#252: John Mackey - The former CEO of Whole Foods Market Shares The Whole Story
John Mackey shares it all in his latest book, The Whole Story
In 2009, John Mackey, the then-CEO of Whole Foods Market, gave Rip the shot of a lifetime to showcase Engine 2 products and tour around Whole Foods Market stores around the world as a healthy eating ambassador extolling the virtues of a whole foods, plant-based diet.
This opportunity and vision truly put PLANTSTRONG on the trajectory that exists today and has allowed Rip to live out his life’s purpose.
Today, Rip speaks with John about his new book, The Whole Story - Adventures in Love, Life and Capitalism. Mackey describes it as a gift to past, present, and future employees of Whole Foods. It’s also a gift to entrepreneurs and dreamers who dare to envision something unconventional in a conventional-minded world.
John may be one of the most successful CEOs in business, but he’s also a philosopher, thinker, and teacher.
Mackey vulnerably shares his ideas around competition, authenticity, leadership, and overcoming obstacles in business and life. He delves into his difficult family dynamics, the importance of love, community, and acceptance, and his experience with psychedelics and spiritual awakenings. He also shares his experiences with “play” - something we all need to embrace a little more of in this life.
It’s so rare to get such an authentic glimpse into the mind and heart of a CEO, but John Mackey graciously opens his heart and his playbook for all to see. The Whole Story - Adventures in Love, Life and Capitalism is out now wherever books are sold.
Episode Highlights
2:00 John Mackey's Impact on Rip’s Life
5:36 A Transition to John’s Personal Journey and Life’s Work
10:08 Ethical Veganism and Animal Rights
12:47 John’s Shift to Whole Food Plant-Based Diet thanks to inspiring books like The China Study and Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
17:27 Did John inspire Economist Milton Friedman to become vegan at age 92?
25:26 Mackey’s Four Motivations Behind Writing "The Whole Story"
31:00 The Therapeutic Value of Writing the Book
32:32 Reflecting on Life's Depth and Meaning and His Spiritual Journey Begins
43:28 How A Course in Miracles Led to His Awakening
54:26 Overcoming Self-Judgment and Forgiveness
1:05:01 Navigating Difficult Times and Differences with His Parents
1:09:28 His Mother's Last Wish
1:11:16 John Explores the Meaning of Love and the Barriers that Keep Us From It
1:16:57 A CEO’s View on Competition: Ego vs. Growth
1:22:24 Why He Actually Embraces Competition
1:26:51 Synthesizing World Views to Get the Best From Everybody
1:37:47 The Amazon Solution
1:55:28 The Infinite Game: Business and Life Forever
2:08:17 Love Life: A New Adventure Begins
2:16:42 Beyond Death: The Metaphor of Transition
Mackey is a passionate a long-distance backpacker and hiker.
About John Mackey
John Mackey is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and visionary of Whole Foods Market. In his 44 years of service as CEO, the natural and organic grocer grew from a single store in Austin, Texas, to 540 stores in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, with annual sales exceeding $22 billion. Mackey co-founded the Conscious Capitalism Movement and co-authored a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling book entitled Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business and follow up, Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity through Business. He is also the co-author of The Whole Foods Diet: The Lifesaving Plan for Health and Longevity and The Whole Foods Cookbook: 120 Delicious and Healthy Plant-Centered Recipes. His new book is The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism (Matt Holt Books; May 21, 2024). Mackey currently serves on the board of directors for Conscious Capitalism, The Motley Fool, CATO Institute, The Institute for Cultural Evolution, and Students for Liberty and is pursuing his next business venture, Love.Life. More at www.johnpmackey.com
Episode Resources
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Full Transcription via AI Transcription Service
[0:00] I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. Today, I sit down with co-founder and former CEO of Whole Foods Market Stores for over 44 years, John Mackey, and we discuss the whole story. It's not just the title of his latest book, but really, it's a preview of our very open and very beautiful conversation. That's coming up right after this message from PLANTSTRONG.
John Mackey's Influence on Plant-Based Diet
[0:37] In 2009, John Mackey, the then CEO of Whole Food Market Stores, gave me the shot of a lifetime to showcase Engine 2 products and tour around Whole Food Market Stores all over the world, extolling the virtues of a whole food plant-based diet. it. In essence, he really put me on the path to living my life's purpose. Today, I speak super candidly with John about his life's work and his new book, The Whole Story, Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. He describes it as a gift to past, present, and future team members of Whole Foods, but it's also a gift to entrepreneurs and dreamers who dare to dream of something something perhaps unconventional in a conventional-minded world. And John may be one of the most successful CEOs in business, but he's also a philosopher, a thinker, and a teacher. Today, he shares his ideas around competition, authenticity, leadership, and overcoming obstacles in business and in life. He also shares his experiences with play, something that we all need to embrace a little bit more of in this lifetime. Let's get right to it. Please welcome one of my biggest mentors, John Mackey.
John Mackey's Impact on the Host's Life
[2:02] Hey, John. Welcome to PLANTSTRONG Podcast. Hi. Thanks, Rip. I'm so happy to be here. It's been way too long. I should have had John a year and a half or two years ago. I got more to say today, so it's probably good that you waited. Good. So, obviously, today I want to talk about your new book, The Whole Story, Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. I can't wait to dive into this. And i want to talk about all the different things that you have coming out of your grocery bag of life yeah um before we do for the listeners that are out there.
[2:39] Who may not know exactly who you are or what you mean to me i'd love to just kind of start with that by saying that you've been at your you were at the helm of whole foods for 44 years founders founder ceo co-ceo and you also um you reached out to me in 2009 and you gave me really what i consider the opportunity of a lifetime and you and i've told you this before but you saw something in me that i didn't see in myself and you allowed me to fulfill my greatest expression expression of myself by being this crusader for the advancement of all things whole food plant-based. And really because of you and your belief in me, I've now been able to build this ecosystem that has a food line, that has a podcast, that has meal planner, that has events, all these things. And I believe in large part because of you, I am living my highest purpose. And it feels so fantastic. So I just want the listeners to know that and know how grateful I am for you coming into my life. Hey, it's been a win-win-win relationship.
[4:01] You know, I liked you from the first time I met you. And you were a fireman when I first met you. But I loved the Engine 2 book. I loved the spirit that was written in, the can-do attitude. And, of course, your dad had a huge influence on me with his How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease book. And so then I liked you and I admired you too because of your athletic prowess, but mostly your enthusiasm. I thought this guy is going to be great at promoting and marketing a PLANTSTRONGlifestyle, plant-based whole foods, plant-based lifestyle.
[4:43] And so as we started our healthy eating team up, I really wanted you on that team. And then you just did a fantastic job. I mean, you toured, I mean, you were on the road a lot touring whole foods markets, But you were making these great connections and then we started doing the immersions and we wanted to do an engine two immersion and you were great at that. And so Whole Foods started using that for that and that ended up being a kind of a business in its own right for you. And probably one of the best things that happened was as I was beginning to sort of wind down at Whole Foods and the marketing team thought, well, we don't know if we want to continue to have this healthy eating team. And we don't know if we need RIP to stay there. So having you go out on your own to leave Whole Foods behind actually was a huge benefit for you personally. And it was a little bit risky, of course, but you've done such a fantastic job.
Transition to John Mackey's Personal Journey
[5:37] And you really blossomed into, as you listed all the things that you're doing now, you've had a much bigger impact in the world. You had a big impact when you were within the Whole Foods market umbrella, but you've had even a bigger impact out as you developed your own thing. And so, hey, I'm, Honored to be associated with you, and you're still schooling me in pickleball once a week, but I'm slowly getting better under your tutelage. And it's been a good friendship. I really, really love you, and I appreciate you. Yeah, yeah. Thank you.
Turning Point to Veganism
[6:09] Why don't we start, and you talk about this in the book, but I think since it's what brought us together, I'd love for you to share what was it that turned you on to veganism? And then on to whole food plant-based nutrition. Yeah. So my path, first, I was actually a vegetarian for many years, many, many years. That happened, I talk about it in the book. I moved, I wasn't a vegetarian. I moved in this vegetarian co-op when I was 23 years old, 22 or 23. And I was interested in all things counterculture. And I just thought vegetarians would probably be really cool people. And they were. And I met two girlfriends at, I moved to this co-op called Prana House. And we had about 18 or 19 people living communally, mostly UT students, as I was still a UT student at that point too. And I learned everything about food. I had my food awakening in Prana House. And I learned about natural organic foods. I learned how to cook. I became the food buyer for the co-op. Then I went to work for a small natural food store and I didn't know it at the time, but I had found my higher purpose. I found my life's mission because I got so excited about it. Then I started reading books and everything I could and I became a very staunch vegetarian. And-
[7:35] And then from that, I remember coming home from working at Good Foods one day, and I was wrapping up the day. I was closing the store down, and I was looking around, and I just loved what I was doing. It was so much fun. Where was Good Foods located? It was located at 5th and on Baylor Street, 5th and Baylor. They had five, but I worked at the one at 5th and Baylor. So sort of in central Austin, not too far from where Safer Way ended up opening up. And I was the assistant manager there, so I'd oftentimes close up the store. And I was closing it up this day, and I just felt, I just looked around and thought, you know, this is fun. I like the customers that come in. I get to serve them. I have all these friends I work with. This is, I could do this. This is within my realm of competence. And I went home to the co-op and I was talking, I talked to Renee and I grabbed her hands and I said, Renee, what do you think if we were to open up our own store together?
[8:38] And Renee was a very enthusiastic person and a lover of life. And she looked at me in the eyes and she said, oh, Mac-O-Man, that'd be so much fun. Let's do it. And she was, you know, she had said, what do we know about grocery stores? I mean, that's a dumb idea. I mean, where are we going to get the money? If she'd been a, you know, a skeptic or a naysayer, that might have been the end of the dream right there. But she was very encouraging. And that... Gave me the, with doing it together, that gave me sort of the courage at age 20, I was 23 or 24 at that point, to go out and start raising money and find a location. And we did the first store called Safer Way. And then I was vegetarian for a number of years. And then I got, Renee and I fell apart eventually after five or six years. And I got involved with other women. And one of the women I got involved with slowly sort of, you know, got me eating a little bit of seafood. So I got off my vegetarian path a little bit with her.
[9:42] And it wasn't until I became an ethical vegan that my life really changed. And that occurred back in 2003 when we had animal rights groups protesting at our annual meeting in Santa Monica, California. And they were protesting a duck supplier that we were using. We actually had some animal welfare standards at Whole Foods back then.
Ethical Veganism and Animal Rights
[10:06] They weren't very rigorous at that point. And we thought we had the best duck producer. But the animal rights group said that, you know, you guys are bullshitting you. They're fooling you. These guys are not good. And so I began a conversation with one of the women that was from Viva USA, Lauren Anelius. And Lauren was very passionate. she was like a little like five foot tall 90 pound little mighty mite because she was so powerful in her latina energy and and we began as conversation that led to email conversation and she challenged me she said you know after all these conversations with you i can see you actually are a pretty idealistic guy but when it comes to animal welfare you know you don't know what you're talking about you haven't researched it you haven't gone to the suppliers you're taking the word of your team, and you need to do more. You need to inform yourself. So that summer, summer of 2003, I read about a dozen books on animal welfare and began to understand the livestock industry a little bit better. And by the end of that summer.
[11:11] My little voice, a little voice in my soul, my being said, you should become a vegan. You know it's the right thing to do. Do it. And so I made the decision. I'm going to become a vegan. And then I communicated with her. And she was, of course, excited. And then we talked about, I want to change the way I can't make whole foods vegan. My first store was vegetarian. Safer Way was vegetarian.
[11:33] And it just didn't appeal to a big enough market. it so uh we but and i couldn't change whole foods to become a vegan store people said why don't you change the vegan store and it's like because i'd be fired i mean i couldn't even no way i could execute it i don't own this company i started it but i don't own it there's a public company we have shareholders you know it would be it would be so i'd go down in a blaze of glory but i would have been i'd have gone down and nothing would have changed it would have been a foodless thing to do. So, we began to work on the animal welfare statements, but it was the ethical argument that I always say that people that are not ethical vegans probably won't stay vegans. If you're not, if it's not grounded in this desire to not harm animals, it's very difficult to stay with it just for health reasons. You start making exceptions like I did when I was a vegetarian and started eating a little bit of fish, which to me, it's like, I'll never eat fish again. That's, Why would I want to kill fish? And so the health argument only goes so far. The ethical argument is what I really think makes a lifetime. I know I'll never eat animals consciously ever again in this lifetime. I just won't do it. And so that's how I became a vegan. So 2003.
Transition to Whole Food Plant-Based Diet
[12:47] 2003, yeah. So now 20, 21 years. Okay, so but there's another step to go from vegan to whole food plant-based. Yes. So what took you there? Yeah.
