.
00:24:29.420But the reality is they don't understand free markets because free markets are about voluntary exchange.
00:24:34.840So if I'm a shareholder of an organization, whether it's Anheuser-Busch or something as simple and lowly as order of man, it's in my best interest to serve my clientele in the best way possible.
00:24:47.660Provide maximum value for lowest out of pocket cost.
00:25:00.780But even the corporation's response was equally as bad and equally inflamed the issue, I think more so inflamed the issue than the ad itself.
00:25:09.200And I think this is the point that if you had like really strong values and really strong leadership, they could have immediately shut down.
00:25:14.980It came out with a very strong response that said this was the wrong advertising campaign.
00:25:22.260We fired the person in charge and the story would have been over.
00:25:25.580I mean, but that's not the position they took because they were kind of in this like rock and a hard place where they had made all these commitments to DEI and the ESG and to the Black Rocks and state streets and vanguards of the world that they were going to get more involved in terms of like political and social issues.
00:25:41.680And so therefore, I don't know if you remember this, but the advertisement actually dropped on April Fool's Day of 2023.
00:25:49.880That's when the advertisement came out.
00:25:55.340And it was actually like very like highly politicized, contentious times.
00:25:59.200You'll probably remember that week before that there was the transgender person that shot up the Christian school in Tennessee and killed a lot of people in Tennessee that week before.
00:26:11.000So these were very contentious issues.
00:26:13.180This was also the time when there were a lot of ballot initiatives.
00:26:15.680I think half the states in the country at this time had should biological males be able to compete against biological women in sports like on the ballot, which is like, you know, silly enough to talk about.
00:26:26.460But this was becoming like a big ballot issue.
00:26:28.100There was like gender affirmation issues on the ballots.
00:26:30.360Like this is a very contested political issue.
00:26:32.780And then the school shooting was heightened very much in flame.
00:26:37.400So the timing of this happening on, you know, like April Fool's Day, a lot of people really thought there was like an April Fool's joke of like Bud Light, like literally like being like April Fool's Day.
00:27:08.640And it was all like ladies night, you know, like some people thought that's legitimately like what this was like rehashing ladies night or something.
00:27:14.940You know, it was just people like that.
00:27:16.280So they wanted to get Bud Light was like acting like ladies.
00:27:18.360That would have been an unbelievable commercial.
00:27:19.880And like people would have thought it would be really funny.
00:27:22.060But then when they realized that this was, you know, like a real commercial, people were like, wait, what's going on?
00:27:25.500And, you know, you had the whole Kid Rock issue, you know, like shooting up Bud Light cans.
00:27:29.080And, you know, then 15 days later, like Bud Light went dark.
00:27:32.560You know, essentially they were like, wow, like what's going on?
00:29:29.640And the reason that they couldn't give that that, you know, the answer either way is, again, because they were caught between this on one side.
00:29:36.680These commitments to ESG and DEI and and everything else.
00:29:41.600And or do you just have like, you know, try to or and then the other piece was they got copies of their customers and their customers said, wait a minute.
00:29:46.940Like, I don't want all this like political stuff like I don't want, you know, hear about, you know, Dylan Mulvaney, transgendered issues from Bud Light.
00:30:09.980And they're one of the very few companies that hasn't walked back a lot of their commitments on DEI.
00:30:14.540I mean, think about Walmart and McDonald's and Tractor Supply and like other ones have realized how controversial and how problematic like a lot of these philosophies were.
00:30:23.940And, you know, to this day, and as Bush and Bud Light, they still haven't walked back.
00:30:27.980One of the issues they're now owned by a European company called InBev.
00:30:32.260And over in Europe, again, they have this different philosophy of stakeholder capitalism.
00:30:36.680And that's what's like ruining their business here in the U.S.
00:30:39.560And hopefully they figure out a way to get it back.
00:30:41.340Men, I'm just going to step away from the conversation very quickly.
00:30:46.400As you may have already heard, we've got a very, very incredible event in May.
