Starbucks' Howard Schultz Doesn't Sleep—But Don't Blame the Coffee

you visited a Starbucks in the last week. The thirty year old coffee chain has become every bit as much an American icon as McDonald's and every bit as ubiquitous. Howard Schultz is the company's long time CEO, Operating out of the company's Seattle headquarters. He's overseen a worldwide expansion. In the process, he's become one of the most successful business men in the world. But before he became a coffee magnate, Howard Schultz was a Brooklyn boy who was

anything but no money. My dad was had a series of just awful blue collar jobs and uh, no money. I have so how many siblings, brother and sister, younger, but it's very tough. So what do you do? Where'd you go? I went to school in Northern Michigan and Marquette, Michigan you probably have never heard of. That was in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan. And one day to play football.

I had a problem, and that I was. I thought I was really good until I got to Michigan and I had a guy in front of me who turned out to be Steve Mariucci. Great guy, and he was a great college player. And I was not good enough to to make a long story shure, so I didn't. I did not play football. I got hurt when I was eight, team broke my jaw had a concussion, and uh,

but I stayed and finished school there. When I finished school, I went to work for xerox Um in Manhattan, came back to New York, moved back into my parents house and apartment in Brooklyn, took the subway. My job at zero was to make fifty cold calls a day. I did that for three years. Uh. I loathed it, but it was great training and you knew you had to do it. I knew I had to do that, and I you know, I was making I was making a thousand dollars a month, and I gave half it to

my mom. Living at home, I had one suit, two shirts. It was, but I was you know, I was twenty two years old. I didn't know any better, and I was happy. I mean suit and two shirts? How many suits and shirts do you have? Now? I'm just kidding, never mind, don't answer them. Now when you you gave half the money to your mom and you were living, they were in Brooklyn still, then you're taking the train to work every day. And then what changed? I knew I had to get out. I just I had this

entrepreneurial dream and vision for myself. I remember telling my mom I was leaving zero. She started crying, and I was very fortunate. I got a job with a Swedish company that was opening up a US division as the general manager and kind of sold myself, yawn, my capability and worked for them for a few years. And that was the beginning of kind of realizing the potential capability I had to to to do something on my own.

And that company you went to was where based in Sweden with the New York office, And what did they do? They sold very high end house wars and one of the products was a non electric coffee maker, which is a drip coffee was not electric. It was just it was a poor over hot water. And they sold a product to a small company in Seattle, Washington that had three stores, and that company was Starbucks, and the only

roasted beans didn't surf coffee. You've done your homework. And I went out to Seattle on a day where it was majestic. It was like it was like Wizard of Odds type sunny, the snowcapped mountains, fresh air. I was dating my girlfriend who's now my wife, and I called her and said, this is where we have to live. And I spent the next year and a half trying to convince the founder of Starbucks, who had three stores, to hire me, and he ultimately did. We moved out

to Seattle in September of eighty two. We had three stores that year. Uh. He sent you want this whole story? Uh? They sent me to Italy. I went to Milan for the first time to a trade show, and as you know, in Milan, in Italy, there's coffee bars everywhere. And as I was walking the streets in Milan, I kept bumping into another coffee bar, kept going in, and I could see the sense of community and a sense of place, and that the beverage was so romantic and brought people together.

And I raced back from Italy and sat down with the founder of the company and said, I just think we're in the wrong part of the business. We should we should integrate the business into the beverage, and they didn't want to do it. Long story shortness, I left Starbucks. I opened my own Italian coffee bar with no money in Seattle. Three too in Seattle, one in Vancouver, BC.

Then Starbucks Coffee Company acquired another company in California called Pete's Coffee, and Pets and Starbucks came together, and a year later Starbus got into financial trouble. The founder of star Wars came to me when they had six stores and said, I'm going to keep Pets and sell Starbucks. But I had no money. Uh to where you get the money to Starbucks. I knocked on everyone's door I knew,

and finally I raised. I bought Starbucks in August of eighty seven for three point eight million dollars, and all three point eight million was money that was not mine. I had to raise it and um. At the end of eighty seven, we had eleven stores, a hundred employees, losing money. And then I had to raise money to try and build a national company. And I had this crazy idea and the idea he was in the back of my mind. I kept dreaming about what I needed

to do for my dad. And my dad died in seven and I wanted to try and build the kind of company he never got a chance to work for. So the entire business model was trying to balance profit with conscience, benevolence, and social impact. So the first thing I did was, Uh, everyone in Starbucks was gonna be an owner. So I gave ownership to every employee in

eighties seven, which I've done since then. And I gave comprehensive health insurance, first company in America to provide confidence and health way before the Affordable Care for every single person that works for you. Yes, yeah, what does that cost you a year? Uh? Before the Affordable Care Act? It costs three hundred million a year, more than the cost of coffee beans for Starbucks. People thought it was crazy, and I was trying to raise money at the same time.

