He Foresaw Bud Light Losing $30 BILLION - Then Built the Fix to End Woke Capital

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Here's a simple truth. Almost nobody wants to say out loud. The world you're living in right now is about to disappear. Not in a century, not in a generation. Soon. Artificial intelligence, biotech, energy, capital markets, every foundation of the modern economy. is being ripped up and re-poured at the same time. One day in the very near future, we're all going to wake up and the world around us will be unrecognizable. Now, a lot of people are terrified of that. You understand. They look at the horizon, they see a dystopian hellscape and a handful of tech CEOs make trillions while everybody else is managed by the machines. Your job, automated, your choices, decided by algorithm, a world where everything is provided for you and nothing is up to you. But that's not really the truth. This could be the greatest era of human flourishing in history. Free people, free markets, armed with the most powerful tools ever created, making life longer, richer and freer. But that outcome is not automatic, does have to be built. The people building that future are not waiting for permission. So instead of speculating about them, I'm going to sit down with them. The founders, the CEOs, the people actually making the decisions that will decide the next decade, the next century. What are they building? Why are they building it? What should the rest of us be doing about it? This is Titans on tomorrow. It's about to be a new world out there. Let's get ready for it. My guest today knows exactly what happens when a great American company forgets who it works for. Anson Ferricks spent over a decade inside Anheuser-Busch InBeb, rising to president of Anheuser-Busch sales and distribution, the operational heart of what was for generations, the most American company in America. And from that seat, he watched the company trade its customers for a scorecard. He saw the Bud Light collapse coming before the rest of the country watched $30 billion in market value evaporate. But Anson didn't just diagnose the disease. He then went out and built the alternative. In 2022, he co-founded Strive Asset Management with his high school friend Vivek Ramaswamy, an asset manager built on a radical idea that used to be called capitalism. Today, Strive manages billions. And now he's on to the next frontier. Radley Health, a startup using technology and human connection to take on one of the hardest, most neglected problems in American health care, serious mental illness. Yale, Harvard Business School, Big Beer, Wall Street. Now, healthcare and AI. Anson Frerex has seen how corporate America breaks, and he's betting his career on how to fix it.

This episode is brought to you by Ethos. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at ethos.com slash Titans. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Anson, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me out here. So obviously Anheuser-Busch is one of the most famous American companies ever. And you were there as things started to go sideways. Kind of, yes or no? Like, how did this work? No, absolutely. I mean, if you think about Anheuser-Busch historically, this was sort of American a bottle. This is a company that was selling beer. It was had Clydesdales. It owned baseball teams. It had Bush Stadium. You know, probably if it existed when, I don't know, George Washington was crossed in Delaware. They probably would have had a case of Budweiser in the deal. And even when I joined the company, I joined it because it was a meritocracy. This was a company that was started by entrepreneurs, great American dream story. And I think the company had kept that ethos for a really long thing. time. But unfortunately, over my 11-year time period, I really saw the company's value shifting. Frankly, as I think a lot of the global organizations really started pushing down values of stakeholder capitalism, ESG, DEI, on just broader corporate American. Unfortunately, Anheuser-Busch was very susceptible to adopting a lot of policies that weren't good for the brand. I mean, the question that always arises in that context is why do corporations go along with this sort of stuff? So there's always been on the right, the free market take. on corporations, that corporations exist to serve the shareholders of the corporation. And then there's been this bizarre idea that there's a stakeholder interest, meaning like anyone who is remotely affected by the company somehow should have a say in the direction of the company. But if you're the head of a company and your goal is to make stock price go up, to create more profit at your company, why would you buy into a stakeholder capitalism model or say an environmental social governance model? Like, what are the forces that are being brought to bear that cause the heads of major companies to rethink how they've been doing their entire business model. Yeah, it's bizarre. And unfortunately, there was, I think mostly it was a lot of CEOs going along with what was popular, what was the fat at the time, which was this stakeholder capitalism model, which originated really in these large global organizations with zero accountability. Stakeholder capitalism originated with Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum, this idea of downstream of stakeholder capitalism where, again, all companies supposed to serve all stakeholders equally. They had ESG, DEI. The ESG idea originated with the United Nations in 2004. DEI originated with McKinsey. So these are these large global organizations that aren't accountable to anybody, but they all sort of come together and they collectively start putting pressure on organizations. The UN pushes down an initiative. Some European countries, especially sovereign wealth funds pick it up. They start putting pressure on companies that they're invested into. McKinsey comes on board. They start selling consulting services. And all of a sudden, you almost have this cartel of organizations that comes together, puts pressure. You might have some early adopters in sort of the progressive tech sectors, especially on the West Coast. They all sudden say that, oh, look how well our company. doing, even though it's a tech company that's doing well anyway, but they will attribute their success to the DEI, ESG, stakeholder capitalism. Therefore, it's foisted on the rest of corporate America. And unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of strong leaders that stood up and said, hey, this might not make sense for my business. And so as we'll get to it in a little while, you guys ended up, and I say you guys, mean, you and Vic Romoomiswamy ended up actually founding a firm that was designed to push back at the market and efficiency this was creating. But it does, again, raise all these questions for, I think, people who watch business.