00:32:27.340Why do you think – I mean, yeah, hopefully they find a chance to correct it, but if they're not going to correct it, I would just assume they go under.
00:32:37.380And I know that hurts thousands, literally thousands of American citizens.
00:32:43.640And then I see guys like Dana White and Kid Rock walk back some of their statements and start getting on board and put together huge contracts with the UFC.
00:32:51.940And I actually really respect Dana White.
00:32:54.640I don't know much about Kid Rock other than I liked his music when I was 20 years old.
00:32:58.780But I don't understand why all of a sudden it's like we've lifted the boycott on Bud Light.
00:33:08.260And then that gets me questioning nothing's changed on Bud Light's part, and now we've got Dana White, Kid Rock, and these others who are adamantly against it.
00:33:16.980All of a sudden now they're on board, even Trump, who I like, is on board.
00:33:22.940Well, it is, but this is what's interesting.
00:33:24.580There's a reason these guys came back around.
00:33:26.760And Kid Rock, he was actually on Joe Rogan talking about this.
00:33:29.680And one of the reasons that Kid Rock came back around is actually like Anheuser-Busch executives like flew to Kid Rock, met with Kid Rock, and Kid Rock got an apology.
00:33:37.240I mean, essentially, like they told Kid Rock, like, we screwed up.
00:34:08.940Now he can't drink it anymore because all his buddies are, you know, making fun of him any time that he has a Bud Light.
00:34:13.760And, like, the worst thing that could happen is, like, man, this company goes under.
00:34:16.420That's the worst thing that could happen because there's, like, a ton of good, not only that Anheuser-Busch has done historically in a bunch of different ways, but also they have hundreds of distributors.
00:34:25.620And these are independent family-owned businesses across the country.
00:34:30.600And there's been tons of people, I mean, thousands of people have lost their jobs over this just, like, you know, stupid marketing mistake and the stupid aftermath.
00:34:39.000And, like, from my standpoint, like, I think the company, like, they're kind of at this, you know, kind of fork in the road.
00:34:44.920That either that they have to realize that they screwed up, they have to figure out how to make the apology, they got to do it in a big, you know, important way.
00:34:52.400You know, that's a great time to say, hey, guys, we screwed up, you know, but, hey, now we're back.
00:34:55.420Or, like, otherwise, if they're going to be just owned by sort of, like, you know, this European group that believes in, you know, more of the stakeholder capitalism idea and companies should get involved in politics and everything else.
00:35:05.040I actually think that they should just sell the U.S. business and they should sell the U.S. business back to Americans.
00:35:10.080You know, sell it to either, you know, like, I don't know, Berkshire Hathaway, sell it to Buffett, sell it to a bunch of private equity firms.
00:35:15.540And then you could go on an unbelievable kind of PR campaign where you say, hey, guys, we're back in U.S. hands.
00:35:21.900We're all of a sudden, you know, focused back on core American values that we always once had.
00:35:26.220You know, this business was built on meritocracy.
00:36:16.320And then, like, you know, until you get that, like, you're just not going to be able to have that comeback arc.
00:36:20.900And then, man, then when the guy went out there and won the Masters after all the issues that he has had, never seen, you know, a crowd that excited my entire life.
00:36:29.360I think there'd be tons of people who would love to see Anheuser-Busch.
00:36:31.740Like, one of the greatest American companies of all time.
00:36:34.080Eagle is a logo and works with the military.
00:36:36.880I mean, like, during World War II, these guys were, like, you know, building all types of military stuff, survived Prohibition.
00:36:42.640I mean, there's a company that for 10 years, like, couldn't sell beer and survived by being, you know, very, having a lot of ingenuity.
00:36:49.520At the time, they were making, like, non-alcohol products.
00:39:10.180Like, that's what they should have been doing all along.
00:39:12.500And that's what was sort of, like, missing.
00:39:13.800Because, man, like, you know, like, Bud Light just always had iconic.
00:39:16.920Bud Light and Budweiser, you know, a lot of times people think of them as sort of the same brand.
00:39:20.140But, like, I think we're from the Budweiser Frogs and the Real Men of Genius.