[13:00] And why? Yeah. So two books, two books made that change for me. The first one was when somebody gave me the China study to read. And so I read the China study and it had a big impact on me. And then, but you know how it is, like sometimes you hear something from one voice, one friend tells you something and you think it, but when you hear it a second time, it starts to hit in. And then my friend Bruce Friedrich sent me your dad's book, How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. And your dad had such rigorous standards in there. And it's like, I'm reading it, and it's like, wow, this is super serious stuff. And it also got my attention because my family has a history of heart disease. My father had heart disease. My mother died from it.
[13:49] She had multiple strokes, and she died when she was 64, so a pretty young age. And my brother and sister both struggle with heart disease as well so it's there and reading your dad's book and just the sort of I love the fact that it was just sort of like black and white right we're just we're just gonna eat as you call it the the plant pure diet and and so perfect plant perfect diet sorry plant Plant-perfect diet. And I began to live a plant-perfect lifestyle, which I did pretty rigorously for a few years. I would say now I'm PLANTSTRONG. Meaning I'm, I mean, and I ate at True Food Kitchen last night. So I got, and I did the best I could, but I probably got a little bit of oil. I really try to avoid oil. So I'm always vegan. And I really try to eat plant-perfect. I try to eat a whole foods plant-based diet in every meal. if I eat out, just do the best that I can in those circumstances.
[14:52] So, in going vegan, when that woman challenged you, you read all these books on animal welfare. You, you know, read a number of books, including the China Study Preventing Reverse Heart Disease. I know you read my book. Yes. The Engine to Diet. I'd already converted by the time I got to your book. Yeah, yeah. But were you, what was it that made you such a voracious reader of books and wanting to gather new information and your curiosity? I don't know. I've always been that way, even as a little boy. I was one of those kids that wanted to read the entire encyclopedia. I started at A. Wow. Did you ever make it to Z? No, I didn't make it past A. I mean, those were big, thick books. But I mean, I still spent time reading and I just love to read. I still just, I absorb information.
John Mackey's Passion for Reading
[15:45] I just, it makes my, reading makes my universe bigger.
[15:50] Ideas are fun. I love it. Yeah. Do you prefer reading now or do you listen to audio books? Do you have a preference? A combination of the two. If I was to probably add up, because now I can listen to books. I'm a long-distance backpacker and hiker, and you can take those audio books out there, and you can read a lot of books. If you're hiking 8, 10, 12 hours a day, you can knock a whole book out in a day or day and a half if you stay with it. And then anytime you're in a car, like just coming over here, listening to almost finish the audio book for the whole story because I had not heard the audio book. So now I've just about finished listening to that. And I'm pretty happy that I wish I'd read the whole thing. I think I did a good job on the prologue. But the professional reader we got, Adam Barr, I think he did an excellent job.
[16:44] That's one of the things I was going to ask you is if you actually did the reading for the whole story. Because one of my biggest regrets is that I didn't do the reading for the Engine 2. You should have. And I'm very happy with the way I did the reading for the prologue, the first 17 pages of the book. And when I listened to it, I thought, man, I wish I'd done the reading for the whole book. Yeah. And a lot of people have told me the same thing. So I didn't. And that's a lot of work. But now it's a minor, we'll call it a minor regret. Yeah. Yeah, they wanted me to fly to New York City and be in a recording studio for five days. Yeah, that's how long it would take you to read the whole book. Yeah. But on the other hand, there's an authenticity when an author reads a book that cannot be replaced by a professional reader. Yeah.
Anecdote with Economist Milton Friedman
[17:28] I can't remember when, but one time when we were out for dinner, you told me about the conversation you had with one of the great free market economists, Milton Friedman.
[17:41] And how you kind of, if this is... That's a great story that my book had been 500... My book was supposed to be a... We wrote a 500-page book and they basically, the editors took out about 100 pages of the book. Right. One of the stories that got taken out was a Milton Friedman story. Would you share that? I'll share the story with you because it's such a good story and it always shocks people. So it was 2005. 2005. So I'd been a vegan now for a couple of years. But I've also been a big, huge fan of Milton Friedman. I believe in free markets. I really believe in economic liberty and freedom. This comes out through the book. I believe in capitalism. Milton Friedman is one of the great exponents of free market capitalism in my lifetime. So I'd read all of his books and And sort of a little bit of a hero of mine. So mutual friends kind of hooked us up. And so Debra and I flew to San Francisco. And for people, Debra's your wife. Debra is my wife, yes. One of the stars of the book. And we were taking Milton and his wife Rose out. And they were 92 years old at this point, 92.
[18:59] And very small little munchkins. They're both about five feet tall, 5'1". So Milton Friedman was a giant in economics and giant in promoting capitalism and economic liberty, but a very small man. And his wife was also tiny. And so we pick them up. We go over to their place to pick them up. We're going to a famous vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco called Green's, which I always eat at when I go to San Francisco. Now they have half the menus vegan and the food's really good. And so we pick him up, and he offers us a drink, and we're talking. We're making small talk because we're a little early before our reservation at the restaurant. And he shows me his Nobel Prize. Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.
[19:48] Yes. And so, you know, you can get a bigger trophy for winning a pickleball competition than you get for winning the Nobel Prize. It was it was it's it wasn't the size of the thing But of course how many people win Nobel Prizes of anything and so that's a great great honor In fact, he was living and he the Nobel Prize enabled him to retire.
[20:09] From the University of Chicago because you get I don't know how much winnings he got But then he bought his place in San Francisco and Russian Hill. So he that Nobel Prize really helped him out financially So anyway, he asked me a question. He says John I, Why are you a vegan? And I said, Milton, I'll tell you what. I'm going to give you, Milton's one of the great debaters of that era as well. If you ever watch him on YouTube, he's an incredibly good debater. And I said, I'm going to make an argument to you. And we've got four points to the argument. If you can answer the argument effectively, I will stop being a vegan. But if you can't answer it, I would expect you to become one. And he thinks about it before he takes that challenge on. And he says, let's hear it. And so I said, okay, number one, if you eat animals, the animals necessarily have to die, right? There's no eating an animal that doesn't die. And if you're eating animals that were raised in America, there's over a 99% chance that animal was raised in a factory farm under the most horrific conditions that people are just not aware of in the United States because it's kind of just hidden away.
[21:24] And so here's that. And so point number two, you don't need to eat animals to be healthy. It's just something that we evolved with over time because people were trying to get enough food to eat. We were calorie deprived and you could raise, you could hunt animals and you could have livestock animals and you always had a source of calories, a source of that year round. And so that became part of our cultural traditions to eat animals. Um and three we continue to eat animals we don't need to eat animals anymore because we live in a world of abundant food um that we have a problem with too many calories and obesity in america we're now 74 overweight and over 42 obese so we have we have a cal we have too many calories you don't need to eat meat anymore to get calories and we do it because it's just the way we were We're raised, it's cultural. And then we learn to like, you learn to like whatever foods you eat. So we've learned to like meat and we enjoy it.
[22:28] So, and then the fourth point is, but you don't need to eat animals to be healthy. And you just do it because of your culture. How do you justify that? Knowing that you're causing all this pain and suffering, knowing that over your lifetime, thousands of animals will die just to feed you. How do you justify that? I can't justify it. I don't need to eat it. I'm healthier not eating it. In fact, eating a whole foods plant-based diet is probably the healthiest diet you can possibly eat. And, I mean, I'm thin. I don't have these diseases. I'm vital. This is a really good diet to eat, and no animals have to die, and there's no suffering. How do you justify it, Milton? I can't. That's why I'm a vegan. Okay, end of argument. So he gets really thoughtful. You can just see him. He's chewing this over in his mind. Then he looks at his watch, and he says, we're going to be late to dinner. Let's go. So on the drive over, he's quiet. I'm driving. This is pre-smartphones, pre-GPS garments. And so he's giving me directions on how to get to the restaurant. So we get to the restaurant and he's not saying anything about, he's not answering it. So I think, oh, that's okay. You know, he's 92. It doesn't matter. And we sit down, we get our menus and we're looking at the menus. And all of a sudden, Milton Friedman, he stands up, he stands up and he throws his menu on the table.
[23:57] And he looks at his wife of 70 years, of 70, to Rose for 70 years. He looks at his wife for 70 years and says, Rose, I cannot answer John's argument.
[24:10] From this point forward, I am becoming a vegan. And then the next thing that happens is like Debra and I are stunned, right? We're happy. It's like, wow, cool. Milton Friedman's going to be a vegan. But then his wife, Rose, stands up and she throws her menu down on the table. And she says, Milton, don't be ridiculous. We're 92 years old. It's too late for us to become vegans. So, I'll leave it to the listener to... Did Milton Friedman's intellectual integrity went out and did he become a vegan? Or did his wife of 70 years have the final say on this one? I don't know. Right. Because, in fact, Milton only – I didn't see him again. He died just a little over a year later. He slipped in a bathtub and hit his head. And so, I never got to find out the answer to that question. So, I kind of think maybe a wife of 70 years, having been married now for 34 years, they have a lot of influence on you. Yeah. Well, it depends who did the cooking, right? That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah. I'm sorry that story got cut from the book. Yeah. It's amazing.
Motivations Behind Writing "The Whole Story"
[25:27] So I want to dive into this book. You've written four other books, Conscious Capitalism, The Whole Foods Diet, Conscious Leadership, and The Whole Foods cookbook what what was the spark that that um prompted you to write the whole story because it's as we talked right before we jumped in here you poured your heart and soul and you bared it all yeah i mean there's almost nothing that you didn't uh you know oh there's a few, A few things that I am married that are not in the book, but it's pretty full disclosure, particularly about Whole Foods. Yeah. So what was the spark for the book? Yeah.
[26:16] First, I do think this is the best book I've ever written. It's as good as I think Conscious Capitalism was or Conscious Leadership or the Whole Foods Diet. I think the whole story is just such a good book. It reads like a novel. And so why did I write it is kind of what your question. Yeah.
[26:35] There are many reasons. And the first reason is that it's a gift to the team members of Whole Foods. Whole Foods. I started thinking about it. Whole Foods currently has 120,000 team members working there. And over the history of the company, over a million people have worked for Whole Foods.
[26:53] And then there are going to be millions in the future that work for Whole Foods. So it's like, I wrote it for the team members. I dedicated the book to past, present, and future team members. This is the story of Whole Foods, at least for the first 44 years of it. And I didn't want that to be lost. And I wanted team members to read it and think think, and to remind them of what we once were, and so they'll know where they came from. I actually feel like that's a good thing to do in general about any type of history. We take for granted that people know the story, but they don't. They don't know. They're coming into the story later on, and they don't necessarily know what went before. One of the great gifts my sister gave me about three or four years ago, she wrote up this, she created a book and gave it to me. It was a story of our family with lots of photos of my grandparents, my parents. And, you know, I didn't even know any of this stuff. It's amazing how little I really actually knew about my own parents. And what I knew about my grandparents was far less than that. And my great-grandparents, I all knew nothing about. So it was a great gift. Best present I've ever gotten in my life. So it's a present to the team members. That's the first reason.
[28:05] Secondly, it's for myself. self.
[28:08] This is my final gift to Whole Foods. It completes me with Whole Foods. This allows me to be completely finished. It's like if you're an entrepreneur and you create your own business, it's kind of always your child and you're always going to be a little bit worried about it. But I'm not responsible for it any longer. The child's fully grown up on its own. And I hope to still be friends with this child, but I'm not responsible and this helps me psychologically to be complete with it. It's like my final gift.
[28:40] Thirdly, it was to go back and write a book like this, it's I, looking backwards is how you understand it. The present to a certain extent. As you know, you've worked on a few books yourself, Rip, and you learn a lot of things when you write a book. It's a creative process. I was learning about, I was putting certain things together that I'd never really realized before until I thought about it and then I understood things I'd never understood before. So it was very good for me personally. I got to relive 40, almost 50 years of my life, If you go with some of the stuff that predates the start of SaferWay. Almost 50 years of my life, I got to relive.
[29:26] And I came away realizing I've had such an amazing life. I'm so grateful. I had so much joy in building the company. And one of the things I tried to communicate in the book is how much fun it is creating a business. It's not easy. It's very difficult. But it's so deeply satisfying to watch it grow. Row and you're doing it not by yourself you're doing it with a team and you're bonding together you're getting really close it's like it's why marines go through these processes together and they're they're friends for life and so the people that i built whole foods with these are friends for my life right they're they're people i'm always going to love people like glinda and walter and jim and and ac so um and the very final reason is that um i wrote it for entrepreneurs Entrepreneurs, because anybody that's an entrepreneur is going to love this book because a lot of the fears and self-doubts and challenges and struggles, every entrepreneur deals with them. And I just feel like I've always felt a special rapport with entrepreneurs.
[30:34] I feel like even they can be tech entrepreneurs or music entrepreneurs. It doesn't really matter. I connect with them. I connect with their life spirit of creativity and moving forward. And problems are things you can solve and overcome. They're not whiners and complaining about being victims. They're out creating a better life for themselves. And so I wrote it for them, too. So those are all reasons that I think I wrote the book for. Yeah.
