David Senra - John Mackey, Whole Foods Market

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

John Mackey is the co-founder of Whole Foods Market, where he also served as the company's CEO for 44 years (1980–2022). More recently, Mackey is the co-founder of Love.Life, a wellness company focused on a holistic approach to health. He is an entrepreneur, author and advocate for conscious capitalism who spent over four decades building the natural foods industry. Under his leadership, Whole Foods grew from a single store in Austin, Texas, in 1980 to the world's largest natural and organic foods retailer, with over 500 stores across North America and the United Kingdom before its acquisition by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion. After dropping out of the University of Texas at Austin, Mackey opened SaferWay Natural Foods in 1978 with Renee Lawson Hardy. He merged SaferWay with Clarksville Natural Grocery in 1980 to create Whole Foods Market. He became known for pioneering high-quality natural foods retail, championing stakeholder-oriented business philosophy and popularizing the concept of conscious capitalism. His accomplishments include building Whole Foods into a Fortune 500 company, co-founding the Conscious Capitalism movement with Raj Sisodia, serving as CEO of Whole Foods for 44 years until his retirement in 2022, co-authoring "Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business" in 2013 and "The Whole Foods Diet" in 2017 and launching Love.Life in 2023 to focus on longevity and integrative medicine. Episode show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/john-mackey Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com Function Health: https://functionhealth.com/senra Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Fanatical Entrepreneurs: Why Work Feels Like Play (00:02:18) The Missionary vs. Mercenary Co-Founder Conflict (00:06:16) The Shirtless Hitchhiking Hippie and Johnny Rockefeller (00:08:12) Entrepreneur Confidence: Solving Puzzles and Cracking the Code (00:10:19) Flying Under the Radar: How Supermarkets Ignored Whole Foods (00:10:52) Venture Capitalists Are Hitchhikers With Credit Cards (00:14:03) Builder Entrepreneurs vs. Serial Entrepreneurs (00:16:31) Time Is the Only Filter I Trust (00:20:52) How Walmart Accidentally Fueled Whole Foods' Success (00:24:01) The Jaw-Drop Effect: When Customers First Walked In (00:27:17) Growth Through Acquisition: Building Geographic Platforms (00:29:19) Secret Allies: The Natural Foods Network (00:33:17) Mrs. Gooch's and the Revelation of Scale (00:34:52) Missionaries Sharing Financial Statements and Building Friendships (00:38:10) Never Competing Head-On With Friends (00:41:22) Going Public and Creating Liquidity for the Network (00:42:00) Continuous Learning: The Michael Dell Principle (00:44:10) Steve Jobs and Spotting Markets With Second-Rate Products (00:46:50) The Joy of Watching Team Members Become Millionaires (00:48:09) Capitalism: The Greatest Thing Humans Ever Invented (00:55:59) Cult Brands Are Built by Evangelists (00:58:01) Passion Is Infectious: The Reality Distortion Field (01:00:08) From Busboy to CEO: The Resume of an Entrepreneur (01:02:57) Learning From Near-Death Experiences (01:04:05) Money Means Freedom: Early Work Ethic (01:05:25) Shoe Dog as the Benchmark: Belief Is Irresistible (01:09:16) Documenting Time: Why Chronology Matters in Memoirs (01:11:14) Rockefeller, Bezos, and Musk: The Master Strategists (01:14:39) Using Doubt as Fuel: The Slow Burn of Proving People Wrong (01:20:04) Daniel Ek and Having No Ceilings (01:23:09) How His Father Shaped His Ambition (01:25:52) Firing His Father From the Board: The Hardest Decision (01:28:01) His Mother's Deathbed Wish and Lasting Regret (01:34:47) The Ceremony of Forgiveness (01:36:17) MDMA Therapy and Breathwork: Accessing Deeper Consciousness (01:38:54) The Entrepreneurial Journey as a Spiritual Journey (01:40:45) Conclusion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, one of your themes that comes out and listening to a lot of your is you admire entrepreneurs and you find one of the common threads for the successful entrepreneurs be those who are basically fanatics. They just are into their businesses. I just listen to the Michael Dell. I mean, Michael, you know, it's like he says, and even started off the episode by quoting him, he says, well, how much time did you work? And he said, all the time, all of the time. And that's the theme for oftentimes, for entrepreneurs that they are so it's not like they're even think about working. Michael doesn't make a distinction I don't think between work and play. Neither do I.

Because when you're really enjoying it, is it work? I mean, you're doing what you want to do and it's playful. So it takes a lot of time, but you're not thinking about it because you're loving every minute of it. You're enjoying it. That comes through with the Todd Graves one as well, you know. I mean, he just loved his business so much. And so all these entrepreneurs, they're 100% in.

And that's where they're. time goes. You ask Michael if he was kind of like a Renaissance man or if he was doing a lot of different things. And it's like, no, and no, not really. I think that's also true for most entrepreneurs. They're pretty focused on a few things and mostly they're focused on their business. Yeah, so the conversation we're just having before we started recording was, you know, I'm essentially seeking your counsel because I think I'm just like these kind of people. Like you wouldn't spend 10 years making this podcast, reading 400 of these books. Your book is excellent, by the way, which we'll talk a lot about today. I wasn't expecting to start here.

If you didn't think that you were similar or there was something about them that was attractive, and I feel like essentially my entire life is my work. Now, I think one thing that we share together, and we spent several hours together too, is very obvious in your book, but also with you, you viewed yourself, I don't know if you use this word, but to me, you're definitely a missionary. And one of the things I want to talk to you about, I talk to a lot of founders about this. So there's not a lot of co-founder conflict. And it's very obvious that, you know, that, especially when you're a missionary, you weren't like, oh, I just wanna start, you know,

one grocery store so people eat healthier and better food. You're like, we're gonna change the way that the country eats. And that was a very distinct philosophical mismatch from some of your early co-founders. You talk a little about that. I mean, the first one, we started it up, it was kind of like, it thought it'd be fun.

We weren't trying to change the way America eats. We just wanted to open up a small natural food store, that's a safer way. And actually, the good part of the book is dedicated to the early days because I think many entrepreneurs, they remember the early startup part of the business very well. And then they remember the last few years. And then there's the period in between they don't think about. One of the good things about writing a memoir is like I got to rethink it all, relive at all.

And, you know, my original founders, co-founders, particularly one, Mark, he just wanted to make a lot of money. And the very first store, the very first sold food market, is very profitable. And even though the flood knocked it back, we got back on our feet, and it was just very profitable.

And he said, we don't really need to do anything else. We've got it made. Let's just not screw it up. It's like, well, I don't want to do just one store. I want to open up more stores. And he went along with that, but those new stores started slow,

had to grow into it. And so there even came a time where we were losing money again. and he was very angry about it. He says, you've blown it. And I said, no, these stores are going to be fine. They're going to grow. We wait and see.

But he didn't have the patience to do that. It's like you plan a seed. You can't be digging around. You've got to let it grow. You've got to give it time seed to germinate and turn into something. So you have to be patient. It's sort of like investing. You have to let it compound over many years.

Well, you have to let a business compound over many years as well. So the missionary part. was as we began to grow, I began to realize nobody's really doing quite what Whole Foods is doing. Nobody quite has a vision that we have, that I had, to be a national company, to maybe change our agricultural system, maybe be able to help people to eat healthier. I could see what was happening simultaneously. With Whole Foods growth, America was getting sicker and sicker. That's the paradox.

It almost tracks perfectly, where we see... I mean, David, 74% of Americans are overweight and 43% are obese. And that has not peaked. It is still going up. And you can see it now with Make America Healthy again, that people are beginning to respond to the fact that we are literally killing ourselves through what we're eating. The co-founder that had the philosophical mismatch, one of them,

was that the same one that you guys bought out? Was it Mark that you bought out early in? Yes, Mark. That's right. The other co-founder was with me. I mean, he was Mark's partner originally, Craig. But Craig really had a larger vision. Craig really wanted to grow the business.