When people watch business, they think, okay, businesses are capitalism. And because businesses are capitalism, that means that when businesses betray the fundamental trust of the public, by doing the thing they're not supposed to do, that feels like a failure of capitalism. So how is this not a failure of capitalism, or was it? This is definitely a failure of capitalism. This is, I think, a perversion of capitalism where there's really two type of capitalistic models that have been prevailing over the last 50 years. In Europe, you had this stakeholder capitalism model that was talked about by Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum, that said, the purpose of business is supposed to solve all stakeholders equally. That could be activists, that could be customers, that could be politicians. Whereas in the United States, we have this Milton Friedman view of the world that said, no, no, no. Our capitalist model is shareholder capitalism. That, of course, they're these stakeholders, but we hold this shareholder paramount. This is the one that we always look through the lens of, are we benefiting the shareholder? And I think if you take a look at the last 50 years of history of that U.S. model that had the shareholder approach versus the stakeholder approach. The U.S. on every single financial metric has trounced that stakeholder model. Our financial markets have outperformed Europe by three to four percent annually. If you take a look at sort of the GDP of the United States, well above where we are in Europe, the purchasing power of the United States citizens versus Europe, we trounce that model. But unfortunately, the European model, which was adopted by the United Nations, by the World Economic Forum, pushed by consulting firms like McKinsey, started coming to the United States, and unfortunately it became a follow-the-money. problem where you had large asset managers Black Rock State Street Vanguard. They sort of adopted it, started pushing on corporations, put people's money into ESG and DEI funds. They charged three to four times the amount of money on versus regular funds. And then all of a sudden we ended up in this problem that we were in right now where everybody had adopted a stakeholder model, even though it did not make sense for most corporations. And I think that is one of the keys here for people to understand is that when we think about, okay, I can choose between a stakeholder model and a shareholder model. Obviously, if you're looking for more profitability and a better business, function you're going to do the shareholder model. What does that mean? It means that the only way to get companies to do the stakeholder model is to have a gigantic collective action attempt. You have to get everybody in because if somebody decides to buck the trend, they're just going to out-compete everybody and eat their lunch. And so you really do have to have this gigantic, overwhelming tsunami of propaganda and ideological commitment from everyone. Everyone has to buy in. And I think, you know, it's important to describe that from the inside. So you were at one of these companies when this was happening. What are the pressure campaigns like? What are the tactics that are being used? And how does that affect the people who are in positions of management? That's it. So, again, I say it goes back to these large global organizations that are not accountable to any ordinary citizens. It's World Economic Forum, United Nations. It's the McKinsey's the consultants of the world. And they're going to first come into organizations, and they're going to say that we want you to adopt stakeholder capitalism. And they actually got the...

Larry Fink, who was head of the business council here in the United States, to really adopt stakeholder capital to the roundtable in 2019. On top of that, you had large organizations on the DEI side. You had McKinsey coming in, pushing the DEI narrative. And they're going to go to the board members of companies first. And they're going to say, hey, we want you to change your essentially business focus. We want you as Anheuser Bush not to be focused on just delivering great beer to customers. But we now want you guys to fight global warming. We want you to have diversity, equity, inclusion, to write systemic racism and historic wrongs. We now want you to... hop on board and figure out how we're going to get biological men to compete against women in sports. That's essentially what it starts at the board level. And the board, unfortunately, then, they're going to have this creep that goes in over time. And originally how they sell us to the board is not in those words. They sell it to the board is, this is going to be better for your company. We're going to include you in certain stock market indexes. More people are going to buy your shares. Your stock's going to perform. You're going to do better. And to help you get there, we want you to then start putting in metrics that are going to track how you're going to hire certain people in your company. or your emission standards that you have, or what causes you donate to, whether that's defund the police or overturning election laws. Those all get put in over time, but it starts with a very benign and sort of a very noble path. And, you know, the road to hell is tend to be paved with good intentions. And I think this was a good example. It started with noble intentions. This is going to help your business. It's going to help you perform better. But over time, it got progressively worse, starting for the board and pushed all the way down to individual people at companies. Now, how much of that has to do with the customer? there's a Harvard Business School study a while back that suggested that liberal consumers will only buy from companies they perceive as liberal or neutral. They will not buy from conservative companies. And if a company overtly does something that is not neutral or not liberal, they assume neutral means liberal because so many companies have moved in this direction, or at least war or five, six years ago. And so... If you're trying to cater to the conservative consumer, the conservative consumer might buy something neutral or may even buy something liberal because they know that all these companies are moving that direction. Liberal consumers are much more intolerant in how they actually approach the business cycle. And so if they see Anheuser-Busch making overtures toward ESG, they may actually consume more Anheiser-Busch, whereas conservatives traditionally have been like, okay, we don't really care if the beer is good, we'll drink the beer. And it really took until a gigantic flashing FU to conservative customers for conservative customers to say, we're not doing that anymore. and then push back the other way. You're right, you're done. And I'm a free market capitalist. What I actually like is that here in the United States, you can make businesses that cater to liberal folks. For example, Ben and Jerry's. I have no problem with Ben and Jerry's. They're very transparent. They say that our mission as a company is to use ice cream to advance a socially progressive mission. I have no problem with that because they're open, they're transparent about it. And if you want to buy Ben and Jerry's, you're going to go out there and solve world peace and you're going to do all these different things. No problem. I think the bigger problem is that when you have companies that are supposed to be neutral, but then they're actually acting and pushing more of a... left agenda against the wishes and wills of their customers. And that's exactly what happened in the case of Anheuser-Busch, where people thought Bud Light, which used to be the biggest beer brand in the United States, enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans alike, because it was really for the every man. And Bud Light was like the real men of genius commercials where they were celebrating the guy that he created a footlong hot dog and a giant Taco Bowl salad. This is where it was heroing every man. And then all of a sudden, they're starting to put out cans that have a very...