Therapeutic Value of Writing the Book
[31:00] Was it – so it sounds like it was in many ways very therapeutic. Very therapeutic, yes. How – was it scary? Yeah. Is that an accurate term, scary? Because when I'm reading it, I'm thinking, man, John, you are one courageous dude. You've known me for a while, so I'm just a very open person. I really don't.
[31:24] It's natural for me to express kind of how I'm feeling with people and to try to be open, to be authentic. So part of what you're feeling in the book is my authenticity. Yeah. And you say it's courageous. pages i just feel like it's me being authentic and so i don't feel like i'm acting particularly brave some people will judge some of the things i wrote well that's yeah their stuff not my stuff and but i think when you show up authentically some people like you and some people don't but the people that like you like you for who you really are not for who you pretend to be if you think people if you pretend to be somebody that you're not and people like you you never know for for sure, do they like this fake person I'm showing them or do they really know who I am? Would they like me? So if you just keep showing up as who you really are, you attract the right kind of friends to yourself and the people that don't like you, well, then you know it. You don't have to hang out with them. Where do you think you got that from? You got that from your dad? Wow. No one's ever asked that question.
Reflecting on Life's Depth and Meaning
[32:30] I'm going to have to chew on that question. That's a really good question. I won't have an answer for that podcast, but I might have an answer to you personally some other time all right um i want to discuss if you're cool with it the opening of the book sure it's it's it's called the game of life yes and you're having this acid trip yep and you're pondering the meaning of life religion love community and infinite of one you run into one One of your, I think, philosophy professor, Solomon, you talk about wanting to live a life of depth and intellectual courage and love and possibility. It just is like... It's, you have just like cracked open this incredible, like I read that chapter, that opening chapter, and I wanted what you had, what you had going on. I mean, it was awesome. What made you decide to open up your book with this particular? Well, because it was completely life changing. Yeah.
[33:40] Let's, readers haven't read it yet. Yeah. And so I am just turned 23. It was soon after my 22nd birthday. So I had just turned 22. And I had done LSD several times from about ages of, I think 19 was the first time I did it. But this was the largest dose I'd ever taken. It's what people would call a hero's dose. I didn't know how much it was. and I experienced, I mean, I'd been a seeker. The LSD, when I first took it at age 19, it knocked me off the path my parents had programmed into me, which was I'm going to go to school, I'm going to get a degree, then I'm going to go to graduate school, I'm going to become a lawyer, I'm going to become a doctor, I'm going to get an MBA, I'm going to be a professional of some kind.
[34:35] And that was what my parents wanted for me, and that's what I was on track to do. And I took LSD at age 19, not a very large dose, but it was like, oh my God.
[34:47] The universe is so much bigger than I realized. This is incredible. And there was an inner universe, an inner part of my being that I'd never really felt before. I mean, I never really, I didn't realize there was an external universe that
The Power of LSD and Ego Death
[35:04] seems to be infinite, but there's also an internal universe that is also infinite. But I'd just never been in touch with it before that, and LSD opened it up to me. And then I became sort of a seeker, seeking, I started studying Eastern religions. I learned how to meditate.
[35:18] I started growing my hair long. I was no longer on the track to be a doctor or a lawyer. I wanted to study philosophy and religion. And it's what I did. And I started reading dozens and dozens and eventually hundreds of books about it. So this dose that I took soon after my 22nd birthday, I didn't, this back in the day, I didn't exactly know how you were getting. This was very powerful. I took it by myself. And I was kind of depressed. I wasn't in a relationship. I didn't have a girlfriend. friend i was knew i was off the track my parents had for me and i wasn't sure what i wanted to be, i think at that point i was an atheist i'd call myself an existentialist because of my philosophy studies um so a little bit lost and this experience was so intense it was such, But I experienced what later on I came to interpret as an ego death. And so what I mean by ego death, we experience ourselves as separate beings. You're Rip. I'm John. This is a glass.
[36:22] That's a video screen. That's my book. And they're all separate from me, right? They're different from the me. They're different than John. And that separation that we experience is, we can call that the ego that identifies ourself as different and separate from everything else. It is how we live our lives. We live our lives in a state of ego consciousness. Just imagine for a second that there's another reality with nothing separate. There is only the one. Everything is connected. Everything is connected. There is no separation. Our minds see separation, but it's because that's what our minds are creating. So I took this large enough dose where I described it in the book. It's like.
[37:15] I'm hanging on to like a rock over Niagara Falls, you know, and I eventually got tired and I got swept over and I just surrendered. I let go. I couldn't hold out. I couldn't hold the separation out any longer. And then I just merged into the one. And it's very hard to describe that experience to somebody that's never had it because it just sounds sort of like googly gawk, whoa, whoa, woo, woo stuff. But it was bliss. I mean, to let go of that separate self and just to know that you can just totally relax into the one. And so what I realized in that experience is that, oh, my God, I had no idea. I'm a manifestation of the one. I am the one. We are all, everything is the one. I'm not special. I'm just another manifestation of the one. And it's all connected. And there's nothing to be afraid of. There's nothing to be, no reason to fear death, no reason to fear anything. You're free. We're here, we're this beings of basically playing a game, an infinite game. And that's what I saw in this experience. And it obviously changed my life completely. And it's like, whoa.
[38:28] And then I, because I'd been, you know, timid and this gave me the courage. I'm like, I'm going to go explore everything. What's there to be afraid of? Am I going to get hurt? Sure. Am I going to die? Yes. Yes, but that's not who I am. I'm not the ego. I'm not the body. I'm not the separate self. I am an expression of this eternal beingness. I don't know how else to put it. And that is so liberating. You just cannot imagine because it's like the whole death anxiety and all that stuff sort of fades away and you're just free to go create and be. It's an amazing feeling.
[39:04] Yeah. So that's what's in that. And then why that's important is that I run into this, I think I run into my philosophy professor that I so admired, a professor at University of Texas named Bob Solomon, Robert C. Solomon. He wrote, he's an existentialist and an intellectual hero, and I worshipped him when I was very, very young at that age. He just lived such an, oh, my God, I might have my answer for you about the authenticity. He was so authentic, Bob Solomon was. He was himself and it's like i wanted to be like him i wanted to be this authentic self and no bullshit self you just to be present and be who you are so maybe that was the seed thank you know how to come under your consciousness shows up things later so i think that is the answer and so i wanted to be like him and he was um i i i envisioned myself being you know like this guy that would i couldn't i didn't know if i was going to be a professor like him because I didn't know if I wanted to go do the whole PhD thing. But I wanted to be a philosopher. I thought I was an existentialist, and a lot like he was. So...
[40:15] I'm coming down from this journey now, and I started hitchhiking around. But we'll save that for the story. I run into the professor walking, and this is a great opportunity. And I went up to him. I didn't have a shirt on because it was hot. It was August in Austin.
[40:33] So I ran up to him, and I said, Professor Solomon, it's John Mackey. He didn't recognize me immediately. I said, I'm one of your students. I've taken several classes from you. And then he began to recognize who I was. And I said, listen, I just want to ask you a couple of questions. I've been wanting to ask you these questions for a long time. And I just, you know, I said, sure, sure, go ahead, ask me whatever you want. And I said, well, sir, you teach that in your books, in your classes, that life is absurd. There's no meaning to life. There's no point to it. And that there's really no objective meaning. But we can give it meaning. We give it meaning in our own minds, but it's not really real. Because the life itself and me is all, you know, just pointless. It's all, you know, there's no point in it. And he said, yes, that's what I believe. And I said, well, sir, I don't, are you happy? Because I don't, if you don't think there's any objective meaning to life or any purpose, we're just going to die and disappear and there's nothing more than that. I mean, I don't know how you'd be happy. And he looked at me and says, I'm not very happy. I just think that's the truth.
[41:40] And well he gave you an authentic answer didn't he gave me an authentic answer yeah and, I looked and I looked at him and he looked at me and nodded and he kept walking his way and I kept walking my way but that conversation it's like that's when I realized, I don't I just had this amazing experience of ego death and I said I don't believe that I don't believe that any longer it's all meaningful it's it's it's everything is purposeful it's all All intensely alive.
[42:10] And I knew in my heart I wanted to live a life, authentic life like Professor Solomon, but I wanted love and joy and community and purpose and passion. I wanted all these things. I didn't want to be a lonely existentialist atheist who was unhappy and miserable. And so I moved away from that. That was the changing point of my life. I moved into the co-op pretty soon after that. And then I had my food awakening and the things we talked about earlier. So that LSD trip completely changed my life. I'm not making a recommendation that people drop acid or any other psychedelic drugs. I do refer later on in the book to a couple of other experiences, which we may want to talk about. But at this point, at age 22, this was a very important experience for me. Yeah, no, I definitely want to come back to... Some psychedelics that you took. Yeah. Because I think it comes full circle. It does. In a very powerful way. The first chapter of the book is the game of life. And the last chapter of the book is the infinite game. That's not accidental. That's a thread that's woven through the entire book. Yeah.
A Course in Miracles and Spiritual Awakening
[43:28] I want to read a quote. Sure. This is under the topic of religion. And you say, I'd opted to believe that God didn't exist and became an atheist. A course in miracles had a different answer. One that got me so excited that I jumped up and down and began running around my home. My question is, where are you currently on your spiritual journey with religion? I'm not in any place with religion, but if you ask me where I am with spirituality, Spirituality. Yes, spirituality. I'm far deeper right now than I've ever been. I'm more awake than I've ever been. I'm more conscious than I've ever been. That quote is put it into proper context. That quote is about when I was younger, I had been, when I was like 18, I'd become, for about two years, I became a evangelical born-again Christian. And studied the Bible intensely. I actually, my evangelical skills were good. I actually converted several people to Christianity including one that went on to became a minister and another theologian and, Two of my friends from high school so But it was the problem of evil that moved me away from Christianity because I didn't I didn't find the answer satisfying it's like the problem of evil is look if God is.
[44:52] All-knowing and all-powerful and loving, how can there be so much evil in this world? How can it exist? How can God allow it? And I always felt like the Christian answer was unsatisfactory. Well, you know, God gave us free choice. Well, free will, and we've made bad choices. It's like, didn't you know we were going to make bad choices? You know, it's like, he's all-knowing. And so, the problem of evil proved to be so powerful for me that I couldn't answer it. But it's kind of like the question I gave Milton Friedman. He couldn't answer that, so he had to change his mind. Well, I couldn't answer that problem, so I changed my mind. So I moved away from Christianity at that point. But after I, let's just say, we can get to the MDMA point at another time. But a friend of mine gave me a book to read called The Course in Miracles. And I said, well, what is this book? He was a good friend. He was a very spiritually awake guy. And he said, well, it's supposed to be a channeling from Jesus. I said, oh, yeah, sure, a channeling from Jesus. How likely is that? And he said, but, John, you're interested in all these questions. Why don't you give the book a try, just out of your friendship for me? And so I went in and started reading the book with a bad attitude. I was like, this has got to be nonsense. I'm going to read it enough so I can go argue with my friend. And I'm reading the book. And...
[46:18] I can't remember where it was, but it was early on in the first 50, 60, 70 pages, I come across a passage which answered the problem of evil for me. And it was like I couldn't believe it. The Course in Miracles had a very unique answer to the problem of evil, which is you've got your all-powerful, all-knowing God, all the things. The Course in Miracles says, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, lifetime you have blamed god for all the evil that you see all the problems that you see, and i tell you god doesn't even know about any of it and i said well and it's like what does that mean and it says my child you were in a dream you think you wake up after you go to sleep but you just wake up to another dream and you are creating the dream all the evil that you see all the things that you curse and judge, you're creating it. You're creating this dream. And the Course in Miracles is a path to awaken from the dream.
[47:23] It's a path of love. Through practicing forgiveness and opening your heart wider to the possibilities of love, your dream begins to change. It becomes a happier dream. And then eventually you fully, completely awakened. And since I've put that in, that philosophy into effect, I've found it to be true. As I open myself deeper to love, my life becomes happier and happier and happier. The most loving, kind people show up in my life. And so the answer to the problem of evil, according to The Course in Miracles, is just simply that you're blaming God. Well, well, God's not creating this dream for you, you are. And you're having fun, it's an adventure, but is it really satisfying your soul to the way it could be? Then if you don't like it, change the dream. And you change that dream by changing your consciousness. That's really powerful. That's why when I heard it, I got up and started running around the room. I was so excited about it. Yeah. I think that's a good transition to love. Yeah. Because to me, love is... That's the theme of the book. At the end of the day, that's the theme of the book. It is. What is love to you?
[48:42] Love is the... In some sense, love cannot be completely defined. mind. Love is the essence of reality. Love is what we are. In our hearts, in our souls, is love. And that's the universe is grounded in love. We're just asleep. We're just not awake to it. But as we open to it, as we begin to think of it as like there are blocks to the presence of love in our lives, those blocks are fear, that's the biggest one, fear, anger, judgment.
[49:22] Resentment, envy, these all take us away from love. We spend our lives judging other people, judging ourselves, and those block the love that's within us. Or we begin to make exceptions for our children or for very special people, but not in general everyone and everything.
