From $0 To $13 Billion: How John Mackey Built and Sold Whole Foods Market

Foreign.

If there is ever a Mount Rushmore for capitalism dot com, John Mackey will be on it. John Mackey is the founder of Whole Foods Markets. I first met John about nine years ago when he came to speak at one of the first capitalism conferences. And I was impressed with what he has done as a business person, but even more impressed with who he was as a human being and how he saw the world. We've become acquaintances over that time and I invited John to give a talk to our mastermind group here in Austin, Texas. John is launching his new book, which is called the Whole Story. I'm not a fan of memoirs, but I loved reading it because this man and how he sees the world is so fascinating to me. And it was a peek into how he views a myriad of topics including capitalism, love and business. So this is that talk with John Mackey here in Austin with our mastermind. By the way, if you want to be in the room at these types of events, you can go over to capitalism.com events and get on the waiting list for the next time we do one of our in person meetups. Let's go hang out with one of my entrepreneurial heroes, the founder of Whole Foods, John Mackey. To start, I just want to tell all of you, if there's a Mount Rushmore for capitalism.com, i have John Mackey on it. So. So John draws not the same amount of attention to himself in the social media world that some of the next generation of entrepreneurs come, but as a human being and as a founder and as a leader, he's on my Mount Rushmore. So, John, thank you for being here with us.

Thank you, Ryan.

In your new book, you start off basically tripping balls. So the story starts with you high AF on acid.

True.

Why do you start the book with that? You're doing psychedelics. Before psychedelics were cool. Well, why does the story start that way?

So I'm 22 years old and you.

Look great for 22, by the way.

I'm 22 years old and, you know, I don't really know.

What I'm going to do or what I'm going to be in life. I'm in this study in philosophy going back and forth between University of Texas in Austin, Trinity University in San Antonio in Austin, I'm studying philosophy. In Trinity, I'm studying religion. And I went three times to each of the schools. And so here I am, I just turned 22 just a couple of weeks before and not in a relationship with anybody. Not sure what I'm going to do. And so I just took a hit of acid back when you don't really know how much is in the dose. And it was an incredibly. It was definitely hero, what they call a hero's dose. And it was an amazing journey. But I did experience what I did experience ego death. And by that means, the ego is what we identify as our separate self. I have a body. I'm different than you. I'm different than this microphone. We're separate. So when you have an ego death, you. That part of the separateness dissolves. It just disappears and you merge back into the one. And that's the best way I can describe it, because language doesn't really describe it, because language is referencing something that you can compare it to. And there is nothing to compare it to. So that's the best I can do. And that was amazing simply because I re experienced like this, the big bang, the creation of the multiverse, which has happened an infinite number of times. And I. I experienced the moving through the multiverse and then coming back into the singularity, into the one, and then breathing out, breathing in. I experienced that. It was incredible. And it also completely changed my life. So I came out of that and I realized, oh, my God, this entire life is just a grand adventure. Forever and ever and ever, there's this adventure of consciousness. And so that just shifted my attitude. It's like there's really nothing to be afraid of because our ego may disappear, our bodies may die, but the essence of what we are is the one being, and it's immortal. Completely immortal. Never has a beginning, no end. So it's like, man, I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna. It's life's adventure. And I immediately, once I figured that out, I was coming down from beginning to come down from the high. And I started hitchhiking. Not because I had any place to go to. It's just like. It's an adventure. Let's see what happens next. And I get picked up by this guy, and he takes me. He says, where are you going, son? And I said, don't really care wherever you're going. He says, well, I'm going home. I said, great. So he takes me up the road a few miles. I don't have a shirt on, by the way. So he says, well, this is as far as I'm going. I said, okay, fantastic. I got out and tried to blink myself back home again because I thought I was still like, super high. And I guess I still was, but I was coming down and I was Actually, now, about three miles from where I lived, this is back in Central Austin, Enfield Road. So I'm walking back down there, trying to get back to my house, and I come across.

This philosophy professor that was pretty famous. His name was Robert C. Solomon. And this is back when he was probably late 20s, 30 years old. He'd already written a bunch of books. He was an existentialist, an atheist. He had a huge influence on me. I wanted to be an existentialist. I wanted to be. I was an atheist. I. I was like, although I just had this amazing psychedelic experience that shifted my consciousness. But I ran into him, and I think I ran into him. I can't really be sure, but I had a conversation with him, in any case, that changed my life. And in this conversation, I asked him, I said, so, Professor Solomon, you know, I'm one of your students. I've taken a number of your classes. And he kind of recognized me, but he'd never seen me without a shirt on. So I said, well, I have a couple of questions I really want to ask you. And the first question I asked him was, so, you know, you teach that really life's absurd. There's absolutely no purpose to it. There's no meaning to it. You know, we live, we die, and it's just. There's no point. And so. But you take sort of a romantic, heroic response to that, and you say, yes, but let's.

Even though there is no real meaning, we just make it up. And I said, so you don't believe there is any real objective meaning to life, but you just think we can just make up whatever we do, and we just do that? And he said, exactly. I thought about it and I said, I know. And it's always troubled me. I don't see how. If you believe that, I don't see how you could be very happy. He looked me in the eye and he said, I'm not.

And so. And he went his way, I went my way. And I thought, I don't want to be an existentialist anymore. That's not my adventure. I don't want to be an existentialist adventurer. So I don't want to drag this on too much, but you asked.

I actually want to end.

Almost done. So I move into this vegetarian co op and become a vegetarian. That launches the Whole Foods adventure, which turned out to be one of the big adventures of my life.

I have a clarifying question, because we were sitting at Casa de Luz a few years ago, and I had just had a psychedelic experience and was Feeling kind of bummed out about it. It. Because I had felt this loss of meaning afterwards, and I was sharing with you how there. How I was processing this idea that nothing has any inherent meaning. And you said something that I'll never. I don't remember anything else from that lunch except what you said here. You said, well, if you're the meaning maker, then everything that you decide has meaning, has meaning. So how do those two things collide? This idea of you don't want to be an existentialist, but that was your background. And this idea that anything we do give meaning to can have meaning. What is, what's your. How would you answer that question now?

So the best way I can say it is going to use a metaphor. So we all have. We all have dreams at night, right? We all have these experiences of dreams. And in the dream, it's very interesting. We're the dreamer, right? We're having the dream. We. We're also a character in the dream. We're always in our own dreams. Who are the other characters? They seem to be acting independently of us. But how could they be independent if we're the dreamer, Right? Imagine that when you wake up, you're actually not waking up to reality. You're just waking up to another dream. Your mind is still creating it. And once you realize that, that you are the creator, the meaning maker, the dream maker, you are free to create a different kind of dream. A dream with love, meaning, purpose.

Because there is ultimately, because we're all expression of the one being. There is nothing outside of yourself. There's only the one.

We both dropped acid before this podcast, by the way, to make this conversation more.

Pretty sure I didn't. And I made sure that drink was, you know, I opened it, it was. Nobody had opened it before.

Psychedelics are kind of in vogue right now. They're going through their. Their time in the sun.

Sure. You used to get thrown into jail for, for decades if you, if you got caught with it. Now they're not really prosecuting that stuff anymore.

