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SPEAKER_04: Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So back in 2016, one of our very earliest episodes was on the founding of the Boston Beer Company, makers of Sam Adams Beer. Our guest was its founder, Jim Cook. I know lots of you remember that episode because so many of you have come to talk to me about it when you meet me. It was really funny. It was full of great lessons and Jim talked about a framework he came up with that gave him the courage to start the company. And that framework was pretty simple. He asked himself, what's worse, doing something scary or something dangerous? Well for Jim, leaving his comfortable job as a consultant to start a beer company was certainly going to be scary, but not doing it, not taking the leap and staying at a job you really didn't love. Well, that was dangerous because one day he might regret not trying and it would be too
late to start.
Fast forward to today and a lot has changed in the beer industry, even in the time since Jim first joined us. There's been a flood of craft beer brands that have started up, some have prospered, many of them have failed, and American drinking habits have changed as well with more people opting for spirits or even non-alcoholic drinks. None of this has ruffled Jim Cook or stifled his creativity in any way. In fact, it's just made him more innovative, as you will hear. Jim no longer runs the day-to-day operations at Boston Beer Company, but he's still very much involved and a big part of product innovation there. A few weeks ago, I asked him to come back onto the show for an update and when he sat down in the studio, he decided to celebrate our conversation with, well, a nice cold beer.
SPEAKER_03: When I actually, and you were talking about the last episode, it reminded me of actually the secret of why that came out so well. And if I may, I'm going to give you the key to that, which is I discovered long ago that
I'm really boring when I'm dead sober.
SPEAKER_04: Back then, there were about 5,700 craft breweries in the US. Boston Beer Company is still considered a craft beer company. I think you make about 8.5 million barrels of beer a year, so you're still considered very small compared to the big guys. Not the biggest. I think Yengling is the biggest craft beer, beer number two, but at the time, there were about 5,500. To date, there are almost 10,000. By 2022, almost 10,000 craft breweries in America.
You, Jim, are widely considered to be the guy who reinvigorated craft brewing in the US. You're called the godfather of craft brewing, but I wonder whether you think that there's too many. Is there market saturation now? What do you think?
SPEAKER_03:
You're asking a brewer. Is there too many beers? I mean, a brewer always wants another beer. I'm very happy that there are 10,000 craft brewers. In all seriousness, this is sort of what success looks like. When I started Sam Adams, it'll be 40 years ago, that was kind of what we dreamed about, that someday everybody was 10 minutes away from a craft brewer and that there would be great beer everywhere.
SPEAKER_03:
The downside to that is there is so much competition. Everybody's innovating. Everybody's trying to make the next new thing, but that's wonderful. Yes, it's a much harder business to be in, but on the other hand, it's stable.
SPEAKER_03: It's not going anywhere. It has totally changed the landscape of beer in the United States.
Today the place where brewers from all over the world look for inspiration and innovation
is not Germany, it's not Belgium, it's not England, it's America.
We are teaching the rest of the world how to make great beer. When I started Sam Adams, American beer was a joke. I come from a brewing family with a deep history of brewing in America and it bothered me. Today nobody makes that joke anymore.
SPEAKER_04:
Right, because things like IPAs, which you see in Europe, and it's amazing, those are
SPEAKER_04: really influenced by American brewers.
But I'm just curious because I've been reading things like craft brewing, we know is more competitive and the market share is slightly decreasing. The market share of spirits has really jumped from 2000 to today and it's now a greater share of the overall alcohol market than beer, slightly.
Beer is still big, 40, 41%, but spirits now outselling beer a little bit.
Do you think that it sort of foreshadows what is going to happen over time? It doesn't mean that Boston Beer Company and other companies won't come up with other products, but do you think that in 20 years from now it's possible that beer consumption accounts for let's say 15% of all alcohol consumption in the US?
SPEAKER_03: Lots of things are possible. There's a country western song called The Hard Way and one of the lines in there is we've got two lives, one we're given and the other one we make.
SPEAKER_03: Maybe 15% is the life we're given, but it's not the one we make.
