The Atlas Society Asks Anson Frericks Transcript

Anson Frericks, a former president at Anheuser-Busch—formerly the home of America’s most popular brewery—watched as the company unraveled at the hands of globe-trotting financiers and progressive middle management. In his book Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America's Favorite Beer explores how stakeholder capitalism, DEI, and ESG unraveled America’s most popular brewery and offers insight into how businesses should focus on shareholder capitalism and the people who buy their products and what may happen when they don’t. Watch the entire video HERE or check out the transcript below.

JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman

AF: Anson Frericks

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JAG: Hey everyone! Welcome to the 249th episode of The Atlas Society Asks. My name is JAG. I'm CEO of The Atlas Society. I'm really excited today to have Anson Frericks come and join us to talk about his book, Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America's Favorite Beer. Anson, thanks so much for joining us.

I've been an Ayn Rand fan since I read, I want to say, Anthem in eighth grade and then, of course, Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged afterwards.

AF: JAG, thank you so much for having me. I've been an Ayn Rand fan since I read, I want to say, Anthem in eighth grade and then, of course, Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged afterwards. So, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here.

JAG: Fantastic. Now, you have how many kids?

AF: I have three kids. I have a 10-year-old son, an eight-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son.

JAG: Okay, well, the 10-year-old is just about ready for Anthem. Maybe a couple of years. Afterwards, perhaps we can get your address because we have recruited a Marvel Comics illustrator to turn some of Rand's works into graphic novels. We've done that with Anthem and Red Pawn and just trying to find ways to get kids to read her books, which is a bit of a tough sell these days when so few young people are reading books.

AF: That's amazing because my son, he reads all the Dogman and Captain Underpants and all these books, but I think we're aging out of those. I actually got him a book on Babe Ruth yesterday when we were at the library. So, I would absolutely love it if there was a graphic novel on Anthem, but I almost feel like Anthem itself was, to my mind, almost a graphic novel in and of itself. This dystopian future and what can go wrong if we lose the word I. But I love that idea and would love to have those books and would love to get my son reading those if you ever come out with those.

JAG: Yes, absolutely. As a matter of fact, we also have created book trailers of Anthem and scenes from the novella. You know, if young people look, it's a dystopian post-apocalyptic love story. What's not to love? Especially for a teenage boy or girl. Well, speaking of books, this was your first one. What was the biggest surprise about the process of writing and publishing your first book?

It's a little bit of a love letter, I think, to capitalism, but then also to a company that I once loved, Anheuser-Busch.

AF: Yes, I'd say that the biggest surprise to me was that I actually was writing the book for myself. It's a little bit of a love letter, I think, to capitalism, but then also to a company that I once loved, Anheuser-Busch. So, a lot of this became very natural to me to write. It was fun to get the story out. I think the most frustrating part was I actually had this book probably written almost in full about a year ago at this point and I was telling Simon & Schuster that they should get it out and that they should publish it. They said, no, no, no, you don't understand, because we have an election going on, and all of the news is going to be geared towards the election, and then you have all these other political novels coming out. You want to wait after the election. 

So I was really frustrated by that process, but it actually worked out perfectly because a lot of the themes in this book are about what went wrong with the diversity, equity, inclusion movement, the DEI movement, what I saw at Anheuser-Busch, how certain voices were being silenced. I wanted to do a partnership with Black Rifle Coffee Company. It actually played out incredibly well when we released this book in February. This was really the time when the Trump administration was starting to come down on the DEI-Industrial Complex. You had a lot of companies that had yet to walk away from DEI, were reconsidering what DEI had become, which was effectively quota systems and forced equity and the exclusion of a lot of voices. A lot of companies were walking away. So, it actually worked out really, really well; the timing was wise. But I was sort of frustrated how long it takes to go from an actual book that was ready to be published until it actually gets out there.

JAG: Well, as someone who worked for 12 years at Dole Food Company, again, a very large international conglomerate, and to see over time, how just usual HR stuff began to get infected with this kind of thinking, I like to say that the choice to do one thing is really a choice not to do another thing. So, when you're really focusing, putting the focus on these incredibly divisive political agenda items, you're not focusing on your brand. So that, to me, was part of the really interesting thing about your book, which we tend to think, whoa, this is just some random thing that happened. Somebody took their eye off the ball and sent a can of beer to Dylan Mulvaney. But you write about how this actually began much, much earlier. 

For you, it also began much, much earlier. When you were growing up, you were a big fan of Budweiser and the brand. How did that first come about? How did it manifest when you were in high school and college?

AF: Yes, definitely. Even though I don't think I was supposed to be the target audience for beer commercials, I think maybe unintended I probably was in the ’80s and ’90s. I think this is really, call it, the peak of beer commercials where Peak beer was involved in culture. One of the first memories that I have is I was at the Super Bowl in 1988 and it was the Bengals versus the 49ers. I was from Cincinnati, Ohio. It was the first world memory I had. My parents threw a big Super Bowl party and they had a lot of Bud, Bud Light. Then I remember this also because, people might remember, this was the first of what was called the Bud Bowl commercials. This is where you had Budweiser versus Bud Light. The company spent $4 million to produce this ad, which at the time was an astronomical amount of money. It was the first commercial-produced Bowl that ran during the Super Bowl as well. So they put a bunch of money into this. 

Budweiser and Bud Light became the number one and number two beer brands in the entire country. Because these brands were associated with sports and music and backyard barbecuing and humor. Just things that brought people together, didn't divide people.

I really remember those Bud Bowl commercials. Then throughout the ’90s, they had Bud versus Bud Light and there's Bud Bowls going on. But they also had the Budweiser Frogs. They had real men of genius. They had the “waz-up?” guys. I mean that's sort of the commercials that I grew up with and I love. No surprise at the time, Budweiser and Bud Light became the number one and number two beer brands in the entire country. Because these brands were associated with sports and music and backyard barbecuing and humor. Just things that brought people together, didn't divide people. The Busch family, which was running the company at the time, I thought, they really understood the American consumer, almost better than any entrepreneur that I can really think of. I think part of that was the company was headquartered in the geographic center of the U.S. which is in St. Louis, Missouri. I think you have a really good understanding if you have an urban center downtown, you have farms within 50 miles, you have suburbs. They just did a really good job of understanding who that US consumer was. For myself, I mean, grew up with those commercials and never thought I'd actually work at a beer company. But it was always kind of in the back of my mind that I did like beer, I enjoyed beer. It was, I think, a large part of my college and post-college experience.

