Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Venti Schultz Roast (1/28/19)

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

In honor of his potential 2020 bid, here's our segment reading from billionaire bean man Howard Schultz's books, way back at our live show at the Vera Project in Seattle on March 30, 2018.

Hello Seattle I'm listening so um Seattle's you know it's treating us pretty pretty good don't want to don't want to roast it too hard but that's fantastic scrambled eggs are amazing top salad best in the world Niles this is the worst you've ever messed up you said the n-word on your twitch stream after Drake was on it there's a Starbucks in my hotel I didn't know they did that there are Starbucks everywhere and actually we would like to start out this evening by reading to you guys from not one but two books by Howard Schultz yes of Starbucks the modern prophet the man who saw a disgusting stink infested fish-gut riddled town and the Puget Sound had said here I will build my church I'm just I will build a glorious church made of

beans I'm just inspired by Howard Schultz you know it wasn't enough for him to invent the beloved comic strip peanuts or or to appear on the hilarious sitcom Hogan's Heroes Sergeant Schultz remember him folks can we get the sad face of the evening for that Hogan's Heroes reference of it there are a lot of that show there is the the figure of masculine order Colonel Kurtz but he's always being fooled by the feminine energy of his buxom secretary clink it's Colonel Clink if it was Colonel Kurtz that'd be a way more interesting show in turn well in the month they got LaBeau's head out of fucking steak in front of the camp am I right folks in the manga it's Colonel Kurtz he cannot be stopped no no you know what people think they can get you

if you're wrong about something but the truth is if you know one thing you know everything and you connected back to that one thing and pretend you were talking about that if you look to realize this after he referred to the famous volcano in ancient Rome as a Mount Vesuvio it would stop most people but I said well actually the restaurant Vesuvio Xbrano's also burned down see done he cannot be fated folks okay so this is Howard Schultz who again someone informed me of this in addition to being the Starbucks guy he's also the asshole that fucked up the supersonics right that Oklahoma City is a big fan of this guy and and if you go to the Wikipedia page for 2020 potential Democratic presidential candidates no it's a very broad list it's got a lot of crazy

names on there Mark Cuban and stuff it's the broadest possible list but on the list is Howard Schultz okay he wasn't considered remember he was on the short list for Hillary's cabinet he would have been at least secretary of I think labor and maybe even like commerce or or fucking treasury well this is interesting because in these books he offers a fairly telling vision of the ideology of contemporary capitalism indeed so I just want to dive into this one his first book is called onward which I think was the same slogan as the Italian fascist party okay this is a from part one which is titled love chapter one a beverage of truth yes in coffee very talk so on Tuesday afternoon in February 2008 Starbucks closed all of its u.s. stores whoa a note posted on

71,000 locked doors explain the reason we're taking time to perfect our espresso great espresso requires patience that's why our dick we're dedicating ourselves to honing our craft now I vaguely remember this because everyone was pointing out how shitty their coffee was there you go so Starbucks they've won they've won so like this whole first chapter is about the decision decision point he made to shutter all the Starbucks to retrain their staff so I'd like to read a little of this now he says pouring espresso is an art one that requires the barista to care about the quality of the beverage if the barista only goes through the motions if he or she does not care and produces an inferior espresso that is too weak or too bitter then Starbucks has

lost the essence of what we set out to do 40 years ago inspire the human spirit for for context you know Starbucks is where you go if you did a lot of cocaine the night before and you're not letting go of your idea with your business partner for a pizzeria that's inspired by nightclub atmospheres Starbucks has always been about so much more than coffee but without great coffee we have no reason to exist well hold on a minute seems to me that if you if the coffee is that necessary then it's the thing it's about I just one last thing it's about the thing that you literally can't have it without yeah it's a coffee place I'm pretty sure yeah all right one last thing here for chapter one he says there is a word that comes to my mind when