00:39:23.080And, like, you know, the ladies' night commercials.
00:39:25.300And, you know, I mean, Spuds McKinsey.
00:39:26.620Like, when Spuds McKinsey, like, when Bud Light launched, like, he was the original, like, you know, party animal, fun guy, going out, knew all the jokes.
00:39:32.980Like, that's what they should have been doing all along.
00:39:35.020But it's crazy that it took them to lose 30%, 40% of their customer base to realize that, like, that's just what they needed to do.
00:39:40.840And, you know, there's a long arc that we can get into if this happened.
00:39:46.020But, you know, I mentioned that the company was, Anheuser-Busch, was bought in the year 2008 by this European kind of conglomerate called InBev.
00:39:56.000It was kind of a roll-up of, like, South American beer companies, European beer companies.
00:40:00.000And then they bought Anheuser-Busch in 2008.
00:40:04.720And there was just, like, two very different cultures.
00:40:07.180Anheuser-Busch was incredibly good at marketing.
00:40:10.400They had almost 50% of the beer category.
00:40:12.600They won the Super Bowl Ad Meter Award every single year.
00:40:14.720Like, they got the pulse of the American consumer.
00:40:16.460Whereas, like, the InBev company, they were better, I would call it, like, financially and business-wise.
00:40:22.140Kind of, like, managing the bottom line, cost-cutting, those types of things.
00:40:25.400And theoretically, if you could put those two business together, there should have been a ton of shareholder value created.
00:40:30.640You know, I kind of joined the company around that time because the company at that time was talking about we're a meritocracy.
00:40:35.980And, you know, we're going to manage the bottom line, but we do that to reinvest in the marketing campaigns.
00:40:39.800And, you know, I'd say for probably the first at least, you know, five, six, seven years that I was there, the company did an amazing job.
00:40:44.720But sort of starting in the 2017, 2018, 2019 timeframe, both internally and Anheuser-Busch on a micro level, the company kind of ran out of companies to buy and to integrate, took on too much debt from this purchase of S.A.B. Miller.
00:41:02.560And so needed to figure out how they were going to get back to more top line marketing brand growth.
00:41:08.140And at the same time, that's when you really saw this stakeholder capitalism sort of philosophy, like, really take hold in America.
00:41:16.300It was really when Trump came to power in 2016.
00:41:19.680There were a lot of organizations, and he pulled out of things like the Paris Climate Accords, where he said, like, you know, the U.S. is not going to sign up for certain climate emissions reductions if China's not going to and if other people aren't.
00:41:33.080It's not sort of an America first policy.
00:41:35.520And then you had, you know, again, a lot of these sovereign wealth funds in Europe, like in Norway, progressive pension funds that said, OK, well, you know, if Trump or, you know, the U.S. is not going to solve these existential issues, then all of a sudden, like, we need companies to do it.
00:41:49.540And then they started putting pressure on the large asset managers that own the companies, again, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, to say, you guys need to start putting in policies that are going to start affecting.
00:42:10.520So you have, like, Harvard University, Yale University, pension funds in New York, pension funds in California, Sovereign Wealth Fund of Norway, all of these more, like, progressive institutions that adopted more progressive values.
00:42:24.620They control billions, if not trillions of dollars of capital.
00:42:29.080And they usually have large asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard manage that money.
00:42:35.180They manage that money by having, like, if you can see, like, your 401K, you'll probably have, like, a large cap value fund or portfolio.
00:42:43.320Well, so those companies are investing into corporate America.
00:42:46.380When they invest in the corporate America, they have ownership in those businesses to the point that most of those, like, those three companies mentioned, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, they own almost 20% of every single company in corporate America, in the S&P 500,
00:43:00.700which gives them the ability to vote for shareholder proposals and also gives them the ability to interact with management and kind of work with management on certain policies.
00:43:12.900So every year, Larry Fink, in 2018, wrote this letter to all the CEOs of corporate America.
00:43:20.320And in his annual letter, he essentially said that now we're evolving the purpose of a corporation to not focus on shareholders but on stakeholders.