JAG: I was really impressed by the lengths that Anheuser-Busch went to recruit you out of Harvard Business School. Do you think that your early fandom was a factor or were they looking for specific traits in recruiting executives with potential?

AF: Yes, it was one of these things in life that I wasn't expecting at all. You mentioned I was at Harvard Business School. So, my quick background is I graduated from Yale for undergrad. I was at a private equity firm in Boston for a couple of years after undergrad and then went back to business school at Harvard and was actually interning at Citadel, which is a large hedge fund in New York. I think probably just because of my like for beer, one of my friends was interning at Anheuser-Busch that summer and invited me to come to a company happy hour. It was in New York and I was an intern. Anytime I think there's an opportunity for free beer when you're an intern in New York, you take it. I wasn't really expecting much from the company. I had known about Anheuser-Busch. I had also known a little bit about this company called AB InBev. AB InBev purchased Anheuser-Busch in 2008. AB InBev was this company that was headquartered in Belgium, but they were run by a group of investment bankers from Brazil, but were a European company that owned brands like Stella Artois, Hoegaarden Left.

The way that they sold it to me when I first met these folks at this happy hour was kind of a coincidence; they sold it to me as “We're the world's essentially largest, private equity firm that happens to sell beer”; that was the way they talked about their company. They kind of consolidated the South American beer market, they consolidated in the European beer market. They just bought Anheuser-Busch in the US and they said we're going to buy Grupo Modelo which owns brands like Modelo and Corona. We're going to go buy SABMiller. Who knows, we might buy Coke and Pepsi. We're looking for essentially American folks who understand the US and US culture and we want you to help us build this brand. My background was also as an athlete. One of the folks recruiting me was an athlete as well. So, it kind of worked out early on. But it was funny, I originally said, no. There's no way I'm ever going to work at a large consumer company. Yes, I like beer, but I was always in finance and finance was more where I was heading. My brother had worked at Procter and Gamble, which is another consumer company. He was very frustrated. That was a hierarchy. Took forever to get promoted. Really quickly AB InBev and the folks that recruited me, they kind of disarmed a lot of these concerns. They said, no, you don't understand, we're a meritocracy. You can come in here, you can quickly show that you can get results. If you get results, you get promoted. You can manage folks. So, originally I said no a bunch of times. They continued to pursue me. Actually the night I got engaged to my wife, I said, “Hey, by the way, there's these folks that continue to pursue me and they want us to go and live over in Belgium. Do you have an interest in living in Europe for a couple of years and seeing that and working for this company?” And my wife said, “Hey, yes, that sounds great, let's do it.” So anyway, that's what eventually got me there. The whole idea was if it works out, there's this major democratic organization that was going to grow and that was going to acquire more and I was going to have opportunities. Great. If it didn't work out, I could always go back to finance. So that was how I ended up at AB InBev.

JAG: One of the things I really enjoyed about your book was the history of the company. Did you know much about the history of Anheuser-Busch before you got into writing the book or is that something that you had to research? I was very impressed by how the company really rose to prominence during the Gilded Age of industrialization and all of the innovations that it brought to bear.

There’s an amazing history...Anheuser-Busch was started in the 1850s–1860s around the same time you had families like the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers. We don't have Vanderbilts or Rockefellers or Carnegies running businesses anymore...but in 2008...It was August Busch IV who was running Anheuser-Busch.

AF: Yes, it's an amazing company. I think I had known by growing up in the ’80s and ’90s and early 2000s and again I knew about the company from the commercials and the beer and that was kind of part of culture. I know a little bit about the Busch family as well. You'd mentioned there’s an amazing history to this company where Anheuser-Busch was started in the 1850s–1860s around the same time you had families like the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers. We don't have Vanderbilts or Rockefellers or Carnegies running businesses anymore in the US but in 2008 you start with the Busch family. It was August Busch IV who was running Anheuser-Busch. It was an amazing sort of entrepreneurial American dream story of an immigrant coming to the US, finding opportunities to serve a customer base, making a great product and then over time built this incredible organization. I didn't know a lot about that piece of the business when I originally joined Anheuser-Busch or when I accepted my offer. But I started reading a lot before I officially signed my offer. There are a couple of good books. One is called Dethroning the King, which is essentially what happened when InBev bought Anheuser-Busch in the US and why that happened. 

But then there was also a book called Bitter Brew, which was an interesting history of the Busch family. The Bitter Brew Busch family has a really interesting, illustrious history to it. I think they epitomized the “work hard, play hard” mentality of the beer industry. I mean, when the company got bought in 2008, I think they had, I don't know, eight private jets, four helicopters, boats. The family lived large. They almost lived this rock star type of lifestyle, which after four generations, most family businesses struggle to make it to two generations or three, but this one had made it all the way to the fourth. Finally, I think some of those successes of the family caught up with them. But, to their credit, they built the world's most valuable and largest beer company along the way.

JAG: Well, talking a little bit about the history of the company, and you'd mentioned Ayn Rand before, she rarely drank alcohol, but during Prohibition, she applauded Americans who broke the law to, quote, begin drinking on principle.

So how did Prohibition affect Anheuser-Busch?

The 18th Amendment said you could not produce alcohol and sell alcohol in the United States. There were 3,500 breweries in the country at that time. There were a bunch of distilleries, there were a bunch of winemakers, there were wholesalers. Then overnight you were put out of business.

AF: You think about existential crises that companies face. Right now everyone's concerned about tariffs and what could happen with tariffs and what's that going to do to a business? I mean, think about if you were a beer company or wine or spirits company and you're sitting there in the 1910s and heading into the 1920s, when you have the 18th Amendment that's on the horizon, which is essentially government mandating that you will be put out of business. The 18th Amendment said you could not produce alcohol and sell alcohol in the United States. There were 3,500 breweries in the country at that time. There were a bunch of distilleries, there were a bunch of winemakers, there were wholesalers. Then overnight you were put out of business. I think this speaks to a little bit of the ingenuity of the Busch family, but of a lot of people and entrepreneurs that all of a sudden on a daily basis you have to figure out, okay, well, this business no longer exists. What am I going to do to innovate? You give the company a ton of credit at the time. They started going to more non-alcoholic products. They made a product called Bevo, which was sort of one of the first big non-alcoholic beers that they created at the time. 