I want a different future and I'm willing to take the challenge of creating that different
future and to me as a brewer there are great beers that have not been made yet and they
may take a form that we can't imagine today. To me that's the opportunity, that's what's exciting. I've been making beer for 40 years and I wake up excited every day by the possibilities. We make things that are almost beyond imagination. We make a special beer, we release it every two years, it's called Samuel Adams Utopias. It weighs in at about 60 proof. It's the strongest naturally fermented beer in history and we sell it for $250 a bottle and we sell out. We have to ration it. To me a beer like that easily stands next to a vintage port or a fine cognac, an old
SPEAKER_03: sherry. We've moved into a flavor space where beer has never been. On the other hand, we've made canned cocktails that are just flat out delicious and it's not technically a beer, but it leverages our culinary skills, our flavor innovation. It's in a can, you make it in a brewery, goes through beer, wholesalers and so forth. Whether you call that spirits or beer, to me it's just part of this wonderful universe of beautiful things you can do with the fermentation of grain.
SPEAKER_03: How do you begin to think about innovating?
SPEAKER_04: You start as a beer company and then you make different kinds of beers, but now Boston Beer Company makes hard ciders, it makes seltzers, it sells a hard iced tea. So let's break this down. How do you decide what to do next?
Is it based on market research and looking at where younger consumers are going, what
they're drinking? Do you follow the consumer essentially?
SPEAKER_03: No. No. There are plenty of people who are very good at that. Big companies have lots of research and they buy reports and they get all this quantitative stuff and so forth. We can't really compete with these big companies. They've got all these feelers out there. We have to be successful, we have to be different. For me, this starts with ideas that are, if you will, paradigm shifts. We approach the world in paradigms and we are prisoners of those paradigms.
SPEAKER_03:
I've always tried to take those blinders and that structure away because it forces you
to think in the same way that everybody else is thinking.
So it inhibits innovation and new ways of adding value.
For our whole time in alcohol, last few centuries, alcohol is basically divided into three realms. There's beer, there's wine, and there's hard liquor or spirits. And those are three lanes. And an insight about that is they're all acquired tastes.
They all have a flavor structure that as human beings, we're not actually evolved to like.
Wine is tannic and acidic.
Beer is bitter and has that tongue sting of carbonic acid on the palate. And of course, hard liquor has that ferocious ethanol attack up front. So they all are acquired tastes.
SPEAKER_04:
Which is why kids don't like them. Kids drink a sip of beer, wine, and all that.
SPEAKER_03: No. You have to evolve your taste to like them. And that's fine. But you're fighting something. So the term I use is a fourth category.
And that's kind of our blue ocean where we can innovate because nobody's really there.
SPEAKER_04: And the fourth category is what do you call it?
SPEAKER_03:
I call it the fourth category. The fourth category. I love it. Because it doesn't have a name. But it is the space of intersection of all of them. Things that are not traditional wine, traditional beer, traditional liquor. I mean, there's a place for all these wonderful things. But there was this unexplored territory of wonderful beverages that had not yet been made. But to me, I think of them, they exist. They're just unrecognized and lying dormant. And my job is to kind of dust them off and find them in this junkyard of bad ideas.
SPEAKER_04: We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, how Boston Beer Company brought an alcoholic twist to some of our favorite non-alcoholic beverages. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Build This Lab.
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SPEAKER_04: Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So Jim Cook loves thinking outside traditional paradigms. A great drink doesn't need to be a beer or wine. It can be something totally different.
SPEAKER_03: So, for example, we've developed an ability to ferment grain and then clean it and take
out a lot of the less pleasant notes.
We're essentially making this beautiful, clean, clear, 20% alcohol liquid that then can form a base for other flavors. It's like the pizza dough on the counter and you can put anything on it you want.
SPEAKER_03: And you can turn that into several other products?
SPEAKER_03:
I can turn that into an unlimited number of products. One of the first things that we developed that was over 20 years ago was hard tea. And it was very appealing to me because tea has, you know, like beer and hops and so forth. Tea has a couple of thousand years of tradition. It's got big flavor variations between different teas. You've got black teas, green tea, red tea, white tea. And it's a flavor I know that people are familiar with, but I can introduce it to them in a new way. And so we came out with a hard tea called Bodine's. Chuck that one up. That was another failure. But it didn't do that well.