[49:47] And so we have to heal those blocks. We have to begin to remove the blocks. And the Course in Miracles, anyway, the path for removing those blocks in the Course is simply forgiveness. You practice forgiveness. And as we forgive, we come to discover that we, too, are also forgiven. We judge ourselves for not being perfect and for the mistakes that we make. We all make mistakes. And another thing I've learned that's very important is that the past doesn't exist any longer. All that's real is this moment. moment, and in this moment, we can choose love. It doesn't matter if you didn't choose at last moment. It doesn't matter what you did in the past. It doesn't exist any longer. Right now, we can choose love. And if you forget that, it's okay, because the next moment, you can choose love. And so if you choose love, moment after moment after moment after moment after moment, eventually, that's all there is. One of the things that stood out to me in the book is that you have grappled with loving yourself yes and often failed.
[50:57] And by the end and and i want to go into this later but by the end i i feel like you've you're in a great space a great place with loving yourself but earlier on in the book and maybe this isn't the word you use, but you despised yourself? You didn't like yourself? So we're in this dream, and...
[51:20] Think of the dream like when you're dreaming at night. To get the dream out, of course, you can understand this a little bit better. Have you ever had a lucid dream? A lucid dream is a dream that you become conscious that you're dreaming. You're actually asleep dreaming, but you're aware that you're dreaming. Have you ever had that? I think maybe once. So what's common when you become aware that you're the dreamer is it's like, oh my gosh, you can control the dream. As you think, there the dream begins to manifest what you're thinking. So if you're a young man, you have to resist the temptation to go into a sexual fantasy at that point. And if you can resist that, then it's like if you want to fly, you can fly. You can do these amazing things. I still have these flying dreams where I'm like sitting here and it's like, Rip, you're not going to believe this. I can fly. It's like you can't fly. Nobody can fly. I said, watch this. And I start flying around the room. It's like, how do you do that? It's like, I don't know. I can just do it. So in a lucid dream, you become aware of the dreamer and then you can begin to create the dream as you want it.
[52:31] It's the same way here. As you awaken, as you become aware that you're the dreamer, you can begin to create the dream that you wish. And if you do it from the spirit of love, the dream becomes happier and happier. Now, what happens though is we attack and judge other people, as we put fear out there, as we do that, we begin to feel guilty. We know that's not a good thing. We don't want to hurt people. So when we hurt somebody, even if we say, well, he got what he deserved, there's part of us that knows that was not a good thought, not a good judgment to put out there. And so we don't always act perfectly, and we tend to judge ourselves for our imperfections. And and we don't and so we begin to get trapped by our own negative energy and it starts to it reciprocates but then the dream reflects it back to us so as we attack others we begin to feel that we're being attacked um hey if you talk a lot of trash talking in a pickleball uh you it may come back to you with a smash exactly so um.
[53:40] That's why it was hard for me to love myself, because I've done so many terrible things. I mean, I've hurt so many people. I've said so many things that wounded people. I've been thoughtless and careless and angry and judgmental. I've been in the human condition of fear and guilt and anger and all those emotions. And as I've expressed those emotions, I don't feel good about myself. I don't love myself. Who would love a person that would be doing this kind of stuff, that does these terrible things?
[54:14] So that's why forgiveness is such an important path. As we forgive others, it comes back to us. Does this make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Overcoming Self-Judgment and Forgiveness
[54:26] This is a very different podcast than you're a younger person. I want to read a couple of passages from the book that to me also talk about love. So Mark Skiles, he's somebody that you were in. He was one of the co-founders, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, and a very close friend. And a close friend. And it sounds like you guys, so I'm going to read here. Mark Skiles and you had a riff. Had a falling out. And in your book, Appreciations, you wrote this to your co-founders. What a wonderful company we created together. Thank you! Mark, wherever you are now, I think about you and I love you.
[55:12] I think there's forgiveness there. There's putting out the love. I'm amazed that you read all the Appreciations at the end. Oh, yeah. To me, it's important. That won't show up in the audio book. Yeah.
[55:29] And then, and then we already talked about this, but then in your dedication to the book, you express the love that you feel for all team members. And this is what you say to all the Whole Food team members, past, present, and future. We did this together and I will always love you. Um, I, I bring up those two examples because, you know, to me, there's just so much love to me that's just coursing through this, this book and presents itself in a variety of ways. But to you know so a guy who was basically gunning for your spot right and wanted you to leave and yet at the end of the day uh you're able to say hey you know what i love you and it's it's all okay of course i maybe when it was going on i didn't feel that this is now remember i said that the past doesn't exist any longer but in this present moment i do love mark i love everyone and uh And you can continue to make that choice. So, yes, the book is, that is the deepest message in the book, is the importance of love and that we all have this potential to go deeper into love. And also, there's an evolution thesis in the book that we're continuing to evolve as beings. And that's the infinite game, is continued evolution, continued learning and growing, continuing awakening.
[56:57] There's the big bang, and then there's the coming back together again. There's the breathing in and the breathing out. They're all the dreams. They're all the creations that go on, the multiverse. That's all the one continually creating, continually expressing itself. And Rip, we're part of it. It's amazing. It's incredible. Forever. Oh, it's so great to be alive. It's so great.
[57:26] Can we talk about your mom and your dad for a sec? Sure, of course. Because they play an important part in your life. They do. And I'd love to start with your dad, who it sounds from what I read, I never got to meet your father.
[57:44] You weren't that close growing up, but then when you decided to start Whole Foods, You kind of reached out to him, and he gave you a number of books to read, and you invited him to be on the board, and he gave you a loan. I think we were close when I was very young because I was an athlete, and my dad loved sports. So he'd go out and throw the football with us. He spent hours hitting fly balls to me and my brother. I was the center fielder on the baseball team.
[58:10] And he wasn't very good at basketball, but we'd go out, and he'd shoot some hoops with me from time to time. And he'd take us to games. And so that love of sports is where I got it from my father. And so I think both my brother and I were close to my dad when we were younger. But then when you get into high school, you get into adolescence, you know, and I just drifted away from him. And then I talk about how, you know, I had this, my dad being in a depression, born in 1921, you know, grew up first in the prosperous 20s. But then the Great Depression hit when he was eight or nine years old. So he kind of formative years in the Depression. And then World War II broke out. My dad was 20 when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And he joined up almost immediately, as did almost everybody at that age. And then when the war was over, he was married. And the whole suburban thing happens. And my dad, he didn't really follow his own dreams in life. He did not follow his heart. Because he was so bound by duty. And they just wanted to earn a living. And so my dad was like the epitome of responsibility.
[59:20] Hard work, a dutiful provider to his family, maybe not very expressive of his emotions. And I tell the story in the book about when I started getting interested in, you know, metaphysical spiritual questions. And I go talk to my dad and I said, dad, what do you think about, is there a God? Do you think God exists? And, you know, is there life after death or, you know, what's it all about? Do you think there's, what is, is there any meaning or any purpose to any of this? Because my dad looked at me and says, you know, John, when I was about your age, I thought really hard about that for almost a whole day. And I couldn't figure it out. Really haven't thought about it since. That was so different. But it was my dad, responsible, focused on the reality that he experienced and just trying to be a good person and work hard and provide for his children. He did a wonderful job of that. So I was alienated from him at that time. But then as I got the business going, my dad, I didn't have any. I studied philosophy and religion and literature and the humanities. I just took whatever courses I was interested. None of those were business. Probably because my dad was into business, I thought, I'm never going to be a business person. My God, look how boring that would be. But when I got interested in Whole Foods and I wanted to start up a business, he was highly supportive of that. As I say, and I make a joke in the book, it's like, being a grocer is a lot better than being a hippie guy that doesn't do any work. Yeah. And so, well, whereas my mother...
[1:00:50] Thought being a grocer was like so beneath where she wanted her son to be, a doctor or a lawyer or something respectable. My dad picked up on the entrepreneurial enthusiasm and he supported it. He encouraged it. He invested in it. And then he mentored me. I never could have done what I did if my dad hadn't mentored me. He's this, in the first half of the book, he's clearly the second most important character, you know.
[1:01:15] And- Very- Brought us very close together. Yeah. Very important teacher and mentor in your life. At what point did the tables kind of turn a little bit where you're like, dad, I think that I'd be better off if you were no longer on the board and I really want you to resign. And it really, you describe it here as being a very painful conversation you had to have with your dad. It was. It was the hardest thing I ever did, actually, in business, was firing my dad from the board. And it'll make more sense when I explain it retroactively in a minute.
[1:01:55] But so he'd been my mentor and helped me, and we'd never made any big decisions that he didn't sign off on. And that's one reason we were successful. And he taught me frugality and the importance of making money and reinvesting in and not spending, overspending. He taught me about people and leadership. He was just a great, great mentor. And he loved me. And so we had complete trust. You know, I could tell my dad anything, and he knew he could tell me what he really thought. And so it was a really, really good partnership.
[1:02:28] And then Whole Food went public in 1992. It was our initial public offering. We sold stock to the public. And my dad was pretty well off from his own business experiences, but he made a lot of money because he'd invested. And once we went public, his net worth went up considerably, as did mine, since I had no net worth prior to that. And at first, I thought we started to fight a lot about we weren't syncing up on these decisions, like these acquisitions, First Bread and Circus in Boston and Mrs. Gooch's in L.A. And he kind of opposed on both of them. And I was surprised because he'd always been excited about our growth. And at the time, I thought, well, maybe he just doesn't want to lose the money. He's older. He's in a different state in his life, right? I'm like, we did our IPO. How old was I? I was in my 30s still. And he was in his 60s. And so he's thinking, I don't want to lose it. And so he wants to be getting more conservative. And so we started fighting at the board meetings. And we're a public company, and we're fighting because I want to grow, and he wants us to be careful, not make mistakes. And I couldn't understand it. He changed. And he'd have these emotional outbursts that I didn't understand. Yeah.
[1:03:47] He ultimately supported both the acquisitions of Bread and Circus and Mrs. Gooch's, which were life-changing for Whole Foods. Those two companies combined with Whole Foods, we got – we just – that combination is really what helped us to be able to grow the talent we got from those deals. A.C. Gallo, for one, and the Mrs. Gooch's people were fantastic as well. So, anyway, I remember after the Mrs. Gooch's merger, which I had to beg him to do. He did not want to do it. I said, you've got to trust me on this. This is going to be huge. And it was. It was a huge deal. And after that, I thought to myself, you know, I just, we're fighting all the time. I need to get, I went back and forth. I didn't make a decision instantaneously about it. But then I realized, no, it's time for him to go. I just turned 40. And this was two years after the IPO. I just turned 40. And with Mrs. Gucces was 1993. And then I just went to him and I said, Dad, you're always going to be my mentor. I'm always going to take every decision to you, but we can't keep fighting like this. The media is going to find out about it. It's going to be bad news.
Navigating Change with Family
[1:04:59] He says, we can change. And I said, I don't think we can change. You and I like to argue things and we're debaters, but you're doing you're doing it so emotionally now and i don't understand and he and i just said you you need to sell half your stock i thought it was about the money you need to sell half your stock then you're never gonna have to worry about money again keep the other half because i'm going to grow this company and it's going to be worth a lot more and he and i said otherwise it's destroying our relationship we are so close we're best friends my father was my best man at my wedding um and uh.
[1:05:33] He agreed. He did it. And he stepped down. And I still went to him, but he's no longer going to the board meetings. A year after that is when he got diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And that's when I realized, when I researched it, it's like, oh, he already had it. He just didn't know it. Because one of the early symptoms of Alzheimer's is these emotional outbursts, a lot of emotional irrationality, you might say, that doesn't fit. It's like, I've never seen my dad like that before. What's going on? So that explained it. I just didn't know it at the time. It wasn't about the money at all. It was just he wasn't really the father that I knew so well.
[1:06:13] That's a terrible disease. I have so much empathy. If you ever get Alzheimer's, if I got Alzheimer's, I think I would kill myself rather than go through that because it's just so terrible disease. Do you know if you have the gene? I do have the gene. Well, you're doing the right thing. I'm eating a whole foods, plant-based diet, baby. That's the best protection I have. Sure as eyes would love that. Well, I do have it. And I tested for it. It's like, oh, shit, I got that Alzheimer's disease. And what is it? It's the APO4. O-4, O-E-4. And there are other markers, but that's the worst one. I don't have, that's the only marker. There are four markers for it. I have one, but the worst one. Well, you're doing so many things, right? between eating this way, constantly challenging your mind.
[1:07:07] Exercising, meditation, and what, are you 70 yet? I'll be 71 in a couple months. 71. I know, I mean, it's terrible. All I can think about when I pick a ball is that I'm at a peak now, I can only decline. That's not true. Well, I think I'm better than I was a year ago, so maybe I can get better for a while.
Exploring Relationships with Parents
[1:07:26] What about your mom?