politically active transgender person on them, Dylan Mulvaney. And this was not what Bud Light was all about. It was supposed to be easy to drink, easy to enjoy. And there's nothing about being easy to drink and easy to enjoy for most consumers when Dylan Mulvaney's on their can. So when you're running sales and distribution for Anheuser-Busch, how many bad proposals would come across your desk along these lines? Were people underneath you realizing how the winds had shifted and just like stuffing your desk with these kind of bad ideas? There were a lot of bad ideas that were out there. But the one thing that we did have is I think of Anheuser-Busch, it's a portfolio of brands. And those brands were supposed to serve individual customers. You had certain brands like Bush, which was for hunting and fishing, and that's what Bush was about. On the other side, you had craft breweries that were headquartered in Seattle, and they sponsored every single left wing. activity that was going on in Seattle. But that was okay because you had different brands that were for different customers. Same way to talk about Netflix. They should put out just different content for different people. Let people decide. Don't censor what that is. Now, there would be different, there would be a lot of bad ideas that would come for different brands, people that went in Bush, which was a hunting and fishing brand to get involved in some of the Seattle activities. That made absolutely no sense. So we have to stop a lot of those activities. But unfortunately, there tend to be more and more bad ideas about brands getting involved more socially and political. ideologies that had nothing to do with the individual mission of that brand and who that customer was and who they were supposed to serve. So when it came to Anheuser-Busch is with a lot of other major corporations, there really sort of two issues with the SG and DEI. One was the outward-facing issue, what people actually see on the shelf, the marketing, what people are actually, and then there's the internal. You mentioned that when you joined Anheuser-Busch was a meritocracy. How did that change over done? I think the biggest thing you have to take a look at is the values of a company when you join that mission, what are they trying to achieve, and then what are the values to get there? And when I joined Anheuser-Busch, we were supposed to be a company that was making beer and bringing more cheer to more people. And one of the big values of the company was we were meritocracy. We hired the best, brightest, and promoted based off the results that we got. One of the big red flags for me is that that value in terms of meritocracy changed. All of a sudden, instead of hiring the best and the brightest, it was, you were now going to be promoted based on the diversity of your team. And that was a big red flag. And the company was changing. And all of a sudden, we weren't trying to just. serve the customer, serve beer, but all of a sudden you're having these ideologies that are coming into the company about now we're trying to force equality as opposed to provide opportunities for everybody to succeed. When did you realize that building a business wasn't the biggest responsibility in your life anymore and that the people depending on you actually work? Here's the reality. Business matters, but your family matters a lot more. And life insurance matters most of all because it's not about expecting the worst. It's making sure that the people who depend on you are actually taken... care of if something terrible happens. One thing I appreciate about ethos is they've removed a lot of the friction from the process. Everything happens 100% online. You can get a quote in second, supply and minutes often get same day coverage. Plus, there's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions online. You can get up to three million bucks in coverage. Some policies start as low as 30 bucks a month. With more than 4,000 trust pilot reviews and a 4.8 star rating, it's clear a lot of people have had a tremendous experience with ethos. With life insurance through ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash titans. That's E. hos.com slash titans application times may vary rates may vary trust pilot rating as of 6-1 2025

So, yeah, you're watching all of this go down. And at what point does it occur to you that this is actually a market opening, that the fact that so many corporations are moving in the direction, stakeholder capitalism, ESG, DEI, all of these sorts of anti-market ideas being infused into business, that that was actually a market opportunity to compete by investing in companies and moving toward companies that weren't doing this sort of stuff, following the old shareholder capitalism model. Yeah. So I think there were really two eye-opening events for me. One, I was living in Atlanta in 2021 when Governor Brian Kemp, he signed the lawsuit. need an ID to vote. And that to me didn't seem that crazy. And I think there's 30 some odd states that have it. But it was amazing to see all of the Atlanta-based companies that pushed back in a massive way that had nothing to do with voter ID. Coca-Cola put a statement out about it. Delta put a big statement out. Major League Baseball canceled the All-Star game in 2021 over this. And it was interesting to me is I had a lot of neighbors that were throwing out Coke, that they were canceling Delta tickets, not going to baseball games anymore over this, which to me had said, wow, these people would probably love to have companies that were just... politically neutral, focused on their mission, not getting involved in these issues. So that was going on what I was seeing externally. And then internally at Ann Hester Bush, I actually tried to do a deal with Black Rifle Coffee Company, where I was going to be doing distributing Black Rifle Coffee Company because the same person that was drinking Budweiser at night, a lot of them were drinking Black Rifle Coffee in the morning, a lot of overlap and mission in terms of folds of honor partnerships serving the military. And I was told that we could not do a partnership with Black Rifle Coffee Company because it was too controversial of a brand. And I said, what do you mean? Like they have a mission that's going to be just serving. people who love America, coffee, culture, and content. That doesn't seem that crazy to me. But I was told we couldn't do it by our legal team that was in New York City. And they essentially made a political ideology that they just weren't going to work with brands that leaned more conservative. And that was problematic for me as well, especially at the time the company was growing like gangbusters. So at this time, you decide. What, you're going to call Vivek Ramaswamy? How does this whole thing start? Yeah, so Vivek Ramaswamy and we're buddies from high school. So we were actually mock trial partners in high school. We've known each other for 25 some odd years. We went to very similar schools in grad school. We've always kept in contact. And so we were always thinking about, hey, maybe there's ways to work together. So in that summer of 2021, we talked a lot about all these problems going on with companies like Coke and Pepsi and everyone getting involved in political issues. And maybe there's market opportunities that better serve people that just want companies to focus on. on their mission, go back to kind of this shareholder capitalism approach that had been overturned in 2019 by Larry Fink and others of the stakeholder model. And so we actually originally thought about, hey, should we go after Coca-Cola and create just pop without politics? Or we actually thought about, should we go after Delta Airlines? We're just going to charge people $100 more to fly on our airline where we just hire the best and brightest pilots, the top 5, period. I don't care what your skin color is, what your religion is, who you are, we're just going to hire the best and bright pilots. Eventually, we decided to say there was a bigger problem where we need to go more upstream and we need to to change the culture in corporate America, where we actually needed to compete with these large asset managers, Black Rock State Street Vanguard, who had adopted stakeholder capitalism. They managed $20 trillion with the capital. They're the single largest shareholders in 95% of the S&P 500, and they were the ones that were really from a top-down approach forcing change in corporate America by essentially voting for what it was proxy statements at companies, that if you're an activist, you can buy $25,000 of stock in any company you want to, and you can put up shareholder proposals. You can ask Apple to do racial equity audits. You can ask the oil and gas companies to stop pumping oil and gas. And people were doing this in 2020, 2021. And 30 to 40% of these proposals were passing because BlackRock State Street and Vanguard were all voting affirmatively for them. So that was the problem we were trying to solve is how do we get back to having companies focused on their mission and not necessarily being forced into these social and political agendas because these so-called large asset managers Black Rock State Street and Vanguard were voting for them and pushing them in this more left progressive.