They started making refrigerated rail cars. So they made refrigerated rail cars, which were becoming big at the time to ship a lot of refrigerated products. They started making parts for cars and planes and they did a bunch of different things to survive. To their credit, Prohibition lasted, I think, 12–13 years and they survived over that timeframe. I mean that's a heck of a long cycle to restart and have your business. Then, when prohibition ended with the 21st Amendment, the repeal of Prohibition, Anheuser-Busch—it was one of the first times they used the Clydesdale horses and the hitch—actually went to FDR at the White House and delivered the first keg of beer that was  going to be commercially sold. So, it was pretty interesting that history and surviving then over the next really took another 30 years from there. It wasn't until the 1960s, late 1960s, early 1970s, they actually passed Schlitz. Schlitz was the biggest beer brand in the United States. But in the 1970s they passed Schlitz and then became and have continued to hold onto their spot as the number one brewery in the United States. Though that's sort of a precarious position that they're now currently in after the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. But since the 1970s it's been the largest brewer in the United States.

JAG: So, in Last Call you say you are,, “writing this book to show that the decline of AB InBev and Bud Light is not as sudden as everyone thinks. Thousands of decisions and choices over 15 years led to the ill-advised partnership with Mulvaney.” What were some of those pivotal choices and decisions?

Bud Light was the biggest beer brand in the United States when they did the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. They have very senior people involved in every single decision that's made. So, it wasn't just a one time, bad decision that was made.

AF: Yes, you know. You have this experience, JAG, of working at Dole. I mean you get this, that it's not just when a decision is made by a company to go in a certain direction with the brand, it's usually not just a sudden decision that some VP makes and they do it with a knee-jerk reaction. There tends to be a lot of people that need to sign off. It's legal teams and it's a CEO and it could be the board, depending on how big the decision is. For a company like Anheuser-Busch that had Bud Light, Bud Light was the biggest beer brand in the United States when they did the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. They have very senior people involved in every single decision that's made. So, it wasn't just a one time, bad decision that was made. The decision itself to partner with Mulvaney, we can get into it, wasn't the right one. 

Obviously, they lost millions of consumers, billions of dollars of shareholder value. But even the company, their response afterwards, where they had a lot of opportunities to clearly come out and address consumers and explain what Bud Light as a brand is going to stand for; is it going to be more like Ben and Jerry's where it's going to be more progressive and it's going to get into politics and they're going to put on their website that they're going to use Bud Light to have a progressive agenda? They were more than okay to do that. I mean, it's a free country and you can do that if you want. Ben and Jerry's does that and puts it on their website. They're proud about it. They didn't do that. They didn't do that because they had gotten caught up in the stakeholder capitalism, ESG, DEI movement. That really goes back almost 15 years. It went back to when InBev bought Anheuser-Busch. InBev, more of a European-based company, abides by more of that stakeholder capitalism, ESG, DEI philosophy. I know you had Stephen Soukup on the call last week, so I won't go all deep into stakeholder capitalism and repeat all that, but more of a European mentality. But some of the big decisions that were made were, I think, specifically when the company got rid of a lot of American executives and they brought in a lot of European executives to run brands like Bud Light and to run brands like Budweiser. 

They moved the geographical headquarters of sales and marketing from St. Louis, Missouri, which I think, again, just geographically in the US has a real center point. There's always a saying in marketing that if it plays in Peoria (Peoria, Illinois), it plays for the whole country. Peoria, Illinois, is very close to St. Louis. So it's kind of a good geographical base, but with a mood. When they moved that headquarters to New York in 2016, all of a sudden they started to look at the beer industry through a Fifth Avenue lens. The lens of Fifth Avenue is obviously very different from the lens of St. Louis, Missouri. They also started hiring a lot of different people. Myself, I was born in Maineville, Ohio, and you’re kind of center of the country, more Midwestern. I don't know if I would have joined a company that was based in New York City. I just tend to like, I don't know, having more of a yard, a little more freedom than I think New York City allows. So, a lot of people that were hired were from New York City, went to schools on the East Coast. A lot of them hadn’t been, hadn't spent a lot of time in the Midwest. A lot of them maybe hadn't even drank a Bud Light or knew people who did. So those were some of the big mistakes that were made. 

The company went all in on the stakeholder capitalism, ESG, DEI agenda, really leading up to 2020 and the COVID timeframe. But especially in the post-Covid world and the post-George Floyd's-death world.

Then I think specifically as well, the company went all in on the stakeholder capitalism, ESG, DEI agenda, really leading up to 2020 and the COVID timeframe. But especially in the post-Covid world and the post-George Floyd's-death world, the company really went all in on ESG, DEI, adopting a lot of quota systems in terms of looking at dashboards and taking a look at how are we going to even abide by what's known as a Human Rights Campaign which was a group that has companies put up so much advertisement specifically to communities like the LGBTQ community, which can be not for every single brand. So, I saw a lot of problems that were happening. Our marketing team, which used to win the Super Bowl Ad Meter award every year, that was the North Star in the US. We’re now being asked to win these Con Line awards over in Europe. To win the Con Line awards over in Europe, your commercials had to meet a DEI checklist and agenda. So these were some of the problems that I saw leading up to the Mulvaney campaign. 

A lot of companies lost focus on what their real North Star was, their shareholders—making money for their shareholders. How do you do that? You understand your customers and give them great products and services. Don't get involved in social and political issues.

To some degree, Bud Light is somewhat of a microcosm of the capture that we saw happen across corporate America, where not only companies like Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light got caught up in the ESG, DEI movement getting their brands involved in politics, but you saw, for example, that Coca Cola got involved in the Voting Rights Acts in Georgia. You saw a lot of companies that gave hundreds of millions of dollars to movements like Black Lives Matter without any accountability. So, it was just sort of a microcosm, I think, of what went wrong. I think one of the reasons I wrote this book was to talk about this chapter in US capitalism where a lot of companies lost focus on what their real North Star was, their shareholders—making money for their shareholders. How do you do that? You understand your customers and give them great products and services. Don't get involved in social and political issues unless it's really germane to your business, to what you're trying to do.

