Crypto News: Bud Light’s politics have people hopping to new beer brands

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Bud Light sets a new low in corporate courage.
The AI doctor will (not) see you now.
Cheap flights won't exist by 2026.
Amazon isn't very good at video games.

It's only Monday, I realize, a little early in the week for such a beer-soaked newsletter. But we have to talk about the Bud Light boycott, which Ben Schott calls "a marketing case study for the ages." So feel free to crack open whatever carbonated wheat juice you have in the back of your fridge. You're gonna need it.

The backstory: A few weeks ago, influencer Dylan Mulvaney partnered with Bud Light to promote the beer during March Madness. Mulvaney, who began charting her gender transition on TikTok last year, now boasts more than 13 million social followers and is a popular figure within the LGBTQ+ community. Sadly, her collaboration did not go over well with Bud Light's core demographic, which is now boycotting it (with varying degrees of success— nice try, Dan Crenshaw).

The National Republican Congressional Committee posted a now-deleted tweet that said, "Thanks to Dylan Mulvaney, we can all finally admit that Bud Light tastes like water." And Freedom Speaks Up — which normally sells things like t-shirts and fleece blankets — said it would soon start selling a malt beverage, called "Conservative Dad's Ultra Right 100% Woke Free American Beer."

Bud Light's parent company, Anheuser-Busch — ironically, one of the NRCC's largest donors — was clearly not ready for this level of vitriol. Its solution? First it ghosted Bud Light's followers, with all its social channels going dark. Then its CEO released a statement about Bud Light's "proud history supporting our communities, military, first responders, sports fans and hard-working Americans." Instead of standing up for trans rights, Anheuser-Busch released a commercial featuring the infamous Clydesdale horses. If that's not THE definition of simping, I don't know what is.

As Ben points out, a Bud Light vice president, Alissa Heinerscheid, has admitted that the brand had "a fratty, kind of out of touch humor" that was in need of an update. Running for the hills at the first sight of backlash is probably not the approach she had in mind. "Bud Light's action is worse than a gaffe, it's a betrayal," Ben writes. And it's a dangerous one, too. Read the whole thing.

Bonus Ben Schott Brand Reading:

TurboTax is a prime example of a "Leech Brand."
Pepsi's rebrand came with an off-putting side of defensiveness.

A funny thing about getting knee surgery is that when you're on the operating table, moments away from getting anesthesia, the doctor asks, "Which knee?" At first, you wonder if it's a joke, a well-meaning but cringe-worthy effort to put your nerves at ease. But it is not a joke. They really do want to know which knee, so that they can write a big X on it with their magic marker. Because if they didn't, there's a small chance that they'll cut open the wrong knee. No biggie!

The reality is that the perils of human error are everywhere. But what if the operating room could escape that? What if a program like ChatGPT could eliminate the need to ask, "Which knee?" Already, AI is showing some promising signs in the health industry. It has mastered medical licensing exams. It can sympathetically deliver bad news to patients. It can even reduce people's reliance on expensive drugs, as evidenced by Blackstone's new testing program. Unfortunately, "like a human doctor, GPT-4 can be wrong, and not necessarily honest about the limits of its understanding," Faye Flam writes, adding that in an ideal world, AI "wouldn't replace hands-on medical work but enhance it — and yet we're nowhere near understanding when and where it would be practical or ethical to follow its recommendations."

Aside from the ethics, we also have to address the logistics of this AI-physician assistant. Think about that knee surgery. If an AI were assisting in the OR, would you have to pay it a portion of the surgery fee? Tyler Cowen goes one step further with the question: "Should AI agents, when they perform productive work, be required to pay taxes?" As astonishing as it is, Tyler notes that we already are seeing instances of autonomous AI agents creating other autonomous AI agents — AutoGPTs — with no human behind them at all. Who — or what — gets paid and taxed, and how? It quickly becomes quite murky, given the fact that chatbots require far different incentives compared to humans. For now, we might be better off sticking to the magic marker.

Bonus AI Reading:

What if AI wrote its own dictionary? — Tim Culpan
It's official: ChatGPT can decode Fedspeak and predict stock moves.

Quadruple-digit plane tickets are about to become the new reality for the air travel industry. "Over the next three decades, aviation has to transform itself from a polluting industry — planes are responsible for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions — to a net-zero one," Lara Williams writes. So enjoy that $82 Ryanair flight from Dubrovnik to Dublin while you can. That price tag isn't going to last long under these climate compliance laws.

In 2021, Bloomberg News published the headline, "Amazon Can Make Just About Anything — Except a Good Video Game." More than two years later, it still rings true. After a decade of trying, Dave Lee says the Everything Store is still nowhere close to carving out a reputable name in the gaming space. Time and time again, its game-studio projects have fizzled. Maybe publishing third-party creations can fix that.