I remember, I don't know if I told it in the book or not, but I think I might have mentioned it. But one day early on, we were starting to grow, we were starting to went to California, and Craig said, John, we're going to be everywhere. We're going to be everywhere in America. Can you believe this? We're going to have whole food markets everywhere.

He says, I'll bet someday we have a store in Kansas, Kansas City. For Craig, Kansas City, it was like the last place we'd have a store, but he thought we'll get there someday. And I remember, I think Craig had retired by the time we finally got to Kansas City, but I remember calling him up and saying, Craig, we've done it. We're in Kansas City, dude, we made it. There's a lot of things that I mentioned this in the Founders episode I made about you. I was not expecting, because you're hilarious in the book, by the way, where it starts. for like, you know, I'm like this shirtless hitchhiking hippie. Like, I just dropped out of college.

I'm looking for like my life's mission, like what I want to do for work. And so you wouldn't think like a shirtless, you know, hitchhiking hippie. There'd be a lot of parallels between you and Johnny Rockefeller. But there definitely is. And specifically in the early days of his career where there was a commitment mismatch between him and his original co-founders wind up. He bought them out. He said the day that he got rid of those partners was, he looks back as one of the

smartest and best decisions of his life. you were constantly wanting to expand, expand, expand. I wanted to ask you, that's the next question I'm going to ask you, from the very first, like, from the very early days of safer way and then returns into Whole Foods. And your partners were kind of like trying to put the reins and like pull you back. Right. Can you like talk us through that time of your life?

I just had a lot of confidence. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, not that we weren't making mistakes, I just, I think entrepreneurs believe, okay, I got this one, listen to the Michael Dell one on the drive out here, in fact, is that Michael said, well, you got to make mistakes. That's how you learn. That's how you iterate. Entrepreneurs have confidence that they will solve the problems.

Michael likes to figure out puzzles, right? Well, business in some ways a puzzle. It's like, and I'm doing it again with Love Life. It's like, okay, what does the market really want here? And, okay, this isn't working. We've got to do less of that. This is working. Let's do more of that.

And then you're constantly trying to, trying to think about how to create more value for your customers in ways that they don't necessarily even know they need it. So the entrepreneur has confidence that he or she will figure it out, crack the code, solve the puzzle. And so they're willing to go ahead, even though they don't know for certain because what they do believe is they're figuring it out. They're going to figure it out. And people that, I think my co-founders, they weren't sure we would be able to figure it out. And they didn't want to glow it. They didn't, they want to play it safe.

They didn't want to lose what they had, I think. And I was like, we're going to, I didn't, failure wasn't an option. I mean, I just think entrepreneurs have great confidence in their ability to solve the problems, and they will figure it out and win. And I think I fell into that category, looking backwards. Why did you understand, though, that you had to expand or you weren't going to succeed, where they thought, okay, we can just stay with this, like, nice old store. Because the world's constantly, that whole,

Food's had no patents. We were just a grocery store retailer. Anybody could see what we're doing. Anybody could copy what we were doing. I was amazed. I always like to make the joke that Whole Foods flew under the radar. The supermarkets never took us seriously for decades. It wasn't until we opened up in Columbus Circle in New York City.

The media never paid any intention to us either. We opened up in Times, you know, not Times Square, we opened up in Columbus Circle. and the biggest supermarket in New York, and it just, and it was in a basement. I mean, I think I talked in the book about how difficult the decision that was because of the capital investment, no parking, and in a basement, it's like we're bound to fail. But we took the risk, and that store was still the highest-line store at Whole Foods, even though it's got some challengers now. It's ever since we opened, it just took off, and then the supermarkets discovered us. They started to take us more seriously as a competitor because of all the publicity we received. And they were ready to go see that store.

And then the media started to pay attention to us as well. And as the media gave us more attention, more people began to buy the stock. And so we had this, you know, upward spiral of success. And one of the things is, is that we can't patent anything. We don't have any – anybody can see what you're doing. And they can – and it's easy to get your intellectual capital. is hire away some key employees. And we were full food,

it was fortunate because we never were taken seriously by the supermarkets until we really developed scale on our own. I think I tell the story of a venture capitalist who didn't invest. And his basic argument was, well, I don't think it's a big market. You're just a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies. But then, if I'm wrong, these other big supermarket change will put you out of business.

You can't compete with Safeway or H-E-B or those guys. And he might have been right, except that they didn't pay any attention to us. So we kept doing what... They were hypnotized by Walmart. They were so scared about Walmart that they ignored us. This is one of the most surprising things.

I want to go back to the venture capitalist. I'm going to handle the venture capitalist first, and I want to go to Walmart because we talked about this when we had dinner, but in the book, that was one of the most shocking things. We were like, actually, Walmart played a huge role in our success, and I didn't even put it together before that. You call venture capitalists

hitchhikers with credit cards. In the book, you do not hide your disdain for them in general. Can you explain why, like, you call them hitchhikers or credit guards and, like, recount some of the experiences that you had with them in the early days? I mean, first of all, I'm glad we got venture capital money. They, I don't know if we could have grown without it.

We didn't get very much, but it was enough to get us into Northern California. And then after that, four years after we got the money from them, we were public. So they were important for us to get to where we got to. Once we had the public money, we didn't need those hitchhikers any longer, and they got out of the car. And I tell entrepreneurs this all the time. The VCs are playing a different kind of game. The game VCs are playing is that it's kind of a blockbuster model. They're looking for exponential growth.

And when they hit, when you get an Apple or you get an Nvidia or an intuitive surgical, or you get one of these companies that just compound and compounds, and compounds, you can get 100x your venture capital money. And that's what they're looking for. And so what ends up happening is they oftentimes take good businesses and try to scale them too rapidly because they're trying to get that exponential payoff. Remember, they've usually got these funds where the money is only going to be in that, you know, seven years, they've got to start paying back.

So the entrepreneurs, they're not evergreen funds where you can keep the money in, you know, for decades. They're pressured the entrepreneur to try to scale rapidly. and that works for some businesses, and those are happy endings. But a lot of times you take a perfectly good business that's not going to be, you know, a multi-billion dollar business that's going to change the world, but it's still a good business, and they wreck it. But they can afford a lot of failures because of the blockbusters make so much money.

So it's like a batting average. They don't have to hit a thousand. and they just need to hit good enough, and the blockbusters are home runs, and so they make a lot of money on that. So I'm often telling entrepreneurs that, be careful with the VCs, because the first thing they're thinking is

they want to scale your business, and they're going to tell you, don't worry about your burn rate. We'll do another round of financing at a higher level, and a higher level, and a higher level. But what often helps us down that road is that the business doesn't scale as well as they want it to,

and then you get the round where it's kind of a crammed-down round, where it's a down round, and the entrepreneurs shares diluted way down in those down rounds, or they get rid of the entrepreneur and bring professional management in, and they throw them out on the side of the road. I always tell young entrepreneurs, don't give up control of your business to the VCs. They may talk a good game, but they're not fundamentally aligned with you. I think for most entrepreneurs, you really want to build a business,

and you probably want to be here a decade now or 15 or 20 years from now still growing, your business. And if that's the case, you have to be very careful about the VCs because that's not what they want. They have seven years. They want 100 extra turn if they can get it. And they're prepared to crash your business prematurely if that's what it takes. So be careful. That's my main thing I tell. How do the younger entrepreneurs that you're advising usually respond to that advice? Well, for one thing, most of them don't care. Because I think you're a builder, Michael Dells, a lot of these entrepreneurs are talking about, these iconic entrepreneurs, they're builder entrepreneurs. But that's not the most common entrepreneur. Those are the ones you get the biographies about.