JAG: So, you touched on this earlier: back in 2022, you advocated for a distribution deal with Black Rifle Coffee, citing its strong appeal to veterans and law enforcement communities. But this partnership was rejected by higher-ups who perceived the brand as politically provocative, which is kind of ironic in retrospect. Was this, at the time or maybe even in retrospect, a bit of a turning point for you?

AF: This is a real turning point for myself. I was having some issues with Anheuser-Busch as a company before this. I think the company turning away from meritocracy, really going all in on DEI, having diversity dashboards, going down a route in terms of giving people jobs and opportunities that maybe were not qualified for those jobs, but to meet certain requirements, to check a box, all of a sudden people were getting more opportunities. That didn't make any sense to me at all. But then I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me was I was president of Anheuser-Busch Sales and Distribution in the US and I was trying to do this distribution agreement with Black Rifle Coffee Company. For the folks online that don't know Black Rifle Coffee, they're a veteran-owned business in the United States. Their whole mission is to serve coffee and culture to people who love America, including firefighters, military, police, first responders. The company was growing incredibly fast at the time. 

For me it made a lot of sense. The people that were drinking Budweiser at night, we had a lot of studies that showed a lot of them were drinking Black Rifle Coffee in the morning. So, to me it made a ton of sense to do a distribution deal where we would put Black Rifle Coffee on the same trucks that were delivering Budweiser and Bud Light to grocery stores and convenience stores and Walmart and Kroger and 7/11. A lot of these products were already being sold in their stores and it would be a good way for us to make incremental money and serve customers. I was effectively told by our legal department team in New York that you cannot do this partnership. I said, why? What do you mean? It was essentially because we were in the post-George Floyd era where anything that was involved with supporting military, supporting the police and corporate America was almost canceled. Those views became very exclusionary and they became very exclusionary.

You're telling me that Black Rifle Coffee Company, who's just trying to serve coffee and culture to people who love America—firefighters, first responders, et cetera—all of a sudden that's more controversial than some of these other brands that we're selling?

You know, especially anything that wasn't pro-defunding the police or police reform all of a sudden became very controversial. I said, “Guys, this is crazy.” At the time, Anheuser-Busch was selling, I don't know, malt liquor brands like King Cobra, 40-ounce bottles. I was like these brands aren't really beneficial to society. I mean it serves a certain person. But you're telling me that Black Rifle Coffee Company, who's just trying to serve coffee and culture to people who love America—firefighters, first responders, et cetera—all of a sudden that's more controversial than some of these other brands that we're selling? This makes no sense. It was essentially this political decision where I saw there was just going to be no way that this company was going to be able to really grow if we had this New York City mindset. We're looking at the country through this lens of New York when we're almost missing an opportunity to better serve half the country. 

Fortunately enough for me, that's when I was thinking about other opportunities and decided it would be time to leave the company.

At least half the country would love to drink Black Rifle Coffee and all the brands that we have at Anheuser-Busch; we had a portfolio of them. We had brands at the time like Busch, which was essentially for hunters and fishermen. Then we also owned a bunch of craft breweries. We own Goose Island and Elysian that had craft brands that were more progressive and I mean even had names that sound queer; great, they serve those customers also. But this is really where I think corporate America got captured, where they were not doing deals with companies that had even a slight conservative bent to them because they were afraid that it was going to be poorly looked upon by your large asset managers, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, that were asking if you have DEI commitments and what are you doing to become more diverse and more equitable and more inclusive? Or could this endanger your Human Rights Campaign score? Again, the organization I mentioned earlier said you need to do so many advertisements to the LGBTQ + community, otherwise we'll ding your score. If that score is dinged, it's almost like a social credit score, then you won't be included in certain ESG index funds that BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, the large asset managers, are putting you into. So that to me was the moment that broke the camel's back. Unfortunately the company had changed in one way. But again, fortunately enough for me, that's when I was thinking about other opportunities and decided it would be time to leave the company.

JAG: Well, we're going to get into that, but we've got quite a few questions that are rolling in from the audience, so I'm going to pop in and grab a couple of those. My Modern Galt asks, “How did government lockdowns and restrictions affect Anheuser-Busch? Was there an increased demand and did production suffer?”

In the US initially, Covid was a positive for total alcohol sales. You might recall when you were locked down here in the US a lot of people were no longer taking their kids to sports.

AF: Yes, great question. So, if you're close to Anheuser-Busch InBev, it's a global company, so the US is about, call it, 25% of its revenue. Outside of the US, they operate in Europe, they operate in China, they operate in South America and in Mexico, et cetera. So, across the globe, it depended where you were, where alcohol sales could be very restrictive. So, in places like Mexico, when the COVID lockdowns hit, the government of Mexico actually forbid the sale of alcohol. Same thing happened in South Africa. They forbid the sale of alcohol, thinking that it would be bad if people were in their house and just drinking all the time. So, in those countries the sale of alcohol literally went to zero. In the US initially, Covid was a positive for total alcohol sales. You might recall when you were locked down here in the US a lot of people were no longer taking their kids to sports. A lot of people all of a sudden had 5:00 happy hours. Every day people are sitting in their cul-de-sacs. So, in the US initially, alcohol sales increased in terms of one of the things that we had to manage a lot from a supply chain standpoint. Bars and restaurants were all shut down where you sell a lot of keg beer and you sell bottled beer and all of a sudden people were just buying 24 packs of canned beer. So, we really had to change all of our production to make sure that we could fulfill that demand for beer. 

In the US the lockdowns really happened in 2020 and were very good for the beer industry. 2021 was. But then in 2022, the industry started to decline again. Then in ’23 and ’24 and ’25, there's been a decline of the beer market in the United States, mostly as Gen Z is not drinking nearly as much as Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers did. I'm part of the millennial generation. When the millennials were in that 21- to 29-year-old cohort, you had 80% of them drinking alcohol. What's interesting now is Gen Z, which is kind of in that 21 to 29 cohort, only 60% of them are drinking alcohol. People became more focused on health and wellness. So a lot of people aren't drinking nearly as much. Sales have now started to decline from an industry standpoint in the U.S.