position so how quickly did the fund grow strive asset and how big is it right now Yeah. So we within one year, I think we were the fast-growing asset manager to reach a billion dollars in one year. There was a lot of people that really liked our approach that what we were going to do is we were going to create the exact same funds. You would get at Black Rock State Street Vanguard, S&P 500 funds, energy funds, semiconductor funds, and they're all just passive, low-fee funds, but how we differentiate ourselves with how we were going to vote those proxies. And that was very easy to understand. And we used a very legal fiduciary rule that said, if your money is being managed by one of these large asset managers, well, you also have an economic right to the votes that you're supposed to have in companies. So when we use that fiduciary legal argument, people they had to wrestle with us. We just weren't some firebrand political company that says, ah, stop investing in these woke companies. We said, no, no, no. What we're talking about specifically is a fiduciary right, that if you have a share of Apple or a share of Home Depot or share Walmart, you should be able to vote your share how you want that company to operate. And right now, because when you're in a large fund of Black Rock, State Street, Vanguard, they were aggregating all those votes and voting for people in a monolithic way that tended to be against the interest of most people that believed in this shareholder capitalism model. So we had over a billion dollars that came in in the first year, which was great. Now we're a multi-billion dollar asset management company. We've also expanded into Bitcoin. We're one of the largest Bitcoin Treasury companies and have over 20,000 Bitcoin. And after that, we were able to go public last year, which was very beneficial to the company. And we continue to have very strong success as an organization. Support for this show comes from VCX, the public ticker for private tech. For generations, American companies have moved the world forward through their ingenuity and determination. And for generations, everyday Americans could be a part of that journey through perhaps the greatest innovation of all. The U.S. stock market. It didn't matter whether you were a factory worker in Detroit or a farmer in Omaha. Anyone could own a piece of the great American companies. Now that's changed. Today, our most innovative companies are staying private rather than going public. And the results is that everyday Americans are excluded from investing and getting left further behind while a select few reap the benefits. Until now. Introducing VCX, the public ticker for private tech. VCX by Fundrise gives everyone the opportunity to invest in the next generation of innovation, including the companies leading the AI revolution, space exploration, defense tech, and more. Visit getvcx.com for more info. That's getvcx.com. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, including objectives, risks, including the investment material material, this and other information can be found in the Innovations Fund prospectus at getvc.com. Investing involves risks, including the possible loss of all money invested. Past performance does not guarantee future performance. This is a pay. sponsorship. For people who are interested in effectuating real change, first of all, it seems as though the corporate culture has in fact changed. It feels like they've moved away from ESG and DEI. How much of that is due to moves like yours? How much of that is just due overall to the political changes in the country? The American people got sick of this reelected President Trump. And that does beg another question, which is how quickly is all this going to come back in the post-Trump era? Yeah. So I think it's kind of twofold. I think Strive had a big impact where we actually opened a little bit of the Overton window to talk about this problem. We did it in a very legalese and fiduciary manner. We're talking, do you have the right to vote people's shares in a certain way? But then also from a monetary standpoint, a lot of companies started losing money. And that was probably the bigger piece. Even before Hansa Bush, you remember Disney, Disney, the CEO, they got involved in the Florida parental rights issues about when you could teach sex ed to kids in schools. And then you saw Disney stock plummet.