SPEAKER_03: And then there was a band that sued us. So that was a fiasco. So just to clarify, you're talking about as a twisted tea brand.
SPEAKER_04: Already 20 years ago, Boss and Beer Company released a hard tea, but that didn't work. It failed initially? Well, yeah, and then it failed again. So what happened? How did that turn around?
SPEAKER_03: Well, it failed the second time as twisted tea, but it had little pockets. Okay, and we're not a big company.
Big companies, if something fails, they shoot it in the head and they move on. But this was like our baby. And it had these little pockets where it actually was doing reasonably well. What it was was states that start with M, but weren't Mississippi.
SPEAKER_03: So it was doing well in Maine. It was doing well in Massachusetts. It was doing well in Maryland, in Montana, in Michigan. That does not explain anything, though.
SPEAKER_04: That explains nothing to me. There has to be a reason why people- Exactly.
SPEAKER_03: Why?
SPEAKER_03: Well, that's the question you have to ask yourself. That's part of this paradigm thinking.
People focus on the paradigm and what works within the paradigm. What you really have to do is focus on the aberrations, things that are outside the paradigm. That's how Copernicus worked, how Einstein worked. A lot of great scientists, they look at the aberrations. So we went to these aberrations.
SPEAKER_03:
I started with Maine. I just went to Maine and I stood in convenience stores, which was the main place that it was selling. I stood in one of them all day long. There were like five people that came in and bought twisted tea. I asked them why they were buying twisted tea. I was told, well, I like the way it tastes and it's not carbonated, so I don't get bloated. It makes me feel good. It had a very familiar taste. It had the modicum of caffeine in it from the natural tea, not a lot, but enough to just change the contours of the buzz that you got from it.
SPEAKER_03: It was very flavorful, so you didn't chug it.
You'd have one or two. It tastes like a regular iced tea, a little bit.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's actually a bigger tea flavor profile because a lot of the non-alk teas, the Snapples in Arizona, there's not much tea flavor. There's powder, right? They use powder. Yeah, and the tea isn't that ... They're very successful.
They sell a lot because the tea flavor is sort of recessive and the sweetness and the
fruit, the lemon and things that get added are essential elements to it.
It was very tea forward, but it's very high quality tea. The core drinker was a blue-collar drinker, but a kind of educated blue-collar drinker because it wasn't cheap. This was selling for basically craft beer pricing.
SPEAKER_03: The first guy I talked to in Maine, he was a mason and he was building a stone wall.
The next guy was a sheet rocker. He put up the plasterboard in a construction site.
These were people who were very sort of clever with doing odd things. They started sending us pictures of them drinking twisted tea. The first one was this guy who looked like he was in a pool, but then when you opened the aperture, he put a plastic sheet in the back of his pickup truck, filled it with water and was sitting there in his bathing suit having a twisted tea. It made me smile. This is our drinker. This is great. It started to get traction. Bikers adopted it. It's like the official drink of Sturgis, the big bike rally in North Dakota. It's just grown over 20-some years. It started with that base. It's still the base for it. Then it sort of spread out. Now there's college campuses. I remember moving my daughter out from her dorm at Harvard. She was on the top floor. So we walked down all the five floors. On two of them, there was an empty case of twisted tea. Wow. All right.
SPEAKER_04: Let's dig into this a bit more because obviously the tea sort of gamble worked. One other thing that you introduced. This was back in, I think, 2016, was hard seltzer. Initially hard seltzer also didn't take off. It was seen as a gimmick.
SPEAKER_04: Well, no.
SPEAKER_03: It was actually, I'll tell you a story of it. We misconceived it. 25 years ago, we developed this clear malt base. This was before Coors released Zima? It was after Coors released Zima, but the base that Coors had was not clean.
It had some off-notes of sulfur that came out of the fermentation.
SPEAKER_03: They didn't know how to get those molecules out of there. So we had to, it's a little complicated, but we had to develop this ion separation technology.
I'm not a scientist, but I know it tastes good.
We actually did that in partnership with people who make Jack Daniels. They had some chemical engineers. It was a very fruitful partnership.
