 Anyway, Ben and Jerry was the successful company and were post-the-child, I mean, I remember they ran a competition to try to find a CEO, but the problem was that they wouldn't pay the CEO enough because they had this ratio between the lowest paid employee and the CEO, so they couldn't find a CEO. And then they landed up hiring somebody and this guy had formerly worked in a gun manufacturer and people freaked out, the customers, the hippie customers freaked out when they heard about this and they forced them to resign. There were demonstrations, literally demonstrations of San Francisco over the choice of CEO that Ben and Jerry had picked. So Ben and Jerry's always been this symbol of leftism and of corporate social responsibility and of this kind of attitude and this kind of gig. I stopped buying Ben and Jerry sometime in the 90s, well over 20 years ago. I've not had a Ben and Jerry since then because I did not wanna support them because I thought that they were harmful to the country. They were destroying, they were actively advocating against capitalism. They were actively distorting the record of capitalism and promoting what I thought was anti-capitalist ideas and every dollar that they got, out of every ice cream that you buy there, a certain percentage of the money goes to this kind of activism. Anyway, Ben and Jerry sold themselves in April, 2000 to Unilever, a British conglomerate, a big company, massive food giant. And what's interesting is that Unilever, when they bought Ben and Jerry and I think the reason Ben and Jerry were willing to sell to Unilever, is that Unilever committed to carry out the company's tradition of engaging in these kind of socially responsible ideas and they actually created a board at Ben and Jerry and this, I don't know of any other company in the world that has this, a board, an independent board, separate from the board of Unilever, just to oversee Ben and Jerry. And that board was given kind of authority over the whole social responsibility issues involved. Unilever believed that a big part of the selling point of Ben and Jerry was its political and social activism and therefore they encouraged that and they supported that and they continued that as the Ben and Jerry brand under this Unilever brand. Unilever by the time they bought Ben and Jerry was already the largest sell of ice cream in the world. But they didn't have a high quality ice cream. Ben and Jerry was the first kind of high quality ice cream that they could get. Anyway, so since then, Ben and Jerry have continued in spite of having this corporate overload. And by the way, when they sold to Unilever they were demonstrations in the streets of San Francisco again. That is the left hated the idea that Ben and Jerry would sell out. And Ben and Jerry made, they sold the company for $360 million. Most of that was theirs. So they became centi millionaires, these two hippies. And and they both stayed involved with the company. They both stayed connected to it. The board has been run by a, particularly in the last few years by a woman who is well known as a social activist, as a committed leftist and super involved in social causes and left wing agenda and the whole woke thing. Anyway, where is this thing? I had this interesting article about this. Anyway, always chugging along nicely Ben and Jerry never made a huge amount of money for Unilever, but Unilever was committed to social responsibility. It had a CEO committed himself to social responsibility in spite of that. The stock did well for a while. More recently, they replaced the CEO. This CEO was even more committed to social responsibility. And yet now the stock was not doing as well as before. Now, one of the things, I think the first expansion of Ben and Jerry overseas was in, what do you call it? In 2000, no, it wasn't 2004. When did this happen? Yeah, anyway, they basically, their first expansion was an expansion into Israel. And there was an entrepreneur, an Israeli entrepreneur who had lived in the United States who'd liked Ben and Jerry, liked the ice cream, thought the concept would work really well in Israel and he brought the ice cream to Israel. And it's been a huge success. And Ben and Jerry has made a lot of money off of the ice cream in Israel. The Israeli entrepreneur got the list of all the recipes. He then got all the suppliers. He got the original ingredients. Well, not originally green, so a lot of the ingredients are Israeli made. Anyway, he grew it in Israel. And it's been very successful in Israel, including it turns out, in the West Bank, including among Arabs in the West Bank. Now, this has become a real problem for Ben and Jerry. Because on the one hand, they are committed to leftist causes. And one of the most popular leftist causes these days is divestment from Israel because Israel is quote, an apartheid state and Israel is an evil state. It's an oppress of the Palestinians. And it is wrong, according to the left, to have anything to do with Israel. And it's suddenly wrong to have anything to do with the West Bank, with that area which is where the Palestinians live, which is not technically a part of Israel. Israel was never next to it. And there's a huge movement in the United States to divest from Israel, to not have anything to do with Israel. And in 2016, a local Palestinian who'd moved to the United States and who lived in Bullington, Vermont, where Ben and Jerry had lived. Anyway, he approached, I think it was Ben, and said, hey, Ben, they were working out at the gym together. Why are you selling ice cream in the West Bank? This is an evil, the Israelis are evil. The whole thing is evil. You need to stop doing this. Ben took this seriously, because he's a good leftist. And he went to the board of Ben and Jerry, which has independence, and they started debating this. And early on, what they tried to do was, they started buying products from Palestinian farmers. They bought almonds from Palestinian farmers. They tried to actually have the stores in the West Bank and even in Gaza, run by local Palestinians. So they were making money, and then they started buying milk, and they started buying other products from Palestinians, but none of this satisfied. The American left and particularly after Black Lives Matter, when the left became more engaged, and as Ben and Jerry fully supported Black Lives Matter and went completely behind them, there was a big demonstration, for example, in May, 2021, a year after Black Lives Matter in downtown Bullington and against Israel. And the demonstration was focused on the Ben and Jerry store at the place and yelling at them and arguing that Ben and Jerry should have no business there. And indeed, what happened was, the board realized that all this attempt to appease had not worked, but more than that, they realized that they were not acting based on their announced principles. So that in July, 2021, Ben and Jerry announced that