Ben and Jerry Warm Up

or unprofitable. But of course history had other things to say. Today, you'd be forgiven for thinking of Ben and Jerry as more milk and cream than flesh and blood. But it was the real people behind the pints that emerged when the two joined me for a rare joint interview last month. Our conversation was taped in front of a live audience at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, just a couple of miles from the site where Cohen

and Greenfield set up shop. In night. Please help me welcome, then Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, I knew I should have gone into the ice cream business. Look at that applause. You've got to look at that, you know, looking at your story and seeing your lives before you became these huge successes. You've been in each other's lives for a long long time. You know, both of you grew up in Brooklyn and then you met in Merrick Long Island, where you met in school. Why have you stayed so

close to him? And then you go, I've just never run into a better friend to spend my life with. Uh. You know, he's kind as smart, he's funny. Uh. You know, he has a real he has very strange eating habits and well, you know, the earliest memories actually I have of his eating habits as he was once attempting to survive on these one calorie candies that his mom, I guess packed for him in his little sandwich bag for school lunch. And uh, and we were in gym class

together and he keeled over. He fainted and uh, you know it's some kind of strange liquid came out of some facial orifice and the coach covered it up with the gym mats so that he could show it to the nurse when the nurse came by. In the movie version of Your Life, I'm gonna have that kid run up and go, Jerry, are you okay, and he's like, yeah, what's your name, and you're like, Ben, my name is Ben, Thanks buddy, And that's where all was born there. Y. Yeah.

The second food memory I have of Jerry is uh when he was surviving on what he called slop, which was he would mix together cream of wheat and cream of mushroom soup and he kept it around in this jar that he kept in his car and he would kind of drink out of it. And thank god, Ben created all the flavors. So that was a slop something that was consumed with the worse of a day a week. I I Uh, I was trying to be healthy and so I was, I have I have no trouble eating

the same food over and over, day after day. I mean, it's just sort of that he does not lived to eat no imagination does eat a lot, but uh he he doesn't care what he eats. Let's talk about Ben for a minute. That I love so. Uh. We we met first of all because we were both fat kids in junior high school and you know, uh we were

not exactly in the main stream of social activities. We were both kind of nerdy kids, and uh so we we hung out together a lot, and we remained nerdy kids, so I think that was that was and you know, plus we we always did like to eat together. I mean we would have food together and uh Ben, Ben was the first person who talked to me about taught me about uh wet crunch and dry crunch. Ben's really into textures in foods. I used to talk a lot about eating through the pain. So food was a big

glue in your relationship, very much, right. And when you say what's in the ice cream? Is his hemisphere and what's yours? Uh, well, I used to make it. But you know what, what's one of the interesting things? You know? So you think of Ben and Jerry as you think of all these incredible flavors, and so people assume that Ben made some of the flavors and Jerry made some of the flavors. Jerry, what were your flavors? And it's kind of a long pause at that point we had

for a while. But so you're the business end. No, No, neither one of us. No, So you know they were all a really good joint. What are you saying you? Uh, it's legal here, you know, yeah, well do you think we're recording up here? Ben came up with the flavors I would make the ice cream. We started with this

little shop right here in Burlington. Uh. And and for those people who remember forty years ago, about two weeks after we opened up, we closed the store because we couldn't figure out if we were making any money to stay in business. And we put up a little sign on the door that said closed. And uh. We had an accountant who walked in the door and said, hey, I can help you. And so I saved that first shop. Yeah. But but what I want to go back and forth that because in your lives there's a lot of Uh,

you're going to go to college, to medical school. That's conceptually right, yea, I'll take it. Um. And you wanted to become a you were into pottery, pottery, and then you end up teaching pottery. Where again, was it those who can't do you know, well that you can't make a lot of money selling ice cream. But but but you you were you were where did you end up teaching? That was in the in the Adondos in a town called Paradox, at the at the Highland Community School for

Disturbed Teenagers. But there's one section there. I think when you guys are not in the same city and you're not around anything for a few years. Correct when when we decided that we were going to make ice cream together, we were not in the same place and you and you were not in the same place for how long?