00:43:29.120And he was also talking about how he's –
00:43:31.920Anson, can you define a stakeholder for me?
00:43:34.180I mean the way I understand it is somebody who has some sort of interest in the company, whether it's a consumer or a citizen of a country that that business operates in.
00:43:58.100It could be – you know, there's a whole – it could be basically anybody.
00:44:00.360Like a stakeholder can be almost anything.
00:44:02.460And this is sort of the problem is like when it's not defined who a company is serving, then all of a sudden like all these interests come in and start exerting pressure on the business.
00:44:09.820So like a very clear example is – so BlackRock says – writes this letter to all the CEOs, says companies need to earn their social license to operate.
00:44:18.480And to earn their social license, they now need to start abiding by these environmental social governance, ESG, and DEI policies that BlackRock is going to implement into the companies.
00:44:29.680He gets a lot of like 200 sort of CEOs in the U.S. to sign on to something in 2019 that the Business Roundtable did that also evolved the purpose of a corporation.
00:44:38.260And this sort of set what I call sort of like the kindling for really like this COVID bonfire that then emerges.
00:44:44.460So COVID pops up and COVID becomes this sort of like existential threat to humanity.
00:44:50.980And, you know, to some degree like, you know, what was in the news at the time was it was this existential threat that, you know, we're going to – millions of people are going to die and hospitals are going to be overrun and we all have to band together to fight COVID.
00:45:02.800I mean, that was the initial deal with COVID.
00:45:04.500And as you remember, there was this whole deal to like flatten the curve.
00:45:07.320And it was like, you know, keep people out of hospitals.
00:45:12.060And if you remember it, like all of these corporations were all of a sudden like compelled to help flatten the curve.
00:45:18.100You know, even like Trump at the time, he didn't want to do this but was compelled by all these sort of like Democratic congressmen from New York who saw a bunch of people dying in New York.
00:45:25.560He signed something called the Defense Production Act, which can compel companies to stop what they're doing and for national defense purposes do something else.
00:45:37.220Use their resources, their manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera.
00:45:40.200Yeah, you know, it was like General Electric now has to make ventilators because like, you know, we're going to be overwhelmed with ventilators.
00:46:28.880And when that happens, all of a sudden you had all these protests and all the calls for Black Lives Matter.
00:46:34.200And now all of a sudden, like companies are being told and compelled that they now have to solve this problem of systemic racism.
00:46:40.360That was like the next big problem that now companies are supposed to solve.
00:46:44.360And because there was this whole, this stakeholder capitalism movement that has popped up.
00:46:49.420Now, and BlackRock is telling companies, okay, guys, everyone got involved in COVID.
00:46:55.240Now the next thing is let's figure out how we're going to solve this systemic racism issue.
00:46:59.400And this is where like it gets interesting, right?
00:47:01.280Of, you know, so how does this really work in corporate America?
00:47:03.540Well, if you're a stakeholder, like one of these stakeholders being a big activist.
00:47:07.020And if you're an activist and you're a nonprofit organization, you, if you buy $25,000 of any company stock, you have the ability to put up a shareholder proposal at that company every year.
00:47:20.320And the shareholder proposals can be things like, hey, you know, I want the company to have, you know, different boards of directors, or I want the company to, you know, do different innovation.
00:47:31.140But they become very politicized proposals that were put up at companies, especially in the wake of the George Floyd winners.
00:47:38.500Companies like Apple, there's an activist organization called Color of Change.
00:47:42.660And their, you know, whole mission is to stamp out systemic racism in the United States.
00:47:47.240Like, okay, fine, you're a nonprofit, you can do that, fine.
00:47:49.260But like they bought 25,000 shares worth of Apple, and they put up this proposal that said, we want you, Apple, to conduct a racial equity audit to figure out how you contributed to systemic racism and white supremacy historically in the United States.
00:48:03.180And what are you going to do to fix it moving forward?
00:48:07.200Yeah, we want this result, and we want you to come up with a quote-unquote scientific method to validate the predetermined result that we've identified.