I think about our company and our people that word is love I love Starbucks because everything we've tried to do is steeped in humanity that makes it sound like soiling green we steep every one of our delicious beans in rich delicious humanity right well it's not love it's coffee it's about coffee it's not a brothel or something pretty sure a hundred percent of the people who go to Starbucks go there for some sort of coffee or coffee derivative all right now what is your book the other how my book is another one of his his fucking literary self blowjobs it's called pour your heart into it oh how Starbucks built a company one cup at a time wretched garbage of course and really really insidious in the way that it promotes ideology of capitalism and as

like a thing that sort of justifies itself but we'll get to that so this is the one thing he says early in the chapter one thing I've noticed about romantics they try to create a new and better world far from the drabness of everyday life that is Starbucks aim to we've tried to create in our stores a little neighborhood spot where you can take a break listen to some jazz and ponder universal or personal or even whimsical questions over a cup of coffee what kind of person dreams up such a place that my my next one just perfect perfect companions of that one he writes here valuing personal connections at a time when so many people sit alone in front of screens aspiring to build human relationships in an age when so many issues polarized so many and acting ethically even

if it costs more when corners are routinely cut these are honorable pursuits are at the core of what we set out to be and what I like about this is he keeps coming back to this idea that it's more than a coffee shop it's a place anyone has ever been ever yeah it's a coffee clutch it's the modern-day Agora where ideas and philosophies are exchanged every time I've ever been to a Starbucks and by the way they have done a good job of making pretty much okay coffee available everywhere in this country which is no small feat but that's not enough for him it has to be more about love and inspiring human connection and meaning that screen thing is the mantra of every shitty coffee shop that has a sign up that says no Wi-Fi talk to your neighbor oh yeah every Starbucks I've ever

been to it like it's just people robotically shuffling in and out on their way to or from the office just to get the their bean juice that they need to make it through the day spent largely staring at screens what either in Starbucks or out of one the only like passion that exists in a Starbucks is like every few months when a Trump person is like just did you tell them your name is all lives matter just do they can't fucking stop you it's not illegal it's the first man then they have to say it then that raises awareness of Trump yeah this is the guy after all who at one point encouraged his fucking employees to engage the customers on questions of race as a former employee of Starbucks that the best part of it for employees was also not love nor

was it coffee it was all the whippets you got for the whipped cream okay one more here he says infusing work with purpose and meaning however is a two-way street yes love what you do but your company should love you back as a merchant my desire has always been to inspire customers exceed their high expectations and establish and maintain their trust in us as an employer my duty has always been to do the same for people on the other side of the counters for our partners this latter responsibility has driven me for many many years so again it's this idea that it's not enough to just be the most successful coffee chain ever in human history it's that it's about inspiring connections right well the thing is is that for him for a guy like Howard Schultz who

has devoted their life to this acquisition of wealth at this frenzied pace it can't be it has to be about more it has to be about connections and passion and love and family because if it isn't then it's just about the cold bloody inhuman logic of capitalism of buying for X and selling for Y and keeping as much of the surplus as you can like that's the brutal reality of what he has devoted his life to this fucking machinery of exploitation who could fucking handle thinking that every day that that's what they were doing so he's basically ex building an ideological buffer whereby he's not doing the thing he's doing he's doing this other thing I think you're giving too much credit it's what he's doing I'm not saying this is conscious I'm saying what

he's doing in it's so it's the subconscious way that all of us by interacting in in capitalism and then responding to it honestly just put skin in sinew on this gleaming terminator skeleton of capitalism with these ideas about about work being meaningful in some spiritual sense instead of just a cold extractive enterprise I still think you're giving him too much credit I mean really I think the idea that he needs to morally rationalize it has less to do with the fact that he's like this bougie gentile person and coffee king of America sounds tackier than what he wants to be as like some kind of captain of industry no I don't think that he's that he it's I don't think that he's he wants to justify it morally I just think that he wants to feel like it his

life has meaning and that there can be no meaning in capitalism because there it requires no human input he's trying to convince himself that he's actually human being and not just a function in an algorithm here's another thing he's trying to do well it would have been audacious for any of us to compare Starbucks cultural impact to that of the Beatles great start great start already and I have to say Howard Schultz comparing Starbucks to the Beatles is John Lennon comparing the Beatles to Jesus Christ calm the fuck down one thing was clear from comments like cliffs both are icons that play memorable roles in people's lives others piped up with observations about the Beatles career the band took risks someone said they took us on a journey at a time when the world needed

cultural leaders so badly they didn't compromise they led with their hearts the Beatles believed and if you believe you can change anything they kept reinventing themselves but the same time they stayed true to their music I offered recalling their 1967 album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band there was music in that album I remember that so using the Beatles as a metaphor for an iconic brand was I thought brilliant it swept us into a creative process providing fresh context for us to examine and speak about ourselves and the company most of us were enthused although I noticed a few who were lost or rolling their eyes at the exercise and like cliff we got up out of our seats and walked across the posters to pick up our favorites so yeah he thinks