Oh it was years. But we made a vow. So we decided we were gonna learn how to make ice cream, and so we pledged to each other that we were going to start making test batches of ice cream wherever it was we were living and report the results back and whatever. And but I never made any but whatever. We also, I think we're clear on that it should have been Ben. Ben was the guy who stopped doing his homework. What in junior high school? I mean, I was the guy I finished all my homework. I should

have been making the ice cream. But I only mentioned that five year gap because it's back in the time of there art no cell phones and there is no internet. So maintaining that friendship, I mean, your friendship is integral to this. Who we wrote letters, Well, we had a chain letter that we wrote to a group of friends, and you know, each person would America enter the their comments and then send the letter around to the next person. And you know, it just kindt on circulating like that.

So you stayed in touch all that time, so we didn't we didn't lose touch. And what was the what facilitated you getting back here and opening that first place in Burlington in the former gas station that you opened up? Him? Well, I failed at being a potter. H No, nobody would buy my pottery. And he failed at being a doctor. He couldn't get into medical school. So we figured we're not getting anywhere in the world, and um, maybe we should start our own business. Did you know what kind

of business were you? Right? I mean, that's interesting. You didn't decide to go into like, you know, the camping gear business, right, it had to be food. And uh, we were originally going to open a restaurant. We had one friend who knew something about business. He said, whatever you do, don't open a full service restaurant. If it's got to be food, open a very limited menu kind of place. And we wanted to live in a rural

college town. So the idea was to take a food trend that was just starting off in the big cities, take it to a rural college town, and uh, the food trends that were happening was bagels or I scream, and uh, we thought we would do bagels and you couldn't make bagels either. Could That's kind of like sculpting, isn't it. That's kind of like pottery. You gotta shape it, your throw into a kiln, right right, right. It's a little more forgiving than pottery. But you fle up the

pottery and the bagels. Apparently. I was actually a baker's helper once and I got fired, but and you was signed on to that. You like the idea of a food business. Yeah, because we didn't know anything about anything. We knew we liked to eat, and uh, I mean you know when you say a food business, Uh, we weren't really thinking about a business for us. It was kind of a venture open up a shop, and we thought we would do that for a couple of years

and then we thought we would try something else. You know. We we talked about becoming cross country truck drivers together after that. So you know, it's not like God that you you you opened the first store in Burlington when seven and and what was ice cream in America? Then? Well, ice cream in Burlington was you had the UVM Dairy Bar and you had h. Seward's ice cream at the bus station in downtown Burlington, and that was really the only Wasn't that enough? Well the bus station was a

pretty seedy place at the time. Uh no, uh clear. And there was Uptons the pinball parlor. Oh, Upton's right right. Ice Cream also not for you to go back when you were a child, what was ice cream and your child were you? Were you an ice cream person? Yeah, we always had ice cream in our freezer and we would get half gallons from the supermarket and uh it was just kind of a staple in our house. Kind briars.

Same for you bribes. Well, when I was a kid, because you talk about the beginning of the era of the super premium ice cream people spending more money for better quality ice cream. But when I was a kid, you went to Howard Johnson's on the highway in massive people where I was from, and they scooped ice cream,

which was pretty good ice cream. There was carvel. Uh. You bought briars by the container and took briars home from the supermarket, or you had the vendors and trucks like Mr Softy and Good Humor was the big one on when I could be at Truck's, you know, patrolling the neighborhood when I was a kid. And then we get into the era of you know, frozen glagi and hogging does and so forth. When you started making ice cream, did you say to yourself, this is who we are.