[1:07:29] What was your relationship like with your mom? You know, I never was really that close to my mom, even in her early age. She had a lot of anxiety and fear. And I think even as a little boy, I kind of migrated to my father, who was confident and strong, and I felt my mother was consciously anxious and worried about everything all the time. And I didn't have a word for it. She was very neurotic. I didn't have a word for it, but I just didn't, I didn't, you know, I mean, you need your mother. I just kind of pushed her away a little bit because I just kind of, as a child, I just sensed that it wasn't healthy to be, you know, I didn't want to be that way. And her anxiety was something that I did have to do a lot of spiritual work to, I don't feel anxious anymore, but I had to do a lot of spiritual work to overcome it. My brother and sister still have, I think, a lot of fear. But my mom, in fact, I realized that one of the great gifts my mother gave me is that she was, lived a very unhealthy lifestyle. She smoked. I believe she was an alcoholic. She worried constantly. She never exercised. She watched the news several hours a day, which is a good way to be fearful and unhappy. And she had a lot of judgments, a lot of judgments about other people and kind of manipulative.
[1:08:51] But she did love me. So, I mean, she gave the greatest gift any mother can give her child. She did love me and want the best for me. But she really wanted me to be respectable. And so she died in 1987. And Whole Foods at that point only had four stores. And so the story that's in the book is the very last time I ever saw my mother was on her deathbed. She died a few days after I'd seen her. She already had one stroke. She was kind of partially paralyzed and bedridden. And so I went to visit her and she asked me, she'd asked me this before, but the last thing she asked me,
A Mother's Last Wish
[1:09:23] she says, John, you know I'm going to die soon. And would you do this for your dying mother? You know, she was real manipulative. Would you promise me you'll go back and finish school? And you know, we gave you a very fine mind. I just can't believe you're going to be a grocer just wasting your life. And it's like, looking backwards now, I wish I had just lied and said, yeah, mom, I'm going to go back to school for you. I'm going to do this for you. She'd have died this very, not believing her son was a failure. And it was downwardly mobile. But I didn't do that because I was so full of my own integrity at that point. Now, I'm not going to lie to my mother. I mean, why would I do that? This is the truth. I'm not going back to school. I said I was going to get an honorary degree someday, which I did. I did get that. You did. Actually, I want to, if you don't mind, I'd like to read that passage.
[1:10:14] It's right here, page 319. I opened my commencement speech by telling the assembled graduates the story of my mother's deathbed request. It has taken me 37 years, but mom and dad, I finally have that college degree that you wanted me to get so badly. I thank the college for fulfilling my mother's last wish for me and then address the young people in the audience. I'm going to read this because I really, I love it.
[1:10:40] Unless you want to read it, since it's your words right there. Honor and appreciate your parents. No one will ever love you quite like your parents do. And although they have no doubt made plenty of mistakes in helping you to grow up, they've also done the very best job they knew how to do. They've made far more sacrifices on your behalf than you will ever really know. Please forgive them for their mistakes and imperfections, and fully love them and honor them while you can. Because the simple truth is that you won't always have them with you as you move further along your life journey.
Envy and Admiration
[1:11:17] Yeah. Yeah. Rip, one of the things I admire and I envy a little bit about you, but envy in a good way, is you have amazing parents. And they're both characters. And because they're following this diet, you get to enjoy your parents far longer than I got to enjoy your parents. I mean, heck, your parents might still outlive you, for God's sake. They are so full of vitality. So, your parents are huge cheerleaders of you and your work. And I know you have a really close relationship with both of them. And I admire that and envy it. Thank you. Yeah. Ann is going to be 89 in about a month and a half. And Essie. It acts like she's like 39. It's true. And Essie is going to be 91 this year. Wow. So 89 and 91. Fantastic. Yeah. I'm gonna switch topics for a second and go from kind of love and your parents and all that to leadership. And so you were at the helm of Whole Foods for 44 years.
[1:12:25] You must feel like a tried and true warrior that's gone through the gauntlet and come out the other side with a lot of scars. When I'm reading this, I'm thinking about all the different fires you had to put out, the people that were gunning for your position. And my question to you is, do you love being a leader? Do I love being a leader? You know, it's kind of funny because I know I am a leader, but I don't know if I'm trying to be a leader. I'm just being me.
[1:12:56] And so the answer is, do I like being me? And the answer is, I do like being me. Right. So I guess I like being a leader. Right. Well, I can remember you and I, we were at Whole Foods. This is probably in 2015 or 16. And for a Christmas present, I got you 10 sessions with a good friend of mine named Nathan Turner, who was Lance Armstrong's strength and conditioning coach when he won two of his Tour de France's. And you're like, you know, I don't, I don't want that. And I'm like, you're like, I don't, I don't like anybody telling me what to do. And so, you know what, you keep it, you're being authentic, right? Just being authentic the way only you can. I take it today. And then you said, Rip, if I wasn't running Whole Foods, I'd probably be homeless in a ditch somewhere. Your exact words. But so, yeah. But look at you being you, you found Whole Foods and it worked out.
Forgiveness and Appreciation
[1:13:56] I guess what I wonder about you being at the helm for 44 years and what you had to go through is how did you keep getting up after getting knocked down, after challenges and failures and threats to your leadership. What drove that? I think...
[1:14:21] It's another good question. I just think that's kind of who I am. I mean, maybe at a very early age, my father drummed into me, you know, don't quit. I mean, when you hit hardships and whatnot, those are challenges for you. You overcome them. And sometimes you lose, but then you learn a lesson and you'll come back and win the next day. I think entrepreneurs in general are resilient. I think because there's so many setbacks that you get in creating and building anything, so much pushback you get from it, so much skepticism, a world of doubts that it won't work. And we all get our scars, so to speak, as we go through life. And it's kind of how we respond to the circumstances that determine our character. And I just was always, I always kind of had an attitude of, I'll show you. I'll show you what we can do. I'll show you what I can do. And I feel that way still today. You know, we compete. And even when I lose, I feel more determined. I'm going to get better. I'm going to play better next time. So it's part of my character. And where did that come from initially? Was I born with it? Maybe. But I also think it was nurtured by my father. My father, he just did not allow his children to quit.
[1:15:43] I'm going to read this passage. You say, as 2015 drew to a close, I felt tangled in a web of other people's stories about me, about the company, about our future, our value, our integrity, and our intentions. None of these narratives reflected the person that I knew myself to be or the company that I led. head. Schultz misplaced accusations, mingled with the media's gleeful headlines as I lay awake at night. My question to you there is, so I've only been the CEO of PLANTSTRONGFoods now for three plus years. I've had so many nights, sleepless nights where I'm just lying there in agony and I'm like, I just don't, I don't have, I don't have the stomach for this. And it's just, It's like the most insane roller coaster ride you could ever be on. I find the highs and the lows and trying to, you know, figure out how to, you know, keep a nice, steady calm. Yeah. I don't know. I had plenty of sleepless nights. And I just, yeah, how do you do it? I know you're resilient and I know your father kind of drummed it into you,
Competition: Ego vs. Growth
[1:16:54] but to me, there's something more deeper. There's love. There's this adventure. It's an adventure. You know, you're on an adventure and some bad shit happens.
[1:17:05] But it's part of the adventure. And it's – but there's a joy of overcoming challenges and problems. And I've always thought, you know, because I have that spiritual grounding, it's like, okay, this is an – the biggest challenge is it's more of an opportunity to grow. I can evolve past this. I can – I'll come through this stronger. And so I had a determination to move through it because I honestly thought it was an opportunity for me to grow, become a better person, to become a better leader. But you have to face your fears. We're constantly facing fear. Fear is what holds us back. And part of this book is also written as kind of a hero's journey. I'm a great believer in the hero's journey. I believe every person is called to a hero's journey.
[1:17:55] Most people are too scared to answer the call. And I mean, my mother was scared and she just wanted me to do something respectable in my life. I had a calling. I answered it. And then if you're really following your heart And you're answering that hero's journey call The whole thing is an adventure And it's fun Yeah, and you do lose some But it's okay, It's how you're going to get better That's how I've always seen it, It's how I can learn more and be a better leader A better person, kinder, more loving person next time So I just think I had that kind of grounding in me It's really helped me, It's interesting because about six months ago, I went back home after a really hard day. And I said, Jill, I think I need to tap out. I am done. And Jill said, Rip, just hang in there.
[1:18:50] Literally two days later, it was the greatest day ever. And I was like, I love this. Well, I mean, this is so funny, Rip, because you're actually describing very articulately the emotions all entrepreneurs feel. Mm It's like, I know if when we open up El Segundo, if it starts out well, I'm going to be ecstatic. Yeah. And then there are the times where you feel so much fear, a fear of failure, a fear that somehow you're going to be overwhelmed, that you're going to be swept away. That's the intensity of the high, and there's an intensity of the low, just not... understand they're both going to be there and breathe through the fear and enjoy the ecstasy.
[1:19:46] Now, let's move on to competition. And it kind of, I think, is very similar to entrepreneurship that you're just talking to. But I want to see if we can separate it out a little bit. Because one of the things that I really love and respect about you is how competitive you are. You're about as competitive as anyone I know. I think you may be looking in the mirror, too. Yeah. But what I'm wondering is, do you think that there's a level of competition where winning isn't everything and we can remove ourselves and our ego from having to win all the time?
[1:20:27] Absolutely. I mean, I think part of the – there was a genre of books like the Zen and the Art of Tennis, Zen and the Art of Running, Zen and the Art of Archery or whatever that catches that where the competition is not an ego. See, the ego, let's say there's two kinds of competition. One is coming from the ego that just wants to crush other people and be the best and actually rejoices in other people's failing. And it's the ugly part of competition. But there's another part of competition that's not ego-driven, that's the part of your soul, the part of your being that is attempting to go to this higher place. And competition draws it out of us. I am a better pickleball player because I keep showing up on your Sunday events with players that are better than me. Time and time again, I lose. And I don't like that. Ego does not like to lose. But the more transcendent part of me, it's like, this is fantastic because I see myself getting better. I can do things I couldn't do before. And so...
[1:21:40] And I'd rather face that kind of competition because it pulls the very best that I have out of me and makes me a better person and a better player. So I think you've got to see where is the competitive instinct coming from. Is it the drive? Is it an ego drive to just crush others and dominate them?
[1:22:00] That's not necessarily so healthy. But if it's the part of you that's – there's a part of us that wants to be transcendent, that wants to become more than we are, that wants to evolve, that's a beautiful thing. That's very healthy. This is another quote from the book. You say, competition – and I think this is regarding business – competition could be generative, and yet competition
Embracing Competition
[1:22:21] taken too far also had a dark side, like war. Yes. And then you say, in a letter to Debbie, you said, is competition something to transcend or embrace? I do not know yet. But I was very young when I wrote that. I do know that now. I can give you the answer to that. It's both. And I just described it previously. There's the healthy competitive instincts where your opponent is not, you don't hate your opponent. Your opponent's your friend. And you guys are in a mutual quest to become better. And competition helps us to become better. I'll give you a great example in the world of sports. The three greatest tennis players of all time played at the same time. Djokovic, Nadal, and Federer. If they hadn't had the other two, they wouldn't have been as great a tennis player as they were. All three of them were...
[1:23:24] Improving their games because of the fact. And, you know, I think at some level they all love each other because they respect their rival who's in the same quest to be the very best version of themselves. And they became better because of that camaraderie of those. I think that's a healthy form of competition. If you ever watch Federer or Nadal or Djokovic talk, they don't talk with a lot of ego. They talk with respect. For their opponents and with admiration. I think that's a healthy form of competition. And I think those tennis players are great exemplars of that, in my opinion. This is a quote, and I'm going to say this is potentially a business philosophy that you had. You let me know when you hear this. What price will get the deal done? That was your first thing. And then second, am I willing to pay it? Find a number that can work for both sides, and that represents a win-win outcome. Later, I would learn that this is Warren Buffett's approach to dealmaking as well, and I carefully studied his thoughts on the matter.
[1:24:37] That's almost a complete philosophy of business and ethics, I might add, except I'll add the third win. A win-win-win is good for you, good for me, and good for all of us. That's truly what, if you tried to live your life that way, always looking for the win-win-win, it would be an amazing life. Most people think and win-lose. And they seek to get the better of the other person. And my goal, I learned early on, is if the other person's happy, then the relationship deepens, you have more trust, and you probably can do future deals. But if the person feels like they got cheated, they tend to blame you that you screwed them in some way and they seek revenge later on. So I've always thought the win-win-win. And when I say find the price that they're willing to accept –.
[1:25:28] And are you willing to pay it? That's the sweet spot. And so that means I leave some money on the table generally. At one point, some of my fellow Whole Fooders called me, nicknamed me Generous John, because John is always too generous in these deals. He doesn't get the very best deal he could. And I guess I don't. But I get a really good deal for Whole Foods, and I get a really good deal for the other person, and we're both winning. So that philosophy has served me well. Well, I like that, and I wanted to also kind of include it in competition because I feel like that's a good form of competition. It's a healthy form of competition. I think it is, yeah. There's the game of negotiating, and I think that's a good metaphor. There is a game to it. It's like you're going back and forth. You're looking for – you want to get a good deal for your side, and you don't want to necessarily overpay. You don't want to be cheated. hated, you don't want to pay more than you feel like that's going to be good for your business. You don't want to be squeezed. But then I never felt good about using... I never used... If I had a lot of levers in a deal, I still tried to do what I thought was a fair deal. I never tried to take advantage of the fact that we might have negotiating power here to get a deal that would be a loss for the other person just because I could exert power to do so. I think that would be crossing the line. It wouldn't no longer be a win-win-win. in.
