John Mackey: Building Whole Foods

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/fbac86a2ecbb09a6

It's easy to be a critic.
It's actually hard to be an entrepreneur. For years I was told that this was never gonna work. My mother was begging me on her deathbed to give up this stupid grocery dream. I remember feeling that many times.
You're wrong. Whole foods is gonna grow. We're gonna change the world. If you're not willing to seize that opportunity, somebody else will. We really did all feel like we were part of this movement that was gonna change the way America ate. Life is shorter than you think it is.
It's too short.
to not be doing something that you really are passionate about, that you're drawn to.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parish.
In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. If you're listening to this, it means you're not a supporting member. Members get early access, no ads, my personal reflections at the end of the conversation.
Access to the highlights from the books I'm reading, hand edited transcripts, and so much more. Check out the link in the show notes for more information. My guest today is John Mackie, founder of Whole Foods Market. I wanted to hear John's story all the way from the creating of Safer Way to Amazon buying Whole Foods and
Everything in between. John is a master at resilience. Let's look at some of the things he's had to overcome. Consider this, right after the opening of the first Whole Foods market, this huge store where they had apple juice's filler on the shelves to make it look full because they couldn't afford enough inventory, a hundred year flood hit Austin and put the store eight feet underwater.
John didn't have any insurance, and he had no money. And if that wasn't enough, he had to deal with risk-averse investors, four different coup attempts, and so much more. John has interesting takes on lots of things, from investors in capitalism to the clash between the idea of whole foods market and the reality of running a retail business. He also has a fascinating way.
to deal with critics. It's time to listen and learn.

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think the best place to start is going back all the way to the beginning.
To safer way.
Which be was the precursor to whole foods. Right.
Where did the idea for that come from?
And we in my book, uh the whole story, I
actually talk about I had the psychedelic experience
uh where I experienced it's ego death, ego dissolving when I was twenty two and
Pretty soon after that. That's why that's why I started the book there and I'll I'll start the answer to your
Uh question there.
And then that
That really just changed my I got off the
path my parents really wanted me to be on and
Uh
I would just move into this vegetarian co op.
a housing co op, sort of like a commune.
And
Mm. I wasn't uh vegetarian at that time and I really didn't even know much about food. I'd just been a typical
American kind of junk food eater.
And
that but I had my food awakening. My consciousness awoke there. I
I I'd always thought of my body as kinda like but you eat food to get fuel like a car to us to get gasoline.
And I
And that mechanistic model doesn't do credit to the fact that you actually need to nourish
trillions of cells in your body with
Super healthy food if you do that.
Feel better.
immune system will be stronger, you won't get sick as frequently and you'll live longer and
Yeah, just
probably in overall have a better life.
kinda got that when I moved into that co op.
sort of had some older, wiser people than the co op and
And I learned how to cook.
I became the food buyer for the co op and I got m deep into it. It was like wow, th this natural and organic food stuff's pretty interesting.
Then I went to work for a small natural food store.
in Austin, Texas, at that time called the Good Food Company.
And I became the assistant manager there and I I loved it. I never I never worked retail before. I loved
I became friends with customers, friends with the
the employees that I was working with.
And then I remember coming back to the co op one day
No.
Before I came home that night I was
looking around, I was closing up the store and I thought, I love this.
I could do this. This is this is uh within my realm of
life competence I could I could run a store.
And I came back and I t talked to my girlfriend at the co op, Renee.
And I at this time I'm probably
Just about twenty three, and Renee's nineteen.
And I s I said, Renee.
What do you think we open up our own natural food store?
And
Renee looked at me, grabbed my hands, looked me in the eyes and said
She was a hippie, as you said.
Oh, Mercoman.
That'd be so cool.
Let's do it.
And so we did.
And and if she'd said that's a stupid idea, my life might
I wouldn't be here with you today, my life might have taken a completely different trajectory. But she said she's excited about it.
We did it together.
And it was called Safer Way.
It was a vegetarian store.
And it was um it was very pure. We didn't sell we didn't sell meat.
We didn't sell white sugar.
We didn't sell um alcohol.
We didn't even sell coffee.
And and it and
And I was like to say we did very little business.
We were not meeting the market where we found it, so to speak.
It was our own ideals.
And we did that for a couple of years and and we managed to lose about half the capital we'd raise, which of
forty five thousand dollars. But we began to figure out the business.
And
It's
Luck or fate would have it.
Uh I found another location.
And had a lot of trouble persuading the investors to relocate and they would only do it if I found another big investor, which I did.
buddy I play basketball with.
Pick up basketball with and
And uh he'd inherit a lot of money from his parents who died.
And he uh he put in like a hundred thousand bucks.
And or no, fifty thousand dollars.
And then we got more money from the shareholders and we relocated and changed the name to
Whole face market.
And that was the first natural food supermarket in Texas.
I'd been inspired by Bread and Circus in Boston and Mrs. Gucci's in LA and
Fraser Farms in San Diego.
In fact.
This is an idea whose time could be coming.
And and if that became
immensely successful and we s and we sold meat.
We sold alcohol.
We sold uh coffee.
And we were still
featuring natural organic foods, but we were also now a more
uh a grocery store that more people could identify with, particularly our generation.
Um which was a kind of a counterculture.
long hair, hippie generation that was
looking to r reinvent the world.
Starting with
one of the first places to reinvent was food.
And so
Uh.
was immensely successful.
That was the Lamar location. Yes.
It was in fact within six months it became the highest volume natural food store in the entire United States.
Based on everything I know about.
The world back then.
Let's pause there. We'll get we're gonna come back to this in a second.
Talk to me about the tension between the idealism
Uh no me.
Yeah, processed foods.

Uh.
I always say, you know, you've heard this cliche, it's easy to be a saint on the mountaintop.
It's easy for critics to judge.
And say you're selling out, you're betraying your ideals I as I'm plant based.
I hear I hear it all the time from vegans. See, you're just a
You know, you're a hypocrite, you say you're an ethical vegan and yet whole food sold meat, so you're just a hypocrite and a liar, or you're not even an ethical vegan, I don't believe it, blah, blah, blah.
But it's like
What exactly have you done if you think a vegan store will work?
Do it.
Don't just criticize other people if you think you can make that a viable business.
The problem in that instance is that
About half of one percent of Americans are vegan.
and two percent are are vegetarian.
So you just don't have a big big for that big of a market.
And
And another cliche which is true is you kinda have to meet the market where you find it.
Not where you'd like it to be.
So the tension between your ideals
And as long as we're into cliches, I'll give you a third one, which is
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
If you just want to have your ideals
You can have'em.
But you may not have a business.
So you have to
engage with the market, you can try to influence the market, you can try to educate the market.
But at the end of the day they vote every day with their pocketbooks exactly what they want. If you're not prepared to serve them
What they want.
then they're gonna go find it somewhere else and you and your business may end up failing because you
So there is that tension between your ideals.
Yeah, but then you have to
You have to mediate between them. You you
As I always like to say, we're always pushing idea our ideals.
But always listening to our customers. It's like a dialogue you're having or a dance.
And
If you don't dance with your partner.
Your partner's gonna dance away from you.
So you have to you have to meet'em where you find'em.
I've always noticed that most of the people actually all the people who criticize other people doing things
They're usually not doing the same thing. They're not trying to do the same thing. They're not in the same space. They're just sort of like lobbing grenades from
The safety of the sidelines.
And I yes, I think that's absolutely true. And I also think there's a tendency for all of us, including myself, to project
Our own
our own failings out onto other people and criticizing them then.
It's like
You're not doing what I think you should do.

I'm not doing anything.
So
It's it's it's it's easy to be a critic.
It's actually hard to be an entrepreneur.
it's hard to actually create anything. It's really hard.
Particularly anything that's gonna be successful and meet the test of time.
But it's very easy to find fault with what other people are doing. And you know, I've learned the hard way, for example
I just don't read
Comments anymore.
If if if
If you're when this podcast is if you allow comments on your podcast.
I'm not gonna read'em because
I'm gonna get all this hate's gonna come my way. Hate they hate whole foods. They it's gone down since Amazon bought it. I hate John Mack, he's a hypocrite, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The comments just allow people to vent all this negativity.
Um
And so I've learned
Just better to
Um
Just to let the like stuff go. You and me both.
So coming back to Lamar, so you open Lamar, it's uh what was it, ten thousand square feet? It was huge. Ten thousand five hundred square feet. Well
That'd be like the tiniest store at Hallfords now. No, but I mean compared to the Victorian house you had. It was huge compared to that.
And you got all this inventory.
You borrowed
money or location, you convinced the guy to lend it to you'cause he didn't want to lend it to you.
And then a hundred year flood hits.
Yeah, so
Nine months after we opened up that really successful store, the whole first whole foods market in nineteen eighty.
Um
When we were building it
The owner of the building.
Uh.
Texas good old boy named Ben Powell. He let me know that this w we were building it in the hundred year flood zone.
And I said, Well what
What does that mean exactly, a hundred year flood zone? He says, Well, John
What it means, partner, is that about
Once every hundred years.
Austin's gonna experience
A hundred year flood.
There's gonna be eight feet of water that
Shoal crease gonna overflow its banks, water's gonna come down the Lamar, it's gonna fill up your store.
And I said, Really?
K you're kidding, right? He says, No, no, no, it it's in the hundred year flood zone.
And I said, Well, when was the last time that happened?
He says, Well I'm I'm not rightly sure.
It happened over seventy years ago for I was born.
But that's what happened.
I was thinking.
All right. Well what are the chances we're gonna have a hundred year flood zone flood any time soon?
And uh so I thought
Well, I'm gonna still take the risk.
And he said, Well as to be on the on the
Let's give you a little bit of margin error. Let's build a slab that's two feet high.
So our store
What
caught two foot concrete slabs, he had to step up.
To get
There which made it a little hard for
grocery cars to get down in the front, but we
built a ramp for them to get down. Anyhow.
We had the hundred year flood in the first year. We were all fed uh
And Renee, my girlfriend, was working that nine and she swam out of the store.
'Cause it it happened.
kind of in late afternoon, early evening.
And it was um
Memorial Day weekend, it was a Sunday night.
with Memorial Day the next day.
So
Uh
That had some
Good things to it.
But you're asking about the banker that um
This was
Th the thing I didn't know about stakeholders and I didn't have language for, but I experienced
people that love your business because
The day after the flood we had
I don't know, dozens of people come in and help clean up the store that didn't work there.
They were neighbors. They were customers. They didn't want us to die. They loved us.
We had uh
the the suppliers gave us new inventory. Our employees
Worked for free.
While we were
Well we'cause we couldn't make a payroll. We didn't have any money. They worked for free until we could get back open again.
Which there was no assurance that we would.
Um
But the most remarkable story that I found I that about the flood I didn't actually find out about until about ten years ago.
When
Um
Uh
I'm at this conference and this guy coming up to me and he says, You know, John, you don't
You won't remember me.
You know, uh but I used to work for City National Bank back in the day, you know
Terrible thing that flood that when that flood happened to you.
And I said, Yeah, yeah, you were for City Bank, you must have known our bank or uh
Mark Monroe and he said, Yes, Mark and I are really good friends.
And uh that was quite a thing he did for you.
And I said, Well, yeah, sure was. We
I don't know if we could have reopened without that hundred thousand dollar loan the bank gave us.
Said it always puzzled me though, but
'Cause I was surprised the bank would give us the loan'cause you know, it was just my signature guaranteeing and I my signature was
Kind of worthless.
And he looks at me and he says.
You don't know what happened.
And I said.
Well I yeah, I do. The bank gave us money. And he says, No, John, the bank did not give you that money. I said, Yes, they did. We got a check from the bank.
He said, Uh John, the bank turned the loan down.
The only reason he got that money was Mark Monroe personally
Guaranteed that loan.
I said, we're not personally guaranteed. Don't know why the hell would you do that?
And he said he did it because he said he really believes in you and he believed in whole foods and he knew you you'd pay him back even if it took you the rest of your life.
And
And so he took the chance on you.
And I said, That's incredible. I I've got a
I I need to thank him. That's a that's great. He says, Well, you're too late.
He passed away about five years ago.
So
That's a good story, but that's that's
When people ask me about stakeholders.
That's what stakeholders are. They're people that are invested in your business, care about your business, and then you have certain responsibilities too.
Did you realize you were on to something when you saw other people helping clean up that were customers and didn't work there? It was only in retrospect later that I realized we were onto something.
I hadn't really been exposed to any kind of stakeholder thinking before.
Um
But then later when I got exposed to it, I realized yeah, that's what the that's the they were stakeholders. They were
They were our customers and neighbors. They were they cared about us. It also says something about
That's
This we're talking about now.
May of nineteen eighty one, literally forty three years ago.
And
The world's different.
back then than it is today.
Uh
I really wonder whether
people would come in and help clean up. Maybe they would

Austin back then was a much smaller city than it is today.

Much more and
And that
And it was just a different consciousness back then.
It's it's um
Mean up.