We make We just wanted to make the best ice cream we possibly could. And our model was uh Steve's ice Cream in uh Somerville, mass What made a good ice He he was one of the first homemade ice cream parlors on the East coast. He was making ice cream in a five gallon rock salt and ice freezer in the window, and uh, you know, people were lined up around the block. There was a there was a player piano on the line that you could, you know, put a quarter in and make the player piano play

and and it was great ice cream. He was doing Nixons, Uh, you know, so you'd get a scoop of ice cream, you know, vanilla chocolate coffee. You say, I want a scoopa ice cream and I want heath bars mixed in, and they would right. They were the cold stone for runner. So in the beginning, what kind of menu did you have? Was it basic flavors or were you throwing you know, uh,

you know, spare parts in there. From the beginning, always started with vanilla, We started with chocolate, We started with coffee, you know, the real basics. Uh, we Ben had not yet flourished as an ice cream created. I think one of the first flavors we came out with that was a real knockout as far as we were concerned, was cantalope we we made. I mean, it was great, you don't I mean the reason why you don't see it on the menu anymore is, in order to make cantalope

ice cream, you need overripe cantalopes. And uh, you know, the produce wholesalers in town really liked us because, you know, we'd call up and we'd say, hey, do you got any overripe cantalopes? And they just couldn't wait to get rid of the overripe cantalopes. And Jerry would be scooping out, uh you know, the stuff that wasn't rotten, and uh, you know, pushing up the overripe. Absolutely avoided the stuff that was rotten. I did not use and you know,

and it was great. I mean, it wasn't it tasted just like a candaloup, except it was creamy and frozen and uh. But the problem is you can't do it in large quantities because not everybody would be there like Jerry, you know, scooping it out. You know, it's very much a hand operation. So you come up with the flavors, you're like Jerry cut and scoop those five. Well, not

that it was more like that way with the heath bars. Uh. You know at the beginning, we were buying heath bars that were individually wrapped, and uh, Jerry would line them unwrapped and and line them up on a cutting board and we had this big two handled knife, uh and he would cut him what how many ways, which which into thirds and then the other way. Well it was just thirds. Uh. So we were doing this and uh it was our most popular flavor, and you know he

was doing it a lot. Uh. And then you know, we hired our first guy who knew something about business, and who was Checo Lagger by the way. He uh he uh was his name Chico Lagger Logger like beer logger, like beer. He his name is Cheeko Logger, Chico Lagger, the fakest name I've ever heard in my life. He owned the bar. Uh his real name like Andy Harowitz and if it wants to have one guy with a different man, Chico Chico Lager and uh what did he? He called up the heath bar company and said, you know,

we're using all these heath bars. Can't we buy them unwrapped? And they said, huh uh, you know we have boxes and boxes full of all these factory second heath bars that you know there's something slightly wrong with and we didn't wrap them. You want those? And he said, yeah, I'll take him. And you know it was a great deal in terms of money. And you know this guy,

you know, he was an NBA. You know, he does his calculations and figures out the cost of money and the interest in all this kind of crap and ended up ordering like a ton of heath bars. And he's got him piled up in the office behind his chair. And uh so we had a storm in the freezer so that they didn't you know, melt or go bad or whatever. We had them stored on the top rack

in the palettes in in this walk in freezer. And one day somebody went to get the pallette down and he dropped him on the floor before Jerry could cut him up, and we opened we opened up the box and they were broken exactly right. And that became the new method of breaking up the heat box. So so for months afything, Jerry's and the freeze are going step back, Chico, I'll tell them already, tell them already, sweep them mop,

let's go. So you open up in Burlington and it's seventy eight, and when do things start to fizz a little bit? When do you think you're onto something? What's the sign that you're onto something other than you're scooping a lot of slowing down a little before where you started fizzing? Why it turned into the winter from the summer, and that explains why there weren't really many other ice cream barlors here in at the time. Yeah, what did

your competitors do during the longer? Do they close? Well, you know, sew Sewards was selling a lot of the sandwiches and hot door. You didn't want to do that, no, because that was the sign of an ice cream shop that was going out of business. They started to sell all this other crap. What do you do? We started to sell all the crap we were saying discount on broken heath balls. We were selling soups and crepes. Actually, you know, Jerry was in charge of the ice cream.