00:48:28.760He said, guys, like, you know, like, we're Apple.
00:48:30.860Like, our mission is to make magical devices at unbelievable prices, and like, that's what we do.
00:48:35.280You know, like, yeah, I understand, like, this other stuff's important, but like, that's just not what we as Apple do.
00:48:39.080So, like, they recommended against this racial equity audit.
00:48:42.880Yet, this racial equity audit, when it went to the so-called shareholders, it ends up passing 52 to 48 with BlackRock being the second largest shareholder of Apple after Warren Buffett, who, of course, voted against this.
00:48:54.240He was like, no, this is totally silly.
00:48:55.540But when you got on, like, BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard and others that collectively.
00:49:00.740So, now, all of a sudden, like, in the year 2021, Apple's doing a racial equity audit conducted by, like, you know, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and, you know, asking, essentially, like, how they contributed tens of millions of dollars of dollars being spent.
00:49:13.920And this is now ending up in, like, Apple implementing, like, you know, quota systems and, like, all these other DEI policies and talking about, like, the percentages of people from various backgrounds they're going to hire.
00:49:24.740And this is happening across corporate America.
00:49:27.200It's not only the things that create records.
00:49:28.540It's, like, defund the police initiatives.
00:49:29.860It's all of a sudden, like, oil and gas companies were being told to not produce oil and gas to solve climate change.
00:49:35.740And just numerically, before sort of the COVID time period and this adoption of stakeholder capitalism, less than 5% of these so-called ESG and DEI proposals that were being put up at companies passed.
00:49:48.980Yet, in the year 2021, you were having BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard voting for almost 40%, almost 50% of these things were being voted on.
00:49:57.560And in a lot of cases, in many cases past, in corporations.
00:50:00.700So that's why you start to see corporate America get very politicized during this time period on very – on a bunch of different initiatives.
00:50:07.280And not only was that bad for companies, but also it ended up becoming bad really for, like, democracy because, like, a lot of, like, policies were being implemented in corporate America that the vast majority of people disagreed with.
00:50:18.860But it was, like, a really small number of, like, asset managers that were, like, forcing this political agenda onto corporations.
00:50:42.740And then all the attention gets drawn on that person.
00:50:45.700This is gaslighting 101 from BlackRock, from, what did you say, State Street and Vanguard as well.
00:50:51.080Is they're uniting us against, to use your verbiage, an invisible enemy in order to milk us for billions if not trillions of dollars utilizing our own fears and emotions against us.
00:51:12.560And people became, like, paralyzed in corporate America to do anything that was sort of, like, against this very progressive ideologies and all of these, again, shareholder proposals and all this pressure to, you know, again, like, you know, support progressive causes.
00:51:28.520I was seeing it outside of, you know, outside of Anheuser-Busch and also inside.
00:51:32.760I mean, outside of Anheuser-Busch, I mentioned earlier the, you know, I was living in Atlanta, Georgia at the time.
00:51:36.920And Coca-Cola, you know, and Delta and others, they really got involved when citizens of Georgia voted for representatives that you need to have an ID to vote.
00:51:55.420And, again, lo and behold, all these sort of Georgia-based companies, Coca-Cola, Delta, Major League Baseball canceled the All-Star game over this issue, if you'll recall.
00:52:05.180I remember, like, you know, this is sort of, like, crazy what's going on.
00:52:08.220And then, you know, internally at Anheuser-Busch, I'm also seeing a lot of, like, art policies change.
00:52:12.760Like, meritocracy was always the word that we used at Anheuser-Busch when we recruited people, we promoted people.
00:52:18.320And then all of a sudden, like, that got replaced as one of our principles as, you know, now all of a sudden you got promoted based off the diversity of your teams.
00:52:26.000And it was, like, very clear what that meant.
00:52:27.440I was like, that just doesn't make any sense.
00:52:29.320A lot of our marketing was starting to change at Anheuser-Busch at the time.
00:52:32.280We used to try and win the Super Bowl Ad Meter Award every single year.