The Best of Both World Views
[1:26:51] Let's talk about Conscious Capitalism for a sec. I don't want to go deep into it right now, but you have a chapter called The Best of Both World Views. And this is, it's not something you coined, correct? Was it Muhammad Yunus? Yeah, that's the first time I think Muhammad Yunus is the one I, I don't know if he coined it either, but that's the first time I became aware of it. Yeah. Through him. And I'm going to read a passage.
[1:27:18] For a while now, I'd been aware that it was hard for people to fit me into this narrow political and ideological boxes. I sold natural foods, practiced meditation, espoused veganism, and wore hiking shorts to work. I love all that. I believe business should be informed by love, serve a higher purpose, and benefit all stakeholders. And yet, I pushed back against compulsive unionization. I defended capitalism and free markets. I argued for freedom of thought and personal responsibility. And as I made clear in this recent op-ed, I resisted anything that resulted in more governmental controls and subsidies and moved us away from the natural discipline and innovation of free markets towards the stultifying inefficiencies of socialism. Second thing I want to read, and then I'll let you comment. As a result of this exploration, I felt like I had finally found an intellectual home. In its spacious halls, I could be a rationalist and a mystic. I could champion free markets and meditation. My veganism could live alongside my critique of big government. It was big enough to contain all of me. Conscious capitalism became an important artifact to express that new understanding, not just of business, but of myself. self.
[1:28:42] How exciting was it when you were like, I mean, you expressed a great here, but I just want to hear from you like right now. Well, we live in a, as you know, we live in a very politically polarized society where there seem to be like these two tribes and they're both struggling with each other. They're at war with each other. Both think the other tribe is evil and that their tribe is good. And here's my problem. I don't fit into either tribe. So they both potentially think I think I'm evil.
[1:29:12] And conscious capitalism sort of, even the phrase itself kind of catches the conflict because it's conscious capitalism. So conscious appeals to people that will say they're more on the progressive side of politics in the blue tribe. The capitalism part, which reflects modernism, is more in the red tribe. And so.
[1:29:44] One of my challenges with that is that both are important, and I think they need to be synthesized. And so we talk a little bit in the book, but not in depth, about integral thinking, where you have these – it's a developmental model. So you have – we move through certain stages, both as individuals, I might add, but also collectively in culture. So there are three major stages of development that exist, and there are more than that, but there's three big ones. The first one is traditionalism, and traditionalism is traditional religions, traditional patriotism. A lot of Donald Trump's support comes from people with traditional values. They are churchgoers, and they love America, and they are usually conservative in their political beliefs. Then you have modernism, which is broke away from strict traditionalism with the Enlightenment and with science and rationality. And so associated with modernism is capitalism, generally.
[1:30:56] Science, atheism, basically beliefs that a materialistic worldview to a certain extent. So, modernism is the biggest grouping in America. You're dividing these up in terms of the groupings. Traditionalism is maybe 30% of the population. And then modernism, people in the modernistic worldview are about 50%. And then the progressive worldview is about 20%.
[1:31:27] So, progressives have fewer people, but they happen to be the ones that can control education, control journalism, control the arts, media, things like that, so that they punch way above their weight class, you might say. So, conscious capitalism is a very intentional attempt to synthesize all three of these together so that they all are important. And the integral, which I try to take an integral position that... What are the best qualities of traditionalism? Let's keep the best qualities and get rid of the worst qualities. What are the best qualities of modernism? Let's keep those and get rid of the worst qualities. What are the best qualities of progressivism? And let's keep those and get rid of the worst ones. So it's synthesizing the best of each of these worldviews, you might say. And I think that's the way ahead for America is eventually we haven't had an integral leader. We've had traditional leaders, we've had modernist leaders, and we've had progressive leaders. But we've lacked that individual who can be an integral leader, who can appeal to all of the tribes. All of the tribes.
[1:32:42] They'll be uncomfortable with some of the ideas, but they'll be comfortable with the general, since they're articulating the most important values of each of these tribes, people may not be completely comfortable with them, but they'll be comfortable enough to say, well, he gets us or she gets us, might need to be a very conscious woman that can be that unifier. But I do think America hasn't, that person hasn't arisen yet in a political sense that has an integral view. And it could be because generally politicians follow. They don't actually, they're not at the cutting edge of cultural evolution.
Synthesizing Worldviews
[1:33:18] They tend to be followers. So, our culture needs to continue to evolve and it's doing it right now. Now, it's fascinating watching these different worldviews bump up against each other and how they create a lot of sparks and a lot of hatred and anger. And then, but if you, again, I'm looking for the win-win-win. How can all of these different tribes, all these different developmental stages, how can they all win? Because it's not like if one wins and the others lose, right? That's going to be a very bad situation. You'll end up in civil war.
[1:33:51] Instead, we have to be able to embrace those differences and celebrate the beauty in each one of them. I mean, one of the challenges is that, for example, the progressives, they mistrust capitalism and they mistrust free markets. And they've got kind of a zero-sum mentality in many cases where they don't understand somebody like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos became so wealthy not because they just stole a big piece of pie when nobody was looking. They created all this massive value in the world, and that's how they got rich, people voluntarily exchanged.
[1:34:25] Capitalism's been this great force for uplifting humanity to greater levels of prosperity. You can't just throw that out. And I sometimes think that's what they want to do. And that would take us backwards. So they have to embrace part of modernism, recognizing, yes, we need to also care about the environment. We need to do what we can to lessen inequality. We need to do to eliminate racism or any kind of patriarchy. All that stuff needs to be tossed. And that's bad things in the past and traditionalism and modernism. They need to be overcome. But the good things that came from modernism and traditionalism, those need to be embraced. So, the progressives in some ways are cutting edge at this point in cultural evolution. It's going to be the most advanced progressives that begin to see the flaws in progressivism, that it's not a complete system, that will begin to embrace. That's how you make the integral move as you move out of progressivism. I just, honestly, I was progressive at such an early age. And then, you know, I just feel like I just see the beauty of all of it. All of them are beautiful. Let's keep the beautiful things, and then our culture can move on together instead of being sort of fighting with each other.
[1:35:41] A couple of weeks ago, I spent a couple of days out at your ranch for Sports Weekend. Sports Weekend, baby. Which is a, it's an annual event you've had for how many years? I actually started it with one friend, Will Paradise, back in 1993, the year we bought our ranch. And so Will and I did it, just the two of us. We just, you'd love it. Will's so, he's like us, Rip. He's such a competitive guy. He and I went out and competed in basketball. We competed in cornhole. We competed in ping pong. Everything. Everything we had. No pickleball back then, but tennis. And we had so much fun. We said, let's invite a few friends next year. And then the few friends kind of grew. And I think we had, I don't know, 230 people this year came.
[1:36:23] My point in bringing that up is it's incredible what that has turned into. And I've been going for about 14 years.
Community and Acceptance
[1:36:33] It represents to me your sense of love, community, acceptance, traditionalist, modernist, progressives, because you have such a hodgepodge of everybody that you invite. All are welcome. Yeah, yeah. You know what's interesting is how well the different part, they all kind of represent different parts of myself and different parts of Deborah. They all get along so well, even though they may be in different tribes. They're not talking about their differences what they're seeing are the beauty of each other and that's the way you transcend this don't focus on the differences in people focus on the things that are beautiful about them concentrate on that don't judge them for the way they're just different than you so what they're different that's that's gonna be a beautiful thing instead see the see what you have in common see the see the things that you share love those things about each other for the listener you serve, buffets of the most incredible breakfast lunch and dinner for several days. And at mealtime, you're sitting typically next to somebody you've never met before. And the greatest way to start the conversation is, how do you know John? Or how do you know Debra? And that always is a great way to kick it off. It is. It's fantastic.
The Amazon Solution
[1:37:47] Let's talk about the chapter, you call it the Amazon solution. I'd like to start by reading a little paragraph from your book. So this is after you guys went out there, you flew out there, and you guys had a meeting with them. Did they like us too? I was hopeful. All the signs pointed in that direction. Could we turn this whirlwind courtship into a lasting union? I had nurtured Whole Foods, my proverbial child, my baby, from her infancy. I'd watched her take her first steps, held her hand as she entered the adult world, and looked on with pride as she slowly grew into this mature, thriving business. Was I now ready to let her go, to marry her off to the richest man in the world? How did you manifest this whole Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods? Yeah.
[1:38:38] Well, you have to step back a little bit. So we had the shareholder activists. Remember, I mean, there's so many different events that led up to the shareholder activists. Jana Partners? Jana Partners, yes. Yeah. But some other things that made the activists be interested in us. But so it's in the book, so I don't need to talk about it now. But we needed a solution. And that's in the chapter Evolve or Die. As I mentioned previously on the podcast, there are challenges that we face in life that are basically asking us to step up to a higher level. Evolve or die. Or as I say often in the book, you expand into love or you can contract into fear. And when you're being attacked by activists, I can tell you the temptation to contract into fear is very powerful. And it was all it could do for me to continue to expand into love. And I did have some sleepless nights. I did have some fear. I did contract into fear. The difference is that I remember, oh, right, I don't have to go into fear. I can go into love. So I wouldn't stay in that negative space for very long.
[1:39:56] We looked at all the other different solutions. It was like one solution was to just fight the activists and just fight them and hold them off. We met with them. They just told us, we're not interested in working with you. Here's what we're going to do. We are going to take over your board first. And after we do that, we're going to fire the management team. And after that, we're going to put this company up for sale to the highest bidder. And it's like in the Billy Jack, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. And, of course, that would spike my competitive instinct. So we were planning. We had a whole campaign to fight the activists. And we did change over our board. We hired investment bankers on defense. We hired attorneys. We did a round with Wall Street to talk to all of our investors and tell them what our plans were and what our turnaround plans were. So fighting was the first option and one that we were already beginning to engage in. And the second option was, could we sell it to somebody like a Warren Buffett that would – because by that time, Whole Foods was extremely profitable and generating huge amounts of cash flow, more than we could actually invest in new stores. So we were paying dividends out. So we could be – for somebody that –.
[1:41:18] And someone like Buffett who could take the cash and reinvest it in other businesses, we thought it might be tempting. But he just kind of joked about it and said that, you know, I own Dairy Queen. I don't think this is a good brand fit. But he was just joking. He's a very nice person, one of my heroes, actually. Did you actually have some conversations with him around that? No, I did not personally talk to Warren Buffett. This was one of our directors who knew him well, talked to him. So reached out on our behalf, Or we could take it private And this is a sub-theme of the book I won't go into in detail It's definitely one of our And one of our board members wanted us to do.
[1:42:06] And the problem with going private Is that it's always a temporary solution So the way that game works is you get a private equity firm, and they will put up, let's see, Whole Foods was sold to Amazon for $13.7 billion. So let's say that was the same price to take a private. Then they put up about a billion dollars, and then they'd go borrow the rest of the money from somebody like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or Chase, and that would be called a bridge loan. And so you'd buy out all the public shareholders. And then the private equity firm, with that billion-dollar investment, would own the whole company worth 13.7 they pay off that bridge loan by leveraging the balance sheet of whole foods they'd borrow 12.7 billion dollars to pay back the bridge loan and then that debt would be on whole foods markets balance sheet and we'd be paying interest on that think about what the interest is on 12.7 it's a lot and if the company can't service that interest payments payments, then the company's at risk of going bankrupt.
[1:43:10] The theory is, if we get out of being public, we could turn around the company and then they could take it public again for a big increase in valuation, but it's a huge risk. You're betting your whole company on it, and it just wasn't what my heart thought was the best decision. I was thinking, what's the best thing for all our stakeholders? Is giving control of the company to a private equity firm who may not share a higher purpose, campus, may not show our values, just so they can make maybe billions of dollars on a turnaround. Is that the best thing? I didn't think it was.
[1:43:41] I didn't know what to do, but I kept asking the question, asking the question every single day, asking it, asking my soul, meditating on it. What's the best solution? What's the win-win-win solution? I asked it repeatedly every day. And one morning I woke up, and the first thought that popped in my mind was, what about Amazon? And I sort of knew then that's the solution. I knew it right when I thought of it. And then I had met Jeff Bezos a year earlier at a conference called Microsoft CEO Summit. He and I were two guys on a two-person panel. And we had a good conversation about books because he likes science fiction and fantasy, and so do I, and about scuba diving. I've done a lot more than he had and talked about good places I'd dived around the world. And so we kind of liked him. He's an entrepreneur, one of the greatest entrepreneurs who's ever lived, very creative. Very imaginative. And he said, man, this is a good conversation. We should get together and talk about Whole Foods. I said, sure. Yeah. Never heard from him. But a year later, we contacted Amazon and see if they might be interested.