And I'm curious how your adventures in that world have impacted the way you see life in business. Like how. How does it change or impact the way that you go about the projects and the, the opportunities that you pursue?

It completely changes it. That's why I started the book that way. It's. It's. I've always seen my life as this grand adventure. It's a hero's journey, I think we're all called to a hero's journey, so to speak. It's it's what our inner. It's part of the inner part of our interiority. The. The soul, the part of us that's whispers quietly, but it's usually drowned out by our egos and all the. The loud, busy mind, our thoughts go off, and all these different things. So.

Because I see it as an adventure and building a business, I mean, I guess most of you are entrepreneurs. Yes. There's nothing more fun than building a business. That's just telling you if there is, I haven't found it yet. And it's so much fun. It's so hard, it's challenging.

You run into all these problems, people, problems, competition, and you have to overcome it and you have to learn and grow. You have to get better, you have to improve. You have to create more value. That whole thing to me is just a great deal of fun. So that was what the inner part of my being really wanted to do in this particular lifetime. So it influenced everything. Once I realized there was really nothing to be afraid of, I'm on this grand adventure, then I was just free to create, free to do what I really wanted to do. Not what my parents wanted me to do, not what my friends thought I ought to do, but what I wanted to do, that deeper part of my being. And so I've been doing the following that you might say ever since.

Does fear ever come up? And if so, how do you respond to it?

Fear is always coming up, of course. You know, they say there's two dominant emotions all entrepreneurs feel. One is utter terror. Shit, this thing's gonna fail. I'm gonna let everybody down. And then utter ecstasy, right? That euphoria, my God, it's.

Can anyone relate?

So, yeah, so fear does come up, but you have to remember, fear is really a creation of the mind. Fear doesn't exist in the moment. In the moment, fear isn't there. Fear is always something that we're thinking about in the future, something bad that might happen. And so once you can understand that about fear, you don't let fear master you. It's gonna be present, but you don't have to go into it and let it take over your mind. Instead, you see it, oh, there I am. Here I am scared again. But that's scared in the future. I can be here in the moment now. And in the moment, I don't have to be in that fear. So that's how you free yourself from fear, is understanding you're creating it. It's not something external to you. It's something always in your mind, something you're afraid of. And then you don't let it become the master. You use it to energize you to go higher and go faster and go better. Fear becomes your ally rather than your enemy.

We were having lunch right after the 2016 election when a lot of people were really afraid about coming changes.

I've known you that long? Yeah. Amazing.

2015.

You look the same. You're not getting any older.

Thank you very much. I eat a lot of artificial sweeteners. I. I remember you have being very optimistic during that time. In fact, downtown Austin was. There was like this sadness in the air. People were crying about the results of the election. They were staying home from work. It was. It was kind of pathetic. But you danced into that lunch feeling optimistic about the future. Do you still feel that way now?

Of course.

With all of the division and turmoil, do you still feel that optimistic about the future?

Let's just step back for a moment and look at where we are right now as a species. I'll put a challenge to you. I'll give you the entire history of the human race. You can go back hundreds of Thousands of years, 200 years, pick your time. There's never been a better time to be alive than right now. If there is, name it. I had one woman I put that challenge to, and she said, I'd rather have been born in some indigenous tribe in the Amazon. She's living in New York City. She's an attorney. I said, okay, well, why don't you move down to the Amazon? You could join a tribe down there. You know, give up modern dentistry and antibiotics and, you know, you're going to have a lot of mosquitoes down there. No, Spotify.

Go for it. That's where you want to live. No one's stopping you. But anyway, the point is, this is by every objective standard. If you just go back 200 years ago, for example, people, these statistics are so overwhelming. You can check these out yourself. But just 200 years ago, 94% of the people alive on this planet, 94% lived on less than $2 a day. Think you have been one of the 6% or one of the 94%. 85% lived on less than $1 a day. The average lifespan was 35, 35 years old.

Illiteracy rates were 88%. 88% of the people alive could not read.

That was not a super great time to be alive. Unless you were kind of born lucky. Maybe you would have been one of the lucky ones. But an aristocrat or, you know, we Watch the shows and they're always not about the peasants who are dying. You know, getting cholera and tuberculosis. No modern dentistry. We just read about the royals and people like that. And even that's all fantasy. If you watch that show Bridgerton, it's all been sanitized. We got a black queen and it's like we're just reimagining history anyway. This is the best time it's ever been alive. That's why I'm optimistic. And we have more creativity, have more innovation. People are getting smarter, they're getting more creative. And I mean just think about where was AI like five years ago, right? And now you can't talk to somebody who's in business model. They're always telling you I'm working, I got an AI component to this. I mean, and we know AI is going to be hugely transformative, probably the most transformative technology of our lifetimes. So I would have said the Internet prior to that, but now it's going to be probably AI. So.

All that fear, all that comes from people projecting out and the meat and we're addicted to fear. Fear is if you weren't afraid when tens of thousands of years ago, if you saw a saber toothed tiger, you probably got eliminated from the gene pool. So we evolved where fear was kind of our ally. Now fear really limits what's possible. And so I'm very optimistic. I mean all the facts are on my side. I mean, sure, we could still destroy ourselves, but probably not. I mean it's been a lot worse. I mean we think it's bad now. I'm a student of American history. Imagine trying to be in civil war. If you study what was going on in the south and the north back then, I mean that was some real hatred there. It's really horrible time to be alive actually.

Yeah, objectively, everything is getting better.

Exactly.

And if you look at the graphs from the dawning of capitalism until now, it's just an exponential curve up on every objective measure. It does seem like the internal experience is the negative. Internal experience is projected everywhere. So there's this perception of objective measures being positive, but the internal experience being negative. What is your view on that?

It's like I said, people are addicted to fear and so the market gives people what they want.

If you want artificial sweeteners.

The market will provide them for you. And if you want to be afraid, the market will provide it for you. Personally, I don't watch the news because it's all just fear mongering. I don't know why People would want to watch horror pictures because they scare you and being scared doesn't feel very good. Although I tell my wife, if you just turn the volume down, you won't be scared any longer because the creepy music that makes you scared.

So people seem to want that.

I don't want it. So I keep it out of my consciousness, I keep it out of my life.

Tell me what you think about this perspective. This has been true for my own life that when I feel the most scared, it is usually when I'm pursuing things that are easy. It's like I have atrophied the muscle of doing hard things or facing difficult challenges and, and the more that I trust myself to do hard things or I view myself as strong, as one who overcomes, then the minor challenges from a day to day perspective don't bother me so much. It seems to me that as objective facts have improved, people have gotten weaker because we can be, because you can be addicted to dopamine, you don't have to do difficult things. And so of course the world is going to scare you. That's been my experience. What is your take?

I've never thought about it quite that way before. So that'll be a thought I'll go out of here and chew on and think about a little bit further.

I just know it's all about how you view fear. If you don't let fear take you and you don't let it be you, you can just see fear. It's just an opportunity to grow. It's an opportunity, it's a challenge. We meet challenges. Entrepreneurs are always overcoming challenges. And that maybe how I can tie it back to what you were saying is if you are, because building a business is difficult, you're going to face competition, you're going to face setbacks, failures, all learning opportunities, all opportunities to get better, to do better next time. And so resilience is part of what almost all entrepreneurs are very resilient people because they don't quit when they hit the first, you know, bump in the road and they don't take the victim stance like it's all so unfair. So fear is there, but we use it to help us grow. So you're right, if people are super lazy, then they're not going to push back when they get into a fearful situation, then maybe fear does take them over, so to speak. We just don't let it, we don't let fear doesn't, we don't let it master us.

