My opinion around here these days is laugh for while you can, monkey boy, ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country.
Mister gorbachaw tear down this wall.
It's the Ricchet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lillax. Today we're going to talk to Charlie Gasparino about his new book, Go Woke, Go Broke, on.
The inside story of the radicalization of Corporate America. So let's episodes a podcasting.
Grocery prices of skyrocketed.
Cereals are up twenty six percent, bread is up twenty four percent, butter is up thirty seven percent, maybe formulas up thirty percent, flowers up thirty eight percent, and eggs are up forty six percent, and many items are at much higher rates than that.
Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast. Number seven oh who cares? Who cares what number it is? I mean, it's not like you can go back and say you said something at seven oh two that I believe was contradicted by a guest in number two hundred and four. Now, no what he's keeping drat Okay, it's seven four and We're very proud we have got this far. It's a
rainy day here in Minneapolis. I'm joined by Stephen Hayward somewhere and Charles CW which does not stand for conventional Wisdom Cook, who I believe is still being the ultimate Florida man down there. The nation's waning, and you know, gentlemen, it's those who forget history are doomed to repeat, et cetera.
Et cetera, et cetera.
But how about a good round of price controls on food that's worked out so.
Well everywhere it's tried.
What do you think of a VEEP presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris's proposal to do that?
And Hi, thanks for being here.
Well, all right, I'll go first, since I'm at Steve Hayward sitting in for Peter Robinson again. You know it's bad when even the Washington Post economics columnist Catherine Rampel says, well, her subhead is, it's hard to exaggerate how bad Mala Harris's price gouging proposal is. Yeah. I actually remember having done research years ago on Nixon's wage and price freeze from the nineteen seventy one and one of their problems was how do you enforce her set price controls on food?
And one of the more comical elements was orange juice. The price of frozen orange juice wasn't defrozen, but oranges were not because they're seasonal, right, And so all became arbitrary and ridiculous. And I'm trying to remember there are a couple of other categories. I don't know, it was tomatoes or whatever, where they just it was chaos and
you couldn't possibly make it work. So this is just an attempt to deflect blame for inflation that everyone's mad about and say it wasn't our fault, it was the fault of Albertson's and Kroger and Win Dixie or something like that.
Charles Well, I think that's right. I think that's primarily why she did it. It's a political ploy, not an economic ploy. She is aware that, despite how many attempts to sinuate otherwise, he is still called Harris, that Harris being the Harris of the Biden Harris administration. She is in the office of the Vice President as we speak, and massive overspending later inflation, and people are angry. So she wants to point at the mustachioed man from Monopoly
and say he did it. That said, although I have been a leading exponent of this idea that this is a political ploy not an economic one, I do think it's incumbent upon voters to take it face value what candidates say they want to do, and not least because although he hasn't gone this far, Biden has been with the.
Federal Trade Commission doing.
Some of this stuff already, And there are people within the FTC who are very much in favor of this sort of thing. And once again, Harris has not mentioned Congress. This is a running trend. She never mentions Congress. Back in twenty nineteen, she said over and over and over again she could do anything without Congress, including gun control. Even she was going to ban the AAR fifteen without Congress. So when Jason Furman, Obama's economics friend, said this morning, Wow,
this is a terrible idea. So it won't happen, Yeah, under our constitution lawder that's probably true. But if she's going to leverage the administrative state, which is already poised to try this sort of thing, then you should be worried about it. And I think she should pay a price for having proposed it.
Yeah, I mean there's there's an epicycle to these things too. That comes up a lot here in California. When oil prices are high, the left says, oh, it's collusion, price gouging by the oil companies and the refiners. Let's investigate. The government at all levels has been investigating high prices and gasoline and so forth for forty or fifty years now, and they always come up empty because it's wrong. But then the other side of the mouth, they say, we
should have higher tax on gasoline to discourage consumption. Well, which is it. It's actually an easy lesson. The left is only happy when high gasoline prices are because of taxes and not because of market forces. And the same thing's happening now on groceries. And you're right, though, Charlie,
I mean again an old story. When the Reagan people came into office in nineteen eighty one, they found the Federal Trade Commission had an open investigation not of my dog marking in the background, but of the serial company, you know, Kellogg and Posts. And the argument was they were monopolizing shelf space in grocery stores and that had to be stopped. And the Reagan, people scratched their head and said, go away, this is stupid, which of course it was.
If I could just very very briefly out another cycle to that which has amused me enormously, that is that when prices go up when a Democrat's president, it's price gouging. Apparently, big companies don't price gouge under Republicans. You think they would be more likely to do that because evil Republicans love corporations, but they price goug when Democrats come in. When the price is when the prices go down, that's
because of the president. So we've seen the most hilarious trend under Biden where prices are gone and he would say this is outrageous collusion from the supermarkets and the meat producers. And then he would go down and he would say, happy Thanksgiving, Joe Biden wishes to tell you that your potato is a less than they would have been last year.
Right, Well, how do you think that this Let's say she gets elected president and she does she decides to go around Congress to do this. How do you possibly think that would manifest itself as an executive order that would say what because I know that this is just thrown out there for as you said, for political means, but it is revelatory of what somebody wants to do
and thinks they can do. How would she possibly keep the grocery stores profit margins within an acceptable amount for her executive order saying.