JAG: Another question here from Jackson Sinclair on YouTube. He asks, “Do you think the current situation for Anheuser-Busch would be different if Biden had gotten a second term instead of Trump? Especially with Trump and how Trump is going after DEI?”

You saw an immediate sales hit when there was the partnership with Dylan and Bud Light because of this controversy. Sales immediately dropped 10%, 20%, 30% in the year 2023. Last year, you saw sales continue to decline.

AF: No, I mean, I don't think the situation would be different for Anheuser-Busch because, remember, their partnership with Dylan Mulvaney had happened under the Biden administration, you might recall. Why did Dylan Mulvaney become a very controversial transgender figure? Well, not only did Dylan do this 365 days of girlhood, of documenting Dylan's transition from a biological male to saying that Dylan is female, but also during that time period, Dylan was at the White House with Joe Biden, and Dylan was advocating for gender-affirmation care for people under the age of 18. Dylan was advocating for biological men to compete against women in sports. So, almost became the face of this very controversial movement. If you go back in time two years ago when this partnership happened, this was 2023, you had at the state level, you had half the states in this country that had bills to ban gender-affirmation care for people under the age of 18 and to ban biological males from competing in sports. So, you saw an immediate sales hit when there was the partnership with Dylan and Bud Light because of this controversy. Sales immediately dropped 10%, 20%, 30% in the year 2023. Last year, you saw sales continue to decline.

Now this year, sales are down almost 50% from where they were two years ago on Bud Light, which is unbelievable to see. I think because of this, I think a lot of companies did not want to be, did not want to be “Bud Lighted.” I mean, “Bud Lighted” almost became a verb. They did not want to lose all these sales. So, even before you saw Biden lose to Trump, a lot of companies started walking back their DEI commitments. You saw Walmart, Tractor Supply, Harley Davidson, a lot of companies that were saying, wait a minute, we adopted all these DEI policies and ESG policies, and we adopted them under this guise that they were supposed to make us more money and bring in more customers and make us a better company and make us earn a better social license was what BlackRock was telling these companies they would earn. They were saying, it really hasn't helped us. It's actually been worse for us when we've been forced to take positions on whether it was defund-the-police initiatives, whether it was on Roe v. Wade over the last couple of years, whether it was when the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action, or whether it's been on LGBTQ + issues. 

For us individual companies, a lot of these things just don't make sense. If we're Walmart and our whole mission is to pay less, save better, why are we getting involved in all these other issues that we're getting involved in? Even when you compare Walmart to Target, Target stock is off almost 50% over the last couple of years since they got involved with having tuck-friendly bathing suits and putting them in all of their prime real estate. When you walk into Target to promote Pride Month instead of promoting whether it was July 4th or promoting Memorial Day, and their stock's been hit big time, whereas Walmart hasn't, because they did not get as involved in a lot of these political issues; a lot of companies have started to roll back their support of these programs because, again, it didn't help their bottom line. I don't think it helps society either. So, even if Biden was in a second term right now, I think you would have a lot of companies rolling back their DEI and ESG commitments. Maybe not as many as we've seen, but definitely, I think that snowball had already started and that train had left the station even before Trump beat Biden last year.

JAG: So, you advance an interesting argument that I hadn't heard before. To explain Wall Street's embrace of ESG and DEI, how in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, which demanded economic redistribution, they instead promised to champion fighting climate change and gender and racial disparities. Let's explore that a little bit.

AF: Yes, I think if you recall going back to the 2008 time frame, the banks were essentially the big boogeyman that had come out of this, that they had lent all this money to a bunch of people with subprime mortgages that couldn't afford the mortgages. They end up foreclosing on a lot of the people who lose their houses, and then the banks end up getting bailed out of this. When that big bailout happened, what happened next is then you had the rise of Occupy Wall Street and it was all about we are the 99%. The banks came out of this with a bad eye. So, all of a sudden they kind of try and redo their image and try and get banks to a better spot. It was much easier to all of a sudden pick up this program of ESG, (Environmental, Social, Governance), which term was first coined in 2005; it was by the UN. It was when Europe was starting to push ESG and then banks in the 2011–2012–2013 time frame in the US started picking up as well because it seemed like an easy way to move beyond Occupy Wall Street if you could say, “Oh, now all of a sudden we're using capital for so-called societal good. So, BlackRock was one of the first big companies that picked this up in a meaningful way. 

Larry Fink was pushing a lot of companies to adopt his ESG funds which were essentially him charging three times the amount of money for a fund that had worse performance than just a broad-based S&P 500 fund or a growth fund or a dividend growth fund.

You also had consulting companies like McKinsey. McKinsey wanted to start selling more consultative services on ESG and DEI. So, they came out with this big report in 2014 that was called “Diversity Matters, Diversity Wins.” This study has been debunked numerous times subsequently as it didn't make sense. But they essentially looked at a bunch of tech companies that were performing well and said that they had all this diversity, these tech companies. If you were maybe a manufacturer of airplane parts in Des Moines, Iowa, you should have sort of the same DEI standards that a Silicon Valley firm has in San Francisco. They started selling these services to companies. BlackRock at the time started coming out and Larry Fink, their CEO, was writing letters to companies about how they need to earn their social license and how they were going to start forcing behaviors at companies if they were not going to abide by the environmental-social-governance policies that BlackRock was pushing. What they didn't tell you is that Larry Fink was pushing a lot of companies to adopt his ESG funds which were essentially him charging three times the amount of money for a fund that had worse performance than just a broad-based S&P 500 fund or a growth fund or a dividend growth fund. And one of the ways that they were starting to tell companies that these ESG funds weren't performing, they essentially said we're just going to pick an oil and gas company and take that out, we're going to take a timber company, pick that out. If you don't like some of the defense companies, we're going to pick those out and we're going to package this up and sell you an ESG fund. So, actually some of the most susceptible companies to ESG actually became some of the so-called SIN companies, oil and gas companies, alcohol companies, tobacco companies, these were the ones as well.