I was in charge of all the other crap, and we don't sell any of that. An you just were deciding what that would be. You with a decider of that as well, pretty much, I think, I mean we discussed it together, but we came up with a great ice cream marketing promotion in the winter. It was called POP said Biswi, which stood for Penny Off per Celsius degree below zero Winter Extravaganza. They all remember it. Everybody

remembers that promotion at Ben and Jerry's. The older it gets, the more you say so, it's a miracle that you're up here with me today about your great success. When you tell me that acronymic, what is it again? Pop said Biswie, penny off pricelsis. She had a screwy way of selling ice cream. We have TV commercial that that had pop said Buswi in it. It put up each

letter one at a time. P O PC D. Did you win some marketing a boy institution when you would literally discount per the weather and that's what saved you. You think no, no, but but one of the great things that grew out of that. So that was our first winter. We were really struggling, uh, and Ben and I said to each other, boy, if we're still in business after a year, we'll celebrate by giving out free

ice cream to everybody. Because we didn't think we were going to stay in business and there was really not much there. But we wore in busines us after a year, and that was our first free cone Day, which still takes place every year. It's around the first Tuesday in April. You can get in line as many times as you want at any Ben and Jerry's shop. And when do we really thinks start, When do you look at each other and say we gotta take this to another level?

We things started getting worse, uh, and so we said, we're never gonna make it with an ice cream shop. We need to find another way to bring in more money. And so we started selling ice cream to some local restaurants that had asked for it. Ben became our roots salesman.

He would go around selling ice cream and then he was passing by all these mom and pop stores that he was going by delivering ice cream to restaurants, and he thought we should package our ice cream into pine containers and he could sell it in there, and that is what started the business going forward. Yeah, there were stores. H And what year did that start to take off? I don't know. We we don't remember this, Okay, okay, I'm just curious about when do you do? You mean

right now? It's a I mean, let's not kill ourselves. It's a huge company. Where did you go public? We went public first just within the state of Vermont. Uh. The idea was to make the community the shareholders of the business. Uh. We had, you know, a bunch of venture capitalists that were approaching us saying they wanted to invest in the business, and we said, no, we don't want to do it that way. We want to use this need for cash as an opportunity to make the

community the owners of the business. Worked out great. We sold out the offering. It was the first ever in state public stock offering, and you know a lot of people bought stock and uh, happily the aock went up. A lot of people made a bunch of money. People's kids went to college on Benajera's stock. What was unique about that was there was a very low minimum purchase there was a hundred and twenty six dollars. So it was not aimed at sophisticated investors. It was aimed at everybody.

So the Vermont offering was in eighty four, and then we had a public offering nationally in and then you sell the company to Unilever in two thousand. The company got sold. The company got you tried to keep independent. You did, you did explain to people how that works? Mean you have a board and uh, I mean I just would assume a company named Ben and Jerry, and Ben and Jerry are alive and I'm assuming that they're involved,

they're calling the shots. How does a company get sold by your board if you don't want it to get sold to you a laver? How did that work out? I mean, in the end you said that we have when things with you to Lever at five that worked out well. But how did it get sold? Uh? There was a CEO who was running the Cuppenning at the time who um saw a way for him to make a bunch of money by selling the company, and uh,

you Lever was courting him. They were courting each other, I think, and so you know, Lever ended up offering so much money for the stock, so much above with the price that it was trading at that the board had no choice legally but to recommend uh sale. Do they have other ice cream popsicle briars Klondike, uh Magnum magnum tlenty tlenty go. They're a very big ice cream and they've got every shelf of the freezer case. If you like ice cream, you've probably already heard this one.