What, well, I think Charlie put his finger on it. That'll use things like the Federal Trade Commission to harass big business and the grocery Chaine and so, I mean they aren't The Justice Department is trying to block a big grocery store merger right now. I think it's I forget it's Albertson's and somebody. It might be Kroger, I can't remember, but they'll do that kind of thing. And you know that that always has some effect. But what the effects that we will see as consumers are shortages
hoarding black markets pop up. It's the old story, especially with supermarkets and low margin items, is that's why you run out of toilet paper when there's price controls.
For example, I mean, the profit margin for supermarkets in the United States is about one point one eight percent, it's the latest figure. One point just very low relative to most American businesses. That's lower even than health insurance, which always get told that they're making gobs of money,
which they're not. One point eight percent. So the actual capacity of the Federal Trade Commission to do anything here is limited, and as Steve says, the product of that will not be a change in profit margins, but shortages. But that doesn't mean that the attempt won't be extremely difficult. I mean, it's a bit like being sued. Even if
you're right on the law. You could be one hundred percent right on the law, but if somebody decides to make your life hell, the process becomes the punishment, and you end up having to spend all your time.
Complying with this or that and paying lawyers and frankly just worrying at night.
And I think you know, if indeed I am right, which I am sometimes, and this is a political rather than an economic thing, then that sort of harassment will be more likely, not less, because she'll want to point to it and say, look at all of the stuff that I'm doing. I'm an outsider, I didn't have anything to do with this. I'm trying to stop it, and that will make it worse for publics, not less.
People don't understand the percentage of the American workforce that it is involved in compliance. It tells you something about the reach and the power of the regulatory state when you have so many, when you have entire departments as companies engaged in compliance, the name of which just sounds as if we're in a state of constant servitude with our heads bent and arms manacled. But you're right about the profit margins, Charlie. They are absolutely thin. And how do they make their money then.
Well, with really highjacked up stuff that people pay for.
I mean the profit margins on ready to eat meals. You walk into the store and you see a sandwich for twelve dollars, you see an entree for fourteen or something, and people pick it up because they can and it's convenient and the.
Rest of it. And that's where the profit really comes from. Because the margins are so huge, Is that in itself gouging?
Are we to have the never blinking eye of the pentopticon fall upon the deli meat section and called their margins too fat? If it all ends with people, as you said, a black market, people in going to an alleyway some or where somebody sells them a plastic baggy full of Captain crunch. That is not exactly the America I signed on for. Then again, I'm speaking as one of those people who owns a house and isn't troubled by the market today, which is very expensive and bad
for first time homeowners. I think the best way to stabilize the homeownership market, get more people in, and bring the price down is to give everybody twenty five thousand dollars if they're buying a house.
Some say ridiculously that that would just mean that twenty five thousand dollars would be tacked under the price. I don't understand this.
Thing called echoonomics, but that's what they say. Is this another serious proposal or is it just another bit of political grand standing?
And I think we know the answer to that.
I mean, wage and price controls are one thing, but proposing this kind of substy for housing really does remind us once again how economically illiterate leading Democrats have become.
I mean, one of the reasons, in fact, one of the main reasons thatigher education costs have risen I think at twice the rate of healthcare is the government subsidizing student loans, having lots of grants and the colleges are even though they're nonprofit quote unquote institutions, they capture those subsidies in higher prices and can get away with it. And why you would think that wouldn't happen in housing
is beyond me. And you know, the rent control proposal is also that Biden has already floated and Harris is doubling down on, will have the same effect on rents. It's just gonna raise prices or raise rents.
And I don't know what remind me again with the rent control proposal is because we've had it here.
In the Twin Cities and it has been disastrous.
They put a I mean they captained at three percent or something like that over the course of X number of years, and what it meant was that just about everybody who's going to build something said, nah, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm I'm gonna go build it over here across the border from your tout.
It never works.
But are they remind me again, because I've had a busy week and I have been able to follow every little.
Detail of rent controlled national rent control laws well as I.
Understand that the Biden proposal was to apply this to large corporate owners of multi family housing, so that would be you know, your large apartment reads like avalon Bay and people like that. But also supposedly hedge funds have been buying a lot of residential property, both single family homes and apartments, and so they want to gouge the big guy. But eventually that's going to trickle down to
the little guy. It just has to, because it seems to me if you're going to be consistent about it, which they have been in places that have rent control, like you know New York. From New York's rent control started as a temporary measure in World War One, just to remind people, and we still have a century later.
So there are a few liberals. I'm surprised to find them out here in California, and maybe, James, you have some in Minneapolis who are been saying I never thought I'd live long enough to hear this, that the problem with housing is we over regulate land use and building
too much. And there's actually so of this left wing it's actually here in California called the NIMB movement, NIMB Meeting or nimby sorry, yes, in my back back yard, and they actually say pretty sensible things along with a lot of nonsense about you know, segregation and redlining and stuff like that. But you would think that this would trickle up to the Biden administration or Democrats at the national level, but so far not much progress on that front.