A lot of people start up going to Disney World and they lost a lot of money. Bob Chapin gets fired. Bob Iger comes back in, essentially said, we're going to try and be neutral. On the heels of that, you have the whole Bud Light and Bud Light and partners with Dylan Mulvaney on April 1st, April Fool's Day of 2023. A lot of people thought this was a joke. And when they realized the company couldn't have a statement to say, no, this wasn't a joke or they couldn't take a position either way. They're going to work with Dylan or not. All of a sudden, you could see the sales. down 10%, then 20%, then 30%. And what was interesting about Bud Light is that there's data that gets published every week about beer sales that come from Walmart and Kroger and 7-11. And every week you get this data dump that says down 30% and 40% certain weeks. And so they had a real, real impact on the company. And so that is when you had a lot of companies starting to retreat and say, well, wait a minute. Are we doing the right things by our customer if we're getting involved in ESG or DEI or climate pledges or you might name it that have nothing to do with our business? business. And then so all of a sudden, a lot of companies that had adopted these ESG and DEI commitments, tractor supply company and Pepsi and Anheuser-Bush, they now have the cover to walk back and say, wait a minute, we don't want to have our stock price impacted by billions of dollars and lose millions of customers and then have to fire people. So I think it was a both-hand. Strive really opened that Overton window and we gave companies the ability to walk back. And then once the Disney Bud Light lost billions of dollars, other people said, hey, we're not going to get involved anymore. So I think the big question a lot of people have, myself. included are the big question is you know we're living in this this kind of blowback period in which americans got sick of this stuff they pushed back we were very involved in the bud light boycott at our company matt walsh was very involved in i was very involved in it pushing back against the idea that you had some sort of obligation to give companies or money as they promoted a bunch of stuff that you hated however We are going to move at a certain point into the post-Trump era. President Trump is going to be president, God willing, for another two and a half years, and then there's another election. I hope and pray that Republicans win those elections. But at some point, Democrats will be back in charge. And it does feel as though corporations surf the waves more than drive the tide, that depending on how politics goes, this sort of stuff could come back very, very quickly and with a vengeance. You're absolutely right. And unfortunately, it probably will, because if you actually look at the history of stakeholder capitalism, ESGDI, before those programs, there was sustainable investments or responsible investments. These originated in divestment campaigns. There was CSR, corporate social responsibility. And I have no doubt that there was, it will evolve. Stakeholder capitalism, ESGDI will evolve into something else. And it will be pushed on corporations once again, especially more from a left view. Now, I'm hoping that at least in the near term CEOs, they've experienced the loss. of billions of dollars of value, millions of customers being lost, and that they can say Moving forward, we're going to be a mission-driven organization. We're going to be meritocratic. We're not going to serve the waves on the left or on the right. We're just going to focus on our business, focus on capitalism, focus on the shareholders. That's what's good for the business. And frankly, that's what's good for the country as well, because businesses should be one of these apolitical areas where people come together in to accomplish a mission, and they shouldn't have to have certain political ideologies stuffed down them by CEOs or by other global organizations that have zero accountability to that, to the success of that firm. And just have to just on a personal level.

all your friends at Anheuser-Busch and say, what the hell are you doing? What did anything happen? But what actually happened there? Yeah, now, I called up. Most people at Anheuser-Bush were told not to talk to me because I was one of the few people that I wasn't there and I was very open about what had gone wrong and what had happened. And I was probably the worst person that could have left Anheuser-Busch a year beforehand because I literally left to start a company that was telling companies to stay out of politics. And we'd already had a lot of success engaging with companies like Salesforce and Mark Beniof who was using shareholder capital to try and defund the police and overturn election integrity laws. And there was the Bob Chapic and Disney piece. So I was the worst person that could been there. So there was a shutdown internally that was said, you cannot talk to Andy. Now, there's a lot of external vendors. There's wholesalers, there's retailer customers. And it tells them reached out to me and said, keep up what you're doing because Anheuser-Busch is not making a strong commitment either way. They're trying to walk through the middle of this cultural warfare where they're not going to say that it was a mistake to partner with Dylan Mulvaney, but they're also not going to say that we're going to double down and do more of this progress. They tried to walk the middle of a cultural battlefield, got shot out from both sides and said, you're the only one that's actually speaking up, talking about how crazy this is. You have very cogent and thought. ideas about what the company should do to rectify the situation that they're in and keep up the conversation. Opportunities don't wait for paperwork. If you run a business, you probably have had the experience of spotting an opportunity, a new hire, a bulk inventory purchase, and expansion, and realizing that the financing process might take longer than the opportunity itself. That's a real problem. More than 70% of America's 36 million small businesses say they need additional capital at least once. a year. And at the same time, business revenues at record highs, big banks are tightening underwriting and approving fewer loans. Even if you qualify, the process can take forever. But if you want bank rates, without the bank delays, check out cardiff.co slash ben for up to $500,000 in same-day funding. Since 2004, they've funded more than $12 billion for businesses. The application takes less than five minutes. There's no impact on your personal credits. Businesses are approved in the very same day. Whether you're hiring, buying inventory, investing, and equipment, expanding your business. Access to capital should not be the thing that stops you. Banks try to lock out those small businesses, and Cardiff has the key. If you've been in business for at least a year and you're pulling in 20 grand a month in revenue, apply right now for up to $500,000 in same-day funding at cardiff.co slash ben. It's cardiff.combe. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff, borrow better. On a political level, do you think that conservatives really ought to be shooting for neutrality from these companies, or should they be pushing even harder for open conservatism from these companies? The reason I ask is because once you go conservative, it's very hard to go back to neutral and then go back to liberal. And so I think there are some people who are sort of, I'd say, post-liberal in their orientation sometimes, who will make the case, which is... understandable, that the threat level is so great, that things are going to swivel back toward the left with the institutions of business behind them, that really conservatives are pushing even harder, even on neutral businesses to become more overtly conservative in their pursuit. This is my view. I don't think it's a coincidence that in 1776 you have both the Declaration of Independence and you have the wealth of nations that was published. Also, common sense by Tom Spain. So I think that we should be separating really capitalism and our markets and business from politics as much as we can. I want actually businesses to be neutral.