But the most common entrepreneurs is a serial entrepreneur. They just start businesses, and they do them for five years and flip them. They're like somebody remodeling a house and then flipping it. Except in these cases, they're really creative. They're good at germinating things. They don't want to operate them. They don't want to really build them over the long run. and so they're okay with that trying to scale it because they're not going to be around anyway. They want a rich exit. That's more common than you realize.

I think I now am realizing that, and I have for several years. Actually, it's funny. I just thought about this story this morning, and I think this is actually a really important point, that I remember a few years ago having dinner with a founder. And the weird thing is I had never met him. He was a fan of the podcast. But I'm like, I don't know if this guy's actually listening to the podcast.

podcast because he wanted to talk about like the watch he has and the car he's driving and I found out he was selling a ton of like secondary before his company was successful at all and it just came out yesterday the day before that this company that had a two billion dollar valuation in like 2022 or 2021 whenever I was having dinner with them last year they did seven million in revenue wow and they had 47 million dollars of expenses and I'm like oh you're just this guy this that sign I's like I don't give a shit about the car you have or the watch you have. I care about what you build, not consume. You should be proud of what you have built,

not that you have money to buy somebody else's product. Like, that doesn't impress me. And obviously I left the dinner and never saw him again. And I've kind of forgot about them until yesterday. I'm like, oh, this I spent. And I was like, you idiot, David. You have like one of the benefits of reading a book like yours or any of these biographies. Like you get to the end of the story.

And you just, you're reminded that, you know, our life, you can come to the end in the book, our life, we have limited time here. And you should be ruthless with how you're spending your time. And I just gave two hours to this guy that was not even a B player. He's F. You've done nothing. You fucking joker. Like this is useless for me to spend any time with you. And this is why people take them a little crazy where I spend almost all my time with people that have, I said in the episode, people like you, where Michael Dell, Todd Graves, I'm obsessed with people that do things for a long time because time is the only filter that I trust. I have no idea, no predictive ability that this entrepreneur that started a company today is going to be successful. We're going to see. And it's going to be up to them and the decisions that they make. And so I am kind of drawn to these, like, more missionary founders because you just make better, longer term decisions. So I'm not sure he was a typical of serial entrepreneur because a lot of serial entrepreneurs that I know, I know a bunch of them. And they do care about their businesses.

And for them, it's more, it's more, they have a certain skill set of creating businesses and then getting them to a certain level. And there's not primarily about the money. For them, the fun part is creating the business. And then as you start to staff it up and you build a bureaucracy, they're, they feel trapped by their own creations in a way. They're just, they're not wired to fit within that kind of corporate structure that they're creating. And all businesses eventually evolved to, or almost all businesses eventually evolved. to if they get any scale. They just don't like that, so they start over again. But I think those people are very interesting people. I think many serial entrepreneurs are not simply shallow people

in it just for the money. I have some good close friends who made a lot of money creating different businesses that only, like one of my good friends in Austin, a guy named Brett Hurt. He was the, he co-founded three public companies. His most famous one was Bizarre Voice, which does, did all the, if you do a review on an online business, you're probably using bizarre by his technology. And Brett is just, he said, well, I just love creating businesses. And, but after I've done it for, I don't know, five or six years, I just get bored with it and I want to create something new. Yeah, I don't have any problem with that. Like, I mean, the whole point of being an entrepreneur, you get to decide where you work on,

who's around you. Like, that's one of the biggest choice. Brett would never be bragging about any of his cars he drives or, you. You know, his wealth. It was just not, he just wouldn't do that. Before having this conversation with John Mackey, I got to spend seven hours with him over two days. And it was during one of our conversations that John Mackey told me one of the craziest things

that anyone has ever said about Founders' Podcast. He had listened to over 100 episodes before he met, and he told me that if Founders' Podcasts existed when he was younger, that Whole Foods would still be an independent company, that since the podcast and all of history's greatest entrepreneurs constantly emphasize the importance of controlling, expenses. He would have put a much higher priority on it, especially during good times. During boom times, it is very natural for a company and for human nature to not watch your costs as closely

because everything is going so well. Andrew Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again. Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the costs of goods were permanent. This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp and have spent a ton of time with them over the last two years. They all listened to the podcast and they picked up on the fact that the main theme is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend and how doing so can give

you a massive competitive advantage. That is a main theme for Ramp. The reason that Ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp gives you a lot of everything you need to control your costs. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. In this episode you're currently listening to, there's a shocking idea that John Mackey told me about and it has to do with the role that Walmart played in Whole Foods success. And it has to do with how impossible it was for other people to compete with Sam Walton and Walmart. In his autobiography, Sam Walton wrote this. Our money was made by controlling expenses. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you

run an efficient operation or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your spend and optimize all of your financial operations all on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. Make sure you go to Ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time and money. That is ramp.com. Let's go back to the role that Walmart played in Whole Foods Success, which is a very interesting part of your book. Well, it was it was sort of, if I was using a metaphor, it's kind of like we were using a football metaphor. It's kind of like Walmart was such a massive force. They created everybody, all the supermarkets. Remember, Walmart

started out. They didn't sell food. They were, they were, you know, Sam Walton. You read his book probably 10 times. And Sam, you know, he started out kind of in the five and dime store. And that was kind of his initial model. I remember he had his big idea to do the bigger general merchandise store, and he couldn't sell it to the company. To Ben Franklin. To Ben Franklin. So he just went out and did it on his own.

And it was only later, after Walmart was very successful growing, and they were competing with Gibson's and companies like that, Kmart, that they started thinking about food. But when they put groceries in, it so disrupted the conventional supermarket industry that all they wanted to do was

figure out how to compete with Walmart. So the existing grocery stores saw the competition from Walmart, and they made the drastic mistake of trying to compete on price. Yes. With the low-cost provider. Correct. And so they tried to cut their cost. And they spent less money in building out their boxes.

They looked more like warehouses. They were more sterile. They went with cheap lighting, everything to cut their capital investments down. Then they cut their labor to the bone. A lot of them had unions, so they had. but so they'd cut by cut service back. And they still couldn't compete with Walmart. You had playing Walmart's game.

In Whole Foods, we just were going this different direction. We'd like, well, we can't compete with Walmart and price. We're not even going to try to. We're going to compete on quality. We're going to compete on service. We're going to have differentiated product mix. And so that's what we did. As that one venture capital said,

you're a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies. That's true. It was true at one point. We were definitely fooded for a younger generation or more health-conscious people. But what it ended up happening is, is that as those supermarkets made their stores less attractive, we'll say to middle-class, upper-middle-class women

who do most of the food shopping, they wanted to come into a store that was pretty, it was beautiful, that was people that gave them good service, that took their groceries to their car, that was nice to them, that answered their questions. And they didn't get the products that Whole Foods sold, but what they got was our produce was beautiful and it tasted good. And these people were really nice to us, even though they had piercings and tattoos and they didn't

look like. But they looked like their children, actually. So they were more sympathetic to it than you might think. And so we kind of cracked that, we kind of cracked that upper middle class next that bought our food for the quality and the service. And then as that happened, we began to grow faster. Our cops went up. We were not just in our own little sort of hippie-hippieville any longer. And the supermarkets didn't pick it up, and again, until we got to really didn't pick it up. So they were ignoring you? They were ignoring us.