You also lose certain things. I mean a lot of people I think would have just thrown their arms up in the air and
sort of try to walk away. And I think the answer to that.
Honestly is that
Um
I thought I thought maybe Renee and I were gonna that the
universe decided we weren't gonna do this, I'm I was gonna do something else in life, but
I had a lot of friends and family that invested money.
I had real I felt like I can't let these people down.
We gotta find a way to get back open again.
And
That's it's in in the book I talk about when Whole Foods does its IPO fourteen or
In nineteen ninety two, so eleven years later it was
one of the happiest days of my life because
Finally, all the investors that
Believe in me.
and believed in our vision, believed in Renee, they could leave now. They could they could cash out.
And so that really took a a load off of my
My chest, so to speak.
Turned my back.
Talk to me a little bit about
learning the X and O's of retailing. What are the X and O's of retailing in a grocery store that you've you've learned over the years, but you started out with no experience. Yeah.
Well, I mean there's literally thousands and thousands of things. I mean I can just give you
So and the most important things you realize is that
Hey.
Nobody has to shop with you.
I thought it was so funny.
Later on when the F Federal Trade Commission said Whole Foods was a monopoly.
It's like you gotta be kidding, we got we got less than one percent of the grocery business and they sort of made up this category that we were the
Whether we're a monopoly of premium natural and organic food supermarkets.
But
My point is, of course, we want a monopoly of anything.
And
What I learned early on is that
Customers always have choices.
If you don't serve if you if they don't like your
Prices.
Your service, your quality.
If you're not convenient, if they can't get in and out fast.
That you don't have a business.
So
I learned that the most important stakeholder
Is and always will be.
A customer.
That's number one stakeholder.
And and
If a business doesn't realize that or forgets it
Um
their business probably is gonna suffer in the long run.
Because people do
Your competitors are constantly innovating.
They're constantly studying what you're doing, copying your best ideas.
And then iterating on them.
And this is how the human race makes progress, to be honest, is that
Um
Mm.
People have choices.
And you ha and you have to compete.
to serve your customers.
Does that mean some people do a poor job? Of course they do.
I mean that happens, but
There is this
competitive drive to serve your customers better.
That's the single most important lesson I learned in business, period.
But certainly it's true in the retail business.
We don't have any patents.
We don't have any monopolies. Everything we're doing is
wide open for people to see
copy. I mean I people used to come in and
Tak.
You know, pictures of our prices and
And they'd be looking at our products and they're showing up in the supermarkets. So everybody was studying us and we'd no way to stop that.
So that's one thing I learned. Secondly,
I learned that.
Um
Yeah.
You gotta take care of your customers.
Well who takes care of them?
Your employees do, your team members do.
If they're unhappy.
They're not gonna take care of all of your customers well.
So
If you really want
Good service to your customers.
Make sure your team members

Well motivated.
And that they are
Rewarded.
For serving
the customers well. That you have a high standard.
And then you meet
Because happy team members
lead to happy customers.
Happy customers lead to a prosperous business, that makes happy investors.
So I learned then about sort of the interdependency of all these stakeholders that are that are connected together.
And then
And a sense of business is this ecosystem.
Uh
emplo of of of stakeholders, an ecosystem of customers
Employees, suppliers, investors
The communities that we're all part of.
And that
Once you see that.
Then you see that there are systems.
And that you can
You can create these synergies between the different constituencies, between the different stakeholders.
To help this business to optimize itself at a higher level.
That was what we call conscious capitalism.
at the end of the day it's being very conscious about how you're
you have these responsibilities to all these stakeholders and you're trying to create value for all of them.
And that's very difficult to do. That's also another thing I learned. That's hard to do all of that.
There are little trade offs that end up being made. So but how do you minimize the trade offs
And maximise the synergies.
Um
And I also learn isn't the adage goes, retail is detail.
There's
A thousand little details. I mean
typical store's got tens of thousands of products.
And what's more irritating that if you go to the store and you you have a recipe that needs
broccoli in it and they just h don't happen to have any broccoli.
Well.
You're really pissed off. First of all, you have to go to another store.
It's like how can you run out of broccoli?
So
But then again if you stock too much broccoli
It's gonna rot on the shelf.
So you have to you have to develop the skills
particularly in the grocery business where you have all these perishables.
to be able to
Keep your food fresh and in stock.
But turn it over fast enough.
Uh
But if you tr and so there's that there's that relationship where you want it fresh
But you also
Don't w uh also
Don't want
it to be out of stock and sometimes are in tension with each other.
There are so many other things I could tell you about. It's just uh
Um the retail business is uh
Um
H how do you price stuff?
Like
Okay.
You know, if c somebody's underpricing, do you match that?
Which what do you match? What do you go lower on? There's a whole
There's a whole pricing strategy that you have to do and that's
can be complex because you have a variety of different competitors competing with you if you're competing with a
Erwan in LA, you're not worried about price, but
They may be having higher
higher quality, higher uh
More um
More high end
product that you have to compete against and do you choose to compete against it.
So
I suppose.
What I like about business in general is that
You never qu quite figure it all out. You're continually learning.
The world's continually evolving and changing.
Like uh let's say

Look at what happened in the grocery business when Covid came in.
Uh
all of a sudden, you know, um, people want that stuff delivered at home.
And
Fortunately for us, we were teamed up with Amazon at that time and Amazon was able to step up and
Invest literally hundreds of millions of dollars in delivery.
In order to enable whole foods.
and Amazon Fresh to be able to deliver when the demand went from virtually zero to
Two
A huge percentage of your business.
So I don't know. I can keep I can keep going on this, but you m you may want to have different questions. Keep going. I I love the detail here. Is is perishables the most important part of the store to get right?
Absolutely. Particularly uh particularly in food retailing.
People choose their supermarkets based usually on the qualifying.
Partly convenience.
But then
If they have crummy produce
Crummy meat.
So seafood's fishy.
I mean they're gonna go someplace else. Whole foods' competitive advantage has always been
I just thought we did a better job than just about anybody else.
out there in overall per
Produce.
Parishable quality.
And that gave us competitive competitive edge.
Why is produce the first part of the story you walk into?
Because
That sets the tone for the whole store.
People
Oftentimes pick
They're store by how good the qu how
How good the produce is.
And it's not easy to do it well.
It takes a lot of skill.
to be able to manage your produce so that you keep your in stock position while you keep freshness.
It's it's uh
It's part
Part science and part art.
Um
And I mean I just think produce is is
It's also the healthiest part of the store. Produce is is the most important foods that we eat, fruits and vegetables.
Are
the the healthiest foods we can eat.
And if you want to have a strong immune system
And you want to have high longevity.
You're gonna have to learn to eat like vegetables.
And fruits.
Let's go back to Lamar for a second here. So you reopen.
And at this point you're you're you're profitable. You're the most
Yeah, we became profitable.
Safer way was a struggle.
And that's also an interesting story here. We were struggling with safer way.
Wait.
We relocate it to a better location, make it bigger.
expand our product mix and we went from a struggling business to hugely successful
Um
And then I thought, Wow, we got a tiger by the tail here, let's grow this thing and we just had a flood, so we had to grow it just so we'd have a
You know, if we'd have all of our eggs in one basket that might float down the river.
But you had four founders at that time. Right. And
Not everybody wanted to grow the business.
Yeah, uh one of my one of my co founders, Mark, Mark Skiles.
Um
After we had the really successful store
Hm.
really did want us to grow.
Because
He said John.
We have a gold mine here.
Let's just not screw it up.
We we're we can be rich. We don't have to do anything else. We can just
Live off this thing for the next
twenty five years and and just you know have a wonderful lifestyle and
And I said, I I don't wanna do that. I I wanna
I know I'm gonna grow the business. I'm gonna have more stores.
And he was willing to go along with that until
W you know the the and the next couple of stores we opened up were
were slow.
They didn't take off, right either but
right off
Uh at the go point.

Remember that very first whole food to market took two small stores'cause we merged with this other natural food store.
We took them together.
uh and we had their customer bases from both stores as a foundation.
And then we were unlike any other store.
And so we were able to pull in from a much wider geographical area, which is one reason the store was so successful.
We opened a second store.
Well, we had to go out in the suburbs.
It wasn't hippies anymore, it wasn't a counterculture market.
And it started slower.
Now it grew really well.
But it took a few years before it became profitable.
And that's proved to be the case any time whole foods went into a new market for the first
Ten to fifteen years we existed.
It was a slow growth.
Because people just had never heard of us before. And what are you? That stores weird.
Yeah.
Guys all dress weird. You don't look like a regular supermarket.
So but once our brand got well known then our stores started to take off.
But in a day for Mark.
When he remembers, I mean he was there.
the the new stores were slow and they diluted down this the first very successful store. And he got he blamed it on me. He got m angrier and angry at me angrier at me and
That ultimately led to a break.
Or Mark.
um decided to leave the company.
And he said I was gonna wreck the company with your gr growth dreams.
And uh
He sold out his interest and
Opened up a pizza place and
And uh
That probably wasn't the best decision he could have made.
He wasn't the only one who thought you were gonna wreck the company with growth dreams.
Over the years, I mean Mark f first nickname me wacky Mackie.
And uh
Oh yeah.
Through the years, um I think entrepreneurs always are climbing a wall of doubt.

The entrepreneurs looking ahead. They're seeing possibilities that other people don't see yet.
And
So
It's easy to be skeptical. I I just for years I was told that this was never gonna work.
I mean
My mother was begging me on her deathbed to give up this stupid grocery dream.
think we had about four stores back in nineteen eighty seven and
And just you know.
Go back to school to make something of my life.
So
In general.
Um
There's just a huge amount of scepticism about
What new entrepreneurial ideas and an entrepreneur's got to have the
uh the faith and confidence to move forward even though people are constantly telling it's gonna fail. In my case
All of that criticism, all those attacks
They just made me
More determined.
I'm gonna prove all these people wrong. I remember feeling that many times
You're wrong.
What we're gonna do we're we're whole foods is gonna we're gonna grow. We're gonna change the world. I felt that with Mark when he was telling me I was gonna wreck the company.
And he he didn't want to keep any of his stock and he wanted all of his stock out before I wrecked the company.
So yeah, that happened several times.
I had I count four different coup attempts that occurred.
uh over the history of the company that I was able to beat back.
Does that come from like is there a chip on your shoulder or was there at the time that was sort of like I'm gonna prove you wrong?
You know, I don't think I I had sort of an inherent chip on my shoulder.
It's just in some ways I'm a very competitive guy.
And and when people will tell me
It won't work.
You're gonna fail.
It's just I just
Is it a chip on my shoulder? I I think a chip on the shoulders is something that you're
You're just kinda mad at the world about and I
But
When people would say what we were doing wasn't gonna work, it just made me more determined.
It's kinda like um
you get a competitive challenge from somebody
You could see I was
Uh
Talk about
about Erwan we were off camera that I would love to be competing more aggressively with Erwan
If I was still the CEO.
But
And because just in general, I just um
I love I love games. I love play. I love to
To compete.
To me it's really fun.
And so
When people would tell me that it's not gonna work.
It's like
I'd look at it and I would s you know, maybe they're are they right?
No, they're not right. I'm gonna prove them not right.
And or if s if I would hear about a competitor
I I just
I feel like that's not
unusual for entrepreneurs.
They've
They're they're constantly being told what they're doing's not gonna work.
And so I think you have to have resilience.
And that resilience, in my case, comes from kind of my competitive spirit, which is like
It would just make me more determined.
I think that's a healthy thing, by the way.
Because
Too many people quit.
They y they hit a
A roadblock or they a setback?
An entrepreneur gets set back so many times.
You get knocked down and you gotta get back up again.
It's it's like a
You know, like in a uh if you're a fighter, I mean you know, eventually
Yeah, you might have to admit defeat eventually'cause you're gonna die if you don't, but
In general
You just want to keep getting up and see if you can get the next punch in.
Um
Anyway that's how I'm sort of wired.
Growth man.
More money, more capital needed.
Yeah. Talk to me about the various sources of capital and and sort of
When you chose at first to take outside money.
Well of course in it.
Yeah. Like the c classic entrepreneurial story.
The
Initially it was friends and family.
And then um
My dad taught me is he was my mentor.
That
The best capital you have, this is very different than the way people think about it today, says the best capital you'll ever have is the capital you make yourself.
And if you if you don't want to
Yeah.
lose control of your business.
Then
Make sure you're very profitable. Don't scale too quickly.
Grow your business.
Thoughtfully and painfully, uh patiently.
Keep your costs down.
And plow the money back in.
And that's how Whole Foods operated for the first
many di most first decade of our lives.
We took venture capital money in
Well uh
We started trying to get it.
in nineteen eighty eight, so ten years after we'd started safe for way and we
We got our first investment in nineteen eighty nine.
I call the VCs
Um
I call them hitchhikers with credit cards.
And but what I mean by that is that
Uh
They're getting into your car.
And as long as you take'em where they want to get to, which is an exit.
Uh
Which either has to be a sale or an IPO and we didn't want to sell the business. We wanted to
We want it
To grow it.