[1:44:55] And they were very interested. Three days after we contacted them, we flew down and had a meeting with Jeff and with three of his senior members of the team. And we had this amazing conversation where it's like oftentimes times when you fall in love with somebody you have what you call the conversation where you just realize there's this huge connection and you might stay up all night talking and i found in talking to lots of couples that they had a conversation at some point when they just knew they clicked and uh that happened on the very first date with amazon so to speak and then it's kind of a whirlwind romance because six weeks after that first meeting we signed a merger agreement And we spent that first meeting, we talked for three hours about all the things we could do together. And we were kind of, our team thought the Amazon guys walked on water. They were so smart. And they were not the typical corporate types. They were very smart, very creative, asked great questions. They really seemed to understand how Whole Foods could help Amazon and how Amazon could help Whole Foods. So it ended up being the best solution. Now, I'm often asked on this book tour I've been on, I'm often asked, do you regret or do you ever regret selling to Amazon? And the honest answer is, I regret that selling.
[1:46:16] The circumstances we found ourselves in made Amazon the best solution. But if I had to go back, faced with the same circumstances, that was the best solution. It was a win-win. It was good for our customers. They got lower prices. It was good for our team members. They got raises in pay. It was good for our suppliers. They got to keep Whole Foods, but a lot of them expanded into Amazon for the first time to their dot-com business.
[1:46:40] It was good for our investors. They got a huge increase on the value of the stock. Good for the government. They got lots of taxes paid on the sale and the capital gains that resulted in. So, it was a win-win-win-win all the way around. But I'll always wonder about the path not chosen. What if we had fought? I didn't think it was the best choice, but if we had and we'd won, would we still be independent today? No way, no. And one of my things is that since you can't change the past you always move forward and optimize the present as you find it yeah to waste the time to spend a lot of time wondering about what might have been we made the best choice at the time and and uh really no point in looking back yeah chapter 39 is playing the infinite game.
[1:47:32] What what in your what's an infinite game yeah so you have to contrast it with what a finite game A finite game is like if we go play pickleball or play basketball, there's a set of rules, and you play the game, and then there's a winner declared, and there are losers declared, and he's not the winner. And then maybe you start another game, but the game is finite in time. And an infinite game is not finite in time. An infinite game can go on forever. So, some examples of an infinite game are, well, life is an infinite game. DNA is replicating over and over and over again with no intention to ever stop. Now, of course, technically, it won't be an infinite game because eventually the sun will go supernova and the earth will be destroyed. But probably by then, DNA will have gotten off the planet and gone to other star systems. So the game goes on. Maybe eventually the universe will collapse. But anyway, the point is, it's a really long time. And an infinite game is a game where the players may change, but the game itself goes on. And business is an infinite game. Business has been played.
[1:48:46] And theoretically, a company like Whole Foods could be an infinite game. It could last, maybe not infinitely, but the point is, it doesn't die just because I've left it. It's It's continuing to live even though the founder, the co-founder, and the longtime CEO has retired from it. The game of Whole Foods goes on. So an infinite game, and I feel like the new business that I'm co-creating, Love Life, I intend for that to be an infinite game. So it's a game that...
[1:49:14] It doesn't, players change, the participants change, but the game itself continues. And capitalism is an infinite game. It's continuing to evolve and develop. As new businesses are created, other businesses die. But capitalism itself is continuing to innovate and create. It could be, we could destroy capitalism. I mean, it didn't exist for a long, long time because we, so you have to have economic freedom. People have to be able to create and innovate and trade with each other. And if you want to stop capitalism, you don't let people innovate any longer and you don't let them trade with each other and it'll die. But as far as people want to make continued progress in the world, capitalism will be dynamic and it'll be an infinite game. So is that a good explanation? Yeah. It's interesting to me in reading Elon Musk's book by… Isaacson. Great blogger. Yeah, Walter Isaacson. And how I'm wondering if the potential with artificial intelligence and some other things will allow for this universal income where people don't have to work and what that will do for capitalism. I just feel like things are moving so quickly right now with artificial intelligence, what's going on in the world.
[1:50:42] But anyway, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows what the next 10, 15 years hold. You know, when people ask me what's going to happen in the next 10 or 15 years, I usually go back in 10 or 15 years in the past and look how the world has changed in the last 10 or 15 years. Or even better, you go back 20 years, it's like nobody had a smartphone. Now nobody can leave home without it. And everybody has a smartphone. People all over the world have smartphones. It didn't even exist. And you know what? The ironical thing is 20 years, we may not be using smartphones anymore. We might have a little AI watch or AI implant or AI thing we're wearing on our ring or in our ear. And you don't need to look at your thing. It's just call up Rip and schedule a lunch with him. Or, hey, what's the height of Mount Everest? And you don't need to do the searches anymore because you have this little AI with you and it has answers to all your questions. Yeah. So it's hard to predict the future. You can only extrapolate from what you know about in the past. Yeah. You say in the book that you are a god of play.
[1:51:51] Yeah. I like to play. You do. And I love it. But for people that don't know you, give me an example of how you like to play. I mean, I think playing is a way of being. I have a playful attitude as I go through each day. I love children. So, I mean, you see me trying to connect with your kids and they weren't having too much of it, but I still like them. I still want to play with them.
[1:52:22] It's not just the games that you play. I mean, I try to play games every day. But it's just more or less, I think it's a mental attitude of a spirit of fun and a spirit of adventure. I say life's an adventure. Business is an adventure. It's an attitude I try to bring to, if not each moment, certainly every day, multiple times a day. And I do play a lot of games. I just like playing almost any kind of game. It's fun. And so, I like to do things that are fun. Yeah. Business is fun. It's hard, but it's fun. Well, you say business is a wonderful, creative, ever-evolving game, a complex game, which leads me to, let me know, like, tell me all about your latest business adventure that you're super excited about playing, and that's Love Life. Yeah. Now, I talk about in the book how love life or something similar to it almost got created back in 1985 called LifeWorks. And it was going to be this expressing the consciousness part of my life. It was going to have a breath work in it. Something that's been one of the – I cannot recommend breath work too highly for people. It's a way to have a transcendent experience without taking a psychedelic or having to do meditation. If you'll do the breathing, it's very powerful.
[1:53:51] We were going to do a center called LifeWorks back in 1985 that had meditation, BreathWorks, consciousness bookstore, and all kinds of ways for people to help people to spiritually develop, you might say. And it didn't happen for various reasons. But the dream never died. Now it's almost 40 years later. And I think maybe the world might be ready for what Love Life's going to be, which is there's like, if I was going to describe it as a business model, there's five parts to it. Well, first, we already have elements in Love Life existing right now. We've made some acquisitions. We have a telehealth business called Love Life Telehealth, and we're licensed to practice medicine in all 50 states. And the doctors are lifestyle medicine certified. And I think those doctors are helping a lot of people, and they potentially could help listeners here. I've had several of them on the podcast. They're wonderful. Chris Miller, for example. Dr. Miller is my own personal physician. Yeah, fantastic.
[1:54:54] I've had Anthony on the podcast who kind of, he's kind of running that. Yeah, he's the president of Love Love Telehealth. Yeah. So I feel like particularly as we begin to open the physical locations, that's going to help publicize the telehealth business. So I think the telehealth business has a great future. We also acquired a company called Mastering Diabetes, which you've had probably Cyrus and Robbie on your podcast as well. Love them. Yeah, I love those guys too. And they're doing online coaching for
The Infinite Game: Business and Life Forever
[1:55:25] people that have diabetes to mastering. They wrote a tremendous book called Mastering Diabetes, which is a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. And now they've got another besides diabetes. They also can help people with weight loss. And I think eventually we can have online coaching for all of these chronic diseases. So mastering heart disease, mastering lupus, mastering autoimmune diseases of different types.
[1:55:54] Again, I think they will also benefit from the exposure Love Life's going to get when we open up our first physical location. Of course, what I'm most excited about are the physical centers that we're going to open up. So we're opening up our very first one in El Segundo in Los Angeles. We call it Los Angeles. It's due to open now in less than six weeks, July 9th. We're taking over an old Best Buy, 45,000 square feet. It's going to be big. It's located right next to one of Whole Foods Market's most successful stores. Highest volume stores in Southern California. I had the advantage of knowing the sales volume of every Whole Foods market store. So I know where the best stores are. There will be good locations for Love Life to go into. So this is going to be like five major parts to a Love Life center. First, we're going to have a healthy restaurant. So it's going to be primarily a Whole Foods plant-based restaurant. It'll be there, part of the 45,000 square feet? Right at the front. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Number two, we're going to have a state-of-the-art fitness center. So we'll have a gym with a lot of advanced equipment that you don't normally see in an Equinox or some of the other gyms, as well as a yoga studio, a Pilates studio.
[1:57:08] You got a pickleball court in there? Pickleball. We have three pickleball courts. Seriously? Three pickleball courts, baby. Oh, man. With soundproofing, you know, so we don't get into the problems some of our quirky guys do. Are you going to allow people that, can people just come and play pickleball there? No. You have to be a member? You have to be a member. Okay, got it. Exactly.
[1:57:31] So then we also have a spa. So a spa that will have massage and facials and wraps and all kinds of scrubs and things like that. And then we have a whole recovery that's kind of part fitness and part spa. So we'll have cold plunges. we'll have a cryotherapy we'll have infrared sauna we'll have regular sauna we will have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber we'll have lots of different modalities for people to recover quicker from their exercise and then of course the most important part of the whole center is the medical center because we'll have a center that has doctors medical doctors that are trained in lifestyle medicine functional medicine integrative medicine the whole idea being the vision of Love Life is, when do most people go see a doctor? When it's a little too late. Yeah, when they're sick. And what does our modern medicine do? It mostly prescribes drugs or medical devices for people. Very seldom do they actually work to cure anybody. They don't believe diet and lifestyle are particularly important. So our vision is to have people come in, do testing, do an assessment, so we can find out through the testing.
[1:58:49] Where they are on the health we're all on a health spectrum and we'll find out where they are, and then depending on then where they are we can recommend certain paths they could go down with us one path would be a healing path if they if they have diabetes or if they have an autoimmune disease or they have they're they're obese we can put them on a healing path and work with them to heal those conditions reverse them so if they have heart disease we know your dad has done work you You can not only prevent it, but you can reverse it. So then another path would be, which would appeal to someone like you, is what we call maximum performance.
[1:59:28] So to get you to peak out at whatever that might be in your physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Somebody that's going to go to the max, you know, wants to become absolutely as fit as they possibly can be. We're there for them. We're going to have that kind of training going on. But others like myself, who are a little bit older, notice I put you in the maximum performance. There's a longevity category.
[1:59:58] So people that are, say, aging Xers and boomers that are looking to live as long as possible, as healthy as possible. So it's partly about extending their lifespan, but also extending their health span.
[2:00:09] If you ask somebody, do they want to live to be 100, they generally say, no, I wouldn't want to be. I don't want to be decrepit. it's like well if you could live to be 100 and feel like you feel like right now would you want to be 100 yeah absolutely okay well that's what the longevity uh program is going to be about and then finally we have a concierge program that want people that want 24 7 365 medical uh care all year round they'll get everything that love life offers so so so that's kind of it in a nutshell shell but there's a lot more to it there's a lot of complexity to it is there uh acupuncture and stuff like that chiropractic acupuncture ayurvedic that's part of the integrative medicine got it and there'll be physical therapy um there's there's pretty much it's i like to describe it kind of as a holistic health membership club it's a membership club and we think we're also going going to be doing it won't surprise you we're going to be doing breath work there we're going to be doing meditation classes we'll be doing yoga classes and yes when they legalize psychedelic therapy we'll be doing that there too well you've been working on love life for i mean it's working on love life my whole life yes you have you have haven't you yeah um well congratulations on having.
[2:01:31] Thank you. I'm very excited about it.
[2:01:44] This is the last paragraph. Unless you want to read it, the creation and growth of Whole Foods was... Sure, I'll read it. Yeah. Last two paragraphs. Yeah. The creation and growth of Whole Foods was a delight to be part of. Others will continue moving that ball down the field. But I'm not done with business. I'm not done with pursuing my own higher purpose. I'm not done with this wondrous, infinite game of conscious capitalism. I'm on a new adventure now. I love being back in startup mode again, free from the shackles of bureaucracy. Love life called me forward, beckoning me back onto the field with a new opportunity to create, to risk, to play, to learn, to evolve, and to grow. Another chance to choose love over fear, to pursue innovation and contribution rather than settling for stasis and limitation. Will it succeed? I honestly don't know. It still might be ahead of its time. But it's what my heart calls me to do. It's what makes me feel alive, exuberant, and young in spirit. Another wonderful game to play. Another beautiful vision to bring into reality. New worlds to create out of nothing. Let us love. Let us create. And let us play again and again and again forever.