Yeah, this is this has cracked me out. It's like, you know, you have someone who's a heroin addict, and he's like, it's causing me all sorts of problems being a heroin addict. I'm I'm late for work and I can't remember to do stuff and my work's really low quality. And you say, well, what are you going to do about that? And they go, I've seen you getting up earlier. Well, this is certainly one option. Well, okay, any other ideas well? I was Thineking of setting alarms that tell me to
do my stuff. You know, I'm going to take some nanacs. Maybe stop being a heroin addict.
Like it's it's.
Obviously a complicated issue, but one of the core problems with housing in the United States is that it is so regulated, especially in places like California, and union rules and environmental rules make it so difficult to build at cheap prices that people are struggling to get into the market, and the fact that the inflation that we cause led to high interest rates has not helped people get into that market either. And the one thing I mean, she
says nothing for a month, nothing. She's an avatar candidate. The press does all of her work, and she says, I'm going to make a big speech, and the one thing she can think of is give people money. On the demand side, you can't see, you can't see all of the stuff that everyone's been talking about.
You want to give people money on them.
It's just astonishing, totally inability to see the problem.
Well, at this point, of course, everybody in her side are saying, well, what about Trump and troosts, And that's another versation. We can have all of these conversations, but at the moment we have our guest, and our guests.
Popped up and we're glad that he did.
It's Charlie Gasperino, senior correspondent for Fox Business, also columnist for The New York Post and an author, most recently of Goo Go Broke, The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America.
Charlie, thanks for joining us today. Charlie.
I know that this is a this is a nation that has many problems that afflict it, many deep societal problems that were eager and keen to grasp with some of them.
Some of them we are too painful and we turn away.
But I know that when I want guidance in where the soul of America should be headed, I look to tractor companies and motorcycle makers. So let's talk about the company, the ones that I just mentioned, for example, the problems that they face may not be.
Instantly knowable to the people who aren't on Twitter and the rest of it.
But Harley Davidson is the most recent company for people to look at them and say, wait a minute, iconic American brand, symbol of the open road, the throaty engine, roar, the smell of the gas, the great American icon, and they're they're lecturing us about the need to reinvent capitalism.
Sadly, they're not alone.
I mean, I mean, one of the things in my book that I point out is just you know, how stupid, just just how pervasive wokeness is at companies. And now you would think corporate America is a right wing pursuit right capitalism. Uh, it is within the confines of wokeness. At least lately. I mean, all these companies have evolved into sort of messaging the the cultural dynamics of the left.
And I know this sounds really sort of academic when I explain this, but you read the book and you'll both get a laugh out of it, because watching corporations do stupid woke stuff is really fucking funny.
Right, it's a New York Post.
We mentioned New York. It absolutely is. It is.
It's amusing and its cluelessness and their and their inability to read the room and the rest of it.
Let's go down.
Let's go down some of the examples you talk about in your book, and then let's also get to the important question, do they really go broke? I mean, Disney still trading, Harley still selling cycles, that farm supply guys.
You know, they may have taken a little hit, but they're going to be still around.
Do they really first example, your favorite example of a company that went woke for no good reason at all.
Well, it's gotta be Budweiser. Well, you know, it's it's a brand. Budweiser is a brand in the people. The Anheuser Bush owns Budweiser. It's it doesn't. It's sold that two thousand and nine, I go through the buyout. The Bush family became very rich by selling it for billions of dollars to a company called ab Imbev, which is essentially a bunch of Brazilians and uh and uh and Belgian you know, the businessmen very Davos who bought the
brand and uh. And you know, that's where you could trace the increasingly sort of progressive branding of Budweiser and there and other brands to that purchase. And you know, it reached its sort of high or low part point with the Dilla mulvaney trans woman in a bubble bath drinking a bud light you know, yeah, which, yes, did happen, but I, you know, sort of that to me was the most infuriating and the funniest and also it just really captured you know, why this is this this occurred.
And I'll tell you why.
I you know, I covered this when it went down in twenty twenty three, and the company tried to blame it on you know, a couple of misfits in the marketing department, and as I found out, it was much more than that. It was literally those misfits in the marketing department. First of all, if it weren't such misfits, were actually good marketers. But they were under some pretty strict sidelines too, to impose DEI diversity equity and inclusion in various parts of the branding of their of their beer,
including the use of influencers. So what happened was they want they abm that was increasingly going there. It wanted to include in its you know, in its DEI mandates for influencers. Uh, trans you know, the trans community essentially as part of that DEI mandate.
And if you're going to go to the.
Trans community to sell beer, you know, Dil mulvaney becomes like someone that you go to even though the company like sits there and says, oh, we've never heard of this person before. I mean, Dil Molvaney is a famous transactivist.
Uh.
She interviewed Joe Biden before the before those ads hit, and you know, and and it became sort of a cultural touch touchstone, the whole the whole Budweiser lap or bud Light flap. She chronicled on Twitter or on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok her three hundred and sixty four days of Man of becoming.
A woman girl.
No, it's called being a girl.