And so we always had the IPO, the initial public offering was in the back of our minds.
But
I realize that
The VCs
They have a little bit different agenda.
They want to exit the car but they don't want to exit the car too soon.
Uh because they they'd like
To have the compounding occur
While they once once the company does an IPO, most of the VCs
Because of their
the way they're structured with their with their own investors.
they have to either distribute that within a year they generally have to either distribute the stock or sell it on behalf of the investors.
And so in in whole foods' case
We actually
Wanted to go public because
The V Cs wanted another round of V C financing.
But that was gonna give them control of the business.
And
talking to my dad about it, we said we don't want those guys to get control of the business.
First of all they first thing we're gonna do is replace me and put in a professional manager.
Which they were trying to do already, and we we
It's in the book, The Guy that was supposed to start working as president
Died.
On the day he was supposed to start work.
It was like if that's not a
Sign of the universe. I don't know what is, but
We didn't
We didn't actually hire that person from the supermarket industry.
And
We got the V Cs to good exit. They made a lot of money on Whole Foods. They only were in the car for
Three years from nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety two.
And so they they got out of the car.
And
Now we had our own currency. Once we once you do a public offering
You can go back to the public markets. We did
several rounds of financing over the years to raise additional money from public
So that's why it's an IPO, that's the initial public offering.
Corporations do other public offerings after that.
And
We did several, particularly when we made acquisitions, we needed to
to cash out the
the investors in those businesses sometimes like with Fresh Fields
we needed to do another public offering in order to just cash out the
They're they're a venture capitalist as well.
So um
Yeah, so venture capitalist
They're
Can be important in a business.
And
It's just I always tell young entrepreneurs a couple of things.
One is they're gonna tell you to to try to don't worry about your burn rate.
Just grow, grow, growth and I said.
That's not in your best interest.
They say that.
Because you they're the ones supplying the money.
And eventually if they need to, they'll do a cram down round.
and basically take it that's do it at a much lower price and you'll have an opportunity to invest.
But you've long and you've long exhausted your own funds to invest and you'll lose control of your business. I've seen m happen many, many, many times.
So I always just say know what your
When you're an entrepreneur and you need capital
you oftentimes aren't really thinking about the consequences of it are so I always try to warn other entrepreneurs
Look.
When you take the V Cs in, just know what you're doing.
They're not.
They're getting in your car. They're not there for the long ride with you.
They're there for their own agenda.
You can go together for a while.
But you need to be careful. That's just generally my message. The minute something happens there.
They're thinking already. They really are.
Mm-hmm.
Is there an optimal level of growth?
Mm.
You know, um I think there is, but it could vary from business to business. Uh
If you
Yeah.
If your business like Whole Foods was, which was a um
A retail business.
Where culture
is very important.
Uh
I found that once our growth got above a
Twenty twenty four percent.
Do you know what the you know the rule of seventy two?
Yeah. So for their listeners, the rule seventy two is
If you take your growth rate and divide it into seventy two
That's how quickly you will double.
So let's say you're growing your sales at twenty four percent a year.
Then twenty four into seventy two is three.
So in three years she'll actually double your sales.
Or if you're growing at eighteen percent, eighteen into seventy two is four. So every four years
You double your cells.
So
Um that's really we found
that when we began to grow faster than twenty four to twenty five percent.
that our culture would begin to get diluted.
And
It was we couldn't
Um
The culture can in
it it can incorporate a certain level of growth.
Before the culture itself.
begins to fray.
Too many new people are coming in.
They're not getting
indoctrinated or inculturated.
And uh
And our business would suffer when we grew that fast.
If you don't grow fast enough.
There's another downside if you're not growing fast enough.
then people will leave they won't want to stick with your company because they don't feel like they have
very many opportunities.
I don't I can't get advanced.
My my leader ahead of me is the same age as me and
She's not going anywhere.
But if you're opening up new stores, then you're opening up new opportunities.
And that really gets people excited because their own dreams get tied into the business. So there is an optimum level of growth.
And it's
Not too little.
that you lose people and not so high
that your culture gets diluted down and changes negatively.
So
Whole foods
That
sweet spot for us was between
About fifteen and twenty five percent.
But I see other businesses, particularly digital businesses, that can scale at enormous rates.
without cultural problems because it's they're doing it with so few people.
I think of it sort of as dividing the pie versus growing the pie. And the minute you stop growing the pie, people are focused on dividing it. That's true. And that causes a lot of internal politics in organizations. It does. And sharp elbows.
If you
One reason you gotta and another thing is if you keep focused on growth
Um
then people are busy
Not in fighting.
Because they've got enough work to do that they don't
Look around for
Something to
you know, occupy their
Their time.
You did over I think twenty acquisitions there. What have you learned?
What have you l and you only had one one that went bad, I think.
Yeah, and it was not and because it was uh
not retail stores. That was Amrion.
It was um
It was a mail order.
supplement company that we fought
We could use that to springboard into the dot com
Boom back in the late nineties.
And
The problem was the people that bought supplements
With a catalogue.
They were slow adopters to the Internet'cause they were mostly in their sixties, seventies and they never
So they didn't really make the adoption.
Uh so that was a mistake on our part.
That one failed.
What what did you learn about acquisitions that
I mean that batting average is just insane. But the thing about it is we were always all the other acquisitions were retail stores
If they had problems.
The team could know how to fix'em.
But we had nobody in our team that knew how to fix a mail order catalog that was slowly dying.
So I couldn't send my best guy, go fix that.
They didn't know what to do.
But if I sent my best guy to fix some stores we acquired and
In Detroit.
They could go fix'em.
So that I learned
It's stick to your knitting. Stick you know
Stick what you know how to do.
And also
If there are problems, you know how to fix them.
Some of the acquisitions you made, you had choices, uh and one of the early ones was what was the California chain misses Mrs. Gucci's. Mrs. Gucci's you weren't
You didn't have the capital at that point.
Well we were public.
And so we did have
our currency.
When when
My dad was objecting to that.
That merger.
He was saying.
John.
You have your hands full with bread and circus, which was still less than a year old.
you don't have the capacity to take on an on the opposite coast.
You're just you're gonna you can't handle it. It's you're gonna d dilute your talent down.
And he was right.
But as I kept pointing out, it's like
You're right.
But this opportunity's not gonna come again. This is the crown jewel natural food store chain
on the West Coast. If we don't take'em, somebody else is.
We'll have to figure out how to do it.
And we did.
And we did acquire'em and we did figure out how to do it, mostly by
leaving them alone. They were already we didn't have to integrate them.
They were Mrs. Gooch's.
They already had great management.
We pretty much just left them alone for the first few years and didn't try to
integrate'em into our into our company or culture. Just let'em operate independently. That was the solution.
And it worked.
It's a clever solution. I like the fact that, you know, often we're not ready for that next leap.
uh that next level we just finished you know, maybe we just finished the acquisition or something, but
It doesn't come up again, right? If you didn't buy that, you weren't gonna get another chance.
You have to s one of the secret to success in life in business
You have to seize the opportunities when they're there.
If you don't s these great opportunities only come around they don't come around every day.
And
He who you know, I he who hesitates lost.
If you're not willing to seize that opportunity, somebody else will
You have to
You have to know when to go all in. It's you know, when to make the bets.
I knew Mrs. They were very profitable, they had a great brand, very successful.
uh did not want to lose those guys. And plus
they were g if we didn't get'em s somebody else would and they would end up being this great competitor for us down the road.
Yeah.
We just had to make that deal.
We paid we paid a really rich price for it too.
You guys created a network, I think, early on of
sort of the operators of the whole food stores and and you would meet regularly.
when we invented the natural food supermarkets
that was co invented by a few different people in different parts of the country.
There hadn't been there were s small natural food stores, but there hadn't been these supermarkets, one stop shops.
And
the ones of us that were doing it, we've we connected with each other and we we developed friendships. We we get together three times a year
different a different operator would host.
And that's how I got to be friends with
The people running Mrs. Gooches, the people running Bread and Circus, the people running
Um
uh alfalfa's in Colorado and
Unicorn Village in Florida. We were all meeting together and we we were
We were all on this common mission.
We wanted to sell natural organic foods.
We're spreading it.
And um
We were helping each other out, sharing financial information. We really bonded well. It was a
It was a wonderful time because I felt like I was part of this larger movement.
And eventually whole foods ended up
Yeah.
All those entrepreneurs all are ultimately sold out to us.
So natural foods network ended up being this great
vehicle relationship building
that allowed those entrepreneurs to all cash out and make become millionaires and make a lot of money.
and gave Whole Foods what we needed which was
these various geographical platforms that we could use to expand and grow.
off of.
Uh one of the curious parts about this for me was you were so open about your books and and what you were doing.
It's you know, the best way to understand it was that we really did all feel like we were part of this movement that was gonna change the way America ate.
We were all
Very idealistic.
uh the original founders were.
And later on you get the venture capitalists coming in seeing this as a good opportunity, but
In the early days.
We were all um
Um
We were young and idealistic and uh
Uh
really thought the world would change the way it ate, and to a large extent it did.
I mean, the world's very different now that the natural foods organic movement came out, it's not the same as it was.
And Whole Foods had a big I think it

It changed the world.
Why do you think you were the one to be able to come out and buy all of those people versus the other operators?
I think
Uh
I think it was
Um
A lot of them
Just didn't have the they were like my friend Mark.
They w they liked being um
Uh my co founder Mark.
They just wanted to be a big wheel and their
Mark just would be happy just to be a big wheel with that one store.
And I think that's true of the other people. They they they were just happy to get the money and
They got local.
Notoriety and whatnot.
They didn't have the vision.
or desire really to build a a chain.
I just think I did.
I had that kind of drive.
I I wanted it to me it was like
This game's getting more and more fun.
Let's just keep
Let's just keep growing it and building it and
That's just
The way I was wired and I think the other people were wired a little bit differently.
Is there a difference between or actually I'll rephrase this.
Um
What's the difference between professional management and a founder led
company.
It's a huge difference. Um
Nobody ever loves their business as much as a founder does.
Uh
And I mean
I led Whole Foods for forty four years.
I will always like
It's like if you're a parent, your child grows up.
I raised that child as best I can. It's on its own now. I can't tell whole feeds what to do anymore.
And you just hope you put inculcated good values and that they have a happy life.
I will always love whole feeds. I will always wish the very best for Whole Feeds.
Even though not
in it any longer.
Uh and in fact I deliberately try to stay
Out of the loop.
because it bothers me when I hear things. So I just try to I just try to leave it alone and and do other things. But professional managers
They're not
I'm not saying they couldn't be, but in my experience they're very they're not usually mission driven.
They've gotten their
They're an MBA from Harvard or Wharton or Stanford.
They're very intelligent.
They work hard.
But
Working in whole foods
Or Amazon. It's just uh
It's just part of their career path.
They wanna put it on their resume and then they wanna use that to leverage to get the next promotion maybe at another company. It's a stepping stone. It's a stepping stone. Thank you. That's exactly correct.
And
I think
One of the things that hold food tied for so long is we did most of our promotions from within.
And so we built this very loyal
committed, mission driven business.
that um
was very unlike most of the other businesses I saw.
Um
And when we brought professionals in
We've spent a lot of time making sure they were good cultural fits.
At least in the early days.
And later on, um
As we got bigger
we be and more famous, we began to attract people
who really were looking at it as more of a career
Move.
Um
And not and they and we never could get them to buy in.
to the mission.
And
I think
What happens
after the founders leave and retire that
It's it's very difficult for a company to be anything but professional you led at that point, going after that.
That's one reason uh most companies don't last that long.
Um
You you start to build as professionalism builds
it begins to uh hire um
More professionals.
And
you you your bure bureaucracy begins to expand as well.
You get a bigger and bigger legal department.
A bigger and bigger HR department.
They have their own sort of
professional ethics, their own professional goals they want to accomplish.
But
It's hard to manage the cost now.
Because the professionals are
running their own little fiefdoms.
And
You either
You either say well every you have to do sort of what Amazon's done from time to time is like everybody has to do a ten percent cut.
Well, that's kinda arbitrary.
It it that hurts morale, but how else do you check your growing bureaucracy?
What the way capitalism deals with it is is that
These big comp these big corporations eventually just get sort of
Oh sclerotic.
And entrepreneurs come in and create these
very new businesses that are that are very nimble.
that are young that haven't built up a bureaucracy yet. I'm I'm having this
Time is building love life now and
I am determined.
You know, as long as I'm still running the company that we're not gonna build up a big bureaucracy.
Because
I mean
You just have to you have to hold it in check. I don't think I did as good a job at Whole Foods.
Of checking that bureaucracy once it got
Th then once the professionalism got in there, I had trouble, um
controlling it. I want to make sure it doesn't get a good fit hold into Love Life. How did that show up? Was that sort of through cost expansion or was it sort of
Uh
You hire people
to try to do something you un you're unable to do.
Or you know you're slight.
We need to hire somebody to work on that.
And then of course they can't do it by themselves, so they have to build a team.
And
What
What
not happening sort of like the federal government.
they add new government departments on but they don't never they don't sunset'em, they don't get read of them, they just add new ones on.
Well, corporations have more of a profit. They just can't
operate indefinitely building up a deficit the way the federal our federal government can do.
So there is the shareholder push to keep control of the cost to be
To be sure.
But
It's hard to do it.
Surgically.
You end up you know doing it.
You take these e everybody figure out how to cut your dewarpen five percent or ten percent or whatever.
Uh that also kills morale when you start doing layoffs.
So
Uh the better way is not to build it up in the first place.
And that just means being skilled at saying no.
No, we're not gonna do that. No.
And because there's always things that are nice to do.
And if you when you're profitable and you have the resources to do it,
You start to add things on.
But you don't go do a good job of sunsetting them or getting rid of them or just evaluating their cost effectiveness.
I think
The most successful businesses and the most successful entrepreneurs
Um
Spend a lot of time worrying about their cost.
And even when they're successful.
One of my mistakes, I think, in looking back was as we got more and more successful
I tended to just not say no enough.
Uh I still do it more than anybody else, but I was
It was easy to just say yes.
And uh figure you can you can grow your way out of it.
Talk to me a little bit more about the the focus aspect of this and and saying no and what you say no to because you you have an organization that you're running.
It's large, you're successful, you're making money, people are coming to you with these ideas, maybe great projections, maybe not.
And they just need a yes from you. And at that point you're disconnected from every you don't see the and you can't easily evaluate
Uh
Whether what they're proposing is going to be successful or not.
And
Generally when something is failing.
The people that
Um
are responsible for it, don't want to admit it's failing and what they do is that we need more resources.
I can make this work, but you need to give more resources.
So at some point you have to say no.