I had all these ideas and people said, wait, you want to get yeah, and I said no. I said, I'm going to prove to you that we will have lower attrition, higher performance, and our customers will know what we're doing for our people and it will resonate with the brand. And this is gonna be our marketing strategy. Do you continue to do that now? You still do that? Now?

Not only do we do that now? But as an example, this year along with first company in America to give free college tuition to every employee, what does that call? Can't keep? Yeah, it's a lot, it's a lot. But all these things ladder up to balancing the company's mission, our core purpose and reason for being. We're not in business just to make money. We have to make money. We have to build your over value. And we've done extremely well. I mean, the market capital of Starbucks is

is quite large. How many countries to two thousand stores? Now, what's an example of a place? I mean you when you when you leave, uh, you have the two in Seattle and the one in Vancouver. Those are Starbucks. Those came coffee bars, correct, those three? When you get beyond When you get beyond Seattle in that area, where do you go next? Where's the next place you where's the next beach out that you break into? Well, the last few years, I think the most successful place. We've been

in China, but we've been there a long time. In the US, where did you go first? Well, where do we go from? Well, we went from Seattle to Portland's Chicago. We struggled in Chicago. It was just took a long time for Chicago people to understand what we're trying to do, and a lot of people lost faith in what we're trying to do. But finally it hit. I went to l A l A was a huge success overnight, and then we came to New York and uh, my mother

came to that opening on eight seventh and Broadway. When you look at what Starbucks is now, did you have a dream that was going to be people having a coconut Martian backflip, frappuccino, every possible iteration. I'm told there's eighty five thousand gyrations to customization and Starbucks. I never imagined that customers would start telling people exactly what they wanted. But I think one of the drivers of our success has been our ability to customize what you want when

you want it. But no, I know, I mean our original business plan when I was raising the original money was a hundred stores and I was having a terrible time, and I didn't have enough money to reprint the business plan, so I crossed out a hundred and wrote seventy five. I mean that's how tight things were. UM, But no, I never imagined we would have this kind of impact or to grow the company this large. What's something that you want to do that you're not sure you can do.

What's something you'd like Starbucks to today? What's what's the thing you've dreamed about for a while that you'd like to do that you're not quite sure you can do

it well? In Seattle a year and a half ago, um I had this ten year idea to build the Willy Wonka of coffee, so an attritional traditional Starbucks stores less than two thousand feet, and we started to design and building almost a twenty thousand square foot Disney like experience in Seattle and people and it's a great expense, I mean, very very expend big bet where we're roasting in the store, we're doing all kinds of things. But it's more than a store. And people thought this is

the beginning of the end. This guy has lost it. That store has turned out to be a mecca for tourists and everyone who comes close to the city of Seattle. We're now under construction New York on the corner of ninth and fifteen for the same operation. Well, that one will be square feet two levels, next to the Chelsea Market and across from Google. And we're under construction in Shanghai with one that will even be bigger. Uh. I don't know if these things will have the same level

of impact. I believe it will um but we have to keep reinventing and keep dreaming, and and you can't embrace the status quo of running a business today. It's just too hard and there's too many challenges. What's a country that you were going to go to? I remember I was with my friend in nineteen in the early nineties, and I went to Paris to visit him, and we

spent many days together. We went to a restaurant and I ordered something and asked for some simple modification on the food of the menu, and the men literally mean like like a like a Saturday Night Live sketch. The man said, we are not Eddie McDonald's now, sir, I mean just barked at me. Two snapped at me, and I thought, what's the foreign country that gave you the most grief in terms of the ethic of Starbucks and

where they're at about coffee. We are open in Paris and friends have done fairly well there, but we have never entered Italy as a result of the respect that I've had for the heritage of coffee. However, we are going Italy for the first time at the end of calendar seventeen. You are where in Milan at a location that is just gonna stunned people. So we'll see that's I mean, this will be the big You're not building the big twenty thousands. We have a Hershey Chocolate factory

of coffee over there. Are you something close? Okay? All right, well you're gonna go. You're gonna get their attention. You're gonna get their attention. But respectfully, were you prepared for how much people have made coffee in general a part of their lives. Because when I was a kid, people had a cup of coffee. I mean my mother had Chase and Sandborn, you know all the names from that.