Yeah, I mean it was really and and by the way she did doing it was pretty off brand if you did any research into her, her brand was bizarre because it was so activist. I mean, no, I listen, I have trans friends, no problem with people that want to go there, and that's your business. I have a problem with proseetizing, obviously, but you know, you could make
a case that you might have proselytized kids. There was a Ted Cruz told me, and it's in the book the Senator from Texas about how she had some did some skit on on Instagram or TikTok about her name being Eloise and she's six and she's dancing around. I mean, it's it's I mean, it's just it's bizarre that that Budweiser go there. But if you know d you understand why they went there. And that's part of the whole
corporate woke movement. Now when I say go woke, go broke, listen, I mean, obviously I'm not prone to exaggeration here, but listen, there is a there is a brokeness to this. Budweiser went from the number three brand, number one brand to number three best selling beer brand. Disney Stock has not moved since now since twenty fourteen. You know that I can go down on the line. Target took a hit to its bottom line. You know, we can go on and on, and you know, I don't think this stuff sells.
I mean, I don't think my book Bruce doesn't sell And it's so stupid.
That you wonder why they go there.
But then you have to kind of get a handle on the woke ecosystem, which I tried to get my hands around.
So, Charles, it's Steve Hayward out in California, and I want to I wanted to take us back to the very beginning a little bit of how this happened. What were the invade routes. I've had two theories about this that are complementary, but I've only really worked on ones. As an academic, I used to say, yeah, it's really bad that our universities are so left and into identity politics. But if you ruin the English department, in the philosophy department,
it's no big deal. But it broke out of the confines of the campus and found its way into the corporate boardrooms. Starting My point is the Silicon Valley fifteen years ago, and I think it's the HR departments are large part of it, because if you've got a degree in gender studies, you can't actually do anything in a real business, but you can go in the HR department and the new DEI Department, which it's one thing to have an HR department that's trying to advance civil rights
and affirmative action and all those problems. Right the DEI people, what do they do there? Just exists to make trouble. And I haven't gotten into your book very far yet, but I'll bet you've got lots of stories. And I keep hearing stories of DEI offices that tie units of companies in knots with their MAOIs struggle sessions over and what statements they should put out and tyway. And then I think the big business lobbies at the other end of this world economic forum also put pressure. Oh and
CEO wives I think are a big problem. I don't know if you get to that or not. But how did this happen? Take us from the top?
For us, well, I did trace how it happened. Again, this is not a history book, but history is important. Here in my view, listen, like all cultural revolutions, that happened slowly at first, and then you know, you know, so I traced, I tried to trace. When was the first time I've heard of ESG. You know, that's a key plank bokeness, environmental social governance investing. The first time I saw it was in you know, when I went
back in my in databases, was nineteen ninety five. Now, coincidentally, in nineteen ninety five, I was hired as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I spent nine years there and covering corporate scams and you name it, all the stuf uff that and the reporters do at the Wall Street Journal. And I noticed at the time I was covering mutual funds, and in nineteen ninety five there was this sort of sort of small but kind of growing movement of social responsible investing.
And it wasn't like quite a thing.
I mean, you know, when I got hired at the Journal, as I remember, it was literally I was in the newsroom, you know, I got offered the job. Today Netscape went public, and I don't know if you remember Netscape, it was like the first browser, right and at the time the IPO.
So, you know, I spent a.
Lot of time initially covering you know, these you know tech funds that were blowing up, people were getting involved in dot com stuff. But there was this sort of side business over here about social responsible investing, and I remember stuff like the Dominie Index that would bring company mutual funds under social responsibility. So it started to grow out of that. Now you know, why wasn't it just ignored and thrown to the side. Well, there's a lot
of there's a lot of factors because of that. Okay, So you there's a group think on in corporate America.
There's no doubt about them. Right, So part of the group think gets together in Davos, and like all bad ideas, you know, I find that all bad ideas begin at the UN, all bad court company ideas, and most ideas begin at the UN and maybe Davos, right, Yeah, it all starts inculcating these sort of classrooms of of influencer professors like Jeff the jeff Sonomfeld to the world at Yell where you know, progressive corporate responsibility become a huge thing,
and and corporate responsibility was defined broadly in terms of your left wing policies in the boardroom.
Right, what?
Right? Well, I remember Charles that around two thousand, what caught on for a while before ESG solidified was you may remember this too. It was the triple bottom line. There's some profit people and planet. It's the same thing as the SG and the name changed. And you do pick up on one thing I think is quite important, and I think more should we said about this. You quite rightly single out the people who call themselves stakeholders.
This has been around for a while, but you know, shareholders, We understand that there are people with skin in the game. They bought the stock. Who is a stakeholder? And how do you become one? It seems very sinister to me. But give us your take on.
That, well, stakeholders.
You know, the whole notion of stakeholder capitalism started to seep in around the time that you mentioned two thousands. You know about that where we actually, you know, live in a global community. It's and and CEOs need to think more holistically, not in the Milton Friedman fashion of shareholder capitalism. And I think the two thousand and eight
financial crisis took in another step further. I mean, you did have congressional pressure on companies, the emergence of Elizabeth Warren at a powerful leftist progressive force in the US and others. And then you had business caving into it. And I think two thousand and eight was one way to cave into it. You know, it was what because remember what happened with big business. There was massive government bailouts.