Whereas if there's a market opportunity to better serve conservatives, great, then start a company to go do it. There's a lot of people that have started up right-wing beer or right-wing media, you name it. Great, just go do that. But I think for most of your large publicly traded organizations that need to have a shareholder mindset, they should not get involved in political issues unless they are relevant to that organization. So if you're a cryptocurrency company, of course you should be involved in cryptocurrency legislation. Or if you're a beer company, you should be involved in alcohol excise taxes. But there's no reason that those companies that they should be involved in the LGBTQ agenda, for example, or they shouldn't be involved in Second Amendment rights either. They shouldn't because they have nothing to do with the purpose or mission of those companies. So I would take both those left and right issues, take them out of those organizations that have just nothing to do with them. Now, so you mentioned that you were working a lot on crypto, but you've also moved into the AI sphere. Obviously, we're watching some most transformational technologies ever unleashed on the human population coming to fruition right now. So your new company is working on AI in the mental health space. Tell me about what brought you to that and how you think AI can actually impact that. Yeah, definitely. I think God has a sense of humor in some way because I spent the last couple of years telling companies they need to stay out of politics, stay out of social and political issues. And I always said that business should solve most of our political issues. not necessarily having government or other companies get off mission. And so God gave me, I think, a big problem to say, great, now put your money where your mouth is. And health care is one of the biggest issues that we have in this country right now. One in five dollars of GDP is spent on health care. It's above inflation. We're getting sicker as a country, not better, and especially mental health is one of the big problems that we have as well. One in five people now have a mental health condition, one in 20 a serious mental health condition. Where I'm specifically taking a look at now is I didn't know I was going to be in health care. But there were two things I think really put me in this position to start this company called Rowedly, where we have a mission to empower adults, living with serious mental illness, live amazing lives. One, I have an immediate family member who's diagnosed with schizophrenia 20 years ago. And we're talking really about serious and persistent mental illness with this company. And 20 years, it wasn't as open about mental illness as much. But it's been amazing over the last 20 years. The more I've opened about my family situation, everyone I talked to has a family. remember a colleague, a relative, somebody that has bipolar, schizophrenia, schizoaffective, et cetera. And they all have the exact same story about there was an initial break. People, they didn't take their medicine early on. They had more breaks. They got worse. And I thought, we got to do a better job with that patient population. And then separately. After Strive, over the past couple years, a lot of success with Strive, went public, allowed me to take kind of a step back, be an advisor. We have now people running that. And I've got to know really two really successful healthcare entrepreneurs. One's a guy named Ricky Kaplan, who very successful down in Florida, runs this entrepreneur group called the Ranch Hang. 30, 40 guys around our age get together and talk about their business pursuits. Another guy in there, Brad Smith, he started multiple multibillion-dollar health care companies. And we were all kind of down at this ranch hanging together. And Brad was talking about how he had essentially focused on the famous 5% of the patient population drives 50% of health care cost. And he had worked really drive down cost to patients that were homebound with physical and developmental disabilities by giving them more help, more care, keeping them out of long-term care facilities and hospitals, did share savings models. Long story short,

he asked him you know, if you would do another one of those business models to drive down cost, improve outcomes, where would you focus? And he said, I would focus on people with serious and persistent mental illness. And I said, oh, interesting. You know, tell me why haven't you? And he said, well, in my mind, it's going to be really hard to focus on that population, which is his mind was more urban, downtown, homeless, hard to find. And I said, yeah, partially true. We have, you know, in this country, we have, I know, five, six hundred thousand folks that are homeless, but there's 15 million people like kind of my family members that are more seriously mentally ill, but they're living in. with their parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters more in urban rural areas, why don't we kind of focus the business model on those folks? And let's go to insurance companies. Let's find people that are ending up in the ER 5, 10, 15 times a year. Let's focus on giving them better help, better care, and really closing what I say is this 50% gap of people that have a mental health break, show up in the ER, get discharged, and they don't get their follow-up medication, they don't get therapy, they don't get their social services. How do we close that gap? And that's going to keep people out of the ER, lower their health care costs, and improve their health care outcomes. hyper-local community way. So that's what we're doing. So how does the AI actually affect that? What are you doing with the AI? So AI specifically, this business model would not have existed if AI did not exist. And what I mean by that is health care is incredibly fragmented. And one of the things that we're doing is we partner directly with hospitals. And so when people are inpatient behavioral health hospitals and they've been diagnosed, schizophrenia, bipolar, et cetera, they are now sending their assessments and their treatment plans to us. What's their medication? What are they supposed to be doing? What's their history? And historically, you would have had to have had a high-paid diet. be able to read all of that information, translate that down to what we call peer support specialists to do the right interventions and activities. We're now utilizing AI to read all of those very complex patient records, patient reports, and then we deliver the right interventions and activities to a licensed professional known as a peer supporter. They're a non-clinical person. But what we're trying to do is we're trying to elevate and hero these kind of everyday folks in every single community to give them a very prescriptive plan of how do you work with this person in recovery to accelerate that recovery journey? and make sure that they're taking their medication, they're getting the therapy, they're connecting to social support, housing, etc., to accelerate, and then we're tracking on the back end how we're actually doing. And then we're using AI as well to help generate clinical quality notes about what we're doing and sending that back to providers to close that loop, close that 50% gap people getting care, keeping people out of the ER and then improving health care outcomes. Successful founders don't necessarily work fewer hours. They just waste less time, which allows them to accomplish more. The best entrepreneurs are constantly looking for ways to eliminate unnecessary decisions they automate repetitive tasks they batch meetings they delegate work someone else can do just as well as they can the goal isn't to be busy the goal is to spend your time where you are uniquely valuable We all have our own time saving hacks for everyday life. But if you're a business owner, how can you save time on hiring? The answer is ZipRecruiter. Hiring is one of those areas where it's easy to lose days or even weeks sorting through resumes that aren't the right fit. That's why ZipRecruiter has a new feature that lets you quickly. So you spend less time searching and more time talking to the people who actually want the job. Their powerful matching technology helps you find qualified candidates quickly, and candidates can even tell you, in their own words, why they're interested in your position.