You know Martinson's, Um, you'd go Horn and Herbert's. Uh, these places like the Automatic like in New York, mean, people had a cup of coffee. Some people drank coffee. People who drank a lot of coffee were viewed as kind of pushing the envelope, you know what I mean. And now it seems like people have told themselves they can't drink enough coffee. I mean, they don't feel that there's any harmful effects. Do you guys study that? Do you have any eye toward Not that I'm bequeating you

with the tobacco industry, but two things. One, I think the success that we have enjoyed and the way in which people have embraced coffee as a beverage and indulgent beverage and a ritual in the morning. So much of all of that is linked to Starbucks becoming this third place between home and work and the sense of community where the rise of technology has created such secular behavior and people are longing for human connection even if they're

in there alone. And so the Starbucks. Really, when you said alcohol, what triggered in me is we replace the pub in a way because uh, that that's not where people want to go. Uh. But we have studied a lot of the issues of caffeine and the the interesting thing is the most medical journals, in most recently the New England Journal Medicine coffee is quite healthy and medicinal specially doing pretty good. I'll tell you, uh, but I don't drink any caffeine after four PM. I just have enough.

But I drink about four or five cups a day. How do you like your coffee? This is the question every he wants to know. Espresso marciato in the morning, first thing. Then I have a French press of age Sumatra. That's what I drink throughout the day, Age Sumatra. Ye, he's black black. What about you? I drink um in the summertime. When I go to Starbucks, I like Starbucks espresso or I like their cold brew. In the summertime,

I take the cobraw. What's good? Because I do want someone to ring my bell if I drink that coffee and I don't feel that special feeling like someone kicks me right in the seat of the pants and I'm ready.

We used to joke, I mean, this is gonna sound like a really vulgar analogy, but we used to have a drink we call the Nazi, And we called it a Nazi because it came into your bedroom and pulled you out of bed in the early more and the more early morning hours, threw you against the walls, slapped you across the phase five times to wake you up. It was four shots of espresso over ice. That's asome soy milk. That's always started my day for years, you know.

I mean. The other thing is like I always remember when they when they had the book Fatal Vision, the Jeffrey McDonald murder case, and I was going to play him in a movie. And in the book they say that part of his defense would he suffered from caffeine psychosis. He said McDonald said he drank too much coffee and then made him go off the deep end. And I thought, well, I got com But you have the Sumatran black. You have an age coffee? Ever have you tasted? No? Are

you a black coffee guy? Sometimes I'd like espresso. I'm gonna send you something that you'll find extraordinary. Now, Um, so you stayed out of Italy. Where has it been a big success overseas? Where have they just taken to it? Well, we talked about China. We have twenty five hundred stores in a hundred cities in China. The wonderful thing story about China is the person who runs China is a

woman who's very strong. We have a completely Chinese team who was based in Shanghai, who has managed and built that company, supported by a lot of sources from Seattle in Hong Kong. We're in a lot of countries, but we own most of the China business are so um. One thing that people don't understand is we don't franchise our stores. You own them. We own all of them, yes, every single one of them, every single one except for stores that are either in airports or in other stories.

But this goes back to the culture of the company. So much of what we've succeeded in is based on the values and culture of the company. And I never believed we could do that in a franchise system where the people weren't working for the company. So we have three thirty thousand employees who work for Starbucks. I want you to know that when my wife and I are driving too Long Island, we stop at the Starbucks on Mannorable Road and next at seventy there by the bank.

Next to the bank, My wife and I go there all the time we are And I'm telling you, I hope I'm allowing me to tell you your business, but send those ladies a bouquet of flowers from you. That is the greatest Starbucks. And glad to hear that. Those ladies, they got to rows of people. It's like the Alamo people coming there wanting their coffee. Then they want to jump in that car. They want to get going through

the traffic. So they just need the coffee just to make the rest of the last leg of the trip. And they got one more hour to go to get to the get to the East End. And those ladies are all the sweetest people and the loveliest people in my wifeend. We go on the way out and on the way that game, we always stopped there and get something. And I'm glad to hear that. I will do something for those people. Thank you. They're fantastic. Now, when you don't own the store, does it go just as well?