It was like, using a football metaphor, coming back, Walmart was like this giant distraction, and we were running down field wide open for the touchdown pass. They were so obsessed with stopping Walmart that allowed Whole Foods to compete on a different, different framework, a different competitive strategy. The supermarkets only competed for the longest time, they only competed on price, really. They just, you know, they had nice stores with Muzac in it, and they never, but they were all trying to compete on price. And Walmart was the killer app, so to speak, and they were trying to, that's all they knew how to do is to compete on that. So Whole Foods created a different business model. Once they figured it out, it became a lot

tougher competition for us. They started copying us. They started making nicer stores. putting a bigger emphasis on their perishable foods like produce, competing with us on price instead of Walmart. How many years did they give you the run on the field? That's the great question. I'd say we got the run of the field. We opened up, the first whole foods was 1980, say, for it 1978, and we didn't open up, it was 2004.

We opened up Columbus Circle. So think about that. We had, you know, 20 to 25 years where nobody paying attention to us. And that allowed us to scale and compound. And they just dismissed us. They just thought, who cares about Whole Food? They don't hurt us. We never hurt any one supermarket that much.

In fact, we'd come into a new market, and they'd be all, they'd compete initially. They'd try to lower prices, get some of our products. But then their sales didn't drop very much, because Whole Foods would take a little bit from a lot of different groceries. We wouldn't take much from any particular one. So as a result, they just thought, we don't have any problem competing with Whole Foods. They just ignored us. What was going on there?

I don't understand how you would take a little bit from, you know, let's say, five, of the other grocery stores and the areas of driving. Well, because we were so differentiated. We'd take only a few of their customers. Not most of their customers didn't switch over. Just some of them did. A few did. But a few switched over from a lot of different places.

And in the early days, when we were the only natural food supermarket, maybe for 50 miles around, we had a lot of people that would drive in on the weekends and stock up. And they'd buy, you know, $300, $400, $400 worth of groceries. How far were they driving to get to you? Oh, I mean, sometimes 100 miles. When we only had one store in a market area, people might come in. I mean, it's not their everyday shop, right? They'd come in.

They couldn't get this food anywhere else. They didn't have what Whole Foods was selling at typical supermarkets in the day. In the day, we were so unique. I would say, David, the first 20 years we existed, when people would first walk into Whole Foods market, you could see, I'd see it again and again and again. Their jaw would drop. It was like, I never been in a store like this. I'd never seen a store like this.

Now, people don't have that feeling because it's more common, and supermarkets have up their gain. But for a long time, at least 20 years, people, we just, were blown away the first time they came into Whole Foods Market. They'd never seen a store like that. It was so different than any other supermarket they'd ever been in. So we were very well differentiated. We were in a niche, and people did not compete with us in that niche. And so we sort of owned it. But as I said, retailers don't have patents.

We couldn't patent a natural food supermarket. We couldn't patent our product mix. couldn't patent our marketing. We couldn't patent our service levels. And so scale was your solution to that? Well, as we scaled, we could get better pricing as well. That was one of the craziest stories in the book that, again, I've been shopping at Whole Foods forever. I never, for some reason, I never thought about the creation. I just figured, oh, he started the first Whole Foods and the second, and so doing it for 40 years, and that's how to happen. I had no idea that how much you grew by acquisition. The acquisitions were key because they created a geographical platform for us to go into a new

geography and create a team of people is very expensive. We did it a few times. We did it. We started in Texas. We did it in Northern California. We did it in Chicago. We did it in Northern California. But most of the other regions like Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., Florida, North Carolina, we got our platform by an acquisition. We bought out an existing company. It means we didn't get many stores. We might have gotten, you know, I think we got six stores in Boston and seven in L.A. And two in Florida. But that was still enough to create the platform. And from there, with that platform in place, with already support there and good intellectual capital, people that knew what they were doing, we were able to grow faster. But if you look at, let's say Whole Foods,

has 550 stores right now. Probably of those that were stores that were acquired that still exist and weren't relocated, maybe 25. So the acquisitions were happening earlier in the company history? Yes, earlier, and they created a platform, a geographical platform that allowed us to expand out from that platform, in a sense, open new stores in that area. This is, again, one of my favorite parts of the book, and I think I want to spend some time here, if you don't mind. Again, Rockefeller did this exact same thing.

I mentioned it in the founders episode I did on you, where he had this thing called Secret Allies that I think is one of my favorite ideas I've ever covered. Chrome Across in any of these books. He's at the very beginning of the defining industry. You're at the very beginning of the natural foods, you know, industry. It doesn't really exist. Right. You are by far the most ambitious. And I called you in the episode, like, oh, like, I should have known this. Anybody that's going to start in a new industry and come out at built a category, defining company in that industry, of course, they have this huge ambition. They're essentially a conqueror is the way I think about you, even though I think a lot of people would not

come away with that same conclusion because of how like, you know, the hippie nature that you started with. So you, what you do is very smart. You did exactly what Rockefeller did. He's like, you looked around. It's like, well, I'm doing this thing. Who else? Let me look around, not just in my area. Who else is doing the same thing? In some cases, you find out about these in like trade journals. And then you don't just like, oh, that's interesting. No, you get on a plane and you go there and you start building a relationship. You built a network, right? Was it an official network? Was this unofficial? No, we had a name for it. It's called the Natural Foods natural food network. Talk about this. This is phenomenal. In some ways, the natural foods industry,

natural organic foods industry came out of the health food industry. The health food industry started earlier, but it's mostly selling, it's mostly what we call pill shops. They're mostly selling supplements and some packaged whole grains and whole grain flowers and things like that. But mostly, most of their sales came from supplements. But that's kind of where the industry grew out. of. You know, think about Jack La Lane. And he was back in the health food day, and he was a health food champion. Just like 70s? What you, what's under? No, no. We're talking, the early health food industry was probably after World War II. And it didn't, until you, until my generation kind of came of age in the late 60s and early 70s, you begin to see start natural food stores, start to pop up that

were primarily food rather than supplements. And there came a point where we realized we're not really health food stores in the old traditional sense. We're different. We're natural food stores. Then the next iteration was, what if we did a store that was a complete one-stop shop for people living this lifestyle so that we were a supermarket, a natural food supermarket. When whole food started, there were only like three or four other natural food supermarkets in the United States.

There was like bread and circus in Boston. There was Mrs. Goochers in L.A., there was Fraser Farms. in San Diego. That's about it. I mean, there were some smaller stores, but they weren't, you've got to be at least 10,000 square feet to be a natural food supermarket in my mind.

And so we opened up. I heard about those in the natural food merchandiser and went and studied them and thought, I remember it was pivotal. It's like I could go and tell the investors, hey, I didn't invent this. There are other people doing it.

It's working in L.A., it's working in Boston. It's working in San Diego. go, why want to work in Austin? It'll work in Austin. Let's try it. Otherwise, I may not have been able to get the money if I didn't have at least a few prototypes that are already working, went and studied them, became friends with them, and ultimately acquired all of them. You jumped to where it was going. But there were others that were opening up about the same time, like alfalfas in Boulder, Whole Food Company in New Orleans.

Unicorn Village in Miami. There were others that were forming about the same time. It was an idea whose time had come. But what was the initial instinct? The initial instinct is these people are doing what I'm doing. Let me go build relationship with them. And then you realize, oh, there was a mismatch of ambition here and I can actually acquire them?

No. Because they didn't want to expand. You're giving me too much credit there. Okay. But Mrs. Goochers, I remember that one. Because that was instrumental at the time. I think you guys were only selling like, you weren't sounding like there wasn't a butcher.

There was some kind of that you were doing. like $8 to $10,000 a week. That was a safer way. Okay, it's a safe for a week or something like that. Yeah. They were doing like $100,000 and you're like, oh, that kind of opened your eyes that you could add the other product category, correct? Bingo.