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and I lost my dad to cancer. It was the worst pain I ever felt. It made me think, what would happen with the people I love when my time is up? That's why I have life insurance. Items makes it easy. It's all online. Take about 10 minutes, and you can get up to $3 million in covering. Check your price today at ethos.com. I said Jensen Huang did a really, I think, beautiful job of explaining what AI is going to do with regard to jobs. He said in one interview he was talking about the idea that when he decided that he was going to go into engineering. that his job was not to type, right? Typing as a task. His job was to create new products and services for people to use, and then he has tools at his disposal. And so if you have those new tools, then you can do a better job of your overall goal. But we tend to measure things in terms of tasks. We think, okay, AI is going to take my job because now AI is going to type for me, or AI is going to do my job because AI is going to be able to draw data quicker than I normally would be able to. But job isn't a job is not just a matter of spending a certain number of hours in front of a computer. It's about... achieving a certain goal. And if you can achieve those goals with more ease and more fruitfulness, then that will actually create more jobs because obviously people are then going to get better service. That will be competitive and more people will want that better service. I mean, what does it take to become a peer support person at your company, for example? And as we said, could you have done that? What kind of training would it have taken without AI to have 500 people working in those jobs? Yeah. So in most states, you actually have peers or licensed or certified profession. So it's still a regulated industry because you need training. You need to know what to do. have lived experience. Now, what the problem was was always connecting those peers to people that are in recovery. Is there a funding mechanism for it? Can you get ongoing training? And are you actually doing the right things that are going to move the needle? And that was always the friction and always the problem. So for us, now we're utilizing that AI to eliminate all of that friction. So this business, again, could not have existed. And I think we don't know what's going to be created with AI in the same way that in 1850, 60% of the people in this country were working as farmers. Whereas now less than 2%, yes, we're creating more food than we ever have in this. in this country. And people had no idea in 1850 that there was going to be all of a sudden the industrial revolution. They were going to work in factories. They were going to work on supply chains. And then we had no idea when computers came along, that there was going to be personal computers that was going to open up more white collar jobs, service jobs, et cetera. And so we don't know what's going to be created. But a lot of things are happening just right now. And that's going to still require a lot of people to start companies. You still need to have lawyers. You still need to have marketers. You still need to have people that are writing copy. You still need to have people that are coding, even utilizing a right now, we've built our software from scratch. We still need computer engineers that are saying what to write and how to type it and make sure it all works together. So I think there's more investment than ever that's going into AI. And I'm more optimistic that in the next 10 years, we're going to have more productivity per worker, which is going to increase paychecks and I think lower costs for everybody over the next 10 years. Yeah. How do you deal with these sort of political backlash? Because obviously there is a political backlash. People have a bias toward the status quo. This is true in literally every area of politics. People hated Obamacare until it was in. at which point people liked Obamacare and

Presumably, if someone tries to change Obamacare, there will be resistance to that, even if the change is in a good direction. People always have a status quo bias in terms of their economic life because, you know, the job that you have to have the job that you want to hold tomorrow. How do you make the case to people that shouldn't be scared of AI, they should be enthusiastic about it, when, of course, AI does mean change. Yeah, definitely. Well, I think conversations like this help. Because over the last couple of years, the people have been driving most of the AI conversations, had been the Mark Zuckerberg, has been the Jensen wings, and a lot of those folks are so disconnected from everyday people that are really starting new business. locally that are empowering individual entrepreneurs. And so Mark Zuckerberg can talk about it, but no one has really seen a tangible result in their own life of meta using AI or of Jensen Hwing. But when you now talk about people like myself now building a company, you talk about a friend of mine who's building a robotics company here. Heck, the athletic director at my high school kind of came me recently and said, look what I built this incredible software utilizing AI that can track every single student athlete and all their stats and send that to colleges. And he's like, this didn't exist. Now I'm selling it on my own. I think we're going to see thousands, tens of thousands of stories just like that of entrepreneurs right now that are just harnessing AI. And we need to share those stories and tell those stories. Because otherwise, you're just going to get the doom and gloom that says, oh, this is coming for your jobs. What's going to come for your jobs if you're not utilizing AI to make yourself more productive? Because if you're making yourself more productive in your job, you're going to protect your job. When it comes to, you know, the kind of threats to... economic growth. Again, the backlash right now is extremely strong. You've seen people who are starting to lobby against AI data centers because they're going to eat our precious farmlands, even though, again, on a statistical level, the number of acres that data centers are going to take up is extraordinarily minimal compared to the gigantic amount of farmland that we have in the country. Or people saying that it's going to put hundreds of thousands, millions of people out of work and all of that. What is the number one thing that you would tell politicians that they need to know? Because again, this is a politically fruitful... thing for politicians right and left to do is to play the populist game where you yell at AI or yell at innovation, you yell at technological development on behalf of a population that may not really understand where things are going and for whom uncertainty is scary. Yeah, I think we just need to tell the truth. And a lot of times we just forget about our history. And the history of this country is, again, going through multiple. revolutions in terms of technology. And every single time, this country has come out wealthier. It's come out more productive. It's coming with people making bigger paychecks, generally paying less for services as well. So why would this be any different? So I think in the interim, of course, people are going to latch onto fear of the unknown, actually more about optimism, the unknown. I think we have to become more American optimist and we have to become more tech optimist and have to tell the story of even over the last 35 years. If you go back into this world, 35 years ago, 40% of people were living in extreme poverty that the World Bank said in 1990, now less than 10% are. And that's over a massive amount of change with having the internet coming in, having social media, having AI coming, and it's only made people wealthier. It's only made them more productive. Why would this be any different at this time? I just don't understand that narrative. So I think we need to keep talking about the history. And I think on the doom side, you need to talk also about tangibly what's happening now. I mean, there's a $500 billion data center that's being built in Circleville, Ohio. That's where my family was from. And that's bring in tons of jobs in terms of manufacturers and welders and, you know, the housing prices are going higher. That's just what Andrews built an entire facility here in Ohio. Manufacturing jobs are coming back. We have to highlight more of those about what's actually happening and talk to the facts and the reality that the lowest jobless report. I mean, in years just came out. GDP growth is still good. There aren't the layoffs that are happening. We need to talk more about that and talk about the new companies that are being built right here in Ohio and across the globe that could not have existed before AI.