No early on.
Or
If you just want to
You just have to set very limited budgets for it.
And then not let those budgets increase.
Is it is a tenants for budgets to sort of grow automatically.
It is uh just um well we're gonna have a
You know, we're gonna have a seven percent increase in that budget.
And it's like
Well
Is that worth it?
Yeah.
We did this for years and it was my least favorite day of the year.
We would we would we would
uh we would bring the leaders
And
to talk about their budgets.
And
I hated that day because I was always the Grinch. I was always the one saying no.
Or we're we're gonna eliminate that.
And um
Probably we should have kept doing that. We stopped doing it and I uh eventually they said we don't need to do this anymore and because it was such a painful day for me
'Cause I ended up having to be the
The asshole.
I I guess I guess um
Yeah.
Every company needs
somebody that's uh
really m really watching the focusing, watch watching the cost. Sometimes that's chief financial officer.
But in general it needs to be kind of a
a cultural thing. Whole foods was not as good at that as we were at other things.
And uh
And I wasn't as good at that as I should have been.
There's a natural entropy to not only bureaucracy but expenses and
Just the scope of the work that you take on. It is. It's really it's it's it's something
That uh
Mm-hmm.
as a business grows that you have to be even more vigilant about it.
Because
So many things.
are happening that you can't even you can't even see'em anymore. Your your company's gotten
It's grown beyond your ability to actually understand everything that's going on in it.
And so you have to
you delegated that out and
You have to trust those leaders.
And so that's why companies end up getting managed a lot by their budgets.
And and
that you're determining where you're gonna expand give resources to and where you're gonna take resources away from. They all would make cases for why they need more resources.
But your function as the leader is to make the difficult decisions that
Well actually we're gonna stop funding that.
Or we're or
We'll ru let that run one more year, but you'll need to hit these objectives or we're gonna pull the plug on it.
So
Um
You know, I gotta say, exce'cause I identify as an entrepreneur, as Whole Foods got to be larger and larger, a lot of ways I enjoyed it less.
Because
The it's the creative part.
That's fun. And that's what I'm doing again with Love Life.
You know, putting deals together, thinking about
You know, this this whole health scene is changing rapidly. Who are you gonna partner with?
What are you gonna let go of?
What do we need to invest in?
Um
And it's it's
You know, I'm thinking about new ideas every day. It's it's that's
Very fun, but when you begin to manage a really big corporation
Ah, it's more about um
I don't I didn't get to be as creative any longer. It wasn't it wasn't my entrepreneurial spirit was sort of
Not
Um
nearly as as engaged as it was for the
And
That was only about the last.
Ten years or so.
Member.
forty four years a long time. So there was a nice long creative run.
And it it didn't like change overnight. It just slowly
As the bureaucracy got bigger.
As I was dealing more with problems rather than opportunities.
uh my enjoyment of the business began to shift.
Are there things that you said yes to that
A more professional manager wouldn't have said yes to I'm thinking
Things that don't make sense on a spreadsheet but make sense for the company.
That's the job of the entrepreneur is to see things of professionals.
it would not see where the professionals are making a more calculated decision on uh
Is this good for my career or not?
Or
If this succeeds, will it really help my career, but if it fails, will I end up getting fired?
Um
The entrepreneur
It's just gonna take a more of a
Let's try it.
Let's see what happens.
And if it works we'll give more money to if it doesn't work we'll we'll we'll discontinue it.
I w I've never had a problem
Uh.
It's always been pretty easy for me to uh
To try things.
Make mistakes.
And
Admit admit that it's a mistake and discontinue it.
It's like we tried that, it didn't work. It's okay.
I'm um
Professionals sometimes have trouble.
Letting go of that because
They worry that
This loss is gonna be a blemish on their resume.
An entrepreneur, I don't think quite thinks that way.
Throughout this you had I think four coup attempts at your leadership at various stages.
Talk to me about what that felt like and and how you dealt with the
You know, um
I use a good metaphor but it's all it's only for the people that know something about the Lord of the Rings. Fortunately the movies came out but I those books had a big influence on me when I was younger. I think I read those
the f the three books. Uh
five times before I got out of high school. It was kinda like my cult reading thing when I was a teenager.
And
Then of course the movies came out, I've seen them multiple times and
Um
In in the Lord of the Rings there's this one ring. It's the
Yeah.
the Amazon now has the rings of power show on and they're showing how these rings were made.
uh which is not actually in the Lord of the Rings, so it's really, really interesting stuff.
And
The one ring, the ring of power
It's a great metaphor.
Because
There are three things that I have found
are very corrupting for most people.
Not everyone.
But most people.
Could be corrupted by
Money.
Fame.
And power.

Is love

Give them love if they have enough of them. If you have enough money
Oh.
Power, fame.
But in fact those things do not satisfy the soul.
And most people can easily be corrupted and addicted by those things. If you have
Money.
You
y you start to compare yourself to people that have more money than you and you're dissatisfied.
Uh
If you have
Fame.
you have certain amount of Instagram followers or
Uh you
See who has more and you want more.
It doesn't really lead to happiness if you get more.
Um
And power. You see this with politicians. They
They want more power.
And
These things again do not satisfy the soul. So these are rings the ring of power is corrupting.
Well
In this case.
I'm the CEO.
Fight.
I'm I'm getting them
Most money.
or the most fame and the most power and other people's coveted those things. And they always felt like they could do a better job.
The coup attempts were always.
I think well intended.
Um
Or
Mm-hmm.
the people doing them thought they were well intended. They thought they really would do a better job than me.
And if I could just get out of the way then they would be able to wear the ring.
And I wasn't
gonna just get out of the way. So they did what they could to get me out of the way.
I think that's
Where the coups came from.
And uh
Um
I just think partly human nature.
As you acquired more wealth and power and fame as you guys grew, how did you stay so grounded?
Um
Well, of course, other people might tell you that they didn't think I stayed that grounded.
So
But I think I did stay pretty crowded and I think it's because um
You know, I have this whole background in philosophy and you know, my book is kinda about my own spiritual journey.
And
I got really clear at a pretty young age.
Like
back in my existential days, back when I was in my
Late twenties and then the psychedelics took it to another level.
I got really clear about death.
What I mean by that is that
Uh
We're all gonna die.
I got that at a very young age. Most people n
They're always in denial. There's a s big denial of death and
that when you're young it's like well that's what old people do, but I'm not old.
And then I got my whole life ahead of me and I and and they just put it out of their mind.
I was just aware that I only had so much time.
Uh that
What do I wanna so my big question is what do I wanna do?
With the time that I have.
And
So I always always had this um
Awareness.
The time.
Was running out.
And uh
That I needed to get on with stuff.
And so
The successes I had
It's like
I once heard that
Somebody asked Picasso what his famous his favorite painting was.
And he said, The one I'm working on right now.
And so
I never I don't think that stuff corrupted me because I didn't care about it.
to me it was creating the next thing. It was the next thing I was doing.
That was fulfilling me.
Yeah.
I didn't
think money or fame or power would really be s very satisfying. And they they weren't.
Um
I remember when I met Jeff Bezos for the first time
Oh.
We've we were
Mm-hmm.
It was it was
Well not my second time I met him'cause I'd met him at this conference and we'd hit it off, but when we were going up there to talk about maybe Amazon buying whole foods.
Um
J you know, we were meeting, which is next to his his mansion on
Like Washington and
And but when w they wouldn't tell us where the meeting place was until
We landed.
And then they gave us an address. When we got there we were searched.
Our car was searched.
Because they were worried about somebody trying to kill Jeff.
And I was thinking to myself
I would never want to be so rich.
And so famous.
And so powerful.
That
I couldn't live a normal life that I didn't have any
Anonymity. That was like a real wake up call. It's like
I'm sure Jeff's one of the most envied people in the world, but
I would not want to have to live my life like that.
So
a little bit of fame, a little bit of money, a little bit of power to a certain point.
is gratifying the soul.
But pass.

you get diminishing returns. It's no longer
bringing you any kind of happiness. It's now a burden.
So
I w I got clear about death at a
Pretty young age.
And I just wanted to accomplish things.
And I didn't think my accomplishments were that big a deal.
Other people accomplishing stuff as well.
So I didn't spend a lot of time comparing myself to others. Either people that had less
Or had more.
I was too busy
creating the next painting.
'Cause that was what was fun. That was what is exciting.
That was where the joy and the love came and then the relationship for the people that you're doing it with.
That's the real satisfying part.
When did you realize that love was the center of everything?
I think I've had glimpses of it many times. I mean I talked about it
the first time I had that ego death and L S T that I had this
realization that we were all that was just the the one being that it was it was all founded on ultimately on
play and love and games.
And then when I did M D M A for the first time, Adam
Uh MDMA.
Excuse me, Molly.
Uh when it was legal back in nineteen eighty four, that just burst my heart open.
And I I I I wrote it down. I was like
Never forget this. There is nothing more important than love.
And of course you will forget it.
But once you had that deep
Connection to it.
You never quite forget it.
And then my spiritual path took me
you know, studying the Course of Miracles, doing breath work, doing meditation.
I I
wanted to go deeper into love. And so that's just sort of been a life
Um

Purpose life mission.
is to'cause I just
That's what makes life worthwhile.
Everybody
That gets to the and they're on their deathbed.
If you imagine you're own you're on your deathbed.
Do you think you'll be w thinking
I wish I'd made more money.
I wish I'd been richer.
I wish I'd been more famous.
Wish I had more power.
No, you're gonna be thinking about
I wish I'd told my son how much I loved him.
I wish I hadn't let that relationship go.
I wish I hadn't said those things. Your regrets are always gonna be about relationships.
And the ways that love failed in your life.
I mean if that that's the clearest indication that love's the most important thing is because that's what happens when you're dying is you're looking back
And you're thinking about the people that you loved.
And didn't love well enough.
Uh
You're not thinking about the other shit.
You've let it go. And so
I've just been clear about that for a long time.
How do you learn to love yourself?
There's always like an inner critic right to love yourself unconditionally. Of course, I you know, you're you're asking great questions and you're also
leading me through the book pretty well. So
Um
In my case, my whole life in some ways has been
Yeah, it
attempt to be able to totally accept myself because I have and I think everybody has an internal critic. We now just have an internal critic.
That internal critic.
Is
Judging everybody else.
And then frequently judging ourselves.
is inadequate, not perfect.
And
In my case
in some ways the the the whole life adventure
And you get back into the deep thing about the way I was raised, my parents
My you know, um
I was kinda that raised where if I brought home a report card and had
All A's and one B, it was like, What are you gonna do about that B, son?
It's like there was no like that's really great.
Fantastic report card.
Um
And then

When I'd have failures.
You know, my own self judgments would be pretty intense.
So I think you come to love yourself.
And what I what I experienced when I finally did it.
And it was just a few years ago now.
Mm.
A little over two years ago.
On a on a guided spiritual journey.
I experienced uh I got really in touch with my
Mike my inner child.
Um this little boy
That was so very beautiful.
And so idealistic.
And so loving and just wanted to help people.
And um but it it it it been hurt.
Which we go through life.
We get wounded.
And the little boy had had many wounds.
And um
But his he's still this beautiful little boy and I saw him very clearly. I saw this
that child like it myself and I realized
That
My entire life I tried to do good and
I'd made a lot of mistakes, I'd hurt people.
But I knew that at the core
There was this good
person that really loved. And um
I saw that.
And that was the first time I
Really, I think unconditionally love myself.
That's really powerful.
Talk to me. Let's go back to the uh Amazon sale, but before we get there, let's rewind. So
Crisis hits.
Sales aren't what's expected.
Chana Partners, who's an optimist firm, comes in.
Walk me through from that moment to the meeting with Bezos.
So
Um
Whole foods.
You know it's it's
We weren't in people think we were like failing or in decline and that was not true.
Whole Foods was actually incredibly successful. We we had it
At the time the activist investors invested in whole foods. We had the highest sales per square foot of any public food retailer.
We'd had the same store s sales growth of
eight percent over thirty plus year period.
By every we we by almost every objective measurement, Wholefeeds was the most profitable food retailer, uh grocery store operator out there.
We had so many wonderful