But there's no better ice cream conversation in our archives than with Barbara streisand I would have my kind of coffee ice cream briers and sit in my bed and dream, go to the movies sometimes on a Saturday afternoon. The Lowise Kings. We had the greatest ice cream, and we also, well, yeah, you're you're, you're like me. Somebody will say, what was the best part of the summer. I'd say, what this is this restaurant that has the best coffee ice cream

with chocolate covered hazels. The rest of that interview and many more that here's the thing dot org when we come back. The skinny on Ben and Jerry's rolls at the company after it was brought out by Unilever and the real story behind Cherry Garcia. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing now more of my interview with the tycoons of Truffle Kerfuffle, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. The company they founded was acquired by

Dutch conglomerate Unilever in two thousand. You're not involved, they were in the company. You're you're not on the board. What's that like for you that your name is on it? Like, like I wonder is You're still walking down the street and people saying I got a flavor for you and

they still think you're the pipeline, You're the conduit. For the record, we love it when people come up and say I've got a flavor for you that we want that k I was once at an event and these these two women came up to me and they said, you know how you know, girlfriends are always bringing over a pint of Ben and Jerry's to their friend who

just broke up with their boyfriend to kind of soothe them. Well, we think you should come out with a flavor that's in a pink container called you can do Better Scotch. I keep on telling the company this is a winner. You should come out with this, I mean coffee ice cream with a butterscotch ripple. I mean, this is an incredible flavor. They say, oh, we got a flavor department. Go back then, go go, go, go do whatever it is you do. That's what they say. What can I say?

It's one thing to enter a business because I have no business sense at all. I mean, I have zero business sense. You know, when people talk about ice cream, it's you know, a handful of flavors of which you're at the top of the pile, and I'm I want to congratulate you, and it's just amazing to have done that, you know, to have built a business in the mad successful. You know, we had a saying, Jerry, it's easy to

make it lousy, it's hard to make it right. It's really hard to shove that chocolate chip cookie dough into the pints of ice cream so that each pint gets the right amount of chocolate chip cookie dough. You know, we used to slice open pint containers four ways into four sections to inspect, uh, the number of chunks of cookie dough that ended up in each section. And then in complex flavors like heath bar crunch, or New York Superfudge.

Not only were you counting the number of chunks of heath bar, but you were counting three different size variations that all had to appear, right. I mean, there's a reason why nobody else was making ice cream like this goes It doesn't really go through the machinery that easily. You know, there's nothing easier to make than a Homo genius liquid or semi liquid like mayonnaise. How many facilities do you have around the country to make ice cream,

like plants that manufactured the ice cream. Well, there's two here in Vermont, there's one in Nevada. Do you think that's it. That's pretty much refrigerator, truck and truck it all around the country. Yeah, in the country. And then there's another plant in the Netherlands. Yeah. Yeah. And that's about the whole thing, right, Ain't nothing else? Uh, we're not really part. You're supposed to know, Jerry, he makes

the flavors. You count the money, Jerry, what's going on? Well, I think this just goes to show that Ben and I are not really on top of things. I mean, now, when you license, I'm assuming there's a licensing involved. What's the first signature flavor you come up with. The first one unusual when we came up with was Oreo Mint. Oreo Mint. You got a kind of deal with Oreo,

Well we didn't. And then we got a letter from uh Nibisco, which owns Oreo, and that was a really nice stationary then it was, And then they explained that Oreo is their most valuable trademark, and they will go to the ends of the earth to defend their trademark. And under no circumstances could we call our ice cream Oreo mint. However, we could call it mint with Oreos.

So we said okay, and we changed the packaging and they were fine, and then you know about I don't know, five or eight years later, we got another letter from the legal department at Nibisco, which began by saying Oreo is their most valuable trademark, they will go to the ends of the earth to defend it, and or no circumstances could we pluralize their trademark. You may not call your ice cream mint with Oreos, you may call it

mint with Oreo cookies. So you know, we changed the packaging again and didn't hear from them until I started doing this online demonstration demonstrating the size of the Pentagon budget in relationship to the education budget and the healthcare budget and the alternative energy budget, et cetera, using stacks of Oreo cookies. Each Oreo cookie would equal ten billion dollars. So I'd come out with this, you know, huge stack representing the Pentagon, and then you had this least little

little stacks. And we got another letter from the Label Compartment of Oreos UH saying, far be it from us to abridge your First Amendment rights of free speech. But we're getting a lot of complaints from our shareholders that the Nibisco company agrees with the point you're trying to make about the excessive Pentagon budget. Could you please refrain from doing that. You know, I felt that wasn't right, But it's their cookie company, right, it is their cookie company.