they would cease. They would not renew the contract with the Israeli entrepreneur, that they would cease selling all Ben and Jerry products in what's called the Occupy Territories in the West Bank and even in Gaza, and that they would find a new licensee who would only sell the ice cream in Israel proper, in what they consider Israel proper. This, of course, created a huge uproar within supporters of Israel in the United States. Israel itself was very unhappy with this. It created a little bit of a diplomatic crisis. The Israeli ambassador talked to the Unilever CEO, put a lot of pressure on Unilever. And indeed, this is all at a time when the Unilever CEO is relatively new and he's even more committed to social justice. And yet the stock price is coming down and there's activists buying into the Unilever board and they're trying to shift. So Unilever then tells, so there's all this uproar and there's all this agitation. And then in Israel, Israelis start boycotting Ben and Jerry. So the business of Ben and Jerry collapses. So then the entrepreneur had the rights to sell Ben and Jerry in Israel sues Unilever. So then Unilever in this amazing kind of, Unilever's basically says, okay, we reject what Ben and Jerry did. We are going to sell Ben and Jerry to the Israeli entrepreneur. We're gonna let him run the whole thing. The only thing he's not allowed to do, he can use the logo, he can use the background with the cows and what do you call it, the clouds and all that crap. The only thing he can't do is have Ben and Jerry's in English. You can have it in Hebrew, you can have it in Arabic, you can't have it in English and he can do what he wants with it, whatever he wants with it. And Unilever basically caved. And the Ben and Jerry both said, wait a minute, we've got a deal. And you had committed at the time of the purchase to giving us independence and giving us the authority to make these kind of decisions. And Unilever said, well, not when it comes, not an important decisions and this is creating an international conflict and this is creating huge losses and this is going nowhere and their lawsuits and everything, no, we're overriding you. So the Ben and Jerry board sued the Unilever board, which again is unprecedented. They all filed in court and they did all the stuff and the thing was in front of a judge. And I think what was happening was it got very, very close to the point where Unilever was basically saying, and remember this board that Ben and Jerry has is the two members from the Unilever board, the CEO and one of the member, but everybody else, I think there are nine members, everybody else is basically a leftist committed social justice warrior, right? And Unilever was basically, even though they were committed to social justice, bottom line, shareholder and activists were starting to put pressure on Unilever, ultimately the CEO's been fired, he's gonna be replaced in July. But Unilever I think told Ben and Jerry, look, if you insist on this, we're basically gonna get do away with this board concept, we're basically gonna get rid of the board. So what happened was Ben and Jerry and Unilever settled. It's not exactly what they settled, but the lawsuits were dismissed. The Israeli entrepreneur has the franchise and since December 15th, 2022, Ben and Jerry is functioning in Israel, functioning in all of Israel, everywhere. It's selling ice cream, it's owned outright by the Israeli entrepreneur, Unilever washed their hands of Israel on the one hand of this part of Israel, just ice cream, they sell other stuff in Israel. But they've also kind of put the Ben and Jerry board in its place. Now why do I tell you this story? Because I wanna tell you this story because it's another illustration as if we need more, but it's another illustration of the principle that the moral is the practical and the practical is the moral and that when you do really, really dumb things, when you do things that don't make sense, when you do things like so-called social corporate responsibility, when you will function and you will, everything is dedicated to, is built around the principle of making money, of profit and maximizing shareholder wealth. You can for a while get around it and obviously Ben and Jerry themselves did. I mean they prospered financially while running a socially responsible place because they catered to a particular crowd and a particular audience, but even they struggled to find a CEO, even they had relatively low profit margins for a high quality ice cream place. In spite of the fact that the ice cream was expensive, profit margins were very low. And then once you deliver botna and once you deliver, which is a corporation listed and has multiple shareholders, even in a system that's semi free like our system, you can't get away with just ignoring your shareholders. You can't get away with just ignoring the marketplace. I think BlackRock these days is discovering that as funds are being pulled from BlackRock because BlackRock is more committed to ESG than they are to maximizing their investors' money, their investors' wealth. And as a consequence, people are pulling out of BlackRock. Well, the same thing is happening in Unilever. Their commitment to social responsibility is ultimately undermined, their ability to be successful as a business and as a consequence of that, they are losing that business. And Ben and Jerry will not be able to function. You know, they'll be allowed to do their social responsibility up to a point. As long as it's deemed as be, you know, real here. As long as it's deemed to be smart marketing. As long as it's deemed to be satisfying their basic customers. Many of whom I think have now moved on to all kinds of other speciality ice cream. There's so much speciality ice cream today. I'm not sure that the buyers of Ben and Jerry anymore attuned to its social responsibility message anymore. I think those people have moved on to something else. So, Ben and Jerry another illustration of the ultimate failure of the attempt to try to bring about social responsibility in the context of a business that has shareholders and is committed to legally, to have fiduciary responsibility to them, to try to have it both ways, to try to somehow figure this out, somehow balance all these quotas. It also shows how decision making, stupid decision making, not selling in the West Bank is not achieving anything. It's denying Palestinians of a delicious ice cream. And it's denying Palestinians of a market for their milk and a market for their almonds and a market for other products that Ben and Jerry is buying in Israel. And so you can see that inconsistency ultimately results in bad performance. Unilever is suffering, it's replacing its CEO. The new CEO coming in is a lot less committed to social responsibility, a lot less committed. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. 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