But
competition was catching up with us. We were being
copied the whole paycheck narrative. The media just ran wild with that.
Um and
we were increasingly being tacked by governments. I talked to in the book about how we had a
Uh that first California and then in New York.
Um
A tactus for
Mispricing.
And which
We weren't deliberately mispricing anything and we were hav making
More mistakes in favor of the customers than others, but it's just on the
Things like cut fruit, if you have a little tear weight and you could be off a penny or two.
But if you have an ambitious um

Department of Consumer Affairs
It's a it's kind of an extortion thing. And that's what happened to us both California and New York.
generating massively negative publicity.
That drove our sales down. We lost a lot of customers from that when it happened in New York.
Um
And then
What we needed to do was we needed to be able to drop our prices.
uh across the whole company.
But
We began to start hap that happening. We got
We got attacked by activists.
activist are
Shareholder activist.
We've been attacked by lots of other activists over the years, uh fr from animal rights activists to
variety of different kinds of activists. But
Uh these were particularly shareholder activists. They
Don't think the business is being managed.
To
Maximize shareholder value.
And so
This particular group of activists was Jana Partners.
And
They
Um
We met with them soon after they took a position
and to find out what, you know, if we could work together to try to create more value for the shareholders and
They had this PowerPoint presentation and they they showed it to me in my
leadership team and a couple of my directors and
Yeah, it did
There were some things in it that were were accurate and there were a lot of things that were not accurate.
I asked him, Could I get a copy of that?
uh presentation that you're making'cause I like to address some of these concerns. I don't think everything you put in there is accurate. I like to correct the
Record he says no.
I can't have it.
And I said, Well, why not? And he says, Well, we don't want to.
Listen, John.
Let me just tell you what's gonna happen here. I was cut to the chase.
We're gonna take over whole foods.
Here's how we're gonna do it.
We're gonna take over your board first.
After we do that.
We're gonna fire you.
And any other management people that won't line up with us.
And then we're gonna put this up for bid and sell it to the highest bidder.
And there's not an F and thing you can do about it.
And walked out of the room.
But
Whoa.
I don't think we're gonna have a partnership with these guys.
And
You know, we had our bankers, we had our lawyers, and we
we began to look around for what I would call the win win win solution.
How do we get a win for every one of our stakeholders? How can we do something that will be best for our customers?
Best for our team members, best for our suppliers, best for our investors, best for the communities that we're part of.
I c started asking that question. I was putting that question, you might say, out to my
To the universe, out to my soul.
Give me an answer for this question.
And
Yeah.
We looked at all the different alternatives.
The the off obvious one is we'll fight Jana.
All my competitive instincts were, you know, and we're beat those guys.
And so that's that was the first thing but we needed time to do that. We we know it we needed to reverse our
Our our same store sales uh
Uh

We needed to have a chance to ch change our prices, but
If you're selling something for a dollar
And now you're selling it for ninety cents in the short run.
In the wrong long run, that's a good decision probably.
But in the short run.
You just your sales just dropped from a dollar to ninety cents.
Your same store sales just went negative.
Your uh your profits
There's a lag period, your profits are gonna are are gonna fall.
And then maybe a couple of years from now
Uh
when people become aware that you have these lower prices, you'll see your traffic go up and it'll end up being a really good business decision.
We needed that time.
Jana wasn't gonna give it to us.
So fighting them.
was going to be very difficult.
And they knew that.
Uh
Secondly, we could we could um
We could find a a sympathetic investor, somebody who would
wouldn't buy us and give us the time we needed to turn the business around, drop the prices and not worry. We'd be off the public markets and
And the logic one, there are people that do that. Warren Buffett's like the best example. And we actually contacted
Warren and ask him if he'd be interested in
He has a good sense of humor, he said that. Um
Ah, you know, I own Barry Queen.
I don't think Holy's a good brand fit for me.
Um
And so
Nothing came of that.
And then it was maybe we could take it private. Am I going private?
would mean we'd you'd work with a private equity firm or two.
And they
They would do it's a kind of a two step process where they
They would they would put up some money and they'd borrow money from the rest of the money they needed from
A consortium of investment banks.
And then
after they get control of the company
The second step is
they would pay back that bridge loan they got from the investment banks.
And they would borrow longer term money.
using the company's own balance sheet to finance
Alone.
Which means they would borrow say they
Whole foods are sold to Am Amazon for thirteen point seven billion, so it's Tucker private for the same amount. They put in about a billion
And they'd borrow twelve point seven billion.
And so Whole Foods would be on the hook for the interest rates.
Of that.
Now, we had really good cash flow. We were very we had EBIT dollars very high.

One point three billion dollars in Aba Dow when Janabartis.
So it's
Again, I did the whole food was failing in some way. That that's just a
Medium myth.
And
Um
So we could have serviced the debt.
Provided that two thousand eight didn't happen again.
Right.
In two thousand and eight
Okay.
The what they call it, the
The plug went out at the top.
And uh
We saw the the whole economy shrink.
our whole foods market stock dropped ninety percent.
We were selling it three times our cash flow. We could have bought our company and paid for it.
in three years with our own with our own cash flow.
And so if a situation like that occurred again.
We would have failed.
And and uh so I uh the going private option was
was one we seriously looked at.
But then the private equity firms would have control of the business. Remember
I wanted to get those venture capitalist hitchhikers out of the cars.
Now
I'm taking them into the car, but they're definitely driving the car.
They're n you're not in control any longer. They're in control. And they're their agendas are very different.
And I just thought it was very risky. You're risking the business. And if if it works
They can make
Well, they can make billions of dollars. That's why they'd be interested in going private.
Um
And so I couldn't find the right solution.
And then I kept but I kept asking the question again and again and again, what's the win win win solution for all the stakeholders?
And then
One day
I woke up
Right when I woke up.
The idea flashed in my mind.
What about Amazon?
That was the question. What about Amazon? And I'd met Jeff the year before
At this Microsoft CEO summit.
And I hit it off with Jeff. We we did a panel together.
Um
And
He he was very interested in whole foods. We talked about whole foods a lot.
He also was interested in science fiction and fantasy and we've read a lot of the same books.
Like the Lord of the Rings.
And
He was into scuba diving and I've been
Yeah, scuba diving a long time and diving over all over the world.
So we hit it off. We we had a good rapport.
So then he said in fact let John let's this has been a great conversation, let's get together sometime and let's talk further.
And I said, Well
You got my number.
But I didn't hear from him.
So
But here it is, and I'm thinking, What about Amazon?
'Cause I knew they were getting I'd read that they were getting more and more interested in the food retailing.
I knew that Amazon Fresh was kind of struggling as a business.
But they hadn't opened up any physical stores yet.
And so
I said, Well let's let's find out.
And
We called them up and they wanted to talk and
We flew into
Uh Seattle.
And I had three executives with me and Jeff had three with him and
Uh we had kind of like
You know when you
When you fall in love with somebody
you'll have this amazing conversation where you where your souls kind of meet.
That happened on that conversation with Amazon that day. We talked about all the things we could do together and we got really excited.
Um
About the technology.
And and they told us about their they wanted to be they really wanted to be big in grocery and they thought Wholefish could help them.
And uh
Also I like the Amazon team. They weren't

professional financial types like I thought I was that I thought they probably were. They were really good guys, super smart.
You know, Jeff's really brilliant man himself and he hired really brilliant people to work with him.
Yeah, but they were
Kind of regular people.
They weren't they weren't uh stuffed shirts. They were really interesting guys with diverse diverse and clever minds like Jeff.
So I remember our team retreated after we talked for about three hours and our team went to a restaurant to kinda process
They were kind of looking around at each other saying, That was an incredible conversation.
Wow.
Man, those guys are smart. I think we could do some amazing stuff together.
And then we're looking around and I I voiced it for the whole group. I said
Maybe so, but do you think they liked us too?
And it turned out they did because they
They came down just three days later.
And
Six weeks after that first meeting.
We had signed an agreement to get married.
To merge.
And um
Yeah.
What kind of questions did the the Amazon team ask at that meeting of you guys?
Everything.
The thing I liked about Amazon was how good their questions were. You can oftentimes tell about somebody's intelligence by how good the questions they're asking. By the way, you're asking me great questions. And uh
Um
They really were asking great questions and uh and and then that would lead to
answers I'm you know, I'm very candid, so I was answering very truthfully to their questions unless I thought it would harm harm her business in some way.
And then but they were they we'd ask them questions and they would be equally forthcoming.
So it was um
A very, very good dialogue.
Uh
Just they wanted to understand our business.
They know and they
They were asking the right questions to how to understand it.
Why why are your same sort of sales
Uh going down. And then you could explain about competition and I could explain about well
We know we can get it back, but we need to drop prices.
So
Let me let me just tell you, so that when the deal got went through
When I remember I was asking that question, what's the win win win solution for all of our stakeholders? The Amazon merger
Every one of our stakeholders benefited from that merger.
We really did drop our prices. We dropped our prices
four times significantly in the first two years of that merger.
I hardly ever hear the whole paycheck narrative any longer.

But I don't hear that narrative any longer because we're far more competitive price wise than we used to be.
It cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars to invest that.
But
They think long term.
They
Jeff and his team thinking
Ten, fifteen, twenty years into the future.
They're willing to make that investment.
They raised they raised our wages.
And every one of our hourly people.
Amazon decided we're going to f this was back in two thousand seventeen.
Within thirty days of the merger they they said we're gonna raise
the minimum starting wage at fifteen bucks.
So that meant everybody got a r got a raise because the people there were
That it were at
fifteen twenty five and
You know there
The gap.
They they couldn't stay at fifteen twenty five, they needed to go up too. So pretty much every hourly person got a raise.
It was
Good for our suppliers.
They not only the Amazon not cutting the more suppliers out.
But they studied our sales.
And they saw wow.
They picked up a ton of our suppliers.
And so they they
Uh that was good for them.
Um
It was good for our investors, right? They got about a thirty percent premium on the deal from what the stock had been.
before Jana got involved.
And then
Um
It was good for our government. They got a massive amount of capital gains taxes from from
From the deal?
uh and good for our communities that we're part of because Amazon did not change our philanthropic
Uh that we had Whole Free Foundations, not only did Amazon not tell us we had to stop doing those, they contributed
additional monies to it.
So every one of our stakeholders was a winner in that.
It doesn't mean that
That merger's been perfect. There's been a lot of things uh
I talk a little bit about it in the book and stuff off the record I won't talk about here, but I had my share of disagreements with Amazon. I
I fought with them many times.
And uh ultimately that led to me to two to retire.
What do you think of activist shareholders
having been a public company CEO
And founder at that.
Yeah.
It's like um
I'm on
Opposed to
To
shareholder activist trying to help, you know, help companies in constructive ways to become more successful and profitable.
But
I think it's a flaw in the current