Plenty to be scared of.

John, you've, you've had a very interesting evolution as an entrepreneur, as an a founder, because you started off bootstrapping basically one small store with a handful of peers and then fast forward a couple of years, you're acquired by Amazon for billions of dollars. In that time, you had to learn things like capital management and allocation and partnerships and IPOs. And these are things that you didn't have formal training on when you start one store. So could you walk us through the evolution of just being a scrappy entrepreneur at the beginning to going out and raising large amounts of capital for scale and what you had to change about your approach as you learned those skills?

So for the record, I do have a 403 page book that talks about it all.

And.

I just kept learning and growing. I don't know how else to put it. I mean, I've always, you know, I didn't study business, I studied philosophy and religion and I didn't study business. But once I started doing business, I got extremely interested and I was aware I didn't know anything. So I just started. I started, I guess three things. A, I read and read and read. I'd work in the day and read at night. And the more I read, the more interesting I got business would be. I would have thought it was boring until I started doing it. And then it's like, this marketing stuff's really interesting. Well, I didn't know accounting had this much. And so as I studied it, I got more interested in it. I also my father mentored me, so I was very fortunate. I had that no background. But my dad was first he was an accounting professor at Rice University in Houston. And then he went into business and he became a chief financial officer and the CEO of a hospital management company. My dad was a very good business person and he invested in Whole Foods. And I'd say for the first 16 years of the business, I really didn't make any really big decisions that I didn't check out with him. And I always say that I probably tried to drive the Whole Foods bus off a cliff multiple times, but he'd grab the wheel and say, steady, steady there, son. Getting close to the edge there. And so I talk about how that we also had a break. My dad did have Alzheimer's and, and we ended up, I had to kick him off our board and end the mentorship when I was 40. But I didn't know he had Alzheimer's until a year later. But he was showing irrational, a lot of irrationality, which occurs early symptom of that particular disease. So no I didn't know how to raise all that capital stuff. It's like. But you gain skills as you need them. And also, I've never had much of a problem admitting I didn't know stuff.

One of the failings that sometimes takes entrepreneurs down is a little bit of success. Hypertrophies, the ego. We started thinking we're hot shit. In fact, we're gonna think we got like Midas touch, really good at this stuff. And that is a huge mistake because you're gonna stop learning then. And in fact, your competitors are constantly pressing you. You have to get better and, and better and better. This is why we've made so much progress in the last 200 years. It's been capitalism. Capitalism. You have innovation and then everybody sees your innovation and they copy it, and then they iterate on it and then they improve on it. Well, you can't sit still. You'll be left in the dust. You've got to be innovating and iterating and studying your competitors. And you get this upward spiral of continued progress and continued learning. And you know what? You never can stop. When you want to stop, that's the time to retire. That's the time to get out. Because your competitors are not going to stop. I talk in the last chapter of the book, I talk about the infinite game. A finite game is a game. Playing basketball or football, for example, you have a set of rules. There's a time you're going to play this length of time or this many points are scored and the game is over and you have a winner and you have a loser. Business is an infinite game. It never ends, it just continues. And the businesses you create, you hope they'll be turned into infinite games, meaning they'll outlive you and they'll continue to go on.

And in the infinite game, the players change, but the game itself goes on. And so that's a really good way to think about what you're doing. You're a player in this game of human progress, and that's the game we're all playing. Ultimately. We're trying to help humans flourish. We're creating goods and services that help people that are.

Creating value for them, things that they want, even if they're not good for them, like artificial sweeteners. But if you want them, the market will create them. And there you have it.

This is where I think spirituality and business start to intersect. This is where I geek out, because we started this conversation talking about basically infinite consciousness, how there is no other, there is no I, and You're just creating, right? And I see businesses exactly the same way. And I would say before I had that shift in understanding, I saw business more as a finite game. And there was money, and I was trying to extract money and I was seeing myself as the center of it and I was trying to pull. And that didn't make me feel satisfied or fulfilled. But when you flip it and think about it as an infinite game, I think that's where those two worlds intersect. And then you're just the creator.

Do you know what the single biggest misunderstanding about business is? The single biggest misunderstanding of why people hate capitalism and why they hate business is? They don't see it as this complex game of multiple winners. They see it as a win lose game. Like basketball is a win, lose game. One team's gonna win, the other team's gonna lose. And people that try to bring that same framework to business to think of businesses like, well, if Jeff Bezos is winning, then everybody else must be losing. He's. In fact, he and Elon Musk are very greedy people because there's this pie, this cake, and they cut off really big pieces for themselves. If they hadn't done that, there'd be more for other people. They don't understand that you have these multiple constituencies in a business that are voluntarily exchanging with it, and they're all winning. That's why stakeholder theory is so important. Because take a business like Whole Foods. We had customers. The customers didn't have to shop with us. In fact, Whole foods has like 2% market share. Most people don't shop at Whole Foods. Most people can't stand Whole Foods. Most people think Whole Foods is too expensive. It's a whole paycheck. It's a horrible place. They got all this hippie food, blah.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Great. You don't have to shop there. It's okay. 2% of the American, you know, Whole Foods is off a $25 billion a year company now, but most people don't shop there because they don't have to. They have competitive alternatives in the marketplace. You got H E B here, really good company. You got Trader Joe's, you've got lots of. You got Walmart. You got all kinds of different competitive alternatives. So customers shop voluntarily for their own benefit. So you have to figure out, how do we create value for those customers? Customers are winning. If they weren't winning, they wouldn't trade. If they don't like to trade, they can find someone else to trade with. Same way with employees, right? Hey, most People work for Whole Foods. Some people work there for a while and they get another job somewhere else. People are always looking out what's in their best interest. Maybe it's now to be at Whole Foods, maybe it'll be somewhere else later on. But they trade for their own, they do it for their own benefit. So we're creating value for customers, we're creating value for employees, suppliers. They don't have to trade with you either if you don't like their and you don't have to trade with them. We both have competitive alternatives in the marketplace. If somebody has better prices or better service or better quality, you do business with them. And if they don't like you, then if they don't like the terms of your, they don't have to trade with you. So you're trading again for mutual gain. And investors, they don't have to invest in your business. Whole Foods is public. If you didn't like the way we were running the company, sell the stock people did every day. So you have these multiple constituencies, stakeholders. They're all trading for their own gain and they're all gaining. That's the amazing thing about business. It's not one winner and a bunch of losers. It's all of these people trading with each other, voluntarily creating value for each other. And we have this continuous upward spiral. It's not a zero sum game. And seen rightly as Ryan's talking about and I were talking about, it's also an infinite game. It's one that never ends and goes on.

How did you discover this? Because this wasn't your background and I don't think that this was your opinion.

When you were all those books I read.

Well, you were, you, I mean you built a very heart centered company that is often affiliated with left leaning ideas. And you come from a spiritual perspective. Where did the libertarian pro capitalism views start to flirt its way into that bubble?