[2:03:07] Love that. Love that so much. All right. Love life. I want to come full circle now to the psychedelics. Yeah. And you end the book taking some psychedelics, MDMA and psilocybin. Yeah. And at one point, this is when you're kind of going through this guided meditation or guided... Guided spiritual journey. Thank you. Guided Spiritual Journey. She suggests that you look in the mirror at yourself. And so I want to read and you say, when I did so, it was as if I met myself face to face for the first time. And without thinking, I told myself not to be so hard on myself, to lighten up, to forgive myself and to love myself. Now I want to read page 391 from your book. And that is here. Actually, I want you to read it. If you don't mind, because this, and start right here with, start with immediately. Okay.
[2:04:27] The message that came to me quickly was, I am perfect, always. Immediately, I rejected that statement as preposterous. I knew I was very far from perfect, but there it was anyway, accompanied by powerful energetic releases. I saw that there was nothing that I need to do, nothing that I need to strive for. I just need to be in my heart. The perfection I realized is in my heart, in my core being. For the first time in my life, I felt unconditional love for myself, for all of life, and for God, all wrapped into one. I cried for a very long time. A tremendous weight lifted off my soul.
[2:05:09] Just one point out. This was actually not on a psychedelic journey. This was my final breath work. That's how powerful breath work was. Breath work released all of this. Now, this was a five. So for context for this, I did this guided spiritual journey back in the summer of 2022.
[2:05:30] It was just two months before I retired. And I wanted to go through a guided spiritual journey because I was leaving Whole Foods behind. It was a really difficult decision for me to make because I love Whole Foods so much. But I knew it was time for me to go. and but it was still difficult and i wanted to go through this spiritual experience a to help me let go but also to help me see what was next you know to see you know am i making a good decision here and what's next so that was five days and on three all five days i did breath work every day on three of those days i did i did i did psychedelic therapy uh combination different combinations of psilocybin and MDMA and those were very powerful as well and I had that when I looked in the mirror and had that experience that was on that was on the psychedelics but that final one that I just read was breathwork alone and it was the most powerful experience of all and I actually thought after my last when I at last what we call a ceremony with the psychedelics I thought I'm done this is uncooked I wanted to go home but my my guide she said you made a deal. You said you'd stay for the whole thing. You need to trust the process. You're not finished yet. I said, I think I'm finished. I want to go home. She said, you've made a deal. Stay. You have to trust the process. I stayed. I did the last breath work.
[2:06:59] And wow, that blew my mind. It was incredible.
[2:07:05] I love how deep you're willing to go on so many things. It's rare. It's rare. I have no idea if it's rare or not. I find it to be rare. I mean, maybe in your circles, you have other people. I hang out with, it's kind of like, it's like hanging out with really good pickleball players. And you think, I don't think I'm that good. But it's because you're playing with, you know, pros. So I do hang out with some pretty conscious and awake people. Like my wife for example she's you've met devra and she's i always tell the joke that i remember we talked about have authority issues i couldn't really take i just can't take orders very well i just never have entrepreneurs have problem with that and so i can't really take a guru on i can never take a spiritual teacher on and so the universe tricked me my wife is she's just the the most loving, kind, awoken, awakened person I've ever met. And I married my guru. I didn't know she was my guru until later on. Although I say in the book, the very first time I met her, my heart told me
Love Life: A New Adventure Begins
[2:08:16] that she was far more conscious than I was. And that proved to be true, and it's still true today. And I feel very, very blessed to be connected with her. She's helped me so much. Yeah.
[2:08:27] I'd love to finish by asking you just a kind of a series of rapid fire questions. Yeah, let's do it. What is your perfect smoothie?
[2:08:37] Half vegetables, half fruit, and some flax and chia seeds. Do you consider yourself an introvert or extrovert? When I was younger, introvert. Now I'm split. it you have any mentors besides deborah my father uh i i call out several mentors i think in my appreciations so that professor bob solomon was a mentor yeah um and uh people like your dad was a mentor but the books that have influenced me they they end up being mentors for me as well i mean could i take those books very seriously and the people that write them end up being kind of my mentors but in actual people probably deborah my father the two biggest influences on me.
[2:09:26] We haven't talked much about it, but one of your greatest loves is hiking. Long distance backpacking, baby. When did you learn to love that? When I hiked the Appalachian Trail back in 2002. I took a sabbatical from Whole Foods and hiked the whole trail with one of my stepdaughters, Evening, and a trail named The Princess, and Grant Seibel, a trail named Gorilla. And I just loved it, and I've been doing it ever since. So that was 2002, so that was 22 years ago, and I haven't missed a year. I've been hiking, doing some kind of long-distance hike every year. Yeah. And in the book, you talk about your 9-11 experience. Was that one of the things that influenced you to get out there and live a little bit more? Yeah.
[2:10:14] It was a total wake-up call for me. We were heading down to the – not to the Twin Towers themselves, but down to Wall Street right next to the Twin Towers. We were in New York to talk with the bond rating agencies, and while on the radio, we heard a newsflash talk about the first tower got hit by a jet.
[2:10:35] That was disturbing, but our driver was an old man, and he said, well, you know, that's not the first time that's happened. The Empire State Building was struck by a plane soon after World War II. So, we thought, I guess that's possible. It could happen. I don't know. Pat's pretty bad driving. driving uh and then though we're driving and then the second jet hit we it just exploded and our car got rained on all with all this debris and we i jumped out of the car to see what's going on you could see there both towers were on fire everybody's pouring out of these office buildings pointing up at it and i immediately realized it's a terrorist attack there's two towers that have been hit we got to get out of new york they're going to shut this this manhattan they're going to shut the city down we got to get out of here so i figured the airplane porch were probably already shut down so i said take us right to the train station and glinda and i got out right before they it was the last train out of new york and then they shut the train down we only got to philadelphia and then we drove and we rented a car and drove back from there and then driving back i was thinking about i could have died yeah and i want to do some other things and we're driving in the appalachian mountains and i remember when i was a kid we were on a road trip and i saw some these long distance backpackers back then with these big backpacks. And I thought that'd be fun to do someday. So that kind of reawakened in my mind. And I thought, I'm going to do that. Did you consider yourself a workaholic before that? I've always been a playaholic.
[2:12:01] Touche. I like that. I like that a lot. This is something, and I'll explain the backstory here, but when did you learn to use the force in Cornhole in the Dark? Thank you.
[2:12:19] I've learned that in any game whether it be pickleball or basketball i've watched the greatest players that play these games and what they all can do is when it gets really at the crunch time when it's winning time they focus in their concentration goes to the deeper level and so i can't always pull that off but i'm always telling myself in a close game at the end And focus, focus, focus, John, focus, focus, and dial in. And so you're talking about sports weekend when we were playing cornhole in the dark and nobody could see the thing. And I kept knocking them in one after another. Well, it was more than that. Jimmy Carter and I had you and Ian down 18 to like six. And you came back. We couldn't even see the cornhole for the most part, but you knew exactly where it was. And to win it, you got three in the hole in the pitch dark. Yeah. It was like unheard of.
[2:13:16] I mean, the ability to, if you can really dial in into the moment, let go of all the thoughts and fears, it is kind of the force. Yeah. In the sense that you are sort of, that's the zen and the art of archery or whatever. You just feel it. You just know it's going to happen. And yeah, you know what? It's that flow state. I was in a flow state. Flow state is when you are really one with your activity. I knew they were going in. I know. I know. And you would say, in, before it actually hit the board. Yeah. Because I could feel it. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. What's your favorite sport to watch?
[2:13:56] Uh, football. I think football's a fun spectator sport. I love to watch football. I also love to watch basketball a lot. That's my, that's really my favorite sport, the NBA. Yeah. You've been keeping up with the, uh, series right now? Absolutely. Of course. Absolutely. Um. You rooting for, uh. None of my, all my teams have lost. I was rooting for, well, no, I like the Celtics. I'll be rooting for the Celtics, but, um. Minnesota? But I was, I'm rooting for Minnesota in that, but I was rooting for Denver. You know, I have a home in Boulder, so I like those Nuggets. I was hoping they would win. I would have been rooting for them against anybody else. What's your favorite sport to play? Pickleball. Now, when I was younger, it was basketball.
[2:14:38] You're a pretty good disc golfer too. Yeah, I'm a shadow of how I used to be. So as I've gotten older, my strength is not what it was. I can't throw it as far, so I don't enjoy it as much. Well, you need to get on the Love Life thing. I know. We need to get a Love Life in Austin so I can get strength training in more consistently.
[2:14:57] Do you love your Apple Watch? I do. Absolutely. It changed my life. It got me off alcohol over two years ago. Explain that. Well, I have an app on the Apple Watch called Auto Sleep, and it tracks my sleep. I sleep with my watch and charge it in the morning when I get up. And I've learned so much from it because it tells me about not only how long I sleep but my quality of sleep and how deep my sleep is. And I started to notice that anytime I drank even one beer or one glass of wine, my deep sleep went to zero. I got no deep sleep and my total sleep would drop about an hour. And I did numerous experiments because I actually liked alcohol and I didn't want to give it up. But the facts were so clear. Every time I drank, no deep sleep. And then I began to realize, wow, maybe I should just stop drinking. And so then the question became, do I want to sleep well or do I want to have a drink? And the answer so far for over two years has been, I'd rather sleep well. But I'll hold out the possibility there might come a time when I'd rather have the drink, but so far it hadn't hit me. What does your friend, our friend Dan Buechner think of that?
[2:16:10] Dan Dan is he's not he's not about to give up drinking uh and it's one of the pillars of the blue zones it's one of the pillars of Dan's blue zones but um he's still fun to hang around with whether he's drinking or not yeah yeah no no doubt um how long do you want to live, In this body? Yeah. As long as I can be of sound mind and healthy and having fun.
Beyond Death: The Metaphor of Transition
[2:16:43] What do you think happens to us when we die? You know, the best way I can describe it is with a metaphor. Again, we so identify with our egos and our bodies. That's who we think we are. So we're very attached to when we die that, you know, some of the body will be resurrected redirected and the ego with all its memories and everything will survive i i think of it a little differently um so like i'm gonna go home tonight and i'm gonna take off my clothes and i'm gonna i'm gonna hang them up or put some of them in the dirty clothes hamper and i'm gonna go to sleep because i'm not my clothes when we die we hang up our ego and our and our and our body, and don't think more anything more about it because it's not who we are we're something far beyond that and that's what each person will remember. Oh, like, oh yeah, I remember now, this is why I'm dead. And you'll see. We will see, won't we? For sure. The reason I say that with so much confidence is because I have died. I've had that ego death. I was obliterated, I didn't exist any longer. For who knows how long that was, time was meaningless. And guess what? Poof, back again.
[2:18:01] What does the perfect day look like for John Mackey? The perfect day would be a day I couldn't quite tell you what it would be because it would be full of surprises. If you know what's going to happen, it's, so let me, so that's the perfect day for me. It'll be a fun, joyful day with a few surprises. And, but if I rephrase that question, what would be a day that I would really enjoy, right? It would be one where, first of all, I do exactly what I want to do all day long. So no, I don't have any social obligations that I have to live up to, no expectations, no duties, just what I feel like doing in the next moment. That'll be a good day for me because it'll be a fun day.
[2:18:47] And probably I'll be playing. I'll be playing that day. I'll be reading. I'll be eating super healthy whole foods, plant-based food. I'll be with Debra. It'll be beautiful. Probably I'd visualize it being at my ranch, going swimming and going for a hike. Maybe driving in to play pickleball with Rip and the gang. So, but it would be shared. It wouldn't be solo by myself. Debra would have to be there and maybe I want to be with some friends too. And it'd be some kind of fun, playful, adventuresome thing. I mean, but you know, it's kind of the attitude you bring to it, Rip. every day can be. One of the things I learned from Dan that I like to say when people say, how's your day going? It's like Dan says, and now I say this, it's the best day of my life. It's a good saying because if you say that, you think that, you're giving the possibility for it to actually manifest. So I like to think this, people say, how are you doing? Fantastic. Couldn't be better.
[2:19:50] I want to thank you for, Sitting down and having this conversation with me, it means a lot. And what you have brought out to the universe with this, the whole story, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is, I think it's your masterpiece. Thank you, Rip. So far. So far, so far. And I wish you so much success with Love Life and continuing to always play like a god, because you are a god of play. Thank you, Rick. You know what? I've got such great people to play with at Love Life, and we're having fun. Whatever the outcome is, we'll let it go to the universe and play and do the best we can. Great. Hey. Yay, bro. Keep it PLANTSTRONG. Yes, keep it PLANTSTRONG. All right. Love you. Love you, too.
[2:20:45] It's rare to get such an authentic glimpse into the mind and heart of a CEO, but John graciously opens his heart and his playbook for everyone to see. The whole story, Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism, is now out wherever books are sold. There's so many great takeaways from today's conversation, but one of the biggest is even in competition, you can lead with love and respect. As always, keep it PLANTSTRONG, my kale cousins, and I'll see you next week.
[2:21:23] The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, and Ami Mackey. If you like what you hear, do us a favor and share the show with your friends and loved ones. You can always leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And while you're there, make sure to hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. As always, this and every episode is dedicated to my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. and Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks so much for listening.