You had a wicked sort of backlash, populous backlash of tea partiers, but mostly Occupy Wall Street, which was you know, just you know, galvanizing cities. And these CEOs started to like, you know, essentially virtue signal to buy to buy themselves covered from from the left, the populous, you know sort of revolt that.
Was going on.
And there was something interesting that happened in twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen, I can't quite remember. They was twenty eighteen is when the Business Roundtable, which is the business lobby group, right, it's where the one hundred top CEOs you know, essentially set the agenda for or public companies.
The Fendistry did Milton Friedman and shareholder capitalism for stakeholder capitalism where you are we think more broadly, and that was Jamie Diamond of all people, the great banker at JP Morgan, who actually turns out to be kind of woke. I mean, it's a funny scene in my book, you know, during the George Floyd, by the way, the George Floyd,
and this just shows you how absurd it is. A cop kills maybe accidentally, probably accidentally, but whether he used brute force too much forces a matter of contention, a guy that was trying to pass a counterfeit check in a convenience store in Minneapolis. That's George Floyd. The guy has spent it all in the system and he resisted
the rest. Now I'm not saying he deserves the death penalty, far from it, but you know, in that struggle, he dies, but that death sparked these riots and all this sort of It was like a weird, woke, come to Jesus moment for every corporate ceo, like they need. It was so absurd that Jamie Diamond, Brian moynihan, a Bank of America.
I go down the list all of them that virtue signals about this, you know, use that example that the country isthmically racist in need of change, and they did, and like, how does people how do people that are like, supposedly smart Jamie Dimond, graduate from Harvard Business School, runs a big bank.
He's not.
He's very smart. How do these people go there? Because it's actually quite stupid if you think about it. My conclusion in the book is they did that for for virtue signaling reasons, to gain good publicity, to get higher because there is a corporate woke ecosystem that's developed. The Human Rights Campaign grades businesses and it does have impact. ESG is now catching on in twenty twenty, and the G and ESG and the the S and ESG is
very much about social justice. And so Jamie Dimond, so Brian moynihan, a Bank of America, doesn't you know, tells all his direct reports to read the collective works of Roger Chetty. I don't know if you know that name. That's a yeah, that's an.
Economist that at very progressive.
And then he says we're going to start at one point five billion dollar fund for you know, for racial equity, right, and everybody's like, well, how we're going to hand out money? I just get it to the communities fast, so they're just low interest loans. Jamie Diamond reads that and says we're going to do bigger one, We're going to do thirty five billion.
Dollars and he does it. You know, so I raised with them. Okay, so are you telling me that George Floyd had a low interest loan.
That day?
And Neil and their answers, I meant, I put their answers in the book. It's stupid, you know. And what's also interesting about this is like Jamie Diamond and you know at the time, was was he went to visit a branch because remember this was during the COVID lockdowns.
He went to visit a JP Morgan branch at Mount Kisso, New York, and he was in the took a picture of him taking a knee and it like went viral and we all asked, you know, it was like a group picture, and we all asked, We said, you know, he is he like, now, you know, a social justice warrior? And they were like, well, you can write whatever you want. You know, we're not going to call you know, So they had no problem letting let you know that that
impression for four years. So when I went back and I checked and this is in the book, I said, yeah, I'm just saying, oh, I'm gonna write about this, and the pr people at JP Morgan were like, oh no, no, Jamie didn't take it. Just wanted to make it clear Jamie is not a BLM supporter. He took a knee merely to fit in the photo because he was didn't want to obstruct the people behind him. And I said, that's so stupid. Why'd you wait four years to tell me that?
Well, I just had a question for you child's cook care.
So how do we fight this?
Because there's a paradox in that you're right to identify a host of examples of where companies that have gone work have suffered to some extent, and yet it's still spread. I mean, there's still an ecosystem that in some sense seems to be impervious to outside influence. And in so far as the examples you've given are of a diminished fortune for a company that's gone work, they're not going
under right, I mean, Disney, it still exists. It's flatlining in the stock market, you're right, and the movies aren't doing so well with one exception. So if you're a consumer and you can't do what was done to Budweiser with the Dylan Malvanian nonsense. How do we fight this so that it goes away because its influences pernicious.
You know.
One of the things I noticed about the Target situation, which is kind of interesting, is that for many years Target would have these very sort of expansive.
Pride Month celebrations, right and.
The they do it, and there was there was increasingly there was stuff on social media about like parents being outraged and you know, I'm taking my kid to the Target, and you know, I see this and that, and you know, I don't I just want to shop there. I want to know, I want to get diapers, so to speak, you know, which is why you can shop at Target, right right, So you want you know, good good, you
want some quality at a low price. They reached a tipping point in twenty twenty three, when you know, woke reached it's I guess a potheosis that the best way to put it. All the stuff's happened in twenty twenty three where you know, people had enough and literally people took to social media and the company was totally caught off guard to just sort of do what the press
would most of the press wouldn't do. The media wouldn't do and just report about what was going on inside the store, which was at another level, literally rainbow colored ones I mean, first off that the probably it wasn't just I have just you know, I have no problem with pride display. I you know, I don't and I
don't have kids, So that's a whole other story. But if I go to a Target and I see a pride display, I will walk by it and it probably might not even register with me, but it does with a lot of a lot of Middle America American people. When they see a rainbow colored onesie next to a tuck friendly bathing suit for men who haven't transitioned, next to a row of books about you know, children transitioning,
that rubs them the wrong way. There's a cultural there is a cultural they're proselytizing the cultural change that most people hate. And they took to social media and guess what happened. Target backed off it. Budweiser backed off it. Now here's the funniest thing with Budweiser. Because I did a lot of reporting on this, they tried to blame it on the the you know, the poor the two guys, the two people in the marketing department, which it's much
more than that. But if you want to know how absurd the overreaction in Budweiser is right now, So they go from Dyla mo'vaney drinking Budweiser half naked in a bubble bath, right, and there were social media spots now there.