Okay. Mrs. Goochers was a huge influence early on because it's like, wow, they're doing 10 times as much sales as we're doing, and their stores are a little bit bigger, but they're not that much bigger, but they're selling fresh meat and they've got big produce departments and so it's like, that's what we need to do too. We can't do it as safer way. It's too small. We need a bigger location.

What ended up happening? I think of it this way. We were all missionaries in a way. We really believed naturally. We saw what was happening with the processed food industry, that it was basically poisoning people. People were eating this terrible food, eating junk food diets. And we thought we need to, so we were sort of like Puritans in a way.

We wanted to create this really natural organic revolution. It could change the world. And other people that were our colleagues, they were missionaries too. They were doing it because they really believed in it. And so initially we created this natural foods network because we were helping each other. We would get together and we'd bring our financial statements and we'd trade them. We didn't see ourselves as competitors. We each had our own geographical niche.

And by exchanging information and financial information, this was making us all better, better retailers. It was sort of like it was a club. And then we used to do trips together too. We called it, we did some people that were in the industry, not just retailers, but we'd call it. We had a wild man's group. We did some adventures together in Alaska, in Yosemite. Not work-related. This is just friendship.

Police, yes. Building friendships. Okay. And not having adventures together. You would also, wouldn't you guys also travel to other stores together and do store visits as a group? Oh, yes. But what we do is we'd come together in a city. There would be a host company hosting, usually around a new store.

We've opened up a new store. see it. And so like when we hosted in Houston, we opened up our first natural foods who were in Houston in 1984, we hosted the Natural Foods Network meeting in Houston. That became one of the highest volume stores in the natural foods world and within a couple of years. Was this like a collective or do you, you felt you were like kind of the leader of this organization? The guy that organized the Natural Foods Network and I credited him in the book because a man named Peter Roy, who was a natural networker. And Peter, he started a Whole Food Company in New Orleans,

which we bought out and acquired that in 1988. And then Peter came on and helped to start Northern California. He eventually became president of Whole Foods for five years, and he left us back in 1998. I'll do some detail on that in the book. And so he was instrumental. He worked for us for 10 years, and Peter brought the network together,

and he helped, one of the first acquisitions we did after Peter was key, and it was key before we went public, we acquired wealth-free growth in North Carolina. Lex Saldon, and Peter were like best friends. So Peter said, John's a good guy, we're going to take good care of the business, we're going to grow it, you're going to get a big paycheck. Because we needed to go public

because I didn't want the VCs to get control of the business. You said they were trying to grab the steering wheel sometimes. The founding investors still had a majority of the stock. The VCs own 34%. But if we'd done another round, they would have gotten control of the business, and they had different agendas. There's a great story in the book, because your dad, which will get to, plays a huge role in your life and in the company.

And there's like, you guys have this knock-down, drag-out fight, and then he pulls you into a room with the VCs after. He pulls you into rooms, like, we need to get rid of these guys as soon as possible. Yeah. He just said, want to take over the company. Let's get him out. Let's get him out of the car. Let's get him out of the car.

He used more choice language about it than that. Let's go back to this network, though. So we're developing all these relationships with these guys. What ended up happening is I did have an ambition to grow the business. Most of them wanted to stay. And when I went to Northern California, that was the first rupture in the Natural Foods network because we'd gone out of our state. and Mrs. Goochess felt like California was theirs.

I said, guys, L.A. is yours. You're there, but nobody's in Northern California. That's 400 miles away. It's like, you know, you never said you even want to have any ambition there, and he said, well, we don't. But we didn't think, you know, we would get there eventually, and now you've gone there. So that kind of was beginning to break up the Natural Foods network. We stopped sharing financial information. There was, we, Whole Foods sort of created some fear in some of these other entrepreneurs. that we were maybe gonna come into their territories.

I kept saying, no, guys, we're not gonna compete with you head on. No, I mean, I, no, seriously. What do you mean you're not gonna compete with them head on? There were markets that we stayed out of for years. And then what happened? Well, then we bought them. But you see, that's a different thing. John, John.

You have this, come on, you have this, you are unbelievably humble, and I don't think that's an act, but you also are this like ruthlessly competitive conquer Like, you admit to how competitive you are in the book. Yes. However, but the point is that these were my friends, and I did not want to hurt my friends. Okay.

So I never hurt Mrs. Gitch's. They never hurt them. I mean, maybe it lessened their upward potential someday if they'd gotten there in 10 years or if somebody else would have gotten there before them, though slow as they were going. But I didn't compete directly with anybody else. The stores ever. I never did it.

I didn't go to Portland for that reason because Nature's was there. I didn't go to Boulder until alfalfas and wild oats had sort of partnered up. And so the people that I developed those relationships with, we could pick where we went. Now, they were scared we were going to come. Why would they be scared of you? What were they seeing in you? Well, Whole Foods got out ahead.

We raised the VC money. And once we went public in 92, that was a big event because now we had this currency. And the entrepreneurs could cash out and make millions and millions of The entrepreneurs? You mean the VCs? Can you get up? Okay. No, I'm talking about... Oh, the network entrepreneurs. And they all did.

What ended up happening is, is they had no... How could they get liquidity? I mean, the reality for most businesses is they're never going to be big enough. They either have to sell the... To get liquidity, they have to sell the business, because most of them can't go public. And how else can you get liquidity? You're going to either have an IPO or you're going to have a sale. So most of them...

saw the writing on the wall, Whole Foods was expanding, and they should, you know, they should cash out. Most of them came to us and said, would you be interested in buying us? They'd, like, once we bought Wellspring, and then particularly once we bought bread and circus, and that was, you know, what we paid for was public, and they thought, my God, we ended up paying, I think, Anthony, we paid him $28 million, but he ended up getting $30 million because there was a lag period between before we could cash the stock out for him, and it was worth more after $2. we did it, and we did our secondary offering. And so they were like, wow, I didn't realize my business was worth this much money. And so they came to us. The guy Terry Dalton in Florida said,

buy me. Why don't you come to Florida? We were great. And so we did buy him. And so that's kind of how it happened. They trusted me. They knew we were going to take care of their business, too. We weren't going to, you know, we were going to love their business and make it better, actually. Most of them saw what Whole Foods was doing, and they admired us. They envied us partly, but they also admired us, and they knew if they sold out that we were going to take care of their team members and that we were going to maintain our standards of we weren't going to turn into a regular supermarket, and that they felt good about that. Win, win, win.

I'm going to go back to your competitive drive because I do want to talk about that because I think it surprised a lot of people. My question, though, I want to know from your perspective in your mind, okay? Because I do the exact same thing now where I go around. And podcasting is not, it's like very positive song. There's no, like, there's really no competition. It's like a lot more collaborative. But I am very curious and I run the same idea that you did and the same idea that Rockefeller does. It's like, I will fly across the country just to have like lunch or dinner with another podcast.

I want to download of your thoughts on how you think about your business and like what you're doing. What did you notice as you're building this network? and you're meeting all these other people and all these different regions. Did you think you were different from them? Sure. I mean, but one of the things I liked about your, in a instance, I just listened to on the drive here

with your Michael Dell, which was impressed. I know Michael, of course, we both live in Austin. For a long time, we were the two big entrepreneurs in Austin before it became kind of an entrepreneurial hub in the last decade or so. And so I followed his career closely, and I know him, and he's a really good guy. Michael talked a lot about continuous learning.

Remember how he talked about, you asked him and said, well, you had to reinvent yourself like three or four times. He said, no more like seven or eight times. Yes, because every time there was a new revolution, he had to adapt his business, right? So I continued to learn. And you thought they were complacent? They were, they just,

the world is constantly evolving. It's constantly changing. And if you sit still, Michael said it, he said it in his talk with you. If you stay the same, you get passed up, you're going to fail. You have to continue to evolve. New things emerge, and you have to change with it. Whole Foods was changing rapidly. We were opening up bigger stores.