Because we treat short term shareholders with the same type of respect that you treat long term shareholders.
I think that long term shareholders
that are really making long term bets on the business and lets the
team execute over the long term, that's really what you need. When you have short term people that are
that are just trying to make a a a pop to the sh to the stock price in a short period of time.
Which are what shareholder actors are trying to do, get a sale.
Um
I don't think that's good for the economy.
Um
And there's a s there's pretty simple solutions to it.
You we need to make a distinction in tax policy. Right now
A short term capital gain is anything less than one year.
What I'd love to see is that
If you held something for
Say.
Ten years.
Maybe your taxes.
Yeah, capital gains taxes went down to close to zero.
And if you sold it in less than a year, maybe they'd be much higher, maybe it'd be fifty or sixty percent.
So that you create these incentives.
To hold longer.
And that would
make a shareholder activist at least have to hold a stock for
a couple of years so they
They'd have less than a lot of the three.
Lower games.
They need to make
Need to be
No.
And
The individual shareholders
Um
are oftentimes taxed on those situations.
and then management is not thinking about taxation at all in those decisions.
So it's almost as if
They should be tax first.
And then the distribution shouldn't be taxed at all.
That would be another solution. I think there's many ways that you can make changes in regulations and laws that would
Make shareholder activi constructive.
And a good thing for business.
rather than what it is today to be seen just they're kinda pirates.
Um
So
I do think that c it's reform could be possible there. A lot of
Founders today seem to be going dual class shares.
Uh where they either retain a super voting share or they issue non voting share.
Love life has
uh that in our structure there. That didn't really exist when Whole Foods got founded back in nineteen seventy eight, but
No, we have two classes of shares.
I I've I've learned that lesson.
Talk to me about sort of the clashing worldviews, I guess, between socialism and capitalism and how you how you think about these things.
That's a much longer topic, so
Um
You wanna dive into it? Sure, let's go.
Well
First, I'm like a
I'm a totally enthusiastic capitalist.
And
And meaning
I'm I'm not
I'm not seen as um
unbiased in this when people talk to me about it because
I know my history.
I know what the world was like two hundred years ago.
As capitalis got started in the late
eighteenth century. So the last two hundred and fifty years. But just two hundred years ago
These statistics tell you all you need to know.
Two hundred years ago, ninety four percent of everyone alive on the planet lived on less than two dollars a day.
In today's dollars.
Eighty five percent.
Live on less than one dollar a day.
The average live span was a thirty.
Oh, by the way, so let's give it to today.
the um only six percent of the world's population lives on on less than uh
Two dollars a day.
It's gone from
Uh
Ninety four percent to six percent in the last two hundred and fifty years.
Um
the average life span.
Two hundred years ago was thirty.
Now
It's across the planet, it's getting closer to eighty.
going from it's about seventy seven, se s I think it's seventy six for men and seventy eight for women across the whole planet, from thirty.
Um illiteracy rates two hundred years ago, eighty eight percent of the people alive couldn't read.
Now
It's under ten percent.
And
childbirth, I mean child de deaths and child deaths, children dying before they're age of ten.
Um uh
Yeah.
the type of advancements we've made in vaccines.
in antibiotics.
Modern dentistry.
Uh
The m amazing innovations that we have today.
and music and it's it's the world is so much better than it was.
The people that complain about the world being a disaster
Don't put it in historical context. Do we have problems today? Sure we do.
Course we do. We always will have problems, by the way.
But these are different problems than we had.
When people talk about
existential threat of climate you know see
The existential threats
are far less today than they were two hundred years ago.
Um
And it's been capitalism. Science plus capitalism has allowed humanity
to
Prosper.
Collectively.
So much we're so much better off. It's it's
Not Utopia.
It's not perfect.
And that's why socialism
still holds such an attraction, particularly for young people.
is they're they're born and they see
They don't see racism.
The way I see it.
In the context of what it was like.
In the United States two hundred years ago.
Or a hundred and seventy years ago, or even when I was a little boy growing up in Houston, Texas, and they had Jim Crow laws.
They had racial segregation was legal.
There's so much less racism today than there was.
And any time, in fact, we're the le least racist we've ever been.
Um
They're
There's always gonna be inequality.
But
There's no more inequality today than there was at the founding of our republic.
Uh
And that just
people change in terms of where they are in that hierarchy.
But um there's always gonna be inequalities.
It's'cause there's different
There's inequalities.
Due to
People certain
Constitutional abilities, intelligence
Way their parents.
tr uh raise them.
the communities that are born in, there's just lots of reasons why
uh people become more s some people become more successful than others.
My point is.
Socialism is a utopian dream.
It's failed.
It's a God that failed.
We
There
Forty one countries in the last
Hundred and twenty years.
Hunter.
Yeah, with starting with the Russia hundred nineteen seventeen or nineteen eighteen.
that have tried socialism.
Every one of them has failed. All forty one have failed.
Socialism has never worked.
And
When people talk about what about the Nordic countries? It's like
They're not socialistic.
If you look at the economic freedom index, which
Which
Charts.
How economically free a country is.
All the Nordic countries
are in the top twenty five in the entire world.
And
Three of those five are ahead of the United States in economic freedom.
Well what about Sweden?
It's like well Freedom's Sweden's my favorite example.
Because
When I talk about when you talk about Sweden, it's like okay, well let's look at what Sweden does.
Did they lock down during COVID?
They didn't.
No, they didn't. They stayed open.
And they said that they already said that was a disaster, but now if you look at deaths
for Sweden over the last four years from Covid.
They were pretty good.
compared to much better than the United States, for example.
Um a per capita basis for everybody. Yes, per capita basis.
much lower population there.
Um Sweden's economic freedom index is lower than the United States. There I think the United States is now up to about like number eighteen, Sweden's like number.
Fifteen or sixteen.
Um, corporate tax rates in Sweden are like twenty percent.
I was
tell people s like so would you favor corporate tax rates dropping in the United States down to twenty percent? Well no.
Um
School choice.
Sweden has
Universal school choice. Students can go to any school they want to.
The students make the choices. The parents and the students make the choices.
school school choice is bitterly fought against the United States by the by the
Well,
the progressives and the teachers unions.
Sweden's
It's a very progressive country that's
That's universalized school choice.
Um
Sweden has um
Amazing um
Oh.
freedoms in other areas and and
They're they're so far from a socialistic
It's just they have a uh I have a big social welfare program with their health care.
And
But they're also
That's kinda the ideal though, isn't it?
If you wanna use Sweeten as an example, you gotta take the whole shoot and match.
I would take the Swedish if you gave me everything Sweden has
But they don't want to take the low corporate taxes. They don't want to take the universal um
Uh uh health care. Healthcare.
They don't they don't wanna take all the things of Sweden. They don't they they wanna lock down the economy and they don't wanna take all of Sweden. They just wanna
Cherry Pickett.
But if you took it all, I'd probably I'd be because what the trade off is you're gonna have those big social welfare programs that Sweden has and you're gonna have higher personal income taxes.
But you're gonna have lower corporate income taxes and you're gonna have more economic freedom.
I'd probably take the Swedish package if you could ought but you'd have to give me the whole thing.
When people don't see it that way.
W why do you think we're still
we as a society, not we as individuals are drawn to it still. I mean, there's talk about price caps, there's all of this stuff, and it seems to be
This time is different. We're smarter than all the other forty one times it's been tried and failed.
It's very di in a in a in a
In a capitalistic society
uh where you have economic freedom and free markets.
No one's actually running.
Thanks.
markets are self adapting and correcting.
Many people are very uncomfortable with that idea. They think somebody has to be in control of it all.
And so
They're
that are willing to give up their economic and personal freedoms
for the security of thinking somebody's in control.
Someone's doing it.
Um
And
They believe that
Despite all the other failures, which by the way they're not aware of.
And
They just can rationalize those failures away, well that was Stalin or that was Mao, or that was Castro.
Or that was Hugo Chavez, these were dictators. If you know, we just gotta get the right people in. If we get the right people in running things.
It'll be different this time.
What they don't understand is the right people never get in.
Because the people that are
most drawn to power.
And control of others.
The monsters.
They eventually eliminate all the well meaning professors and

And the and the dictators end up in power and in in charge.
And you lose your economic freedom and you end up these totalitarian nightmares.
It started well intentioned.
With good intentions.
But when you s take away individual freedom you
By d almost by definition, socialism does cannot allow economic freedom. You can't allow individuals to make these decisions. People have to do what they're told.
And you end up h using coercion and force.
To try to make the utopia work.
It's very interesting.
If you study like
Take the kibbutz.
in Israel, which was such a well intentioned socialistic movement, and the people that founded it were socialist.
And
It's what happens.
the the first generation was so idealistic and made all these sacrifices for the Kabuch.
Second generation.
If they're not quite as much into it, they're more they they wanna have more private possessions. They're not willing they don't want their children raised by the collective. They wanna raise their children themselves.
They want to have their own possessions.
So you might say that individualism starts to creep back in.
And by the third generation, they don't even want to stay in the kibbutz. They wanna get the hell out into the rest of the world. They the world's a big place, lots of opportunities.
So
Those ideals ultimately
are not what most people want.
And so socialism is bound to fail.
It's instr it it will always fail. It'll never succeed.
It's a dream that doesn't work.
It always turns into a nightmare.
But every generation is born
has to be there the young are always idealist. I was a socialist when I was young. I ha before I started my own business. You know, surely we can create a utopia together. It'll be different this time.
But human nature is not changing.
And
Your ideals are I memory.
Safer way was
an idealistic thing and it's like I had to meet the market where I found it, not where I wanted it to be.
Um
I j I just think that um
It's always going to be this
You can always describe it as
in these perfect terms, capitalism is always compared against
It's failures.
And it and socialism is always compared to its ideals.
And that's that's not a fair comparison. You have to compare reality against reality.
Or ideals against ideals.
Because capitalism has noble ideals as well.
They and and so
If you just have complete laissez faire capitalism
You end up with the mafia.
You have to have somebody that keeps
the the violent people from beating up the ones who are their competitors.
So there is no
perfect solution to
We have to muddle along with freedom and some regulations and do the best that we can.
But it's gonna be
Capitalism is really it's never been done before. Humanit the
Economic freedom has always been under the thumb.
Of other people throughout all history until
The late
eighteenth century when freedom broke through
And this great upward lift of prosperity. The genie got out of the bottom.
And they've been trying to cr intellectuals and people have been trying to cram that genie back in the bottle ever since.
They haven't been able to do it yet, but if they ever do, then we're gonna s see progress come screeching to a halt and begin to go in reverse.
Well, I think we already have in some countries where the they've gone
more socialist than
Well whenever they go socialist, um they start like
Venezuela is a great example of what
They're one of the richest co was the richest country in South America before they before Chavez got in there and and they had the richest oil reserves.
And they completely screwed it all up.
Yeah, which pretty much is always what happens.
How did you land on the win win win philosophy? Is there like a moment or example where you started to think that way, or did you always think that way? No, I did not always think that way. Um
It's
We I think we're trained to think in terms of win lose.
I mien think about almost every game, every sport.
There's a winner and there's a loser.
We're taught it in the way what reason people don't understand that about capitalism, by the way, so that I can tie this back into it is
Capitalism is a win win win win game.
It's good for all the participants. The people customers don't have to trade with the business. If they don't like the prices or the service or the selection.
They can go down the you don't like Whole Foods you can go down to Trader Joe's and down alternatives.
If you um
Uh
If you don't like working.
For whole foods? You don't have to.
There's plenty of other peop places you can go work at. So hopefully it has to do a good job.
Or people won't stay working there.
Uh, if you don't do a good job with your customers, they'll trade somewhere else.
Um
If you don't do a good job with your suppliers, they don't have to trade with you. They can they they can they can cut you off. They don't have to be business in business with you any longer.
Um
Same way with your investors. If your public like Whole Foods was publicly traded, we could sell your stock if you don't like it.
So
You have all of these
stakeholders and the business has to be managing
to create a win for the customers, a win for the employees, a win for the suppliers, and the win for the investors, and win for the communities that you're part of. That's when I began to realize
the importance of win win win was to stakeholder philosophy.
But I'll take it one further.
Once you really can internalize win win win in your life and that's how you try to live, you're always looking with every person you interact, you're looking for a win win win. Good for you.
Good for me.
Good for all of us.
It really becomes an ethical system.
It's pr you pretty much can just only you can
You can resolve any ethical question by always going back, What's the win win win here? How do we all win?
It solves almost all ethical questions.
It's kind of a
An ethical code in and of itself.
I love that philosophy. It's also the only one that endures across time'cause we all know what it's like to be on a losing end of a relationship or feel like we're losing.
You know, it's true and
Think about it. Um
When you're with somebody who's always looking out
For you? Who's looking for a win for you too?
You you trust them.
You your relationship deepens and and with trust
There's so many more things you can do together.
So
part of the win win win is is knitting people together. But you have to there are people that don't think win win win. It's it's almost like you've got to be asking the question, is the person I'm dealing with
Are they looking for a win for me too?
Or they just looking to see how much they can get from me.
So you
You need to have the attitude of win win win.
But you also have to be conscious of people that
are working from a different framework.
Who might try to exploit you.
And you need to be more cautious around them. But once you know you're dealing with somebody else
Who's operating from a similar similar framework.
Man, oh man. There's almost nothing you can't do together.
And the interesting thing is like whole foods wouldn't exist today without your your suppliers back after the flood thinking in a win win way where they extended you more inventory.
It's true. And it wasn't altruism on their part.
It's
We had been a very successful business and they felt confident once we got back on our feet we'd be able to pay'em back.
But still they had to take a at least a little bit of a
uh a leap of faith to do it. Well that's kind of win win in action. It is in a moment of crisis, you're going out of your way to make sure that your partner that you want to have a long term relationship with
Not only survives, but th