Now they cut some massive deal. They actually paid up wickedly for it with the UFC, right, the Dana White, the very unwoke Data White, very unwoke you know, cage match boxing, right, guys ripping their head off, the bud wise, the antis of Bushes, the main sponsor that as part of that, they're thinking about one of the antiser Bush brands is thinking about partnering with one of Dana's other side hustles he's doing right now, which is called power Slap.
That's literally two big guys slapping each other in the face until one falls. Now, think about that. The guys that brought you Dyla movaney a year ago, almost a little more than a year ago, is now are now back and now supporting or promoting and sponsoring something where two lunatic guys smash each other in the face. That's how bad their brand has been damaged and how They're to put them Genie back in the bottle. And that's how much the consumer backlash did work. Now you're never
going to put companies. Putting companies out of business is very difficult. As someone who's covered business for years. I mean, you know, you know, Lehman Brothers, Bearsterns, you know that sort of stuff. I broke a lot of stories. Dart a financial crisis. There's a whole bunch of reasons why that happens.
You know.
I don't think Budweiser is going, you know, necessarily going to go out of business tomorrow, but slowly but surely they.
Are losing a lot of money.
Disney stock, the fact that its stock hasn't moved since twenty fourteen will tell you something.
Disney's getting hammered for what it did to Star Wars. Target is getting hammered for what you said exactly. I'm here in Minneatolis so I was here during George Flood's still here, and the Target headquarters I can see it up my window if I crane minex so I'm in the epicenter of all this. You're absolutely right about what tapped to Target. For years, they had pride displays and nobody really cared. Suburban moms didn't care, you know, they'd
go in, they'd see it, they'd wave whatever. But it was when they went specifically, really heavily lean into the trans stuff that the moms who shop at Target all of a sudden reared up and it became known on social media and elsewhere that one of the artists with whom they had partnered, who sold stuff in the Target website was actually, you know, a Satanist, which is you know, tiresome and had was giving little buttons that had Satan
all respect your pronouns, that had a guillotine for the turfs. Target completely completely misread the fact that when this got out, the moms who would just absolutely who would show up at the Pride parade when I went down the suburban street, would look at this and say, wait a minute, hold on, hold on too far. And I don't think that any of them have come back in the same way because I used shop at Target all the time, and now on the back of my head.
I hate to use the word, but they're just weird. The whole feeling I get about the place. Is it just that they did that and they're just you know, they're weird and they got their options.
But you're right, they do come back and they try to tell us that they're not that anymore. As if I see Kid Rock blowing up some you know, some cans of beer of the competitor with a shotgun and then saying I'm a bud Light guy myself, Like I'm going to just robotically turned towards them again and say all this forgiven. No, we all remember, it's going to take so long for budd Light to come back. It's going to take so long for Disney to regain the trust that they've lost amongst the Pontes.
What problems bud Light has is that it's kind of a shitty beer.
You know, that's part of the problem there too.
Yes to go to keg parties and buy bud because it was like you know, Spuds McKenzie and everything. I mean, it was that was in my head. You know, I don't like if I'm going to drink a beer, I'm not going to drink bud. It doesn't taste very good. But you know, so if there was an image that bud you know, it just gives you an impression. If
you really get into buttet which I did. There's this amazing add they did with the Clydesdales right after nine to eleven, right where the Whitsdales walk up in a field and you see the twin towers and then you see them gone and then Clydesdale's take a knee and I still get shivers like watching that ad. It was a just amazing As someone who worked listen, I was two minutes. I worked at the Wall Street Journal at the time. We were across the street from the Trade Center.
You know, I remember that day very well. I mean I was I was at a doctor's appointment, like five blocks uptown, so I saw the whole thing unfold.
You know.
That was chilling and just and you go from that to dyl mulvaney, and I think that will.
Tell you, you.
Know why so many people who revolted and we'll still revolt now.
And it tells you about the shape of the overculture.
Charlie, we gotta, we gotta get out here and U but we got to tell people to buy your book, which is Go Woke, Go Broke, the inside Story the Radicalization of Corporate America. And I hope there's a second edition and it has some addendum at the back that tells us more because it's not over.
It's not done. It's still going to ripple through our through business.
For a while.
But thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure, my pleasure.
Thank you guys.
Bye bye. The Yeah, it's going to keep on going.
You know what I find interesting is we were talking before about Charlie was talking all we're talking about how they don't sometimes realize that what they believe to be the absolute proper way to think is actually no, the luxury beliefs of an overclass that are not.