So I'd say that when I, from my college days, like everybody else I was brainwashed into sort of a, you know, I would have defined myself when I was.

My early 20s as sort of a, you know, democratic socialist, you know, would be more just more fair if we didn't have such wide disparities of income. And that just seems like an unjust, unfair system. But you know what, so I started my business kind of when Star wars was getting going and when Ronald Reagan became president and it was a totally different era. Nobody, a lot of you weren't alive back then. So you don't know what I'm talking about. But.

I started to change when I had to meet a payroll. All of a sudden I had gone. I'd been in the co op movement. I'd been in the food co op movement. I'd lived in a co op. I'd worked at food co ops. I believed in food for people, not for profit. Cooperation, not competition, is a better way to be. So I swallowed that. And then here I was. I started up my own little natural food store with Rene, and they nicknamed me in the co op as Darth Vader. Darth Vader. They thought I'd gone over to the dark side, that I had gone to the evil empire of capitalism. I just barely could meet the payroll. I mean, Safeway was losing money, and I was called this evil person. And it's like I'm just creating jobs for people. I'm serving customers, I'm trading with suppliers. How am I evil?

And you say in the book you're paying yourself $200 a month.

Yeah, Renee and I made $200 a month. But, you know, we were young and we didn't need it. We lived in the store. We lived on the third floor of the store. This is the Safer way is at 8th and Rio Grande. It's now Headwater School, if you know Central Austin at all. And we lived on the third floor. We moved out of the co op and we lived on the third floor. It's a good story because it was not zoned for. It was owned commercial. Right. So nobody knew we were living up there. We snuck up in there and we didn't have, like a shower or bathtub or anything, so we actually bathed in the Hobart dishwasher, which, as I like to say, broke, I think, most of Austin's health code. You're not supposed to bathe where you're washing your dishes. Anyhow.

I lost my train of thought.

Well, that's the life of a greedy entrepreneur right there, where you're extracting as much as possible. So.

Oh. So anyway, I became. I became. I started to read. I had a couple of libertarians that were working for me at Safer Way, and they gave me books to read, like Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlett. And then I read Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. And then later, when, in 1980, when he put up Free to Choose, I read that, and it's like, man, this. This makes a lot more sense to me. This is the way it seems like this is the way the world works. So I. I began to self identify then as sort of a classical liberal or libertarian. And have identified that way ever since.

Yeah, I like how Scott Adams put it that, that he's left of Bernie. When it comes to the outcomes, it just happens to be that capitalism is the best means to make those outcomes a reality. It seems like that.

I hadn't heard that, but I really.

Like it that that idea seems to kind of have driven your thesis behind Whole Foods. You had this goal that you wanted to bring to the world and you know that a pro profit, pro market solution is the best way to bring the best food in the world to all of society.

I'll tell you a story that you'll get a kick out of. So it's not in the book. I think I got cut out. It was a 500 page book and they made me cut 100 pages. So I got invited to speak at the National Food Co Op Organization meeting about, I don't know, 15 years ago, so now, and Whole Foods, you know, we'd grown and they wanted to know if we could, you know, if I, if I had any advice for them. So always being a little bit provocative, I went in there and I said, good afternoon, fellow co operators. And you said, you know, Whole Foods Market is also a co op, you know, and people were looking like, you're not a co op. You guys are a bunch of greedy, capitalistic bastards. And I said, we are a co op. And I said, you're a co op that's owned by your members, you're owned by your customers.

There's other co ops that are owned by workers. There's some co ops that are owned by suppliers. We happen to be a co op that's owned by investors, but we're still the same. It doesn't matter who owns it. You have the same constituencies. You have to figure out how to create value for customers. You can't do that unless you're creating value for your team members. And you can't do that if you don't have not trading with suppliers. The problem with the food co ops. And I told him, I says, you guys don't prioritize profits enough. So because you don't retain your earnings and you don't, because who owns it? The members. What do they want more than anything else? Low prices. They don't want to retain money. We don't care about putting up another store. We just want this store to be as cheap as possible. So it was very difficult for the food co ops to grow because they couldn't retain capital.

If it's owned by the workers, what do they want? They want high wages. They don't care about profits either. We just want the wages to be higher. What about suppliers? Suppliers, co ops, like these agribusinesses. Agribusiness, well, they want to get as much money for themselves. Interestingly enough, the reason why the investor co op, which we think of as capitalism, has been so overwhelmingly successful. The investors have the fewest conflicts of interest and they want to retain profits. And you cannot build a business without profits. You have to retain your earnings and reinvest them. That's what capitalism gets right, and that's what the investor co op gets right. So I'm telling this to these co op guys and they are getting more and more angry at me. It's like, you know, this, this asshole. Because they're really stuck in the zero sum game of, you know, it's just as, you know, you're just successful because you're just greedy. You just take money from people that belongs to the workers, belongs to the customers. And then I start talking about voluntary exchange. Nobody has to trade with us. If they don't think it's a good deal, they can get another job somewhere else or they can go shop somewhere else. And in fact, Whole Foods was able to compete well in prices with the co ops because the extra money that we were making gave us more economies of scale. We were able to buy better than the co ops could buy at that time, Whole Foods Market was bigger than all the food co ops in the United States combined. That's a more successful model.

Amen to that.

I always say to people that want to start nonprofits is nonprofits are good, but you only should do a nonprofit when you can't do a for profit because for profits are able to self replicate and grow, whereas nonprofits are always going to be begging for money.

I want to go off script here for a second because I thought we'd been off script because there's a story that I have never heard you tell. What the heck happened with Joe Rogan? So you were on Joe Rogan a few years ago and I was so pumped. And then he just seemed like he was ready for a fight. And now you've never shied away from a fight, but Joe Rogan just seemed.

Ready for a few fights.

What the heck? What the heck happened with Joe Rogan?

Well, if you listen to the whole podcast, and I got, it's 3 hours and 48 minutes, so that's a mammoth.

That's a short podcast for Joe.

I think it's one of the longer ones he's done. Actually, I was happy to see that Trump's was only like 3 hours and 30 minutes. So you know, Joe and I, if you listen to the whole podcast, it was mostly, you know, we got along pretty good, pretty well. He liked capitalism and he liked libertarians. But then Joe wanted to talk about, because I'm vegan, I'm an ethical vegan, Joe is a carnivore hunter. And he just got talking about that. He got really triggered. I think what triggered him is when I was talking about, well, you know Joe, there's only been one diet that's ever been successfully proven to reverse heart disease. And he says, well, what's that? And I said well that's a whole foods plant based diet. Dean Ornish calvilled Esselstyn has shown that you can reverse heart disease with that diet. And he says that's bullshit. And I said well it's not. Check it out. From that point onward, Joe was going to fight me about diet. And I've been studying it my whole life. I know a lot more about it than Joe does. Joe knows a lot of things, but not in this particular area. It didn't matter. The more I kept trying to change the subject, I just continually tried to change the subject and he kept coming back to it. It's about 30 minutes of Joe kind of ranting about vegans. And.

You know, I wanted, when this book came out, I wanted to get back on the Joe Rogan. I wanted him to do me again. He said, John, when you can, when you write your book and you'll, you'll do a tell all, I'll have you back on the show. Joe, I've got, got the book written to tell all. Talk about psychedelics, talk about all this stuff. You interested? Nah.