Les It should be agnostic. It should, yeah, things, it should be the same. The airports are a little tough because so many people online and people in a rush. You know, sometimes we customers aren't patient. Yeah, what's a

company that you see? Because I'm sure that especially when this thing just takes off and becomes this legendary iconic thing, what's a what's a company you see that you admire in the even a competitor for the But but another food service company or someth you look at and go, man, I really I love what those people live. I think what Danny Meyer has done in New York is quite something. Uh. And I think what he's trying to do with shake Shack is interesting. Uh. Not. A lot of food companies

have scaled very well. Yes, it's it's it tends. Ubiquities is a is a challenge and it's hard to get big and stay small. So on the food side, um, it's. My mind immediately goes to other consumer brands like Nike, like Apple, like Disney. Not a lot of food and national food brands. But some of those food companies are serving your coffee corrective deals with them. Yeah, we have

a we have a real significant partnership with Disney. In fact, we just opened a phenomenal store at the entrance of Shanghai Disney with Bob Iger and I did that together. What about food companies? Were no fast food companies? You don't have any deals to serve a Starbucks coffee? Uh No, we don't really. We have a lot of high end restaurants to serve our coffee. But no, I'll never forget. There was a guy who had a little place in Los Angeles. This guy Dick, his last name will come

to me for a moment. I knew him for years and he owned a place called the Coffee Roaster and you go in there, and he told me an interesting story where he was selling beans. And he goes one day and he goes to a restaurant that he knows who is serving his coffee, and he says to them, um, could I have a cup of coffee? And they bring him the coffee that says his beans, and it was terrible. It was fancy because they've been sitting in the burner

for too long. And he said, that's when I got out of that business because they did not couldn't control the qualtepec that. Oh god, but I just thought of a food company. I do respect which is in and out? Why uh it maintained the quality? Those bathrooms are really clean and maintain a quality. Take care of the people. I'm sure you don't in and out. Now your wife has been with you on a person not your wife is with you the whole ride. What is your wife

think about question of my wife. Okay, I have a great story for you. Okay, okay. So you remember I'm raising money for Starbucks in the early days, Sherry. My wife is pregnant with our first child in I'm working at Starbucks. We we have we we have ill journalie. I don't have Starbucks yet. I have no salary, and we're not making any money. She's eight months pregnant, she's still working. We're in a rental house in Seattle. Her parents from Lime, Ohio come out to see us. I

love her parents, good people. And her father says, uh, let's let's take a walk. So I had a sense that this is this is not gonna be uh uh, not gonna be good. And we sit down and he said, I I respect everything you've tried to do over the last year, but let's look at the facts. My daughter's eight months pregnant, she's working, she has a salary, you have a hobby, no income, and she's gonna give birth in a month. It's time to get a job. And

I just started to cry, embarrassed, humiliated. Uh And part of me knew what he was saying was right, but I couldn't give it up. So that night I didn't say anything until that night when we were alone. I said, I had a interesting talk with your father, and Sherry said, there's there's no way we're giving us up. And if that moment, if she would have said it's time, we wouldn't be here coming up. Howard Schultz explains why Starbucks almost disappeared in two thousand seven explore of the Here's

the Thing Archives. Lorne Michaels runs his own kind of empire, and it's all on television for me, commercial television and those boundaries. I like it. I like that you can't use a certain language. I like that you have to be bright enough to figure out how to get your ideas across in that amount of time, with intelligence being the thing that you're you hope is showing. Take a listen at Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec

Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Howard Schultz runs the world's largest retail coffee company, with more than twenty five thousand outlets across the globe. That's a lot of business to keep track of, but Schultz says he's able to fit more into his day than most people. For some reason, I don't sleep. You never required a lot of sleep, So why do you think that's because of caffeine. No, no, it's not caffeine. I've never inquired a lot of sleep. So I'm up at four am

and you've got to sleep with time the pen. But I'm up. I'm just not. I got a bed of ten, but I'm up. I just don't. I don't see you sip. So for you, a good night is five hours. Yeah, that's that's that's that's gold. Yeah, that's gold. Yeah. Um, And you don't need a lot of I've been cycling for the last ten years. That's the only thing I've been able to do because I've had a couple of of fusion surgeries neck and back. I did they help you? The surgeries have not helped me. You know what was

wrong with your back? What were the songs all related to that problem I have? When I was eighteen and had the jaw problem? How did that happen? Playing football? Somebody drilled you in the face without their helmet. I have a blindside sack in which it was a face plant. Oh my god, it wasn't easy. You know. I'm a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, So pain uh, total hypochondriac. Anything, I got a call, I feel like I'm getting anumonia.