Shared by everybody else. And I find this most notable in the media, where there are words.
That do not have quotation marks around them all the time the meaning is accepted. Climate change is one of them. I mean, it's indisputable that it's happening. Equity is another equity has replaced equality. You guys notice that that whenever somebody talks about equity, it's an automatic, positive good, and nobody seems to.
You know, I don't know.
All I know is that if you want to feel as good tomorrow as you did the day before when you wake up, and that's a form of equity, isn't it equality or something like that. We got to be careful about how you actually do your party.
Yang. Okay, let me tell you this.
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Well, gentlemen, we have a few minutes here before we wrap up. Ah, I've been asked.
To mention the Ricochet Fantasy Football League. And as much as I do love football, I don't do the fantasy football thing. I don't even know where I would start. I don't need that in my head. I don't need to worry about it. I don't need another way to lose.
As a Minnesota Vikings fan. Shall we say, but Charles, of course you are a great football guy. What is this Ricochet Fantasy football thing about?
I love fantasy football. In fact, I won my family league last year, which means I expect to do really badly in the Ricochet Fantasy Football League. Not that I will be included as eligible for the prizes, but I will be taking part, and you too can take part, providing that you are a member of Ricochet. It is a member's only fantasy football league. I think we had
a post up on it last night. And as far as I understand, the idea is to get as many leagues together as Sweeney and I think that's probably a limit on how big each one can be. But we can have five or six of them, we can have divisions and then at the end of the whole thing to hand out prizes. Now, am I right in saying Steve you're going to be involved in this too?
I am. You know, I've never really understood or participated in the fantasy baseball or football leagues, but I want to learn about it. And you know this sounds like fun, so I'll be all in. But I have to say, Charlie, I haven't heard yet. If Henry Olsen is going to be part of it. He probably will look out for him. He does fantasy baseball, Oh my goodness. He absolutely kills every year in fantasy baseball. I know, because he's such a numbers geek. And I'll bet he'll be just as good football.
So look at you know, one of my favorite things is to be checking Twitter and some random evening, you know, Thursday night or something. And Henry Olsen is giving extremely detailed, granular analysis of the election in Lichenstein and saying things like, well, of course when you he went to the Palace region, then the party de from Boise is expected to do well this year given support for the bat two platform. That was anything, Wow, I know you could do this
in America. How can you do this in every single country in the world. So it doesn't surprise me that he's extremely good at fantasy baseball.
Yeah, and then and on the other hand, John, you will just bet on the Philadelphia Eagles. He'll just do hometown stuff, so he'll be easy to pick his pocket.
Yes, well, I was going to show up as I walked to my computer to sign up. Actually, I tore my meniscus, and so I'm going to be.
Out for the.
Your quarterback new quarterback.
Yep, yep, one game. That's all. We're dead. We're dead. We're absolutely dead. Yeah, it does, but that's part of being a Minnesota Viking fan.
The self delusion that is required year after year, week after week is really quite extraordinary. It says something about the character of the state, either our ability to be deluded or our tenacious loyalty, or a combination of the two. You know, I was going to ask, for example, that we're coming down to the end of summer. Here, you've got a fortnight left. I guess, if you want to look at it, calendrical summer, that is, meteorological summer will
last way into September. But nobody in these parts believes that at all. I just thought it's kind of ridiculous to ask you fellows how you feel about the shank of summer since Charles is in Florida and.
Steve when you're in California.
Now, yeah, I mean, you guys live in a in a perpetual bliss of clement weather. You know nothing of the character that develops when the when when the world itself turns and paints itself into these most beautiful ways.
Yes, can I can contradict you slightly. I include know something of it, which is one reason I now live in Florida.
We're up in England for twenty six years.
Yes, yeah, I imagine so. And it was that that drove you away. Is the English? Is the English faull?
Does it lacked that bittersweet I thought, with Keiths telling us the fruits, the mellow fruits of autumn and all the rest of it.
Or is it just another dismal, drizzly interval.
Yeah, it's dismal and drizzly and gray.
You know.
I looked this up recently. The closest analog I find to being rather as Seattle. And for years I said to people, so, what's thing them like? What's the weather like? And I would say, it's like Seattle. Seattle has one
hundred days more of sunshine. So even the one example that I could find, there's actually a really good map I saw that shows how much sunshine places in the world get, and America in general, even you know, you're joking about Minnesota, but Minnesota too they're just so much lighter and sunnier and brighter than all of Europe, with a couple of exceptions. And it has to affect the national character in your outlook.
Oh, it absolutely does.
I mean I was in England in the end of July or the end of June and the beginning of July, and we had five six glorious days in Suffolk.
I mean, it's just it was hot. It was actually hot.