00:52:35.300Like, that's what, you know, basically was the pinnacle of did you get the American consumer.
00:52:39.680We started trying to win these con line awards, cons of city in France that, you know, has, like, very European view.
00:52:45.380And you'd win those awards by having your ESG DEI sort of proposal.
00:52:48.120So I'm seeing a lot of these products materialized.
00:52:50.580And then, you know, really the start to break the camel's back for me is I want to do a partnership, a distribution agreement with Black Rifle Coffee Company.
00:52:59.540You know, if you think about, like, Anheuser-Busch, they've dropped off Bud Light and Budweiser at every single gas station and grocery store and, you know, bar and restaurant across the country.
00:53:08.440And at the time, Black Rifle Coffee Company was coming out with their first sort of, like, canned coffee and ready-to-drink coffee.
00:53:19.980So, like, they were already in, like, Walmarts and, you know, 7-Elevens.
00:53:22.640And we thought, I thought it made a ton of sense of, like, man, like, by the way, the guy who's drinking, like, Budweiser at night, a lot of times he was drinking Black Rifle Coffee Company in the morning.
00:53:30.180You know, and I was like, if you put these things on the same truck, go to the same places, it'll be a great deal for them.
00:53:34.860It'll be a great deal for us, great partnership, and we have a, like, a corporate social responsibility team that was, like, based in New York City that killed the entire deal.
00:53:50.960I was the president of Anheuser-Busch Sales and Distribution Company, yes.
00:53:54.460Which is crazy to me because it seems like you'd have so much weight and pull, and yet you're getting all this pushback.
00:54:01.640Like, I don't understand corporate America, obviously, to the degree that you do, but it seems wild to me that with your influence within the organization, you're still getting, like, no, we're not doing that, and you're getting pushed aside for something else.
00:54:15.460I mean, a lot of people, they were hamstrung by, like, you know, your legal team or your HR team or your, you know, social responsibility team is essentially saying, like, there's too much risk.
00:54:24.180You know, ooh, Black Rifle Coffee Company, like, you know, like, they support, like, the military and, you know, and veterans and police and, like, there's just a lot of heat right now with, like, you know, the police and, you know, like, anyone that's, you know, supporting the police, that seems, you know, you know, persona non grata.
00:54:42.380And, you know, there was, like, I don't know, issues.
00:54:46.900It was, like, you know, Kyle Rittenhouse was, like, the guy that, like, you know, killed a protester, I think, up in Wisconsin, but, like, he was wearing a Black Rifle Coffee Company, like, shirt or something.
00:55:35.980Like, why wouldn't we as an organization be fine working with, like, this great company that, frankly, like, used to share, you know, or shares what used to be our values?
00:55:44.840And, you know, Budweiser had done tons of great partnerships with the military and Folds of Honor and others.
00:55:49.940You know, so, like, but this was going on, like, at large scale across corporate America where, I mean, you literally couldn't do partnerships with certain companies or have a certain viewpoint.
00:56:00.020You know, we opened up this show talking about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
00:56:02.860You know, like, companies that couldn't put out certain messaging because you couldn't be, you didn't want to be deplatformed from Facebook or Instagram or others where a lot of your people were.
00:56:15.380You know, I'm hoping that as we move forward, we get back to an era of, like, you know, free speech, open debate, dialogue, and, like, letting the consumer decide.
00:56:22.460And not necessarily censoring views, censoring voices, censoring products, because that was a real bad era that we were in over the last couple years.
00:56:29.020I mean, the reality is it'll change until it changes, you know, like, Zuckerberg and these types, they're not principled people.
00:56:36.760They're only worried about the bottom line, and so they'll do whatever they need to do, and to preserve themselves as well.
00:56:43.620I'm not dismissing his intelligence or his ability to create these incredible systems that have literally transformed the world, but he's a coward.
00:56:51.000He's a moral, unprincipled coward, and as soon as the culture changes, then he'll change his tune because he's not based on a principled background.