But you see these advertisements where they're talking about some competitor and they're calling the competitor by brand name, and so I talked to a trademark lawyer and uh, I said, what's the story here, and they said, you can use a competitor's name as long as there's no other product that will do to make the point you're trying to make.

So I wrote him a letter back saying, look, I've researched every other chocolate sandwich cookie and no other chocolate sandwich cookie has Oreos high quality standards, and that in other chocolate sandwich cookies the amount of white stuff in the middle tends to vary from cookie to cookie. And I'm sure they can understand how in my demonstration each cookie equaling ten billion dollars, it was off by just a little and I never heard from them again. You

can't take on the Pentagon using Hi cookie. That's that's not gonna work. So did you learn a profound lesson from your dealings with Nibisco and you went on to do other flavor Cherry Garcia? Obviously when you did other signature brands like that, did you get into more or do you get letters from a dear Mr Cohen, the estate of Mr Garcia would like to make it known to you in regard arts to Cherry Garcia, it was a flavor that one of our fans came up with.

They wrote us an anonymous postcard saying dead paraphernalia always sells, So you know it took me a long time. What over a year to come up with a flavor that was deserving of honoring this guy. I don't remember you. Was he alive when it happened. He was. Did he acknowledge what you did? Well? His lawyer did you know? It was like you know, Uh, we sent him the

first point off the line. We overnighted it on dry ice, and his wife called up and said, you know, he can't have any right now because he's in the hospital and diabetic coma. But I really liked the flavor. And then a few months later we got a call from his lawyer, whose name happens to be how can't uh He said, uh, you know, yeah, it's a really good flavor.

But we think Jerry's entitled to a little piece of the action here, and we we we gave him a little piece of the and and now his estate occasionally argues over who gave us the little piece of the action. But you've been politically engaged your entire life, not so much, you know, I think it's uh, it's more after I moved to Vermont. What happened when you moved to Vermont. Part of it was having gone to college. I went

to college during the late sixties and early seventies. There are a lot of social movements going on at the time, and soon thereafter I came to Vermont, which, uh, you know, it's just a wonderfully community oriented state. You can go talk to your legislators in Mont Peelier. I mean, it's it's it's very down home and there's a lot of grassroots activism here. And so I've become very supportive of the Progressive Party in Vermont. There's a it's a third

party here in Vermont. Uh. And you know, plus there's Bernie and there there is there is nobody like Bernie. Ben and I were surrogates for Bernie in in the last presidential primary. Uh. And you know, what's among the amazing things about Bernie, besides what he's been fighting for for his whole political career, is that he is not for sale. And you do do not find people in

the political world with that level of integrity. But what about a year junior high in high school, I wanted to go uh down South with the Freedom Writers, and my parents wouldn't let me so. Again during that same

period of time, I grew up on Long Island. My parents would every once in a while drive into New York City and we would drive over the Triboro Bridge and you get let off, and on one side of the street there's dilapidated housing and people living in poverty, and on the other side there's people living in wealth. And it didn't seem right to me, and that affected me quite a bit. I think it was Desmond Tutu who said that, Uh, in situations of injustice, you cannot

be neutral. If an elephant is standing on the tail of a mouse, you can say you're neutral, but the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. When being confronted with injustice, you have you know, you have three choices. You can either ignore it, you can complain about it, or you can do something about it. Did you guys set up a charitable foundation for the company or do you guys have your own foundation that you funnel money into from

individually or from the company. What's the mission? What do you target? You're mostly income disparity, the arts. What are you doing well so for for the Ben and Jerry's foundation, Uh, it's social justice and grassroots organizing for that. And and the interesting thing about the foundation at the company is that the final decisions about where the money goes is done by employees who volunteer their time to make those decisions,