He want to have me on again.

You've graduated. You're on capitalism.com now. John. John, you, you coined the term conscious capitalism.

Actually, I did not coin the term.

You did not coin it. Okay. Well, you popularized popular, you wrote, wrote a book called Conscious capitalism. And I feel like this term has sort of been co opted by the left as meaning no profit. So you just talked about how co ops don't focus enough on profit and that if they focus on profit they would be much more impactful in the world. So what is your take on how that, what that term means in society now? Would you change anything about that thesis today?

Well, rightly understood. When I explain what conscious capitalism's is to like a capitalist, he or she will look at me and they'll Say that's just capitalism. I said, exactly, it's just capitalism. It's just done more consciously to rightly understand conscious capitalism. Think of it as not an economic system nor a governance system. It's just simply a management philosophy. It's how to manage your business better. Manage it more consciously. Understand that you have a higher purpose besides just making money, that you're creating value for other people. Understand that all your stakeholders matter. They don't all matter equally, but they all matter. You're trading with all of them. And once you understand that they're interdependent, you can manage the relationships in such a way that you can optimize the entire system at a higher level and that leadership matters. A conscious leader, somebody who's basically serving the higher purpose of the business, serving the stakeholders, and is not just in it strictly to maximize their own take home pay and that we're human beings and we flourish in certain healthy cultures. So a conscious culture. And so it's a management philosophy. But the left tried to weaponize it as a way to take power away from the capitalist. It's like, hey, all the stakeholders get a seat on the board. It's like, no, the owners decide who's on the board. The owners control. It's the owner's co op. They're trying to take in the other stakeholders and give them control. Because the left, it's all about power. It's all about power. They think we're into power, they're the ones into power and they project that out onto everyone else. And so they've weaponized that term, conscious capitalism. And so I usually start out by explaining it's not an economic system, it's not a governance system, it's a good way to manage your business. This will help you lead to greater business success. That's how I try to explain it.

I've always had a love hate relationship with that term because to me all capitalism is conscious.

No, it's not all conscious.

You don't think so? You don't, you don't think that bad ideas get flushed out and therefore it's always progressive.

Well, in a very long term period that may be true, but there's a lot of shit that goes on down before that happens. Of course, in the short term, listen, here's the thing. They're bad actors. They're not just in business, they're bad politicians, they're bad lawyers. But there are bad capitalists too. There really are. There are people out there that, I mean, capitalism needs to have the rule of Law, it needs to have boundaries and rules. Otherwise you just. You're in a. You're like in a Mafia. You're like in a Mafia movie where. I remember I was on this Freedom Festival, I was having a Debate with Kevin O', Leary, Mr. Wonderful, about conscious capitalism. And he was telling me, this is all bullshit, this conscious capitalism stuff. He says, I just tell my companies, for me, business is war. I just tell my companies to go out, they don't take any prisoners. They come back, and they bring me back the money. And I said, you don't really think it's like. You don't think it's really a war, do you? And he said, I think it's like a war. I really don't want them taking any prisoners. So you're saying you want your businesses to literally go out and kill their competitors, you know, murder them, shoot them. That's what you do in war. He says, no, of course I don't mean it that way. And I said, but that's what that means when you. But capitalism has rules. It has boundaries. So the bad actors, the unconscious capitalists, are the ones who don't want to recognize those rules, and they'll do anything to win.

And that's. And that's one reason capitalism has a bad name, is because we do have certain ruthless people out there who will do anything it takes. They're the ones that end up in jail. The Bernie Madoffs. There's crooks out there. But what I don't like is business has held up to an impossibly high standard of perfection. We don't have any more. They're bad actors in every business, but ours are in every walk of life. There's bad actors in teaching everywhere you go, because human nature is kind of that way. Business doesn't have any more or less, probably. If you're on a bell curve, it's probably kind of right there in the middle. But the bad business people get called out in the media in a way that the bad teachers don't or the bad doctors don't. We're the ones that write the big stories about when you get a bad actor in business. And so people generalize from those bad actors to, well, everybody's like that.

And so we're always having to defend ourselves. Business people are not well loved by intellectuals. Took me a long time to realize. And then when I read Deirdre McCloskey's books, which I highly recommend, like Bourgeoisie Equality and Bourgeoisie Virtues, she traces the history of business and capitalism, and she Shows that actually business has been disliked throughout all of recorded history.

Why do people persecute Jews? You think it's about religion? No, it's envy. Jews are incredibly successful financially. Why do they persecute the Chinese in the East? Same reason Chinese are really good business people. And they accumulate capital, they're good traders, they create value. And that creates envy and hatred.

The intellectuals have always sustained business. It's not a new thing. It goes back. They were, you know, the priest and.

Always they've tried to keep business under their thumb. They're the class enemy of business. And I'm not saying every intellectual is that way. Some intellectuals are not. But as a class, they're the ones that are the socialists, the communists that think they can remake society if we just give me the power and we will remake society and create a utopia. You hear it today. Young people, particularly a lot of the zoomers to me are like, oh my God, I hope these people don't have to grow up before they get into power. Because they literally think they could change everything and create no racism, no inequality. We could create a perfect utopia if we could just get the damn capitalist out of the way.

Well, I have found that the next generation is very entrepreneurial, Even if that means they want to start YouTube channels and be full time influencers the minute they go to make payroll. I am very confident that some of their views are going to change as.

It did for me.

The next generation is very, very entrepreneurial.

Oh, I'm happy to hear that. Mostly I was worried they're just sitting on their couches playing video games.

Well, there's more opportunities to, to start businesses than ever there. It's infinite now. And now the heroes that they look up to are entrepreneurs or at least successful. And they're still left leaning. But the minute that they go into business and they have to hire somebody else, those values change very quickly. So they're loud, but I'm actually very optimistic about their views.

Good. I'm, as you know, I told you, I'm a very optimistic person, but I'm getting to be an older guy that gets a little cranky about youth.

You have not been immune to media scorn, even though you and I've always.

Been very much an attractor of it.

Well, I'm thinking of one story in particular where you were very vocal about the fact that your private healthcare at Whole Foods was superior to a public health care solution. And I believe that was the last time that as CEO you were public about your political views. But you never shied away from what you believe.

Yeah, well, so the story goes something like this. It's back in 2009 and I was just about to go. I was going out for a week long hike on the Appalachian Trail in Maine. I was going to hike. You started.

The, the northern terminus of the Appalachian trail is in Mount Katahdin. Starting in Mount Katahdin and then hiking in what's called 100 Mile Wilderness, which you go about 100 miles with, you know, no road crossing. So you're sort of out of touch. And I, I've been asked. The Wall Street Journal asked me to write an op ed piece on healthcare reform because I was very proud of what Whole Foods was doing in healthcare. And I thought, I just thought it was a good solution to a lot of the problems that face. Face America. So I.

I stayed up late the night before that. That week long hike was beginning, going to begin to finish up the op ed and you know, and I remember about midnight or so I pushed the send button and then got up and went hiking the next day. When I came out a week later, the whole world had blown up because of my op ed piece. The op ed piece had been, first of all, the Wall Street Journal changed the name to Whole Foods Markets Alternative to Obamacare, which was not my title. That was inflammatory. And then secondly, I did two things in the op ed piece that really pissed off the progressive left. The first one was I quoted Margaret Thatcher and Margaret Thatcher's famous line that says the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money. And that was how I started it out. And then I also got into. Later on, I talked about how.