Most of these guys didn't have the capital to try to match that. They didn't have the ambition to do it. Let me back up. I'm not trying to say this for somebody to be like an arrogant person, like, oh, I'm different from all my competitors. It's like a really great way to spot opportunity. The fact that you see this over and over again is one of my favorite lines in Steve Jobs' biography was that if you actually look at one of his main skill sets

was that he was able to identify markets with second-rate products. Products that he thought he could just make better or think about in a different way. Like he didn't invent, and you just go through all of them, from personal computing to the phone to just everything that he's done.

And I was like, damn, I didn't even realize that until it's probably the 10th time I read that book, or the 10th biography of his that I read. I see that a lot in what you were doing, too. So I'm not trying to be like, you'd just say, oh, I was like better than these people. It's just like, no, I'm fundamentally looking at this industry different than they are.

And I was wondering if that was obvious at the beginning when you started going around and building this network. I think about Steve. I mean, maybe he took products that were very early. I mean, for, I mean, he didn't maybe invent the personal computer, but they weren't very good. made easier to use. Yes, and he, he transformed it with a much better, you know, Apple II in particular was a huge step. Or he didn't do the MP3 player initially, but the iPod was massively better.

No, he didn't do the phone. You could say he invented the smartphone, though. Was there a smartphone? No, but I was using cell phones. Yes, but the smartphone is not just a phone. It is completely new category. You could almost say nobody hardly invents anything because they're always taking some other ideas and putting them together and interesting new combinations. But from your perspective, yeah, obviously you felt different at that time or no? You know, it's hard to say, David, because I don't really know how other people are thinking. I only know how I'm thinking.

I just see how they act. Okay. And I just know most of these people are older than me, for one thing, and they had families. They were more security-oriented. They wanted the financial security. I just was always, always kind of all in. So was I more ambitious? I was having a good, I really like growing the business.

I think that's one thing entrepreneurs have in common. They like to grow their business. You like to see, it's like it's Michael call it a puzzle he's figuring out. But also, growing a business is immensely satisfying because all the stakeholders are benefiting. Your customers are benefiting. Your employees are benefiting. They're getting new opportunities, new promotions. You're watching them flourish.

One of the greatest, most satisfying things, particularly as Whole Foods was a public company before Amazon bought us public for 25 years, independent. So many of our team members became millionaires through our stock option program. If you're on a winning team that grows, you can make a lot of money, even if you're not the most senior executives.

We gave stock options to everybody that worked there. And so I remember going to an annual gathering. We had hundreds and hundreds of people, and I got this, people got, they just standing ovation for me because they were telling me, we bought a house. I didn't think we'd ever build it, buy a house. My kids, they can go to college now. I can retire.

This is so great. I never thought, and these are grocery people, right? They're just, you know, people that work meat cutters and just ordinary team members who never thought they would really have any prosperity in the world. That is so deeply satisfying. That's one of the things I liked about the Todd Graves talk, by the way, was he was so much into his employees flourishing. That is a tremendously good feeling. This is one of the reasons. Like, I resisted for years, very close friends of mine,

where, like, you should, you know all this history of the stuff in your head from, you know, the history of entrepreneurship, maybe better than, maybe better than anybody else in the world. You need to start recording some of the conversations you're already having. And it was very resistant to that idea until I realized the gap in the market was like a lot of business and tech press. And I don't consider myself a journalist. I'm sure as hell not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast. I'm obsessed with this stuff. Look what the books look like when I'm done with them. Where's the camera? Like this, what does that look like? That is, looks like obsession. It looks like you need a new book. That's obsession. And what I realized, like, most of the

business and tech press hate business and tech. And I think a lot of this has to do with, you know, they're not actually, they're just journalists that that's where they got channeled into. And so the opening was exactly, I said, well, I think, you know, as a son of a Cuban immigrant, like, I think capitalism is awesome. You have this great thing where you said capitalism was a greatest thing that humans have ever invented, which mean you've bonded over. And I'm like, no, I'm going to, I want to start hosting conversations to celebrate these kind of people, where you had this idea as this shirtless hitchhiking hippie that I want to start my own little natural food store, and I'm going to continuously learn. I'm going to grow it. And as I grow it, I'm creating

products that people love, which I'll get to one second. And then I'm creating wealth for myself and others, for normal people to work at Whole Foods and be able to send their kids to college as a result of the wealth that the company is able to create. To buy a house, these are things that should be celebrated, not denigrated. And they're not saying because we live in a zero-sum world. We don't. We live in a win-win-win world. But people don't realize it.

People think about the history of humanity, David. For tens of thousands of years, there was really no progress in the world. It's been first the Enlightenment, science, and then the birth of capitalism that's lifted humanity, particularly capitalism, has lifted humanity out of the dirt. People have no reference points. 250 years ago, 94% of everyone alive, 94% lived on less than $2 a day.

94% and that's in today's dollars. 88% of the people alive were illiterate. 88%. The average life span was 30. So many women died in childbirth. There was no modern dentistry. There was no antibiotics, no vaccines. It was horrible.

People do not understand where we came from. And capitalism created the possibility of the win, win, win. It used to be a zero-sum game where somebody won, somebody else lost. And the biggest mistake people make, intellectuals in particular, they still think when a zero-sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk somehow to stole the money from the people. They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching.

They're creating value for their customers. They're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing. Their investors are seeing their capital go up that can be reinvested and compounded. We're seeing governments. Where do all philanthropy ultimately comes from business? That's where the profits are. Where's the money coming from?

Where does all the taxes come from? from, and ultimately comes from business as well, whether you're taxing the employees who are flourishing. This is the engine that's lifting humanity out, and the entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. And somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world. I mean, he's created, he and people like Rockefeller, their lambasted as the villains when

they are the greatest heroes that have ever lived in terms of creating value. and helping people. All of the founders and extreme winners that I have studied have this one trait in common. They have excessively high energy levels. If you're going to be the best at what you do, you need to maximize your energy and output, and that's why I've partnered with Function. I signed up for Function long before. They were a sponsor of this podcast, and when you sign up, they ask you what your health

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It was incredible. He's amazing. One of my favorite ideas that he has is the fact that he's like, the idea that we have like a Forbes 400 and we have like a list of like these are the richest people. He's like, there's a better idea. Why don't we have a list for how much wealth that these people have created for others? And I think he used the example of like, you know, I don't remember what the market cap of Amazon is. It might be $2 trillion today, whatever it is. He's like, out of that $2 trillion, you know, I might own $150 billion of that.

You see Jeff again, when you see Jeff again, he used to say, hey, Jeff, I thought about your idea. Why don't we create a Basel's 1000? And there's an organization with AI in particular, that can be calculated. Yeah, it's a good point. Why don't we do that? That would be so great for people. If people could begin to see how much the multiplicity of value that comes out of those entrepreneurs. and how it compounds over time.

It's so enormous. And the intellectuals do not see it. The average person doesn't see it. They're still stuck in, I think it's a zero-sum game, that somebody's rich, somebody else is poor. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poor. That is not true. In fact, new book for you to read.

It just came out. One of my good friends, Alexander Green, has written a book called The American Dream. And he shows in that book how the American Dream is alive and well. And it's never been better. It's the fact the dream is not only not dead. It's much better than it's ever been before.

Only the intellectuals in the media cannot see it. They refuse to see it. Instead, they focus on all the things that aren't perfect yet in the society, and they're doom and gloomers. They think it's all going downhill. So that's a book you might want to take a look at. I'll definitely check it out. I have a recommendation for you after this.