It was almost as if Wall Street passed the buck and said, no, no, Wall Street's not the problem. You know, don't look at Wall Street, we didn't do anything wrong. It's all the alcohol, tobacco, the defense companies, oil and gas companies. Those are all the boogeymen. Those are the bad ones. We know at Wall Street because BlackRock states United, they manage $20 trillion of capital. They manage a lot of that on behalf of European sovereign wealth funds, which like the ESG agenda, they manage a lot on behalf of the State of California's pension fund, New York's pension fund. All of a sudden it was essentially passing the buck and passing the blame downstream. Now all of a sudden it was don't look over here at us, we're not the bad people. Look at everybody else. Now they wanted to force an agenda again of climate change and of racial justice and of equity on every single company using the capital that they had. That's essentially what they did throughout the late 2015–2020 time period. Then during COVID everything really got turbocharged at that point where they really had an opportunity in the post-Covid world to try and solve all these so-called existential crises. That's when in that 21–22 timeframe, we especially saw a lot of companies getting involved in social and political issues.

JAG: There's another great question from My Modern Galt. He's asking, “Aside from a focus on more progressive marketing, were there other policies that changed things in ways that are not as easily noticeable to the public?” So ESG farming practices or electric vehicles to ship the beer or what have you.

A lot of companies got pushed off their mission because of the so-called existential threat of COVID.

AF: There were so many of these. This really got turbocharged in the post-George Floyd era. The way that I talk about this a lot is companies were having this ESG, DEI agenda imparted on them and forced on them in the 2018–2019 timeframe. But really in 2020, when you had a lot of companies that adopted stakeholder capitalism, a lot of them were forced when Covid first came out to get off their mission and get off track about what they were doing. At Anheuser-Busch, we were all suddenly making hand sanitizer. You had Walmart that was having COVID testing facilities in their parking lots. You had Delta that was flying ventilators all around the country instead of just domestic passengers. A lot of companies got pushed off their mission because of the so-called existential threat of COVID. Then all of a sudden, Covid by April and May of 2020 starts to dissipate as an issue. But a lot of companies were geared up, “Hey, great, we helped solve this crisis.” Flatten the so-called curve was, I think, the famous thing everyone said. 

But then once George Floyd dies at the end of May of 2020, now all of a sudden the next thing to solve is systemic racism. That's the so-called next existential crisis that everybody has to solve. What was really interesting about the number of things that weren't just explicit outward marketing was, you might remember this, when BLM came out, you had to put a black square on your Instagram page. Then a lot of other companies were tithing money to beat the BLM movement, other movements, but there were a lot of things that were not easily accessible to the public. For example, Target, for a lot of their suppliers, they were asking their suppliers to go and buy, for example, cotton for T-shirts they were making. They said, we want you to buy so much cotton from black farmers and we want you to pay more to the black farmers for this commodity, for commodity cotton than you're paying to white farmers. Because we want to have so much from black farmers.

The State of Arkansas called us on this and they got called in before the State of Arkansas to explain this policy, which was just honestly racist. You're paying somebody based on the color of their skin more money for a commodity cotton, even if it was inferior quality, didn't make any sense.

The State of Arkansas called us on this and they got called in before the State of Arkansas to explain this policy, which was just honestly racist. You're paying somebody based on the color of their skin more money for a commodity cotton, even if it was inferior quality, didn't make any sense. You had Coca Cola which said we need to have 30 or a third of our billable hours come from black lawyers. So they were going to all the law firms that they had and they said, we only want to work with essentially black lawyers. A third of the billable hours have to come from black lawyers. Target again, they were allocating shelf space, Costco as well, not based on which products were selling and what people wanted to buy, but they were allocating shelf space at retail based on the owners, essentially the color of your skin, some immutable characteristic, based on gender, based on sex, based on race. They were allocating shelf space. 

A lot of these things were going on that weren't a marketing piece, but they were policies internally that were happening at companies. I think one of the biggest pieces also was the number of companies that tried to get a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign scoring system that comes out that it was an LGBTQ+ organization that 20 years ago came out and said to companies, “Hey, don't make fun of lesbian or gay people in your advertising. Make sure you're hiring them. You're not discriminating. You're abiding with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. You don't discriminate based on race, sex, gender, et cetera.” But in time, this Human Rights Campaign told companies, if you still want to have a 100% index score, and the score was used by companies like BlackRock as a social credit score to be included in the ESG funds, it was a lot of the ESG funds. But to do that, you had to advertise so many LGBTQ+ commercials a year, even if it didn't make sense for your brand. You had to start doing policies internally, healthcare policies. Would you do gender-affirmation care for your employees or for their kids? So, a lot of those policies started to come in as well, which was problematic. 

There were many, many policies that the public didn't see. Then I think (my book talks about a lot of these) for the first time, people are starting to have their eyes open, just not theoretically or conceptually talking about whether it's woke capitalism or woke companies. But actually, I've tried to get into the details about what really went wrong. I think when companies got involved taking political or social views on issues that were completely orthogonal to their mission and what they were doing, why that happened, why it was bad for the businesses. I think most importantly, where we go from here and how we get back on track keeping business focused on shareholders, shareholder returns, that's the greatest social good that a company can do, not necessarily trying to work with governments to social engineer.

JAG: I think one of the most destructive effects of DEI is to cast doubt on the professional merit of the very people, women and minorities, that it's supposed to help. In that light, it's impossible to say whether the hiring of Alyssa Heinerscheid as the vice president of marketing at Bud Light was because of DEI. But certainly the company didn't hesitate to try to score points touting her as the first female VP in the brand's history.  She is the public face of the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. Is that entirely fair?

She even said as much on the podcast that famously came out a couple days before the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, where she referred to Bud Light marketing as fratty and out of touch; she obviously was, I think, a little bit disconnected from the Bud Light consumer.

AF: No. I mean, I don't think it's entirely fair at all, because Alyssa—and I knew Alyssa well—at the company, I worked with her for a number of years. Yes, Alyssa was on record -- there was a whole New Yorker article about her in 2021 where she was talking more about her progressive politics and everything she was doing during COVID to empower certain groups and women, etc. That's fine if she's doing that in her personal life. I think when you take some of those personal beliefs to your professional life and especially to a brand, that's where things become problematic. I've spoken with her boss, Daniel Blake, who's a good friend of mine, who was also let go in this. You know, he essentially said Alyssa basically had the blessings from the CEO to the head of North America on down, that she was going to take Bud Light in a more progressive direction. She said, this is what I'm going to do with the brand. This is where I think it needs to go. She even said as much on the podcast that famously came out a couple days before the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, where she referred to Bud Light marketing as fratty and out of touch; she obviously was, I think, a little bit disconnected from the Bud Light consumer. So, she had a lot of people that had blessed the decision. 