Out of that came this clear malt base that the Jack Daniels country cocktails are built on. We kept thinking about, well, what else could we do with it? It took 20 years to come to this idea, which was hard seltzer. Truly was the first hard seltzer here. It just came from just thinking, pushing, what could we do with this? It was a very simple idea. La Croix was taking off. Seltzer water was taking off. We said, what if we made an alcoholic version of that?
SPEAKER_03: You were paying attention to La Croix because La Croix really just exploded.
SPEAKER_04:
Even though it's been around for a long time, it really started to explode in the 2010s.
SPEAKER_03:
Yeah. To me, when I go into a store, everybody stays in the beer aisle and they look and they try to copy other people's ideas. I'm walking the rest of the store. I'm looking in the non-alc section and just drawing stimulation from that. This idea of an alcoholic hard seltzer and the parameters, the framework for them was,
SPEAKER_03:
what if we made something that had 100 calories?
We were going to do no sugar, no artificial sweeteners. We put relatively complex fruit flavors. Again, we were totally wrong. When we formulated, we thought, who's going to drink this? Well, our drinker is going to be a white blouse woman who didn't want sugar and starches. She's going to drink it after she plays tennis. It's going to be a substitute for Chardonnay on the rocks or vodka soda with a lime. This is going to be a better version of that. We're going to sell a million cases a year, which is not a whole lot in a business with this three billion cases or some huge number. What we've learned is make a beautiful flavor profile, make a beautiful product, and it will find its way to the right drinkers. We learned that from Twisted Tea. We thought that was going to be for urban, yuppies, Snapple drinkers, and we were totally wrong. We put this out. We had it in market a couple of months. We had our beer wholesalers on a, they got an incentive trip. We take them to the Caribbean. One of the days is this booze cruise on a trawler. These are beer wholesalers. They're professional, world-class drinkers. This is a 10, 12-hour booze cruise. We go to some famous Caribbean bars, Foxy's and Salty Dollar and things like that. The boat is stocked with all of our things. There were four of our wholesalers sitting on the back bench of this trawler boat, and they started drinking truly.
SPEAKER_03: The hard sells are designed for the white blouse women. These are big guys. There were four of them. There's probably 1,200 pounds of wholesaler on that bench. I said, guys, do me a favor. Just count the trulys because we're going to be on this boat for 10 hours. I'm curious because I said I'm only going to drink truly because I want to understand what kind of buzz I get. Do I get a hangover? Using my body to experiment. At the end of the day, those wholesalers had like 64 of them, so 16 apiece.
SPEAKER_03: I realized, oh, this is different.
SPEAKER_03: I asked, why are you drinking all this truly, you beer drinker? He said, well, Jim, I got to watch my girlish figure too. It tastes great and it doesn't fill me up. I thought, oh, that sounds like it tastes great, less filling. I realized, this is different than I anticipated. Let me explore that. After that, we changed the packaging to make it less feminine. A great product that's really delicious will find its way to its natural drinker. I don't try to anticipate that.
SPEAKER_04: It's so interesting because you start out by marketing and packaging it for a specific
consumer only to discover that actually it appeals to very different types of consumers.
And I know lots of big burly dudes who love truly and prefer it in part because they go to the gym and they don't want to consume all the carbs. It's about experimenting, but there are also failures. You come up with products that are going to fail. Dozens and dozens and dozens, guy. And that's part of it, right? Because any of these things, like the things we've talked about, Twisted Tea or truly, we haven't talked about Angry Orchard, which is a hard cider, but even those products have by and large been huge successes for the brand.
But in order to have the successes, you have to take risks, right? Presumably taking risks means you're going to have some dogs there that just fail.
SPEAKER_03:
Oh, yeah. I mean, they were all birthed as failures. Angry Orchard hard cider began life as hardcore in 1996. We revived a very traditional beverage.
Beer was not always the number one alcoholic beverage in the United States. But before the Civil War, the number one alcoholic beverage was hard cider.
And beer displaced it after the Civil War for a bunch of reasons.
SPEAKER_04: Hard cider, even in the US.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And so I thought, let's do that. And we called it hardcore, and it failed.