Listen to the episode I just did with James Dyson, because I kept thinking about, you know, I'm going to listen to because in the episode I was just listening to on the drive, you said that's your favorite all-time autobiography. Number one. Yeah. So I thought, okay, that's the next one I'm going to listen to. I told him when I saw him, too, because it's out of print and they own the rights.

I go, please, just like, not even for money. You don't need more money. This book is so important to get an entrepreneur's hands because of the struggle, which is I think what most people identify with. But the reason I brought him up is because one of the things I love about him and what I'm trying to apply to every single thing that I work on is like, he demands. like he demands differentiation. He will not. If somebody else has already made the product, he wants you to do that, you know, a little better. He's like, I have to have, I have to

invent a completely different spin on it. And the reason I think differentiation is really important because there's two things where you kind of knew at the very beginning that you were onto something very powerful. You just told an example. If somebody is driving an hour or two hours to shop at your store, that should tell you something. The other thing, you have, you mentioned how, you know, you reinvested in growth, and as you were invested in growth, obviously sometimes, you know, you're going to lose the money for a little bit. But the first store was like profitable for like 2 p.m. of the first day. And then like a year later, there's like a hundred year flood in Austin. Nine months later. Yeah, nine months later. A hundred year flood in Austin. Okay, eight feet of water.

When there's a flood, it's not just water. It's the stuff from the sewers comes up. So it goes, it floods your store and you have shit water everywhere. And then, the next day or days after whatever, you guys are mopping up and trying to clean up the store. Getting tetan shots. And then you go into this eye and you're like, I thought I knew everybody that worked here. Who's this person? You go over, hey, I'm John.

I'm sorry. I guess I didn't know who you were. He's like, oh, I don't work here, but I'm such a huge fan of what you're doing. I shop here several times a week. I had a day off. It's very important to me that you guys get through this. So I wanted to help in any possible way.

No one does that if your product is not one valuable to them and differentiated. Right. that was I didn't have the language, but that's when I began to discover stakeholders, the people that care about your business. In that case, he was a customer and a neighbor, and he loved Whole Foods. It made a big difference in his life. I think you will find that most brands that are really popular, particularly in their early days, they were kind of cults.

They were cult cult, meaning they had a following, because I think most brands are ultimately built by the, evangelist enthusiast of their users, their customers. Apple's a great example of that, right? I mean, people would line up to get that next iPhone, you know, camp out to get the next iteration of iPhone in the day. Tesla, I mean, before I own a Tesla, and I remember my friend's talking, you got to drive this car. If you drive this car, you want to buy this car. And I said, I don't want Tesla and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's pretentious, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, as soon as one, I finally taught me to drive in.

I got it and bought it from the next day, right? So because, and I became a Tesla fan, super fan, right? So I do think that happened with Whole Foods. People loved our stores, particularly in the early days when we were so unique, so differentiated. And I remember those people would drive in. A lot of times they would tell me, why are you coming in and says, oh, I want to make sure my little boy never doesn't eat this poisonous food. They're just going to eat healthy food.

My child's going to be nourished. I'm going to make sure my children grow up really healthy. And it was oftentimes those parents that were doing it for the next generation, so to speak. So I do think Whole Foods was benefited by that type of cult-like following. But the evangelism that you see present in customers, I would say that is a byproduct of the fact that those cult brands, which I completely agree with you, are started by an evangelist. You use that word multiple times in the book. Steve Jobs. obviously an evangelist for Apple, Elon,

one of the greatest evangelists that we've ever seen. You knew that you had that very special skill of evangelizing. The way I think about this is like passion is infectious. I didn't know I had it until it worked. I mean, I discovered it. At what age did you discover it? Is right at the beginning when you're starting this year 20s?

Yeah, I mean, even raising money the first time, I mean, think about this for a second. I'm out raising money, even with my friends and family. I'm raising money. I have six months of experience working in a natural food store. I have absolutely no business background. I'd work jobs and stuff, but I'd never really been a management. I didn't take any business classes when I was at the university.

I didn't know much about business. And these people were willing to trust their money to this young kid and his girlfriend simply on my enthusiasm, really. At the end of the day, I was so excited. And I more or less said, I know this is going to work. Trust me. And they did, and it did work. I think Jobs called it the reality.

Somebody said it about Steve. They had a reality distortion field. Yes. I think I identified with that. I think most persuasive entrepreneurs, charismatic entrepreneurs, have a reality distortion fields. They're able to get people to spend their normal skepticism. And for a moment, they let them into their vision,

and they catch a little bit. maybe they don't get the vision, but they see the passion. I think you've talked about how passion is infectious. I think entrepreneurs are generally passionate, and they sell others on their dreams. I would say that, I think I said in the book, that entrepreneurs are a little bit like panhandlers out there begging for money. But what they're doing is they're selling dreams. They're selling dreams to people. and they make the dreams come alive.

And people in the reality to disbursed the field, they catch a glimpse of what's possible and then they want to get into it. Was there anything you were working on before Whole Foods? What other jobs did you have? I make this joke. If I did a resume, it would say bus boy, cargo restaurant,

dishwasher at some other restaurant, boys camp counselor, assistant manager at the Good Food Store, CEO, Whole Foods Market. Were you passionate in the assistant manager of the Good Foods? Well, the good food. Good food store? Yeah.

Yeah, that's when I remember I loved working at that. I strongly worked for six months. And I loved it, though. It was like I'd never worked in a retail store before. I like that because, A, I like the customers. I talked to the customers, and they were similar lifestyle that I had. They were like me. counterculture types, the people I was working with.

I liked them as well. We shared it. We were taking care of the customers. It was fun. I liked it. And I remember coming home back to the co-op, back to Prana House. And I had fought that day. I remember the day while I was working, I was looking around loving it.

And I said, I could do this. I could do this the rest of my life. I could open up my own store. It'd be fun. And I went back, the co-op full of this enthusiasm, I guess Renee is the first person I sold on it because I was so excited about it. And I said, Renee, what if we do our own store? And she looked me in the eyes and grabbed my hands and said, oh, McElman, I think that'd be really cool.

Let's do it. And I would say that if Renee had poo-pawed the idea, maybe that would have been it. But she got excited. So my spark led her spark, and together we created safer way, and that led to Whole Foods Market. So that entrepreneurial enthusiasm is very important. And also, entrepreneurs have to be very resilient. This is a quality that's underestimated because they do fail a lot. You do make a lot of mistakes.

I mean, safer way, I could have quit if I wasn't resilient. I remember going back and doubling down and saying, we need to do this. We're, as I read all these books, I realized, my God, we open this safe small store in this residential neighborhood and it's an old house, it's cute. It's terrible place to have a store. It's no cars go by here. This is terrible. We've got to relocate it.

And that was a terrible mistake. And fortunately, I still had enough enthusiasm that I was able to sell people on this big store is going to work. So we raised more capital, and that did work. So I think you have to be able to overcome your setbacks. And the flood could have knocked us out as well. There's so many times that failure is always accompanying you. And entrepreneurs in some ways are constantly learning from, their near-death experiences,

and then determined to learn and get better. You're going to like the Dyson episode, because that's his whole point. It's like, success isn't that interesting? Like, failure is like where all the learning actually happens. Success is interesting. I think he's exaggerating there. But you learn more.

You do learn for success as well. But you learn more from failure. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Because you have to, learn or die. I was always working, like most entrepreneurs, but I was always taking odd jobs and stuff. I worked for Astro World for a while.

even before I legally worked, my parents did something that was pretty smart. I wasn't to tell people they should do this with their kids. They didn't give us an allowance. They assigned prices for things they wanted to get done for dishes washed, lawns mode, leaves raked. They assigned a price for all those things. And if you wanted any money, you go did the jobs. So at a very early age, you know, talking 10 years old, I thought, well, I'd like to have money so I could go buy comic books.