Healthcare is not an intrinsic right. It's like any other good or service. It's something we all need, but it needs to be paid for by creating value for other people. It's not something that you have a right to any more than you have a right to food or shelter or an iPad or.

A copy of my book. These are things you have to buy and pay for. Somebody has to pay for it. So, but, but that was by saying it was an intrinsic right. That is an assumed pretty much on the left. That's just assumed to be true and to question it is not allowed. So and then I, in the, in the, in the op ed piece, I talked about whole food system. We had a good system of, you know, high deductible HSAs. And we also had created a program where we incentivize people to be healthy. If you work for the company you get a 20% discount. But then if you hit certain objective metrics, you could get bigger discounts. Objective metrics were like, you didn't smoke, so we didn't find nicotine in your blood. You didn't. You had. Your body mass index was within certain parameters. You weren't over obese. Your cholesterol levels and your blood pressure, these are all things that are not expensive to test for. And so that really pissed them off too, because we were giving people. We were doing what any good capitalists were doing. We were rewarding good behavior, and we were doing so people that. That pissed people off because the people who needed bigger discounts were the ones that were sick and fat and unhealthy and they needed them. And we were giving it to the people that didn't need it. Do you understand the difference? We were giving it to people who earned it, not who needed it. And that, again, was completely sort of, you know, it's just not. It'd be canceled today if you say that kind of stuff Anyhow, more or less. That's what tried to happen to me after this came out. My phone blows up. I turn my phone on and it's just overwhelmed with hundreds of texts and emails and, you know, call the board immediately. You know, and there were all these protests that were going on in front of Whole Foods Market all around the country. Our board received thousands of emails and letters demanding that I be fired and relieved from duty. I was forbidden by my board of directors to ever write another op ed piece.

There were. This was when the Tea Party was going on. So we had boycotts, and we had boycotts. And it was like all I did was write an op ed piece. I mean, for me, it was just freedom of speech in America. It's like our First Amendment rights. But the thing was, this is the lesson I learned. At least for me. The world could not distinguish me from Whole Foods. I had no problem distinguishing myself. This is my own personal opinions. It's not Whole Foods opinions. These are my opinions. And. But they couldn't punish me, or they tried to punish me by getting me fired, but they tried to punish Whole Foods by boycotting it. And that. And I want to tell you that up until that point, Whole Foods Market was a media darling. And from that point onward, we were not. That's when the whole paycheck thing came out and we began to be attacked. I got a hit piece done in a.

New York magazine, wrote a feature article on me to make me look terrible. And so really after that, I Used to say people still liked Whole Foods, but they did not like me. I was seen as this greedy capitalist. And so.

I was always. After that I got much more careful with the media in general because I no longer trusted that.

They'D be fair. They never really were fair to me after that. So I was. I see it happening today, all these business people coming out and taking positions for where their company stands on George Floyd and racism and inequality and the presidential election. Presidential election. And I'm always. People would ask my opinion. I said, don't get involved business. We need to be politically neutral because.

We have so much divisiveness in this, you know, which tribe are you in? And if you're not in my tribe, then you're evil if you're in my tribe. So because America's kind of split down the middle, half the people are going to hate you if they figure out what tribe you're in. If you're a libertarian, 99% of the people hate you.

I feel like libertarian is the new center now. I think people are coming around.

That's because they don't know what it means. If you're on the left, they think you're slightly right of the Nazi party. If you're on the. And if you're. They. They really do think libertarians are sort of fascist. They don't even know what it means.

When you say they do, you mean the media?

I'm talking about the, the, the people that are sort of. They don't really know what libertarian means. Right.

I, I think that the, the young people, the young generation is very socially liberal and economically conservative.

I know, but they still don't self identify generally as libertarians.

Oh, well, okay. Well then all we need to do is talk about how we're being attacked and oppressed and then we get all the PR we want.

As a privileged white male, you're going to have a tough self.

How do you know that I identify as that, John?

I know you identify as a grasshopper, but.

People still don't believe you.

John.

So anyway, that was a real wake up call for me and it changed my relationship to the media. And that was really your question.

Question, John. Walk me through the acquisition. Walk me through when it.

You mean when Amazon bought Whole Foods?

Yes. So from, from in our community. I wrote about this in my book. This was a, a really big awakening because it was the first time that I could recognize that there was a, a changing of the guard. You had what was considered an online business, even though Amazon has it huge footprint but they had an online first business acquiring a real business, a real established business. This is the first time that you saw this big flippening of and this recognition of an online retailer acquiring a physical retailer. So it was fascinating from our perspective in the e commerce world. But walk me through what was happening internally.

Well, first of all, if you try to understand Amazon's motivations.

Amazon wants to be the biggest company in the world.

And that means being bigger than Walmart. And they don't think they can be bigger than Walmart if they don't have a big chunk of the grocery market. That's really what underlies Amazon's motivations, which I didn't know that until later on when I got after they acquired us in our case. First, let me just say people ask me all the time, do you regret selling to Amazon? And the answer is I regret the circumstances that made that the best alternative for us. And it was the best alternative at that time. But if you're asking me whether I'd rather Whole Food stay independent, absolutely, of course I wanted to stay independent. I just didn't think it was going to be possible. That was the. And so we have to go back to about.

2014. About 2014, Whole Foods kind of reached a pinnacle. Our stock price had become. We went up to 24 billion dollar market capitalization. We were the most valuable food retailer in the United States except for Walmart. We were more valuable than H E B or not Costco, Albertsons, Kroger, any of the other supermarket chains. And.

But we were only about 10% the size of sales that say a Kroger had back in 2014. So I know boardrooms everywhere were in the grocery business were like those assholes.

They began to start undercut us in price. They said Whole Foods was not taken seriously for a long time. And then our market capitalism kept going up and now the supermarkets woke up and said we're going to compete with these guys a lot harder. And at the same time we began to be. Fortune magazine wrote a lead cover story about Whole Foods. Said Whole Foods Market's taking over the world. And that was sort of like the. There's an old joke, if you get in the COVID of Sports Illustrated, if you're an athlete, it's pretty well guaranteed that you've now reached a peak and you're gonna start decline. In our case we not only did competition start coming on, but remember I had this is the media was still after us and.

Remember we talked about bad actors are everywhere. A lot of bad actors in Government. And first we got attacked. All the supermarkets got held up in California for mispricing. And what that means is that let's say you do cut fruit, you cut up some pineapple, or you have a thing full of cut melon, and you, you, you, you weigh that out on your scale and you put a price tag on it. And you have to, you have to have a little tare weight for whatever the, whatever the container weighs, right? And so there are always going to be little micro mistakes that are made in that somebody just accidentally has something else on the scale or, or they're just little tiny mistakes that get made. And so California recognizes this. And California is a state that's always trying to get extra money from business. And so they find all the supermarkets in California and Whole Foods had a choice. We either can go along and just pay it was several hundred thousand dollars and take steps to improve, or we could fight it. But everybody else was settling. And so we thought, it's no big deal. We'll just do what everybody else is doing. We'll pay the fine. We're not any worse off than anybody else, and we don't have to hassle with it. The problem was that settlement was then read by the Department of Consumer affairs head in New York City. And there's only this, this is interesting trivia fact. There's only one city in the United States where Whole Foods Market has the leading market share of sales for a grocery store. New York. We are the biggest supermarket chain in New York City. We have the biggest market share, like, I don't know, 14, 15%.