But the same kind of thing. It had a few pockets, and we were about to kill it, but it started growing, and we went and see who was drinking it. And we realized we had to clean up the flavor profile, because our original hardcore was based on traditional English cider. It had some sulfur, some sort of rough notes that made it a rural drink. And let's clean this up. Let's make it nicer. Let's bring forth the apple flavor. Let's use great ingredients. So we still bring in apples from Normandy and from northern Italy, because true cider
SPEAKER_03:
apples are not grown in the US anymore. And we wanted to make this from true cider apples, not grocery store apples. It's very much like wine. You're not going to make great wine from grocery store grapes.
SPEAKER_04: And so that, again, it just took some time.
SPEAKER_03:
Yes, it did. It took 14 years.
We are patient if we believe in something and it finds a niche. We grow it from that niche. And we ended up, we changed the name from hardcore, because everybody associated with porn, which was not a good idea. And we changed it to angry orchard, which was kind of a weird name, but it was a nice juxtaposition. The orchard is a very primal image of childhood simplicity. Four quartets, the T.S. Eliot poem, there's a line in there, the children in the apple tree, an image of complete simplicity.
SPEAKER_03: And that was to me this beautiful metaphor of you have an angry orchard and it takes you into the orchard. And that's a place that we would love to return. We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, why Jim started brewing
SPEAKER_04: non-alcoholic beer, a drink that for a long time was notorious for how bad it tastes. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
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Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So Jim has boozified all kinds of drinks, but he's also done the opposite as he's gotten into the very complex art of brewing non-alcoholic beer.
SPEAKER_03: For a long time, non-alcoholic beer didn't taste good. It was terrible. It was pretty crappy. Yeah. So 35 years people would say, you know, I've used up my quota, but I loved Sam Adams, you know, when I was still drinking. Can you make a non-alcoholic beer? Why don't you make a non-alcoholic beer? And I'd say, well, the reason I don't is because non-alcoholic beers taste like crap.
SPEAKER_03: And pretty much all of them, because they're basically an unfermented beer that they carbonate
so you don't get any of that yeast complexity in it.
Or they make a beer and then they strip it and it ends up being unpleasant.
And that was true for 30 years.
And then I was in a beer conference and I tasted the first non-alcoholic beer that was
really good. And that was actually Heineken 00. And I remember to this day, it was like six years ago in San Diego, and I poured it to see, well, I'll see if this one's as bad as the previous one, which was called Buckler. And it was night and day. It was a revelation. It's like, this tastes like good beer. And I don't know how they did it, but I'm going to figure this out because they have opened the door. And we started rethinking it.
There was technology that didn't exist before. It was a vacuum distillation. So you could essentially draw the alcohol out of the beer at almost room temperature.
And it got a little complicated. And then take the distillate and redistillate, throw away the alcohol and put the flavor
elements back in the beer, and then build some complexity with some hop character, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, we got a hazy IPA that was non-alcoholic and had the same taste scores
as the alcoholic version of it. When people tasted it blind, they could not identify it as a non-alcoholic beer. And the scores on it that we were getting were equal to the alcoholic variation. And I thought, all right, this is something we can be proud of. This is something we can put out there. I mean, there's times when I want a beer, but I really don't want the alcohol.
Like summer, long bike ride. Sure, hike. Four hours later. I'm a little depleted. I need the hydration. But if I have a couple of beers, I'm going to go to sleep. That's a beautiful time for it. My most fun time is in summer, you're blasting down the highway at 70, 75 miles an hour, and you're drinking a beer.
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_03: That's an experience we've been deprived of, rightfully so.
SPEAKER_04: So let's talk about a failure. What is something that you've introduced in the last 20 years that you maybe hung onto a little too long that just didn't work?
SPEAKER_03: So there was Sam Adams Nitro. Again, the conventional idea for beer is it's carbonated. We drink beer, you get that tung sting of carbonic acid.
It's part of the overall flavor profile.
But the counter idea is, what if we nitrogenated it?
What if it wasn't CO2 with that really sharp sting to it?