00:57:04.100But that actually leads me into the question of Trump because, you know, as of the recording of this, it's January 9th, and, you know, Trump will take office in the next couple of weeks, a little less than two weeks.
00:57:16.460And we're already starting to see major shifts in Zuckerberg's, the way he's showing up, and other organizations, and we're seeing world leaders come to the table, and we're even seeing entertainment and media starting to change some of their tune.
00:57:34.160Like, how does this change under a Trump presidency over the next four years?
00:57:38.240I mean, I think, like, we're just getting back.
00:57:41.220I hope the pendulum is swinging back, like, at least in the corporate world, that we're going to be able to, like, separate sort of, you know, church and state.
00:57:47.740Hopefully there's no longer this world that we were living in were, like, tech companies, you know, were essentially, like, Facebook and Meta and Twitter and others were essentially, like, you know, voices of the government.
00:57:57.600I mean, you know, it was amazing that Elon bought Twitter, unrolled a bunch of logs, turned over a bunch of logs, and showed that there was, like, legitimately, like, the government was working with Twitter to censor voices.
00:58:06.540And I think what we're trying to do is, like, just break that apart, and I don't think that this is necessarily, like, you know, partisan-type issue.
00:58:12.680Like, this is just common sense, that I don't care if, you know, I don't want Trump, or I don't want the Republicans, you know, telling the spying on Democrats or censoring Democrat speech or something.
00:58:26.640I mean, it was one of the worst, most atrocious things that could have happened to us in our privacy as American citizens under conservative leadership.
00:58:35.300So, yeah, I don't like it coming from any side of the table.
00:58:41.000So, like, what I'm hoping is, like, we just break apart this sort of, this, you know, government and corporations sort of, like, collusion that was going on.
00:58:47.580Like, you know, people don't like that.
00:58:52.040And it caused all these problems in retrospect.
00:58:53.840So, what I'm hoping is, like, that's what we're getting back to, like, getting back to, like, principled approaches.
00:58:58.440Like, let's have the rules of the road, whether you're a Democrat, you're a Republican, whatever, gay, straight, black, white, like, don't care.
00:59:04.580But, like, there are certain principles we're going to stand on.
00:59:06.200Free speech is, like, something that we're going to stand on now.
01:00:55.6805,000 applications of people like, oh, my gosh, like, how amazing would that be to come to an organization where, like, I don't have to be indoctrinated every single day about, you know, my white privilege or about my biases or about my whatever else.
01:01:08.280And I can just, you know, work and, you know, hang out with people that I like.
01:01:12.300So I think that's what we're going to get back to.
01:01:13.900And then, you know, I think Elon, you know, a great personal sacrifice to himself.
01:01:17.320I mean, think about, like, what that guy's done over the last couple of years of just sort of bringing back and, you know, buying Twitter.
01:01:24.460I mean, potentially losing billions of dollars on Twitter, but to restore free speech in this country.
01:01:30.100So I think that, you know, there's, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, fear is contagious.
01:01:36.040And there was a lot of fear, especially four or five years ago.
01:02:08.160He was kind of run out of Facebook in 2016 because I think he was like part of the 2% of employees that gave to Trump and not to Hillary.
01:02:16.760And after that, he left Facebook and started a company called Anduril.
01:02:20.980And Anduril now is one of the defense tech companies.
01:02:23.860But they're doing a lot of the autonomous drones and a lot of the weapons that are going to be sort of the next 21st century rapidly to protect here in the U.S.
01:02:32.300And when he did it at the time, he was being called that he was like supporting the military industrial complex and he's, you know, supporting the killing of people.
01:02:41.440And, you know, like, I mean, literally, you know, was so had so many bad things thrown at him.
01:02:47.120And he was on a great all in podcast recently and like ended up like eviscerating a lot of these guys by reading all like the mean things that were said about him.
01:02:55.100Because when he started this company, he was like, listen, like, you know, I realized like China was a threat and us just having like $35 billion, you know, planes or like large tankers.
01:03:04.400Like that wasn't going to be the next iteration of war.
01:03:06.260Like the next iteration of war was going to be, you know, drones and bots and swarms.