You know you can relate to that game. Yeah, if I if I, if I get a little headache and I think I'm a gersh. When I got a brain tumor, I've gone for a brain scan. I got Now you stay when the company is headquartered in Seattle, Yes, and you lived there. Yes, you have other homes, but you live in Seattle. Is important for you to stay in Seattle. We love Seattle. Our kids were born there, but both our kids live in New York ironically, so we're here a lot um. But Seattle is a great place and

that's where home is. But when I when I when I fly into New York, I can already feel the sense of pride and belonging. So I'm very much home here. The the Starbucks just expanded and he's tamping a couple of months ago in the winter, right before this this past summer, and they are just I mean, I can't even imagine how much what the grossers are there. Just it's just constant, constant, and you check and see how

stores are performing. Because what's described for us the evaluative process in which you decide we're going to close that store. We don't close many stores. But so at five am every morning of my life for the last hundred years, we get a report on the data of every single store in the world, basically, and we see what stores are doing versus last week, versus last year, versus budget.

And you don't have the time to go stores. No, But I've been doing this a long time, so I can like you're reading a script, right, So when you see is it specific to areas? When the ones don't work? Why don't they work? Uh, we probably made a mistake with the location, which we've done from time to time, but not many times. We have a real science about demography. We know where to go, what's the area of the United States or what's even one store? What's the place

that just blows your mind? What's what's the all time Champa? A couple of them of Starbucks store, Uh, phenomenal store in Chicago and Oaken Rush you know that, you know, you know Chicago. Um, most of our stores in Manhattan. I do pretty well. The store and asked her places like a high volumet store to store and so on the corner of Cross be in in Broadway and you know that store. Um, I've recently heard Donald Trump say that the store in Trump Tower is the busiest store

in the world. I can promise you that is not the case. Now, Um, did you ever look at this and you think that your four bad moves away from the whole thing going away? Have you ever seen a company that really really, all of a sudden they just went poof? They were gone? Well, we we almost lost the company in oh seven. Uh, Eubrius and success drove a series of undisciplined mistakes. Now, I wasn't at I wasn't I left the CEO job during that period, but I was still. Um. I was bored at the time.

I just felt like I had done so many different things, and I did a couple of things that I wanted to do that I should not have done. Once I left. What you do? I bought a basketball team, which one Seattle Superstonics. You bought the Seattle Supertonics, which you shouldn't have done. No, I should have done it. It just was culturally not for me. But I wanted on the Yankees. But that wasn't gonna happen to you a Yankee fan. I'm more of a Yankee fan, I mean the Mets.

It is hard to root for the Mets. I mean we grew the harder to root for the Jets. I grew up with a Giant fan. I'm a Giant fan now and I respect the Mets. The Jets, I mean, they just never failed to bring it right. The Jets organizationally have time. You never think they don't want to

spend the money. But how long did you own the sh I'm totally ignorant about this, how perspects for five years and um, and when it didn't turn out well and it didn't end well, um, I convinced myself that I could apply my talents and my insight and vision onto a professional basketball team and change the culture. And I was not able to do it. And you wanted to change it from what to what. I wanted to create an environment in which people played for each other.

And I think I was very naive. They don't I think this. I think the the Golden State Warriors have proven that they do. I think the San Antonio Spurs do. It looks like Belichick in New England Patriots do. It's the top down thing. Yeah, I think. I'm very good friends with Tony the russa baseball manager who had such great success in St. Louis, and I think he taught that. But as an owner on as an outsider, I don't think I was able to build a kind of trust

and confidence that could imprint that. I think if you started from scratch, I could do it. By the time that you did it, did someone whisper to you don't do this? We warned my wife, She told you don't do it. Why why did she feel she hated it from the beginning? Just the nature of sports writers, um sports fans, the the immediate need to win, and and how difficult it is in a small market to do that. When you stepped away as CEO, how long did that last? Uh?

Four or five years? During came back to I never planned to come back, but I had to come back as for love and responsibility, trying to save the company. We were almost we almost lost it. And how did that happen? Describe how you would lose the company? Well, we lost about thirty billion dollars in market cap in about a year. The reason was bad locations, uh, measuring and rewarding the wrong things and fracturing the culture of

the company. You see. I mean, I don't know anything about business, but you would see in New York, for example, that CVS and Dwayne Read open stores across the street from each other, like within a block. They have one on every block in a battle to put each other out of business and undercut their prices. And there was a time on the Upper West Side there seemed like