You know, we have like 3 or 4% in Austin. Put things in perspective. Heb dominates Austin. So.

They checked Whole. Oh, by the way, in California, we actually, when I said mispricing, not overpricing, we in fact had more underpricing than we had overpricing, meaning over, on balance, the consumers were better off that you're still penalized anyway for mispricing, even if it's not deliberate. So same thing happened in New York. They were going to nail us. They went out and they got a lot of our stuff in a lot of our stores. And they found out little Mike, they say this is 262, but it's 261 by our scales. So they're mispricing it.

And then they announced on locally, they said, whole Foods Market, this is the most egregious mispricing we've ever seen in the history of New York City. And that got picked up nationally. And the next thing I know the whole company is immersed with everybody. Everywhere is checking our pricing on Cut Fruit. And the headlines were whole paycheck, it's not enough. Whole Foods is the most expensive grocery store. Now they're just outright stealing from their customers. We were completely overwhelmed by this. And as a result, our sales began to decline. We lost a lot of customers under the scandal. The whole thing was so unfair. It was just an ambitious bureaucrat trying to make a name for herself and get a promotion. Because in fact, again, there were some mispricing. There's always mispricing a little bit on the Cut Fruit stuff. But on balance, again, we had more where we underpriced than we overpriced. Anyhow, after that, we became vulnerable to shareholder activists as our, as our, as our sales began to fall back down and we had more competition. We got an. We got a couple of activist shareholder firms. The big, the big one was Jana Partners took a position on us. This is so much more complicated than I'm going to tell you today. I make hints of it in the book, but since I couldn't prove it, I made no direct accusations. This was actually a very well orchestrated plan to try to take Whole Foods Market private, to have private equity firms want to take us over. And Amazon ended up being the way out of that. And it was an inside job. And I just, I'm going to leave it at that because you'll see when you read my book, what I really, I hint at it without directly saying it. And I'm not going to say it here today because I can't prove it. And I just know. Anyway. There's some things you just know. So we get attacked. Jana Partners. It happens to be in 2017 when I have a new book coming out called the Whole Foods Diet. It was my nutritional.

You know what, I'd been studying and believed very passionately that mostly a whole foods plant based diet is the healthiest. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables, strengthen your immune system. So now, interestingly enough, you can think this is a coincidence or not. The very first place my book tour was launching was Goldman Sachs. They asked me to come on this particular date to address all their employees about my new book. They had a book speaker series and wouldn't it be great if you'd come on this particular date? So we launched the book tour going to Goldman Sachs. But as soon as I landed on the airplane, landed in LaGuardia, my phone, I turned my phone back on and it blows up like when I come off the trail in this case. We had shareholder activists took an 8.8% position in whole Foods Market and they were demanding that the company be put up for sale. And it's like, oh my God, you know, it's like I'm about to begin a book tour. I'm going on national television. The next day on the Today show I had several national. I was going to get to pitch my book on all of these morning shows and it was going to be great publicity. Had to cancel them all.

They're not going to talk about my book. They're going to talk about Jana Partners. And we were not prepared at that time to address those kind of questions. So I had to cancel the book tour. And anyway, Jana was saying, here's a CEO whose same store salesman going down, going out on a book tour. How responsible is that? Right? That was all. And so the very first place we land, I'm in shock. We drive straight to Goldman Sachs where I'm going to still do this talk. And I'm sitting there like you know, trying to get gather my thoughts about the talk. But mostly I'm thinking about what the hell. I got to get the board together. We all the stuff I got to do, got to hire lawyers, we got to hire investment bankers. When the soon to be CEO of Goldman Sachs comes up to me, David Solomon puts his arm on my shoulder and says, John, I know this must be a really confusing time for you. And I mean I'm just, I just want you to know that if you need any help in the defense against Jan and pardon, I want you to know we're going to be there for you.

Wow, David, thank you so much. That's very kind. I don't know what we're going to do at this point. I haven't had a chance to really get together with my management team or my board yet. I'm, I'm going to go talk to your employees here in a second about healthy eating. I'm going to leave it there. Except I've got a lot more details in the book about what I think really happened. And it was no accident that A was in Goldman Sachs. There was no accident. They launched this attack on the day I was launching the book tour. Oh, I will tell you one funny story or not funny, but interesting. So we finally did meet with Jana. So they come down to Austin and they have this PowerPoint presentation which they show to us basically taking Whole Foods Market at its all time stock price and then showing how we'd been clearly mismanaging the business because we were, you know, now we were down to 30 times our earnings instead of 75, and stock had dropped accordingly. And this was, you know, so they show us this, and I'm looking at it, and, you know, some of the stuff's true, but a lot of it's just. I just knew it was wrong. So I asked the guys, Barry Rosenstein, I said, barry, can I get a copy of that PowerPoint presentation? I really want to address some of your concerns about that. And he says, no, you can't have it. And I said, well, why not? I just want to correct. I just want to address some of your concerns. He says, you can't have it because we don't want to give it to you. And I said, well, okay, well, can we talk a little bit about how we could work together to create more value for whole food? Shareholders said, nah, there's no reason to talk. I said, why not? He says, listen, Mackey, here's how it's going to go. Here's what's going to happen. We're going to take over your board. That's the first thing we're going to do. Now, after we take over your board, we're going to fire you, and we're going to fire anybody else in your executive team that doesn't fall into line with what we want to do. And I said, well, what exactly do you want to do? He said, we're going to sell your company to the highest bidder, and there's not a fucking thing you can do about it. And then he walked out of the room. By the way, these are the bad actors I'm talking about in capitalism, there are villains in the tale. And so I were all in shock, right? So then there were basically four alternatives available to Whole Foods Market in that time. First alternative was we could fight them. And I'm a very competitive guy, and trust me, I really wanted to fight them.

Secondly, we could sell the business to a friendly investor. And that friendly investor that I thought would be the best would be Warren Buffett. So we contact Warren Buffett, and Warren's got a great sense of humor. He said, yeah, you know, I own Dairy Queen.

And I'm famous for eating kind of a junk food diet. This is a bad brand fit for me. I don't think he was just joking, of course, but I just think he just thought, you know, you guys are not a. He likes to buy value plays, and we were going to be still too expensive for him.

And so the third alternative would be to go private.

That's what I think the game was all about at the end of the day, with Jana being stalking horse to get us to go private, have the private equity guys. Mike Milken, for example, had been courting me for about a year. And.

I had this other person, this woman named Nancy Levine, that followed me around wherever I spoke because I had a friend who was. Used to be. Who was a Jewish rabbi. Used to be a Jewish rabbi. And he'd been accused when he was like 18 years old of some kind of sexual harassment for some 14 year old, like 30 years in the past. And she kept associating me with this guy. And I publicly disavowed that I, you know, I had anything, you know, that I was involved with him at all. And she said, well, we want you to publicly condemn him. And I said, I'm not going to publicly condemn him. I don't have any idea what he did 30 years ago. You're not going to condemn him. He says, well, then we're going to continue to follow you around. So.