I think this is where the company all of a sudden really showed that they were caught between this rock and a hard place. After the partnership with Dylan happened, they were in New York and I think to them it was like “I don't understand what the big deal is; we did a partnership with Dylan Mulvaney.” But they have millions of consumers that are leaving the brand. You know, Kid Rock famously took an AR15 and shot up a bunch of cases of Bud Light. You had a bunch of country music stars and others say, “I'm not for partnerships with Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light, which was the brand that historically did partnerships with Peyton Manning and the real men-of-genius guys.”

So, the blame on Alyssa, yes, she took it in that direction, but it went much higher than that. The only reason that went the direction it did was because of the ESG, DEI agenda that we were in. My problem also is that Alyssa was actually never fired from the company. I mean, she probably should have been for losing that many customers and then also for some of the comments she made about the customer base, but she was placed on leave. This is one of the big issues the companies face. Yes, the partnership is wrong, but the company's response was just as bad. You might recall, the partnership with Dylan happened on April 1st. It was April Fool's Day. Then three or four days later, there was a lot of uproar about Kid Rock. Sales were starting to climb. The company released a bland PR statement that says, “We do partnerships with influencers all the time. The one with Dylan was to celebrate a milestone.” Sales continued to tank. 

Bud Light was one of these beer brands that was equally enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans alike because it didn't touch politics. That's how it became the biggest beer brand in the US and then all of a sudden, they ended up losing even more customers.

Then two weeks later, on April 15, there was the first real corporate response from the CEO of Anheuser-Busch. It was this guy, Brandon Whitworth, who I knew well, reported to when I was president of Anheuser-Busch and essentially never acknowledged the situation nor ever took responsibility for it, but just made a big bland statement about how Anheuser-Busch brews a bunch of beer. We have a heritage, we have a legacy, and we want to serve beer to everybody and then release some video with some Clydesdale's going across the US and it was actually really interesting because then not only were conservatives frustrated (their traditional loyal beer drinkers) because they wanted either an apology or an acknowledgment like, “Hey, this is not what Bud Light's about.” But then they lost a lot of liberal drinkers as well. Bud Light was one of these beer brands that was equally enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans alike because it didn't touch politics. That's how it became the biggest beer brand in the US and then all of a sudden, they ended up losing even more customers. So, sales continued to dive more and more and more after that first piece. 

That's why I don't necessarily blame Alyssa. I think that if the company had come out initially that they kind of went two directions: if their CEO either said, “Yes, Bud Light is going to be like Ben and Jerry's, this is the brand, this is what we can do,” then, okay, people would have understood that they would have lost a lot of customers, maybe they would have picked up some more, but they couldn't do that. The other decision that they could have made, which I think would have been the right one, would have said, “You know what? We screwed up. Bud Light shouldn't have been involved in this partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. It was never a political brand. Dylan's obviously a political person. We made a mistake. You know, we fired our VP of Bud Light, and then we're going to go back to Bud Light regularly. Scheduled program.” 

I think if they had done that, they would have been in a much better spot. It was like a famous Teddy Roosevelt quote that says, when you're faced with a tough decision, you know the best decision is the right decision, the second best decision is the wrong decision, and the worst decision is no decision at all. That's essentially the route the company took. That's why two years later, sales are down now 50%. Things are getting worse, not better. The company's fired thousands of people and they’ve become sort of the face of what went wrong with the whole DEI and ESG movement in the US and nobody wants to be bud-lighted in this day and age.

JAG: Tell us about your decision to leave Anheuser-Busch after so many years and how you and Vivek Ramaswamy came up with the idea for Strive Capital.

AF: Yes. So, it was a tough decision. I'd been there for a number of years. I had tons of friends in the business. The beer industry is a fun industry.

I was at the last five Super Bowls and then went to the Masters and did all these fun things that were part of the beer industry. I had a ton of friends there. Wholesalers were great. But I just saw the company changing. I knew it just wasn't the right fit for me anymore. So, I saw, not only was Anheuser-Busch changing (again, I left a year before the Dylan Mulvaney partnership), but I also saw a lot of other companies that were changing. I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, during COVID. I mentioned Coca Cola earlier when, after Governor Kemp at the time in Georgia signed this Georgia Voting Rights Act that said you need an ID to vote, they were one of the very first companies, along with BlackRock and others that said, “Man, we're against this law. We're pushing back on this voter ID law.” Delta Airlines did Major League Baseball, canceled the all-star game in 2021. It was interesting. I was seeing a lot of my friends in Atlanta, Georgia, throwing out their Major League Baseball tickets, throwing out Coca Cola, frustrated with companies getting involved in politics. 

We started talking about this evolution away from what Milton Friedman says was the purpose of a corporation, which was a focus on shareholders; and the stakeholder capitalism movement that had started over the last four or five years in the U.S. was led by BlackRock, which was really forcing change at all these different companies.

So, I had a phone call with one of my buddies from high school, Vivek Ramaswamy. We go back to high school. We were on the same mock trial team in high school. School always kind of kept us together when we were in the same sort of schools. He was saying “I'm seeing the exact same thing. I'm at this biotech company that I started, and all of a sudden my employees and board members and others are asking me to take views on Black Lives Matter and on defunding the police.” He's like, “I'm just trying to make life-saving drugs and medicines; this makes no sense.” So, that sort of got the ball rolling where we said, “Hey, why is this happening? Why are so many companies getting involved in political issues?” Then we started talking about this evolution away from what Milton Friedman says was the purpose of a corporation, which was a focus on shareholders; and the stakeholder capitalism movement that had started over the last four or five years in the U.S. was led by BlackRock, which was really forcing change at all these different companies. 