People were putting on shorts and they were fanning themselves and complaining about the lack of air conditioning and all the rest of it. Although the place where I stayed had ac because it was by civilized, sane people. But then of course we get in the train and we
go to Glasgow, and Glasgow rained. But as in Minnesotan, I don't understand the sort of Scottish rain until I get there, in which it rains and then it doesn't, and then it rains a little bit, and then it miss for a bit, and then it rains very heavily, and then then the clouds blared through like trumpets from barrios, and then they cloud slam shut again with a claak, and the rain comes in and again over and over
and over again. And I think the Scottish must haves have had as many names for rain as the Eskimos do for snow. That that old canard and it said, no, they don't, it's just rain, which was followed by four glorious, four glorious days in Edinburgh which it barely rained at all,
and everything was absolutely wonderful. But Glasgow, in the rain and the griminess and the and the sort of sodden, care worn nature of the place, really brought through the spirit of it in a way that if I'd gone there during nothing but sun, I don't think I would have understand understood much. So I'm glad my vacation was completely rained in Glasgow.
I understood it a bit more, and I understood it.
Why perhaps that shaped the Scottish temperament as it did Steven. Your summer it's been going fine, I assume make it interesting to everybody in the next few minutes that we have.
Oh that's hard to do. I mean, summertime for an academic is when you try and catch up on unfinished articles, read books that have been piled up in a corner, try to get outside and enjoy things. I will say that this climate change business can go on forever. But this summer has been very unusual. Where I live on the Central Coast, it has been thick fog almost the entire summer until this week. And that's partly because our producer Perry visited me, and I think he brought some
good weather with him. It's sunny outside and beautiful right now and I'm looking at the ocean. But part of it is get off on this for a minute. You and listeners may remember about a year and a half ago there was that enormous volcano eruption in the South Pacific, and the honest climatologist said, ah, this is going to
affect the planet's climate over the next two years. And so there's a little wlag in it because it threw up so much high altitude water, vapor and particulates, and it's going to have both the cooling and warming effect depending on where you are. And I think that accounts for some of the weather patterns that otherwise the media is freaking out about this summer, which are to be entirely expected. If you're honest about it.
It's going to make it cooler or warmer.
That is just a climate change of advocate dream because
you can go in to absolutely everything. And also, but it means that if you're looking at coughed up water vapor in particular, and you look at subterranean jets coming out from the depths of the ocean warming things up, and if you look at the fact that the Great Barrier Reef seems to be doing okay, and if you look at the fact that Antarctie ice is not a nightmare, and you consider that sunspots, that big, huge glowing nuclear furnace up in the sky.
Might have something to do with our climate.
It means then that all of the stuff telling us to do to get out of our cars into evs, which.
Are powered of course by some magic that's generated somewhere.
Uh, that that that that falls on deaf ears, and we can't have that, because we've all got to have an electrified future, right. That's one of the things that I fear the most about a Harris administration would be the continuing war against the most effective means of generating power you possibly can. Then again, maybe she'll be pro nuke. Then again, maybe whatever. I don't particularly trust the gray matter behind those sparkling joy filled eyes. And by the way, guys,
I'm tired of hearing joy. You know, I'm really tired of hearing joy, not because I'm not a joyful person, because they're about this close to saying that America will achieve strength through joy, about this close without realizing.
James, are you really pining for the sour countenance of John Kerry? Is that you're nostalgia?
Now I better better lurch than this, this, this empty effervescence.
Charles.
I just hate being told this stuff that we all know is not true. It's it's it's an in junction. They are joyful, they're not joyful.
You know what.
It reminds me of that old nineteen nineties version of Superman with Dean Kin and Terry Hershe.
So I watched this when I was a kid.
I love this show and there was this particular episode in it where this guy, I think, I guess in the show he was running for an elected office and they found some brain control technique that would allow him to broadcast out to the people of the city. There's one phrase that he was a darn nice guy, and so everywhere Lois went during this episode, she starts to notice she woulday, what do you think of this guy? And they would say, well, you know, I think he's a darn nice guy.
And everyone said it and it just got really, really creepy. This is the joy thing. The people who are promulgating this, they are happy.
They are joyful because there was a period of a few months where they thought they were going to lose, and they thought they might lose Minnesota, in New Mexico and New Hampshire and Virginia, and so they were crying themselves into their breakfast cereal. And now they're all happy because they've got this candidate who looks like she's marched
in the ahead, and they feel joy. But they're using this brain control technique where they're trying to convince everyone else that they feel joy and they see joy and what this is is joy and it's joyful. And the thing that defines it is this joyfulness. And I keep watching these rallies and I'm like, what are.
You talking about, you weird people?
Oh no, no, no, no no, no. Weird is the right. Joy joy joy is the left. These are the two words. It's joy versus weird, Joy versus weird.
Just repeat that to yourself until you are convinced, and vote accordingly and correctly. That'll do for us, folks. Thanks guys for showing up your thanks for Zibiotics for sponsoring us. Go to Apple Podcast give with those five star reviews, five big bright stars so more people can find Ricochet
and joyful about it, though very joyful about it. Yes, press hard with joy and join us joyfully at ricocheted dot, where if you're a part of the member feed, which means you're a member, you get all sorts of stuff, not just the fantasy football, but you get the meetups and you get to have conversations that you know. They're in private, and they're all over the place, and it's a great community. I was just there last night about twelve o'clock or so, typing out and reading.
And go there every day a couple of times.
So I'm not just a flap and mouthpiece here. I'm an actual contributor and I'm also a flap and mouthpiece.
Thank you, guys. We'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet for point zero well next week