he's Don Draper Starbucks is a carousel no it's like the Beatles in that they were both very successful institutions in our culture and also half the original Starbucks board is dead I just I love the idea of like you know really crazed fan kills the CFO of Starbucks but not you don't get it I just hear those quarterly reports meant so much to me quarter quarter three fiscal year 2011 that was like my imagine he got obsessed with chapter 27 of the Papa John memoir and the sun do you think that the Dunkin Donuts people are like well all right fine we're the Stooges I bring a very Iggy Pop energy to the coffee game there's one passage in that book that I didn't flag but the gist of it is Schultz is looking for ideas he wants outside the box

ideas is talking to everyone in the company as I'm talking to an IT guy who explains World of Warcraft to Howard Schultz and says this is the biggest online multiplayer video game of all time and their demographic is males like 19 to 35 who are addicted to caffeine is obviously the subtext here the well well at the time I guess Starbucks that was the one market they couldn't crack they couldn't love 19 to 35 year olds and so Schultz and some other you know C-suites fly to Irvine California to the Blizzard headquarters to think about a partnership the idea was some kind of Starbucks World of Warcraft rewards card and they go to the Blizzard headquarters and Schultz sees this 14-foot statue of an orc warrior riding a horse and just shakes his head at it

and this this partnership never materialized and could you imagine how different history would have been I believe before that he says well I was concerned Warcraft may not be part of our brand not consistent with our values not consistent with our company value yeah we'll see about it when they form their own private army I like the idea that Howard Schultz was just scared by the orc I asked my personal blackwater security to check under my bed sometimes love means still being afraid of monsters when you're 60 okay so here's another section from this other book or your heart into it where he talks about how poor like coffee I just got that basically he talks about he was inspired to basically invent the idea of espresso bars in the United States

because when he took over at Starbucks they didn't sell coffee retail they sold it only in bags and he made that he said let's turn into coffee bars and he brought espresso from Italy to the United States and he talks about how he was inspired to do it here there's no better place to truly savor the romance of life than Italy so he talks about how the Italians do things differently they have an unparalleled appreciation for the fine pleasures of daily life they have figured out how to live in perfect balance they understand what it means to work and equally what it means to relax and enjoy life they embrace everything if passion nothing is mediocre the infrastructure into Italy is appalling nothing works but the food of Italy is absolutely incredible the

architecture is breathtaking the fashion still defines elegance wrong wrong they drink cheap espresso on the Giancarlo hill overlooking roll they do do that so he talks about how he was in Milan Milan no and he he came to a spy a number of very charming espresso shops and he says half a block across the side street I saw another espresso bar this one was even more crowded I noticed that the gray haired man behind the counter greeted every customer by name he appeared to be both owner and operator he and his customers were laughing and talking and enjoying the moment I could tell that the customers were regulars and the routines comfortable and familiar in the next few blocks I saw two more espresso bars I was fascinated it was on that day that I discovered

the ritual and the romance of coffee bars in Italy I saw how popular they were and how vibrant each one had its own unique character but they had one common thread the camaraderie between the customers who knew each other well on the barista who was performing with flair what if he just actually went by like a bunch of cruising spots in Milan customer service at this place oh man the operator and the customers they all get into this big foamy bath together it's amazing it says at that time there were 200,000 coffee bars in Italy and 1500 alone in the city of Milan a city of size of Philadelphia it seemed they were on every street corner and all were packed my night mine started churning and I was wondering how many of those fucking coffee bars

that were destroyed or displaced by a fucking Starbucks since then it's like this amazing vibrant unique culture that I monopolized and destroyed I've never been to Italy but let me ask you this do these coffee bars also sell alcohol and not always often not many of them do though some of them so that they're just bars yeah but I think that's the thing the defining thing the coffee is that the buyers is it's mostly if not entirely coffee there's a coffee place it's sort of booze booze at night becomes a bar I don't know man maybe okay well you started answering the question so I thought you had the inside track on this one I've been to a place that had coffee in their day and then have alcohol at night they exist what was it called we'll be

resolving this in the nine o'clock show tonight this has been Rick Steves kicks on Europe we're gonna resolve this with Chris Hardwick and after chapeau