Exactly correct.
Can we talk about Deborah for a second?
Sure.
Well one of the most interesting parts of the book for me was uh your your first date with Deborah and how it didn't go well, and then
You you sort of mentioned this letter you wrote to her after. What did you say in that letter?
'Cause you totally changed her mind about it. Yeah.
Well in that letter.
Um
I just kind of
Kinda like I've done in this podcast.
I just opened myself up and I just said
Here's
I don't know exactly what I did wrong, but I knew I did something wrong.
But here's who I am.
I got I really like you, here's who I think you are.
Uh
I I realize that I kinda blew the state, but
It's okay. Even having one date with you is very special.
And I I think you're a very special person. I think you're gonna I wish for you the very best. I I I hope you have a wonderful life. This was before email.
I I r stayed up all night writing this letter and polishing it and then rewriting it and and then I stuck it under her door about five AM.
I mean
I had that very faint hope.
That it wh I was it was a Hail Mary pass.
You know, I was I did think I was gonna get a second day, but maybe if she really liked this letter, maybe she'd give me a chance. So I was motivated. I was looking for a win win there.
And uh it worked because she did like the letter.
She called me up.
And said
I wasn't going out with you again.
But anybody that could write that good of a letter
It's worth a second date.
So
Second date went better and
She likes to say by the third day she knew we were getting married.
So
That's incredible. Thirty four years thirty four over thirty four years ago now.
Especially uh you know, I sort of read that story. I wanted to know what was in the letter, but then I sort of map it to dating today, which is
Yeah, you have a date, maybe it goes okay.
Just okay.
Or less than okay in your case, you know, she wasn't gonna give you another date, but you instantly go home, you flip open this app, and all of a sudden there's like fifteen people
volume for your attention and you feel good about that. Whereas
This never would have happened back then, I don't think.
You know, I never thought about it. You're possibly right. My ego was hurt.
And if I had other women that were ready to go out with me, I might have said, Well, you know, that's her loss.
Um
Well she might have done the same, right? She might have done the same. More likely she would have. But you know, that was a blind date.
And uh
It was hard it was harder to meet people.
Back in the day.
have an app and and uh
Uh.
I thought I was being very clever at the time. I I asked my married friends if they were single, is there anybody they'd like to be going out with?
Because I wasn't gonna get any tips from my single friends.
And so fortunately I had a friend that um
was married and he owned an art gallery and and Deborah was a customer and he so he got to meet her that way. And so I think you're gonna really like this woman. She's
You know, she's really she's beautiful, she's smart.
She's really sweet.
girl next door type that you like. And uh
Yeah, she was like my
Yeah, she's my soulmate.
That's amazing.
Wanna come back to business a little bit, but we'll we'll sort of like cover
A lot more different topics. But what do you think of business bonding?
Business planning. Yeah.
Uh
I have mixed feelings about it. I think that uh
It's a useful tool.
But you need to always r remember it's a tool.
And it's a useful tool because it's it's good to think about your business when
You go when you're doing business planning, you're going into a different
frame of mind. You're going into what I call an analytical frame of mind.
Your your
You're gonna
You're gonna analyze where you're at and you're gonna and then you're gonna um
create a like a spreadsheet kind of projecting about the future and you're you're creating this plan around it.
That's all very useful to do. It's good to think about your business that way from time to time.
But the tool shouldn't become the master.
Some businesses become slaves to their business plan and it's like we're behind the plan now.
So what are we gonna do differently to get us back on plan? It's like
No.
Don't do something stupid.
Try to get yourself back on plan.
Because maybe your plan's wrong.
And so the tool is something to help you think about the business.
But it's the master if you start making b business decisions to hit some stupid plan that you may have changed the damn plan.
Um
Yeah.
Um, don't think I'll tell that story. It was a bu about Amazon. They were a real planning company and I had some problems with when they were over planning, but I don't think I'm gonna get into details about that one. No problem.
Uh what qualities do you think the most
successful entrepreneurs have.
I think
I think different entrepreneurs have different and then I think there's not one size that fits all.
But I'll talk about it in general terms. I think there's some a lot that have a lot of overlap. Well most entrepreneurs
are very creative.
You know, I think the average intellectual does not understand how creative entrepreneurs are.
or how um frequently intelligent they are because they're not maybe intelligent the way the intellectuals are.
Uh they're street smart.
They also see opportunities, they see connections.
Um
Entrepreneurs are very feature oriented. They oftentimes see the world
And the way the world could be.
They see possibilities when others see problems.
An entrepreneur oftentimes sees a problem
As
An opportunity to be solved. Wow.
And and they frequently do solve it.
So
Entrepreneurs also are um
They have to be very resilient.
Really you are gonna
It's just nature the beast.
There's trial and error, there's failure.
You're you're you're groping your way. You have an idea that that could be a very successful idea, but you don't exactly know how to put it into practice. And so
Also, entrepreneurs are quick to s see things that are working elsewhere and and and it's like
They can take ideas from one one context and add it to another.
That's something I happen to be really good at.
I see an idea here and it's like wow, we could apply this to love life or we could apply this to whole foods. That's a terrific idea. Let's make that work.
Um
There also um
Willing as I told said earlier, oftentimes entrepreneurs are willing to go and move forward.
And others are not.
They had others hesitate.
They're worried about their downside.
You know, I don't know if you've read have you read Elon Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson yet? I've read a most of it. Okay, I love that book um for a lot of different reasons.
But
You know, I know Elon a little bit, but um
I got to know him better in that book.
And
The thing that that just blew me away because I consider myself a guy who's willing
To move aggressively.
And uh
the to seize opportunities and take chances. But what he did again and again and again
Which you know.
It had never it always paid off for him.
He was always willing to get up there like a a person who'd want a bunch of chips in a poker game and he just put the whole pot. He'd put it all in.
He could have lost everything.
Multiple times.
It was like
That guy's either the most courageous, boldest entrepreneur I've ever seen, or he's a damn fool.
And you'd have to conclude now by his tremendous success and wealth
That he's just the most brilliant entrepreneur because
I mean
In the book it talk about
Some of his friends also I know like his brother Kimball or Luke No Sick, these guys came and helped bail him out when a couple of times when he was near you know, when he might have failed. So he had friends and he had loyal friends who would help him in those crisis situations. But his boldness, I mean, the way Starl I mean not Starlink, the way uh SpaceX got created
And he goes and visits the Russians and and um
to get missiles from'em and they he thinks you're trying to sell'em too expensive.
So we just decides, well, I'm gonna build my own rockets.
It's like
He figures out how much the materials are costing and he says
Well, we can do this for a lot cheaper than they can.
Um I can't just say it. Yeah, and he's able and he's able to attract
uh these amazing people to be on his team. That's an that's an by the way, that's something I haven't talked about in entrepreneurs, I'll say right now. Entrepreneurs generally have a lot of charisma.
They they they talked about Steve Jobs having I never met Steve. They talked about Steve having a reality distortion field.
And I think that's true of a lot of entrepreneurs. They're so passionate about their vision
that that creates a kind of charisma and it attracts people to them.
That wanna work with them.
I mean
I
People like
You know, of everything I've read people like like t like Elon or Steve
These guys can be really they can be very aggress they can be assholes at times.
But they are so passionate about what they're doing.
and they create sense sense of purpose
that they draw very talented people to want to be on their teams.
And they s and those people stay for a long time.
So
I do think

The ability to create a great team is an underrated skill.
that I oftentimes think entrepreneurs
I don't know if they consciously create them. I mean Steve Jobs used to say
That
He would only hire A listers.
Because he says if you hire B listers, B listers will hire C listers.
So he had these high standards of performance.
And he wouldn't sacrifice those high standards for what he wanted in his team and his people. And
You know, by all accounts
You know, Steve attracted just brilliant people to work with him.
Is there a difference between a talent collector and a team builder?
Great question. And and the answer is I never thought about it before, but yeah, absolutely, of course there is.
Um
Mm-hmm.
Sometimes those entrepreneurs that are driving forward
Not sometimes. Almost all the time. They have to have other people on their team.
Who correct
for their faults because their faults generally are very, very
Big I know for example, I'll take my own situation. Um
I was um
I was never very good at hiring.
And that's because
I think my people's weaknesses come out of their shrinks.
One of my strengths was I see people's potential.
I see what I see the very best in them.
And by the way, when you do that
people want to perform to a very high level of you.
Because they don't want to let you down.
And so I could see their potential.
And
But the downside, the shadow side of that, you might say is that
oftentimes didn't see their weaknesses that clearly.
So I've oftentimes needed people on the team
Like I particularly work really well with my chief financial officer Glenn Flanagan.
'Cause she always saw the downside in people.
And with you know, she could see the shadow.
when I was blind blind to it and she said, I don't think we should hire him. He's
You know, I know I he he
He's impressed you here'cause he's dazzled you, John. You think he's so unbrillian and whatnot, but
God, can you just see he's like kind of a slimy bot slime guy. I mean, I don't think we can trust this guy, I don't think he's gonna fit into our culture.
I found out the hard way.
That she was almost always right.
When I'd overrule her and make pick pick hire somebody anyway.
I'd always regret it.
So I finally learned to say, I trust her judgment in this more than I trust my own.
So I think a good entrepreneur, a good team builder

to build a team that uh complements their strengths.
and compensates for their weaknesses.
That's a different thing.
And just being able to collect talent.
Because
Um it's like a difference between like a good basketball team
is one that not just has a lot of talent, but it's a talent that can play well together.
Where they they're synergistic.
And the the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
You just have a lot of talented people who don't work well together.
And are are backbiting each other.
then they might be brilliant, but your team's probably gonna lose.
To what to what extent do you think that
the teams and the organization should be built around the founder.
versus putting the founder into a more typical structure.
Well,
I think
That that question sort of answers itself. The founder
founded the company. So you can't fit the founder in another structure or it wouldn't be the founder any longer. Where I was going with this is like the outside people are always like oh you need to bring in
a professional grocer. You need to bring in an MBA. You need to bring in
All these people from the outside and what do they want to do? I think they tend to be more structured, more organized.
That's the that's the that's the paradox. You do need creativity
But you also need structure. You need
You need generative people and you need structural people.
I for example.
very generative, I needed more structural people around me and also needed people to tell me when my ideas were full of shit.
And uh'cause sometimes they really were.
And I needed people that
Then I had it.
high enough trusting relationship with me and they trusted me enough
But they could come in and just say, John, this is not gonna work.
And here's the reasons why it's not gonna work. We can't figure out how to make it work.
Now, every once in a while I would say
I'll figure out how to make it work and go forward with it and figure it out.
But oftentimes it's like you know, you're right, I can't figure out how to make this work. We'll let it go. But uh but how did you get to a position where you could do that? Most people don't
allow their ego that
Oh, that's a good argument. You had really good points. I hadn't thought of that. I'm gonna change my mind.
One of the challenges that I think
Many entrepreneurs
Uh.
Every successful entrepreneur eventually faces and some don't rise to the occasion, and that is is that

Success can breed
Ego.
You know, expansion.
where you start thinking that you're some kind of universal genius.
I think in my case
I had so many failures.
I had my
If you get your face slammed in the ground a few times
A little humility.
I I've I've
Remember Safer Way was a failure for me.
And uh and we had to get into the first Whole Foods make it successful. Then we had a flood after nine months we were
We were we were bankrupt.
And then I started some new stores and my one of my founders quit because he said you're wrecking the company. You're these new stores are never gonna amount to anything. You're you're diluting down our gold mine with these uh
These mines don't have any gold in them.
So
I had and I and there are many other examples of
Times I had the I bought the Amrion, I pushed to do dot com. We can't let the internet opportunity escape us.
So you know what? I've had my series successes, but
I've had enough failures to recognize I am far from infallible in my judgment.
And to learn to trust people that I'm working with.
And make decisions collectively.
Almost
Only rarely did I go against my team. If they if they took a
universal stand, I would almost say that that the whole is smarter than me.
And just let it go.
And I think any good entrepreneur would
Well back down at times when
that people they love and trust are all telling them this is a mistake.
You gotta listen to it.
We all have blind spots. We all have blind spots.
What advice would you give to
Current
younger entrepreneurs or future entrepreneurs.
Mm.
That's a very open question. Do you want to try to get it? You wanna try to Well, I like the ambiguity of it actually. Okay, because I wanna see where your mind goes with it.
First of all, just in general, um
I get asked a r oh a similar question, slightly different. I get ask what would you what advice would you give a young person?
Entrepreneur or not.
And the advice I'd always give is
Follow your heart.
Life is shorter than you think it is.
It's too short.
to not be doing something that you really are passionate about that you're drawn to.
Don't do something because you're just trying to get safety and security.
He probably won't be happy.
As you as you as you get older, you might have to ch change
And when you get older. So
I I I always tell people, young people, what do you really care about?
What are you passionate about?
Go after that.
Follow I I I call it the hero's journey, or you know, I got that from uh
Joseph Campbell's
The hero's journey. But the hero's journey is
One where you feel
An inner
Calling an inner drive.
And you simply answer it.
You do it.
Even though it's scary.
And you go off on your adventure.
You don't know how it's gonna turn out.
So
Whole foods was my hero's journey.
I'm on a new one.
With Lovelace. I don't know how it's gonna turn. I could fail.
I mean based on probability it will fail because most things do fail. Most businesses do fail.
Uh
But that's the calling and I'm answering the call.
Answer the call. If you hear
That inner calling.
Don't
Hang up the phone.
Do it.
Go for it.
Life's a grand adventure.
Don't sell yourself short and try to play it safe.
Because
You won't be safe.
There's no safety, you're gonna die.
That's why I said, remember earlier on I said, I got clear about death.
I'm gonna die.
I'm gonna live my life as an adventure.
It's more fun that way.
I can't guarantee it'll prove it'll work out.
If it doesn't
I'll learn and grow and do better next time.
Talk to me about the new venture.
Well, Love Life is kind of a continuation of the my hero's
Journey call to
Try to help people be healthier.
First with natural and regaining foods and now with
With Love Life, it's uh
It's a holistic
membership club is really what it is. And it's it's it's got elements
It's it's
It's got a healthy restaurant. It's a it's a
Plant Ford Whole Foods restaurant.

Focused on people eating a lot more fruits and vegetables.
It's um
We've got a state of the art fitness center.
We have a uh uh
We have
All kinds of classes.
The
Spin classes, work out a huge health center.
So I'm just telling you the parts of it. So you've got a gym
We've got yoga, we've got Pilates.
We've got um we have a spa.
We have all the sh recovery.
equipment from hyperbaric oxygen chambers.

cryotherapy to red light therapy to infrared sonist, to regular sonist, to coal plunges.
Uh there's other other
lymphatic massage suits you can wear and
Micro currents that you can
Yeah, we got you know lots of different biohacks there.
Uh and then of course you have a spa with massage and
And facials and things that you would get at any
Kind of.
Not a medical spa, no Botox, but where you get it at
at a good spa, pretty much in the like in a resort setting.
Uh then we have um
Um
We have pickleball.
We have three p indoor pickleball courts because we think play is important and pickleball is a community builder.
People
Uh well since I started playing picker ball about three years ago, I've made at least fifty new friends.
that I hang out with because of pickable.
Um and then the medical center, which is the most important part.
And
Our medical
Our healthcare system is now really a disease management system.
And
It's not preventative.
It's not really dealing with
lifestyle diseases.
It's our medical system's good if you have an infectious disease.
It's good in terms of
Things like vaccinations.
Antibiotics.
surgery, first aid.
But the chronic diseases that kill people
Obesity, heart disease.
Type two diabetes.
Um
Uh autoimmune diseases, cancer.
They're not very good at that.