and they are remarkable. They do an incredible job. But I think what's important to understand is that, uh, you know, the major effect that ben injuries has and the major contribution that ben injuries has to society is not about the foundations. It's not about donating money. It's about integrating those social concerns into our day to day business activities

and using the businesses voice. So going back to the public sale Invermonts certainly that and and I'm also talking about uh speaking out on social and political issues, and we're gonna get to campaign finance reform and protest about you know, all kinds of things that are worrisome in this country that people have been led to believe it's ineffective,

and it is not ineffective. If you see something wrong in this country, you need to scream as loud as you possibly ca You've got the protest, you've got to demonstrate, you've got to get active. It's the patriotic thing to do. They're they're working for you. I'm in a room with congressmen and senators and I'm gonna I'm looking at like you know, you're on the clock, buddy, campaign finance reform, and it's the lynch pen at every problem OFFESSI how

did you get involved with that issue? I was working for a long time on shifting a bunch of priorities from the Pentagon to social needs and didn't get anywhere. I think a lot of that reason was because of so many defense contractor political donations, So that was one factor. And then I was Jerry and I were both active

in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Originally it was laser focused on economic disparity, but as it started broadening and everybody who was protesting whatever came into that movement, the message started to get garbled, and I felt like it was important to folk is and the the common denominator between health care and issues of the environment and energy independence and law street banks, the common denominator was money

in politics. That uh, you know, all these corporations and high high wealth individuals are paying Congress not to pass laws that protect people, but to pass laws that protect corporations. So I got into working to get money out of politics. You see the tax cut to put more money into the bank accounts of a class of people typically GOP supporters, who uh, and if it's if it's a significant amount of money for these people. You see, we're Kushner paid

no taxes all these years. And the Democrats. I want to win the midterms because caause I want to see through Trump's tax returns. You know, they announced are going to get it through their hands and his tax returns, and uh, that would be thrilling, that would be okay, okay, um. But uh, we have some I mean, we just have some mind blowing questions from the audience. They're really just great questions. Someone actually wrote down they wrote vanilla or chocolate? No, no, no, no,

that was that wasn't a question. We went over some of the questions backstage to see which ones they have not been asked, you know, fifty billion times before. But I love this one, which is what's and you hold your answer? You actually you go first, You go first, because I know your answer. What's the longest you've ever gone without eating ice cream? I have gone months without eating ice cream. Really, I would probably say two or three months. You've got two or three months. And then

what happens? And they find you in a pile and I'm a feaster famine kind of. I have a freezer at home that's got a couple of hundred points in there, several gallons. So yeah, because you never know when someone's gonna drop by, and you didn't have any ice cream there. I beat the crap at it. I mean, this guy says he's gone several months. All I know is that every once in a while he comes to me kind of sheepishly, he says, two points less. Night. We were very,

very self disclosing backstage about our ice cream. I mean, I mean, what's the worst sound in the world, that spoon scrape in the bottom. I didn't even prep him on this. At the height of my ice cream addiction, I'd be sitting I was divorced, I'm living by myself. I'm miserable, and what's better medicine than a pint of ice cream? And I'd be sitting there watching CNN and I'll be like, I know, nine o'clock, it's almost ten o'clock. I mean, also, I hear that scrape, he said, I

like that. Wait an neat that whole thing myself. That's not possible. What's the longest you ever went without ice cream? A couple of weeks, maybe one week speaking of speaking of getting screwed, and we really probably should come up with a question that's not unkind to Republicans. Applaud in this house of your republican, if you applaud, if you're Republican. We have four Republicans in this build. I love this town. I love this town. There's four Republicancies. What do we

do if the Democrats don't take control? What are we gonna do? You know, I have a new life philosophy. Lower your expectations, but assume the best. It's a fun line, and I'm assuming the best. I think we've already lowered their expectations as no there's they can buzzibly go the Okay, how do you learn to stick your lips out like Broke? I mean, do you do exercises? It's funny you say that. They came to me and they said do I was gonna do a movie and they said, do you want