So we originally started talking about ideas of how do we end up maybe better serving at least half the country, probably more, that just wants politics out of business. So we originally thought about starting a bunch of different companies. We thought about creating a new airline. We were going to call it Merit airline. Whereas Delta was getting involved in voting rights issues and DEI issues. We said we're just going to start an airline, we're going to hire the best pilots. I don't care what you look like, what your skin color is, who you sleep with. We're going to test the top 5% of the pilots, we're going to hire you and we're going to charge $100 more than every Delta flight and we're going to have the safest airlines. We thought about creating an alternative to Coca Cola to be called just Pop without politics and it was just going to serve Pop and not get involved in politics. 

We ended up with the idea of creating a company called Strive. We ended up creating Strive to be an alternative to BlackRock. Whereas BlackRock was pushing stakeholder capitalism, ESG and DEI, our whole idea was why don't we just be the defenders of American free-market shareholder capitalism and why don't we just be the one that's going to invest in companies and have them be authentic to their mission, whatever that mission is. If you're an oil and gas company, drill for oil and gas. If you're a company that's creating pop or soda, sell that. If you're in the business of major league baseball, just do major league baseball, don't necessarily get involved in all these political issues. So it was interesting because at the time that should have been a simple idea. If we came up with that 10 or 15 years ago people would have said “So what is that, what do asset managers do?” But three years ago that wasn't even a contrarian view, that was almost a subversive view, that you were going to have an asset management firm just asking companies to be great and excellent at what their mission is, stay in that lane, don't try and solve all these other social and political issues with the government. But I think because we were doing something that might not have been the current thing at the time, I think it was the right thing to do because of that. 

When we had the courage to stand up and start fighting back against the BlackRocks and others—we always say fear is contagious, but courage is contagious too—a lot of people all of a sudden felt they could speak up. I think we were making a lot of sense about how we were being a better fiduciary, which is really a legal term to the vast majority of Americans; but whether it's via their 401Ks or their investment funds they just want companies to focus on the bottom line, focus on making money, focus on creating great products and services, innovating and then using those shareholder profits and send those to their investors. Then the investors can donate to whatever cause they see fit. So, that's how we came up with Strive. We've got investors like Bill Ackman, Peter Thiel, Howard Lutnick to help fund it. Then we launched in 2022 with our first fund which was an energy fund called DRLL. The whole idea with that was whereas the energy industry had been cudgelled over the last couple of years, being asked to pump less oil and gas, our whole thing was, “No, no, we need more energy in this country.” At that time that summer, that's when gas was five, six, seven dollars a gallon. So, that was our first fund. Then we had energy funds and a bunch of other funds that we've created. It's been a lot of fun creating, now, a multibillion-dollar asset management company. There's a lot of people that share the same philosophy and that’s really exciting.

JAG: So, we're coming to the end of the hour. Any feedback from your former colleagues at AB InBev? Whether firsthand or maybe secondhand, how did they receive the publication of your book?

AF: Yes, it's funny, I've been told that the higher-ups at Anheuser-Busch have essentially said, “No one's allowed to chat with me or share their view, but I still have tons of friends in the industry. Everyone that reaches out, says, “You basically nailed it in terms of what went wrong over the last 10 years of the company, the changes that happened, why it was bad for the business. Then I've been pretty consistent, I think, for the last two years about what the company really needs to do to get back on track. I think the thing that most excites current employees at Anheuser-Busch, but also there's a whole distributor network of Anheuser-Busch, their family-owned businesses across the country. They really reached out to me because I've been pretty vociferous in saying that I think it's time that InBev, the parent company of Anheuser-Busch, actually sell the Anheuser-Busch business unit, which is based in the US, back to US Investors. I think that's the only way that you can have somebody credibly say that they screwed up, that the company is no longer going to get involved in political and social issues. We're not attached to a European parent that is more progressive with ESG and DEI. 

I always say the path to redemption, it really goes through forgiveness. But to be forgiven, you need to admit that there was a mistake and that mistake still hasn't been admitted.

I think that if you come out and do that, then US citizens tend to be more forgiving folks. I always say the path to redemption, it really goes through forgiveness. But to be forgiven, you need to admit that there was a mistake and that mistake still hasn't been admitted. The best way to do that is sell the US business unit back, sell it to either the Busch family, sell it to Warren Buffett, sell it to somebody, and then have folks that can clearly articulate to the American public that the business is back, owned by Americans. Americans are going to run it. We're going to run this to sell beer and we're going to sell a portfolio of beers. By the way, we have beers for runners like Mich, that's Michelob Ultra. We have beers for hunters and fishermen like Busch. We have Bud Light. It is going to be for everyone in terms of this: that likes humor in sports and football, but we're not touching politics. 

But if you want to be more LGBTQ+ and progressive, we have craft beer brands in Seattle. We have something called Elysian. Yes, they do a big transgender day every single year. That's that. But that's the way that I think that the company needs to move forward. Is it being clear about this portfolio of brands that serve different people? That's the only way to get it back. When I have that message out there, I think people get pretty excited. A lot of people here in the US would wish that InBev would sell the US business back to America.

JAG: They will sell it to you and Vivek. Who knows? So anyway, wonderful, wonderful book. Last Call for Bud Light, the Fall and Future of America's Favorite Beer also has a wonderful audio version. So, I highly recommend it. Really appreciate you, Anson, and looking forward to getting some graphic novels to your kids.

This is a dream. Ayn Rand was one of the biggest influences in my life. Still, on an annual basis, I tend to read the courtroom scene from The Fountainhead. I think it's the best speech of any book that I've ever read.

AF: I can't wait. That's great. Thank you so much for having me. This is a dream. Ayn Rand was one of the biggest influences in my life. Still, on an annual basis, I tend to read the courtroom scene from The Fountainhead. I think it's the best speech of any book that I've ever read. So, thank you so much for having me on. Really appreciate it. I can't wait for this graphic novel.

JAG: Absolutely. Also, a special thanks to everybody who joined us today, all of your great questions.

I will not be here next week. I'm going to be giving the microphone to our senior scholar, Stephen Hicks, as well as Rob Tracinski. They're going to be talking about the tension between academic freedom and what is government's role in all of that. So very timely. Of course, remember that The Atlas Society is a nonprofit, and if you like this kind of content and programming and all of the ways that we are innovatively trying to connect young people with Ayn Rand's ideas, go ahead and head over to atlasssociety.org and donate. Thanks so much, everybody.