there was a Starbucks on every block. Too many problems, too many They just seem that way with thought of this must be a move for them to just kill all the competition. But if you break business down, it's pretty simple. It really is. You have to have a really a vision and a real core purpose and reason for being. You have to recognize its success is best when it's shared, and you've got to create a culture in a set of values where people feel like they're

part of something larger than themselves. You treat people with great respect. You exceed the expectations of your people so they can exceed the expectations of the customer. That's it. Who was whose idea was it for you to come back mine? You can do? I knew it, and they welcomed you. Please. The media and the Wall Street analysts wrote seething stories said how could you possibly bring him back? He was the problem from the beginning. I have all

those headlines. I put him in a drawing the It was brutal, and even some people in the company said, no, not not him. And then there was some people on the board who thought, we need a professional manager, we need a real professional and U with the task in the beginning closing love of stores. We closed a thousand stores within six months of me returning all that had opened in less than a year. That's how bad just makes fires. Yeah, we just and I had to make

some very tough decisions. But here we are. Man, when what period of time does the thirty billion dollar loss of market cap that reverses itself over? What period of time you're there for? How long when you come back? If I came back in January eight, so I've been back eight years almost nine, I guess we lost that market cap from O seven to oh nine. Eight O nine came back and started coming back in in two thousand eleven, and then today, um, as good as it's

ever been. But success at this level is very fragile, and I worry all the time. Well, I mean, I remember when I was a kid, you would see chains of food companies that are gone. You know, they might not have been big monoliths like like a McDonald, but there was heart Ease, and there was Wetson's, and there was other companies and they're there's gone. Remember the Walkman BlackBerry? Do you have a fear of that all the time?

You do? And that's why I think we're you know, part of the reason why I think we're successful was Andy Grove, who was the head of Intel. Intel once said, only the paranoids of what's what's something that you want to do that you're not sure you can do. What's something you'd like Starbucks to today? Right, What's what's the thing you've dreamed about for a while that you'd like to do that you're not quite sure you can do it.

But traditional Starbucks stores less than two thousand feet and we started designing and building almost a twenty thousand square foot Disney like experience in Seattle and people and it's a great expense, I mean, very very expend big bet where we're roasting in the store, we're doing all kinds of things. But it's more than a store. And people thought this is the beginning of the end. This guy has lost it. That store has turned out to be a mecca for tourists and everyone who comes close to

the city of Seattle. We're now under construction New York on the corner of ninth and fifteen for the same operation. Well, that one will be square feet two levels, next to the Chelsea Market and across from Google. And we're under construction in Shanghai with one that will even be bigger. Uh. I don't know if these things will have the same level of impact. I believe it will um but we

have to keep reinventing and keep dreaming. Well, I want to just I want to do what I can because I'm a Starbucks fan, to make my contribution to ensure the success of Starbucks. And as I said to you before off Mike when we were outside, you gotta bring back prison Cake. When I was in New Orleans, it was you gotta find that this one cake. We called it prison cake because it was kind of an oatmeal loaf. It had no glaze on it, no drizzle on it

was very low sugar. You didn't feel guilty in my pre diabetic nightmare, I wanted my coffee and I wanted my prison cake. And then and then we've got I'm asking you, that's why we brought you here, like we're gonna find you. Guys had prison cake. It was like an oatmeal loaf and it's gone or oat loaf for something and it was gone. And I thought, how could you do that to me? I can't eat stuff. Okay, that's a long time ago out a long time ago.

But you were there. This is on your watch, Howard Schultz, you killed prison Cake. I expect you brought your team, your cracked team with you here. I hope they're on the prison cake hunt as searching as we find or maybe not. I never heard back from Starbucks about the origin of prison Cake that said they have been busy with the launch of their new video and podcast series called Upstanders. What basically we've done is we went out and we found these people, and we created podcasts like

we're doing here. We created word essays on each one of them, five minute video stories that are now embedded in Starbucks mobile app. And basically we're doing everything we can to shine a light on the fact that citizens across the country are really the real story. Over the last few years, I've been super critical of the fracturing of leadership and the lack of um responsibility by elected

officials in Washington. How dysfunctional and polarized it's been. But having said that, every day people wake up all over America and every city doing great things. And I want to tell those stories. And I'm gonna use Starbucks and our scale and our platform to share the upstandards. And that's what we're doing. We've got a great response, how great the people in this country really are? Yes, have you ever thought of running? I have thought about that,

but not not now. Not now. It means maybe so all the time. Maybe maybe that'd be a great idea. Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks. You can view and listen to the Upstanders series on the Starbucks mobile app. This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the thing