01:03:11.640And so, like, therefore, I started creating this company and all of a sudden, like when Russia invaded Ukraine, all of a sudden, like the narrative on him had totally shifted because he all of a sudden was like, you know, selling drones to Ukraine and, you know, helping on like the Ukraine front.
01:03:27.460But he was sold as he's like this defender of democracy.
01:03:29.960And he's like, listen, like nothing about me had like changed.
01:03:34.240Like I was doing this company to defend this country and be able to defend like the country and our allies.
01:03:39.400And all of a sudden, you know, a day ago, I was persona non grata in Silicon Valley.
01:03:45.120But now after like Russia invades Ukraine, now like I'm being held up as this like great American hero.
01:03:50.080Like, no, no, like that's not the way we should operate.
01:03:52.280We need to operate on fundamental principles of, you know, principles of sort of like American values, protecting American interests, protecting democracy, protecting our freedoms.
01:04:00.620And these are things that, you know, can change in one lifetime if we don't.
01:04:04.740And it's like these are some of the values that I think that, you know, not only, you know, individuals, but even like corporations need to like dig deeply about what it means to be an American and what it means to be an American corporation, what it means to have that privilege.
01:04:19.340That's what's unleashed the greatest economic miracle in the history of the world here in the United States.
01:04:23.080It also allows our democracy to stand strong.
01:04:25.220And again, I hope those principles are what comes back and sort of this next administration.
01:04:29.020And those principles remain no matter who's in office for the next, you know, at least my lifetime.
01:04:34.340I mean, I, I have my reservations, but I certainly hope that you're right with Zuckerberg and his change of tune and some of these other individuals.
01:04:44.700You know, and I know even with you, your business partners with Vivek Ramaswamy, who's obviously, you know, co, I don't even know what the, what the term or the title is with Doge.
01:05:00.280I don't, I don't know what the term is, but I love to see collaborations like this happen.
01:05:06.660I love to see individuals who believe in the American spirit, who believe in individualism, meritocracy, you know, partnering up, banding together.
01:05:15.780You said it could change in a lifetime.
01:05:17.600You were talking about the negative side, but I, I'm beginning to see how rapidly under the right leadership, how quickly things can change in a positive direction as well.
01:05:30.260I mean, it's just been amazing to see the vibe shift that has happened where all of a sudden, like, you know, you think about like, I mean.
01:05:36.240In like 12 months, less than 12 months.
01:07:06.200We're going to act in the best interest of our country.
01:07:08.760You know, here in the U.S., like we're believers in sort of like the American dream, the American spirit, the American constitution.
01:07:14.560You know, the American revolution is something that this day is like very radical in a lot of countries.
01:07:18.500You know, the fact here in the United States that you can own a gun or that you can speak freely, you know, or that you can choose whatever religion.
01:07:24.920Like, these are like rights that are in a lot of – like very radical in very many other countries.
01:07:30.420And we should continue to stand up for these – to stand up for these rights that have created the most prosperous and free country of the last 250 years.
01:07:38.000But unless we continue to do that, you know, that can collapse in a generation.
01:09:29.980Obviously sharing a lot of things that have been going on in popular culture.
01:09:34.600We talked a lot about the DEI initiatives.
01:09:37.500We talked also about the whole fiasco with Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney.
01:09:47.160We even talked about some of the concepts of the ESG movement, environmental, social, and governance policies that are dictating a lot of what's going on in big corporate today and why these things need to be done away with.
01:10:02.100If you're interested and want to support what Anson is doing, head over to Amazon, pick up a copy of The Last Call for Bud Light.
01:10:10.240And in addition to that, make sure that you check out our brand new event coming out May 1st through the 4th.
01:10:22.480All right, you guys, those are your marching orders.
01:10:25.940We will be back tomorrow for our Ask Me Anything.
01:10:28.840Until then, go out there, take action, and become the man you are meant to be.
01:10:36.900Thank you for listening to the Order of Man podcast.
01:10:39.880If you're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be, we invite you to join the order at orderofman.com.