On an investment level, are you worried at all about an AI bubble? There are a lot of people who have been talking about this. Obviously, there are a lot of sort of circular deals, not in any sort of corrupt sense, but in the sense that you have a lot of companies investing in other companies that invest back in that company. Are you worried that, like any new technology, there will be a lot of competitors that enter a space, a lot of investment goes into that space, and then there's a winnowing process. This did happen with the dot-com bubble. People tend to think that that... you know, was a gigantic disaster. At the time, it was bad for the market, but it turns out the internet was, in fact, a transformative technology. But that happened with pretty much every major industrial boom technology that has ever happened. Anytime you have a new technology. everyone rushes to enter that market. A huge amount of investment follows. And then there's a bit of a bubble and the bubble goes away. Do you think that's going to happen here as well? You're absolutely right. As I have to be consistent with being a student of history. And the history of the United States as well is that there are bubbles. And there are people that put too much money into a new emerging technology or they leverage themselves up too much or maybe the expectations didn't necessarily meet reality. And at some point there might be some sort of a bubble. But every single bubble that we've had in the United States has led to, again, in the longer term, more prosperity. So coming out when the internet bubble. crash, yes, we got rid of the Pets.com and got rid of all these kind of silly businesses that weren't making any money and really weren't serving needs and weren't doing a good job delivering value to people. But then coming out of that, we then get a lot of companies that the Airbnbs and the Facebooks and others have come and they've created massive businesses, incredible wealth, made incredible amounts of people, not only wealth, but also hopefully improve the lives of a lot of people as well. And then so I would expect probably at some point in the next couple years there might be a pullback. I don't know if it would be a crash. probably a pullback on the amount of investment that we're seeing. I don't know when that will be. But I think that will also be maybe a time period where maybe the weaker companies that they do fail, but stronger ones will emerge and people will know how to harness technology to, I think do, to continue to push humanity forward. And I don't think anybody's building AI right now with the idea they're going to put people out of business and that there's going to be doom and gloom and we're going to have robot wars. I think they're building this because I think they want to know more and learn more and frankly continue to make the world a wealthy or happier and more prosperous space. So on a personal level, obviously, you're a very high-octane guy. You're one of the few people who speaks about as quickly as I speak. And so, you know, you've been working in a wide variety of fields and industries. What is your day like? How do you deal with the work-life balance? You have three kids. You were telling me before the show. Yeah. So you're married. So, you know, how do you deal with that? What does your day look like? Yeah, I don't know. We kind of tongue-in-cheek. When I think about one of the values of my family that I talk about a lot. And my last name's Frerick, so we talk a lot about F-words that we like. But our F-words are faith, freedoms. family, fitness, fun. And then so from a faith standpoint, we have a very good prayerful life at our house, give a lot of thanks to all the gifts that we've had. From a freedom standpoint, I think we have a lot of gratitude for this country, for the ability to create. Luckily, I say that in my faith, I was created in the image of God. So therefore, what am I called to do? What's my purpose? It's to create. And I think that's sort of the meaning of life for a lot of people. So we talk about that of creating a lot. And again, I'm glad that I have the freedoms to do that in this country. Talk about family.

very active with my kids, my wife, in terms of their sports, what we do, and then greater beyond, beyond family kind of friends, fitness still got to work out. And a lot of times, we didn't get into too much, but there's a, there's a, even within mental health, there's feel mental health, a lot of people feel like they're anxious or this or that, and there's real mental health, and I don't want to, to, to, Denigrate what the feel people are, but there's the real, which is the schizophrenia, bipolar, that piece. But even to get rid of some of your anxiety, your worries, et cetera, working out, I think helps out a lot. And then it's eating healthy. And then last time, I have a little bit of fun in this country. Some of those people are so uptight. People don't realize you can't joke. So you've got to have some fun as well. And so that's how kind of I orient my life. And then every day is a little bit different in terms of the businesses that we're working on and what we're doing. But I think having those sort of five priorities is the North Star that helps kind of orient the life and keep everything in priority. That sounds a great advice. for pretty much everybody listening. Anson, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Ben. Thanks for having me.