What if it was nitrogen? And nitrogen has this velvety smoothness. Like a creaminess, right? Yeah, exactly. And very small, tight bubbles instead of the bigger CO2 bubbles. And it gives it that beautiful head, that creamy, luscious... Yes. And everybody thought about that's Guinness. So that was our idea. It was, let's nitrogenate other beer styles. Let's do it for a white ale. And we'll put some coriander and some orange in it. Like a saison. Yeah, a variation of a saison. We're sort of riffing on that. And let's try that with a red ale that has this sweet, malty smoothness that will just
SPEAKER_03:
ride along with that creamy nitrogenation. So it's just, you know, once you get the idea, you can riff on it.
A lot of times the ideas also require not just culinary and aesthetic innovation, but as a brewer, in some ways there's an aspect of what I do, other brewers do. It's like Christo. Christo, the artist. Yeah. Giant installations of fabric. And yeah, and crazy things, wrapping a building, things like that. And when he talks about his art, he will point out there's two forms of innovation that are totally different. One is the art itself, and the other is making it exist in the real world. That is physical elements, governmental elements, social elements, and both of them require creativity. I mean, you want to wrap a building. You know, you got to get permits. You got to get people who will go along with your crazy idea. You've got to figure out engineering things of how do you fasten it to the building, how do you keep the wind from doing this and that.
SPEAKER_03: And that was the same sort of dichotomy of creativity that, you know, we needed in order
to make this beautiful idea. So we had to go to England and find a can maker that could put a small capsule in the bottom of the cans that was filled with nitrogen, pressurized to a level where once you opened it, you changed the pressure balance inside the can, released pressure, which then allowed this little capsule in the bottom to rupture through tiny little pinholes and spew out all this nitrogen that created all those beautiful gushing bubbles. So creativity comes in many forms, and I enjoy all of them.
SPEAKER_03: So what happened?
SPEAKER_04: I mean, why did you guys give up on that?
SPEAKER_03:
Because nobody bought it. So I've learned except the verdict of the drinker, it was more expensive because we're, you know, the cans were quite expensive. It was a wonderful beer, but it just could not find a place.
And I'm okay with that. I mean, you know, if I make something really wonderful, beautiful that I believe in, I'm
SPEAKER_03: done. I mean, that's okay.
People don't have to enjoy the same things I enjoy as long as, you know, once in a while
I can create something that changes the beer landscape. That's enough.
SPEAKER_04:
Sam Adams is a product that will, I have no doubt will be around in 50, 100 years, maybe
beyond. It's like an enduring brand of beer, right?
There you go.
SPEAKER_03: I hope so.
SPEAKER_04: But my question to you is, aside from Sam Adams is an enduring brand, enduring product, does it matter if let's say truly is just a successful brand for, you know, seven or ten years and then fizzles out? Like, is it important to, in your view, to build enduring products and brands? Or is it okay if something's really successful for a couple of years and then just kind of fizzles out?
SPEAKER_03: The answer is no. I do want to build enduring products and brands. And I believe that if you're making something really good, it's not a flash in the pan. It will grow. People will acquire a taste for what you're giving them. So I don't want things that are sort of boom, splat. I want things that are slow builds.
I mean, like we were talking, you know, hard cider is now 27 years.
And it's now an enduring success. But it took it 27 years to get to where it is today. And to me, that's all built on the quality of the product and the delightfulness of the
taste experience. And those are enduring characteristics.
That's Jim Cook, co-founder and chairman of Boston Beer Company.
SPEAKER_04:
Jim, thank you so much for coming on again. It's been great having you.
SPEAKER_03: Well, this has been a great pleasure. I got to finish my first beer and I'm halfway through my second. So that tells me this was a great time. Thank you for bringing us together.
SPEAKER_04: Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Ramtin Ereblui. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Mussini. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Kerry Thompson, J.C. Howard, Malia Agudelo, Neva Grant, and Katherine Seifer. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.
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SPEAKER_00: Being an actual royal is never about finding your happy ending. But the worst part is, if they step out of line or fall in love with the wrong person, it changes the course of history.
I'm Arisha Skidmore-Williams. And I'm Brooke Sifrin. We've been telling the stories of the rich and famous on the hit Wondery show, Even the Rich and talking about the latest celebrity news on Rich and Daily. We're going all over the world on our new show, Even the Royals.
SPEAKER_01: We'll be diving headfirst into the lives of the world's kings, queens, and all the wannabes in their orbit throughout history. Like succession meets the crown meets real life.
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