I didn't know what to do. I was looking for the win, win, win solution. What was going to be good for all the stakeholders. I kept asking that question over and over and over again. What's the best solution for our. Our stakeholders? For all of our stakeholders. And then it popped in my brain one day when I woke up. What about Amazon? What about Amazon? And I had met Jeff Bezos almost exactly a year before at this Microsoft CEO summit. I was a little bit starstruck because everybody that you'd ever heard of, that, you know, all the billionaires were all there. And so Jeff and I hit it off. We were on a panel together. And he's into science fiction and fantasy. So am I. We talked a lot about books. He liked to scuba dive. We talked about that. He liked Whole Foods Market. You know, he shopped at Whole Foods. He says, this has been a great conversation, John. Let's get together and I'm going to follow up with you and we're going to. Well, let's continue to have this dialogue. I just didn't hear from Jeff again. And a year passed. But then I thought, what about Amazon? Because I thought maybe they'd be the perfect solution for us. So we contacted them and they said, yeah, come on down, we'd like to meet with you. So I flew up to Seattle with three of my executives. We met with Jeff and three of his executives in Jeff's boathouse on a Sunday, by the way, just a little color. So we get out of the car and we're all immediately searched for weapons and our car was checked for bombs. It had a little bomb detector on it. And I guess when you're like the richest guy in the world, you gotta take a little more precautions. Anyhow, so, great meeting. And do you know if you think about when you've fallen in love before you have what I call the conversation? There is a conversation that takes place at some point where you might stay up all night having the conversation, but there's this meeting of the souls. You realize, he's the one, she's the one. That happened to us. When we talked to Amazon, we were like, we talked for three hours. We talked about all the things we could do together, all the synergies we could create. And we left and the Whole Foods team retreated to a restaurant. And we process it, right? We're kind of looking around. Those guys were really smart. These guys were not like I thought they were going to be. They weren't. They were just seemed like regular guys, but with super high IQs and funny and they ask great questions. And we thought, man, these guys would be great to work with. Think of all, they bring this technology here. They think, long term, we can drop our prices. We needed to get rid of the whole paycheck moniker. Very hard to drop your prices when an activist is attacking you. Because if you need to drop something down, if you drop something down from a dollar to 90 cents, the short term impact is your sales just dropped 10%. Your same store sales dropped 10%, your profits just dropped. Everything dropped. It'll be made up in the long run because you get increased sales. Right? But there's a lag period. And so you can't do it if activists are breathing down your neck. Amazon thinks long term, they were very comfortable with us dropping our prices. So anyway, six weeks after that first meeting, we signed a merger agreement that was a very quick whirlwind romance. And then the government approved it. And yeah, we were married. That's the best way to put it. And I like to make the joke that I always thought of Whole Foods as my daughter and I married my daughter, the richest man in the world.

No, but anyway, the point of it is, and by the way, Amazon has changed Whole Foods. There are many things I don't like about when Amazon's done, but I'd do it again in the same circumstances. It was a good solution for us and, and it was good for all of our stakeholders, our customers. We dropped prices four times in the first three years. And I very seldom hear anything about Whole paycheck any longer. They brought technology to Whole Foods. That really helped us during that whole. When Covid hit, we really could scale up to Trader Joe's. Never did any delivery. Whole Foods scaled up and had amazing delivery services through Amazon doing that. And it cost them millions and millions of dollars. They raised wages of all our hourly people within just a few weeks. Our baseline went to 15 bucks an hour back in 2017. And everyone else, of course that was on a hourly basis went up above that because you had to raise everybody right. You can't. Somebody was making $15 already and everybody else got raised up to 15. You had to raise the $15 an hour person to 17 or $18 an hour. That cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in lower prices and hundreds of millions of dollars in higher wages. Our suppliers not only didn't get cut off, Amazon studied all of our sales volume and picked up hundreds of our suppliers. They didn't know, they didn't even know about them. So it was really good for our suppliers. Our investors got a 30% increase on the stock price. The government got massive amount of capital gains taxes. So everybody, everybody won.

That's how I saw it. And. But you'll find out why I did retire. I did have a massive fight with Amazon that caused me to leave. I'll leave that for you. When you read the book towards the.

End, I want you to talk about love life. It is. It must be a passion project, commercial. It must be a passion project for you to have this storybook career and then decide, and then flush it all down the toilet and then decide to start something brand new. That's a conscious choice. So that must be something that you really want to bring to the world.

Doing full circle to how I started this conversation off. Remember I told you life's an adventure and I'm still on my adventure. I mean, lying on a beach is a nice thing to do as a break, not as a way of life creating.

Continuing to play in the infinite game and doing something that I think can help people. I think love life is basically, you can go check it out online. So Love life. Not love.life.com, just love life. Get our website. We've opened up our first holistic health membership club in the Los Angeles area in El Segundo in the beach cities area. And it's all best buy. It's 45,000 square feet. It happens to be located next to Whole Foods Market's third highest volume store in Southern California, doing about 60 million a year in that Whole Foods. And so love life it has. First you come in and we have a healthy, healthy restaurant, healthy food restaurant. No artificial ingredients, flavorings, colorings or sweeteners.

But not strictly plant based. We have animal foods as well. They're all purchased from Whole Foods. So we have Whole Foods quality standards on our animal products. We have a state of the art fitness center. Think Equinox. Except we have a lot of biohacking type of exercise equipment in there as well that accelerates workouts. We've got yoga studio, we have a Pilates studio. We've got state of the art spa. Not a medical spa, you can't get your Botox there. But anything you'd get in a nice resort spa you can get there. We have three indoor pickleball courts that are really good. But most importantly, we have all these recovery modalities if you're into recovery. We've got cryotherapy, we've got six cold plunges ranging from 38 degrees to 68 degrees. We've got infrared saunas, red light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen chambers. It's a.

Should we do a capitalism.com meetup at Love Life?

Actually, no. You're kind of making a joke, but in fact we are holding type of meetups there.

Count us in. Sounds great.

They're not free. So.

John, thanks for being here. Would you guys thank John for coming out?

Thank you.

John was broke when he started Whole Foods. In fact, everybody that John worked with is broke when he started Whole Foods. And today he's worth a few bucks. He's done okay. I mean, Whole Foods exited to Amazon for $13 billion. That's what's possible with capitalism. You can start with nothing except a vision and bring in the resources and build something that creates value for everyone involved, including yourself. I love that John is such a beautiful example of capitalism done. The right way of benefiting all stakeholders. And I hope to carry that torch forward here@capitalism.com whenever you're ready to start your journey, best place for you to get plugged in is over@capitalism.com playbook. That is where you can download all of our free resources to begin your journey and start the road to 1 million. That is the first milestone to building a business that you can scale and maybe sell and brings a difference and an impact to the world and the people that you want to do it for. Thank you for being here. I'm Ryan Daniel Ryan with capitalism.com I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed recording it with John and I'll see you next time.

If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the Capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over at capitalism.com Inc. That's capitalism.com Inc.