Prevent it or reverse it.
So Love Life aims to change that, to disrupt that paradigm.
Alright.
We think now with the testing protocols we have that you can get most people don't know how healthy they are. It starts with a good assessment so you can find out where you where you stand.
Um
And then
Once we had that then with the wearables, the data you can get from an aura ring.
Apple watch.
Garmin, there's so many different uh continuous glucose monitor.
We can begin to
Uh track people's
And then once you have good assessments and tracking
Then it's about
The doctor.
Works with you.

kind of a precision individualized plan for you.
Unique to yourself.
That allows you to become the healthiest version of yourself.
To be
More vital, more healthy, more alive, stronger immune system.
Uh
Um more energy.
uh positive attitude and also
Love life's working on people's emotional and spiritual health as well. Now not we're doing breath work.
We're doing meditation classes.
And when when psychedelic therapy is legal.
And uh and
California, like it is in Colorado and Oregon.
We'll be doing that under therapeutic sessions.
The whole idea to help
Every person that w becomes a member to become a
The very healthiest
physically, emotionally, and spiritually that they can be
And
If hopefully if people start young enough and work with us long enough.
that these chronic diseases I'll never get them. They're not they're not inevitable.
Um
We're all gonna die of something.
But we should live to be a hundred with
You know, without these chronic diseases wrecking our lives and be a sound mind and high vitality and the wisdom it'll be good for the planet because we'll have
Healthy.
Old wise people being greater percentage of the population.
You know, wise enough to try to keep us out of wars and
You know, all the stupid things that we do when we're when we're not as wise as we should be.
Talk to me a little bit about
I first actually let me rephrase that. I love what you're doing.
Uh, I wish you'd open one in my city.
Uh, I think that needs to exist in in every sort of center. Though the we hope to certainly we hope to open them in New York. Absolutely.
The diet.
Is the biggest bang for the buck here.
versus exercise versus everything else.
I actually feel like
First of all, I think the most important thing is attitude.
I mean a positive attitude.
A sense of purpose and meaning.
Mm-hmm.
It's like
The body as long as the body
feels like it has something it needs to do, it stay it wants to stay alive. It's like you can't dial me now. I got important work to do.
And s that's communicated through all the cells. It's like we're not done here yet.
Yeah.
So I think I think first of all the the the the mind and the attitude is most important for for health and longevity.
Um I know people that eat terrible diets.
That have very positive attitudes that are remarkably healthy.
even though they you know, they should be falling apart.
It's just that they're in Buffett.
Well no.
Warm Buff's a good example'cause he eats a terrible diet.
On the other hand, he's got a great positive attitude.
But he also doesn't take any toxins in other than his diet. He's not a smoker. He doesn't drink.
He actually he eats uh he he ha he does he's not taking a lot of the things that
that wreck our health sooner than
than necessary.
Uh but yes, I think Warren has an incredibly positive attitude and I think it's one of the reasons he's
Gonna probably load to be a hundred and
Still be trucking along.
Sharp as attack.
other than of course he missed out on that whole foods opportunity.
Um
Uh but the then I think diet though is very important. I mean I was a grocer, I do think
Um
the diet that people eat in America today isn't you know, I mean
The statistics tell you all. Seventy four percent of Americans are overweight, forty three percent are obese.
Um
We're dying from diseases like heart disease that are dietary
They're dietary diseases.
Um
Uh obesity
Auto a lot of the autoimmune diseases are also related to they're that's more complicated, but
Diet is a huge factor in terms of how strong our immune systems are.
So
And
You know, it it's
It's not that complicated.
People make it.
I mean I always tell people if you want to s if you try to get your information from the internet, you're gonna be confused. Well let's talk about this for a second, but before we do, what percentage of whole food sales at the time you left were actually whole foods?
I don't know the answer to that.
Quite.
Exam but I do know that I knew I knew what our produce I ca I really don't think I should reveal that those statistics because there's not public information.
I don't want
Whole foods unnecessarily mad at me, but but they were not as high
as they were when we started out.
The processed food industry incorporated our standards and made
processed foods that met whole food market standards.'Cause then we'd sell it.
But they were just meeting them, you might say.
Um
And when we first started they didn't we didn't have very many processed food. We didn't have
Junk that we could easily sell.
So we mostly sold produce and meat and
Bulk food. People cooked.
I will tell you one interesting statistic.
Our very first store.
Was
Over twenty percent of our sales are in the bulk foods department.
And we didn't have any candy back then. So it was just
Whole grains, whole fli whole grain flowers.
Beans.
Nuts, seeds, things like that. Whole foods.
And uh today it's under one percent.
Twenty percent to one percent.
So what is Whole Foods? I mean you've written a book on this, but what what does it mean for people listening? When I say whole food, I mean a food that's as close to its natural state as possible.
So it's been minimally processed.
So
And that would be like
Uh
Things I I listed, fresh f fruits and vegetables.
uh meat, seafood.
Those have been manipulated too, so you I think you want to try to get a
Um
uh animal foods that have you know not been that have been grass fed, for example, if you're beef or they're
There are not been um
Animals have not been put in.
feed lots have not been crowded together, that they have lived out their sort of natural animal lives.
So sort of natural um meat
Then you've got
You've got your
Your beans.
Your nuts, your seeds.
All your legumes.
Um
You're gonna have to do it.
Um
Uh.
Things that are produced.
with minimally processing. So you can cook food, for example.
But if you say take oil
oil or sugar. Those are not whole foods.
If you add oil
whether it be olive oil or seed oil, you're not getting a whole food. You're just getting
The pure fat of that.
Food.
And what is sugar? Sugar is taking a whole carbohydrate food
And stripping away the fiber and the germ until you're just left with pure carbohydrate.
The biggest challenge humans have with our diets
Is that
We evolved.
Our jeans
Preclude us.
Um
We evolved in scarcity. We evolved with
With starvation was our biggest problem. Not for just the last

Tens of thousands of years.
perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, there just wasn't enough food.
And so
We've evolved to crave calorie dense foods.
And it's in our genetic structure.
And we like foods that have a lot of protein.
Or have a lot of sugar.
Or have a lot of fat.
oil
Pure fat. Nothing but fat.
Sugar, nothing but carbohydrate.
uh high concentrations of
Protein.
Uh he people were always putting protein powders and things like that in their smoothies.
We crave calorie density. We also crave salt because
It was scarce.
as we evolved.
And so as a result
The food mi the food system today
It gives the market what it wants. It wants calorie density.
But it's killing us.
It's making us sick, it's making us obese.
We need to
People were always asking me as a plant based guy, Where do you get your protein?
It's like in every food I eat.
Protein's not scarce.
Where do you get your fiber?
'Cause you're not getting fiber from those processed foods. You're not getting it from the animal foods.
I mean something like ninety plus percent of Americans have less fiber than is optimal for their gut health. We now know the gut
is the first most important part of our immune system.
So
That's whole foods. Whole foods are
You know, it's the definition's a little bit fuzzy, so a little bit of processing's not too bad, but the more you do
the worse it tends to become. And now we eat
highly processed foods.
Not just three times a day, some people just eat and eat and eat all day long.
That's a really good way to look at it.
a scale. I uh I'm gonna get this wrong, but it came out from Brazil and it sort of did the one through four
In terms of processing for what food was. That's a good idea, actually.
Yeah, and then that'd be great to put on labels at grocery stores or even on the um shelves. Yeah. People could see this is a three, so it's better than a four, but
The ma the but you know what happens then is that
Those get gamed.
Uh in the sense that
the they've been tried there have been all kinds of rating systems that have tried to be applied.
But then the the the food manufacturing companies
Not only do they lobby
But the they are they're constantly trying to change those
rules so that their products look good.
Um it's more complicated than you think.
Get such.
We tried to do something at Whole Foods we did we actually did it. We call it
It's based on Joel Furman's work.
an aggregate nutritional density index. So we are looking for nutrient density in foods.
You can do it get it you can get those.
You can get how many vitamins and minerals and
And then the phytonutrients that food to have and we rake rated all our food.
We put up the ratings.
all around the store.
Okay.
Fresh.
Vegetables, particularly leafy greens, are by far the most nutrient dense food you can eat. Nutrients per calorie.
Yeah.
I mean it's not even close.
And then all the vegetables are way up there, then the fruits are under that.
Then you've got um
Then you've got beans under that, then you've got whole grains.
Um, then you got nuts and seeds, all the whole foods.
or much higher nutrient density.
Then you get into the animal foods.
This is what became controversial is that the animal foods on a per calorie basis
Have fewer nutrients.
This was very upsetting to people.
And they got angry, a people of team members got angry about it.
People that wanna eat a
a paleo diet were angry. The people that eat a carnivore diet.
Carnivore Diver angry.
because they really want they like their animal foods. They're calorie dense. There's a lot of calories in animal foods. They taste good.
And uh But you're not telling people what to eat. Why is more information getting people to kill the messenger, man? That's not that's not a new thing. They didn't like the message we were delivering. And
because people knew that I was a plant based guy, they thought
Mackie's trying to make everybody eat his diet.
And all we were trying to do is give out the information of nutrient density per calorie. It was important information.
But at the end of the day
My you know, I talked about how I I had caved in. My team was not they didn't
They didn't want to keep doing it.
What do you think would happen if a grocery store did that and they they sort of had like a color coding system, for example, which is like green, yellow, or red.
That's all they did, just on the shelf.
Uh beside the lot of red products on their shelves, and people would ask them, Why the hell are you selling all this red food?
Yeah.
And so
But if they took away the red food, then the people wouldn't go. What they would do is they dumb it down so that a lot of stuff that you think is red now would all of a sudden be green.
Uh.
It's like
Because most of the food that we're selling in supermarkets is not good for people.
If you start telling the truth.
two one or two things are gonna happen. People are gonna be either
Stop shopping at your store because all that store selling is red food. I'm gonna go to this other store
It doesn't put all this red it's the same food, but I I don't want to know. I'm not confronted with it.
Or
They will they will be forced to change the ratio mix so that the
Some of the red food now is
Perceived to be healthy.
Um so it's it's very difficult.
Yeah.
It's
You have to meet the market where you find it, you have to give the market what it wants.
And when you when the market if you feel judged by people
You don't want to do business there anymore.
So
The
the the people in Whole Foods Meat Departments were very unhappy that we they were not getting good Andy scores. So
They
They didn't think there was a good this was this is bullshit.
This is not a good system.
If you could wave a magic wand, I guess, and change a policy or maybe more than one policies, what would it do?
What would you do for the entire country?
Policies and where
Like in terms of health.
Like what w if you get
You can probably diet might be the best place to start, but like where what would you say?
What would you do?
How would you do this?
It's very it's very that's a very challenging question because
In general.
I don't
I think people need to these are adult people need to make their own decisions and I don't think you should be tell people they can't eat things. But can we nudge it?
Uh yes, but then I think you can nudge it.
Um
But then
When you start
Using power to try to change people's behavior.
How do you know that the people that take over the power will do it in a actually good way? We get it's like the s the good intentions of socialism
the bad elements take it over and the next thing you know
the healthy foods are being eliminated because the people in power
Have they it's been co opted. Uh with with that education wouldn't even work, right? Because if we educate people, then we're gonna co opt the education at some point and then if you go onto the internet and you Google is coffee good for me?
You will get
A massive amount of data to get whatever you want it to say. That's right. Exactly. Exactly. And confirmation bias is so powerful.
People just confirm what they want to believe.
So
If it uh
You know what I w if I could do
Anything that would help.
the health of America the most. It it I'd probably want to change I'd want to make
nutrition education.
More
something that was be emphasized in the schools.
and emphasizing particularly the medical schools.
because they're not given doctors given almost no nutritional
They don't they they come to believe that it doesn't have anything to do with health.
that that their potions and their elixirs, their drugs are the
Thing it will restore health, and that's not right. It's not true.
I I think I heard a couple of weeks ago that
The average med school student gets thirty minutes on nutrition or something. Yeah, it's pretty low. Not much.
Don, I wanna thank you for taking the time today. We always end the podcast on the same question, which is what is success for you?
Іно, а фік сусфаль.
has been just
Being following my heart and being true to myself.
Because
Doing
Following my bliss.
Joseph Campbell said, I've tried to follow my bliss.
And I've been very successful by my own internal measurements.
Because I have been true to myself.
I have
Followed my heart.
And uh it's led to me this
My life's been this grand adventure.
I'm a very happy person. I
I I have a lot of love in my life.
I have a lot of friends.
I can do what I want to do.
I meet cool people like you.
Uh and uh

Yeah.
To me that's a successful life is a life well lived.
One that's true to yourself, true to your own values, true to your beliefs.
And has a lot of love in it.
Um
I wouldn't imagine a successful life without didn't have a lot of love in it.
Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes
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Until next time.
Yeah.