to play Trump? Lauren called me, Lawrence, my dear friends, you want to play Trump? I said, are you? Why do you mind? I don't want to play Trump? I said, who the hell wants to do that? And I was gonna go do a movie. Then the movie fell apart, and I called up when I go, all right, I'll come to Trump. He's like, and literally the jokes. He goes, it's three shows. We're to do three shows before the election, and then he's gone and it's gonna be fine. It's a big red. So I'm like, all right, what the

hell I do for three shows? And then they and then um, and I it to myself for the cold opening. It's fast, it's brassy, we're firing the cannon. It's in front of a live audience, even though we're on TV. It's it's like, I want to make this, in one sense, as too dimensional as the man himself is. And so I said to myself, you have to raise your left eyebrow like this, and then sometimes try to stick your mouth at as far as you can, like you're trying to suck the windshield out of the car, and just

make it completely stupid. I mean to make it silly and stupid, because it's not you know, if we did the really finely etched one, that's a David Fincher movie. So we're not gonna be doing that. Um, who do you think of the democrat that can beat Donald Trump? Bernie is he drives? Are loyal? You're to your burn Bernie, well you guys or something else? Now I love this question. How do you feel Ben and Jerry's has shaped the culture of Hermon? You know? I think before Ben and Jerry's,

Vermont was pretty much known for maple syrup. Interestingly enough, I think after Ben and Jerry's, I think they're started to be all these other specialty food companies, great cheese companies. The name Vermont came to stand for really high quality specialty food products. I think Vermont is UH is known as entrepreneurial partly as a result of Ben and Jerry's.

I think because of many things, including Bernie Sanders, Vermont has seen as progressive and And one of the remarkable things about Ben and Jerry's UH is that even after it was sold to this giant multinational, and even after Ben and I have nothing to do with the company, the company continues to be incredibly outspoken about really serious issues like it's publicly supported Black Lives Matter, it's publicly supported gay marriage, UH, it's publicly supported Occupy Wall Street,

which is essentially an anti corporate thing. And what's so wonderful about it is Ben, and I have nothing to do with that. It's it's the company itself and the value. You know, it's about the people. You can say all you want about agreements and whatever. It's about the people involved, and the people at the company are incredible. Um. That's been um. The last question I have then a comment is that your wife is like yeah, and then did

did that play an important role in your success? I just had this image of like, you in bed with your wife, you're in the kitchen table, like, and you call Jerry You're sorry. I called Ben this morning just to say hello, and then he called me this afternoon to ask what are you wearing tonight? And I said, you know, I'm gonna be wearing a button down shirt and uh some jeans and he said, oh, I was going to wear a jacket and I said no, we

can just be ourselves. I mean, you know, And then I proceeded to get dressed up in my button down shirt in my jeans, and my my dear wife said you're not gonna go like that. So I said, okay, you want the jacket and she said, yeah, that's a lot better. So I had to call jury up and say no, well, let me just say that, you know, I think it's amazing to sit with the two of you, who a are synonymous with a with a product that people really enjoy and love. I mean, who doesn't love

ice cream? And be your incredible friendship. I mean learning about you with some more detail about what a great friendship you've had, but also what great citizens the two of you are and what you've done with this Company's kind of credible. Not there but Ben and Jerry Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. They invented cookie dough, ice cream, heath bar crunch, and many many more. But one flavor

they didn't invent is s'mores. That one comes to us from the fevered imagination of a man who might sound familiar to here's the thing, listeners, our engineer Zack McNeice and his mother, Sandra. They submitted the idea of s'more's ice cream to Ben and Jerry's. Now every year hundreds of coupons for free pints arrive in the mail from Vermont. Nobody asks, they just come. Ben and Jerry are men of their word in commerce as in friendship. I'm Alec Baldwin,

and you were listening to here's the Thing. Technical production by Zack s'more's McNeese, thanks to Vermont Public Radio