And then later as I got older, so I could buy records or I can save up and buy a car. And so I eagerly worked. And then as soon as I could legally work, I went and took jobs because I wanted to earn money because to me, money meant freedom. I could do what I wanted to do with that money. I felt exactly the same way. It's exactly what it's like I so deeply desired control over my life. And I was actually just talking to a really close friend about this yesterday that I saw, just relentless work ethic and started working for I was 15. I remember my dad coming into my room

and telling me, because at the time, I really wanted a car and when I turned 16, and he's just like, you don't have to pay rent, but I don't have any money for a car. So whatever, like, you have to find a job and essentially like you're on your own. And so since I was 15, like, I never got a dollar from my family. And then they kicked me out of 18, which is a whole other thing. But I felt, I think there's a lot of people like this. Most entrepreneurs are like this. The connection is just like some kind of, you know, default unhappiness with your life that realize that you're in charge of it,

and I'm going to channel this intense work ethic into having achieved success, and mainly the success is not because it's monetary. It gives me control over what I'm doing. Now, the next stage of that, and I think the ideal stage is like you're actually working on something you're passionate about you believe in. The reason I ask you what other jobs you, had because there's multiple times when I'm reading this book, I thought of Phil Knight's book, Shoe Dog, which is to me one of the greatest. This book, that was my benchmark, shoe dog.

It's one of the greatest entrepreneur autobiographies ever. I love that it's in chronological order. I love the fact that every chapter is the year that's taking place. It's just remarkable. I'm about to reread it again and make another episode of founders. But the reason I, there's two things that you say in this book that I think are important for the next generation of entrepreneurs to understand. One, he realized that. He's another evangelist, right? But he didn't have the evangelist until he found something he was passionate about. He, like, sold mutual funds.

He sold like encyclopedias. And he failed left and right. And then he's like, but I'm obsessed with running. When running, just like you, running was like something weirdos did. You don't just go out for a run at the time he's doing that. Just like it's the funny part in one of your books, it's, you're trying to get the store. I think it's the first store out of Austin. So maybe it's like in Houston or something.

Yeah. And you meet with the landlord. And the landlord's like, listen here, hippie guy. He's like, there's not enough. store, there's not enough other hippies that eat your hippie food. And you're like, we're not opening, this is not hippie food. And he explained to him what it is. He goes, this is hippie food. But he

bought into your enthusiasm. Yes. And he said that you reminded him of like a younger you. It's like correction on the narrative. You got the essence of a right. But that was actually our very first whole food's market. Oh, there you go. When we were jumping up from safer way, because Ben Powell, he was a, he would have been in, he was a lawyer from Houston.

He'd been in LBJ's administration. And he owned the property, so I had to sell him. I mean, entrepreneurs have to sell people on things, and he just thought, it was a crazy idea. You're doing a hippie food store. How can that possibly work, son? I said, it's going to work. I just, it's going to work. And he says, there's not enough hippies in the whole world to fill up the store. And I said, something like, there's more than you think. And then I kept going on, and he started laughing, started laughing at me. and he said, son, you so much remind me when I was young.

You're so full of your enthusiasm and you're so sure you're going to be successful. And he says, let's do your damn hippie store, you know. But one thing I can tell you, son, is life's going to teach you a thing or two before it's through with you. He was great. And he was very helpful. I love these people, the people that are older, further down the path, and they reach back and they give you words of encouragement, or they help you, the guy that helped you at the bank, they didn't even tell you after the flood,

loaned you money, and he didn't even tell you until years later he went to bat for you, which that's a funny story because it happens in these books over and over again. I want to go back and close a loop on Phil Naito, and I think it's important is what he realized is belief is irresistible. And he's like, I couldn't sell the stuff because I didn't believe in the product.

Now I'm selling Japanese running shoes out of the trunk of my car long before Nike's even a thing, and I can't stay in stock, and he's living at his parents' house, not in the situation that he wants to be in. He's like, what the hell is going on here? And that's when he realized, oh, belief.

I believe in my product. Belief is irresistible. And I was like this fuel. The second thing that you said in the book, and I think you mentioned it, I don't remember if this is before we were talking or when we started recording, was entrepreneurs tend to remember the beginning,

like the early years, and then maybe the later years, but there's huge, maybe like two decades in here. And Phil Knight advised, because he's writing that book for the benefit of future generations and entrepreneurship, he's like, man, there's so many times

in the early days. We were talking about what we wanted Nike to be. We were having incredible conversations. We were such a close-knit group and those conversations have been lost to history. I wish I either had a tape recorder

or I wrote it down in a journal. So when I meet younger entrepreneurs, I'm like, you need to write down what you're experiencing. You think it's such an intense feeling. You think you're going to remember. You're going to forget all of this and you're doing an active service

for the future you for two, three, four, four decades down the line. You know, since I used shoe dog as a benchmark, one thing I did differently than filled it in his book, I did document. I kept track of time. And you don't really know the time.

Do you know almost all a shoe dog takes place in like a five-year period? I think it's a little bit more than that. It ends with the IPO. IPO. He got his early years, but he didn't, you know, Nike became this phenomenon that changed, the sports apparel business,

changed marketing. It was huge benefit for athletes. There's a lot of things about Nike in the story that he doesn't go into that book. He should have written, in my opinion, he should have written a follow-up book because I think so much of the Nike story takes place after that occurred.

One of the things I did in this book is I talked about how old I was at this time and the book is written chronologically in a way and it goes, it spans. It spans a 40-4-year period, actually. I do that all the time, even if it's not stated, where I am in a book, I will go and be like, okay, well, we're in 1969. And this guy was, when was he born? And I'd write down on the page, okay, he's 24 when this is happening.

Or I'll go and be like, hey, what was he doing when he was my age? How was he thinking? Do you? Absolutely. And I'm thinking because I'm trying to understand that entrepreneur. And so by saying, well, how was I thinking and feeling at that age, I can understand them a little bit better. I really like the idea of, you know, by the way, you said I was, you know, like Rockefeller. You did draw some analogies there, but there are so many major differences there.

I mean, Rockefeller is the, am I still, and maybe Elon Musk and Steve Jobs can challenge him, but he's probably the greatest entrepreneur they ever lived. And I would argue he's probably done more, even though he's hated as this Rockerner. He's probably done more good in the world than maybe anybody, but some religious leader or Christ or something. But it's unfortunate that he goes down in history as one of the great villains, but the intellectuals have put him there. Not in the episodes I make about him.

No, but the reality is Rockefeller was invented the modern corporation. Oil has fueled the entire rise of prosperity in the world, and he's totally misunderstood. Was he perfect? No. perfect, no. But still the greatest philanthropist that ever lived. So did you take issue with me comparing you to Rockefeller? I was deeply flattered. Okay.

The way you started, I was like, wait a minute. Okay, I didn't know if you were to offense. I was like, no. And when I say when I compare people to other historical people, it's always like, this one thing they did is very similar to this act that you did. Because people are, you know, dynamic. One thing Rockefeller did that I never did in, it was a different era, he continued to vertically integrate.

And he was trying to bring order to his industry because of the boom and busts of oil discoveries. And he was a much more disciplined thinker than I am in terms of thinking through the whole structure and the whole system and trying to control it. And I never tried to control my suppliers or I never, and he was a totally ruthless competitor in the sense that he would do things that today would be illegal, but they were legal at that time.

People don't understand what he was doing was considered sharp business practices, but they weren't considered to be illegal in what he would do. You know, he threatened a lot of his competitors. You should sell out and you should take the stock because you're going to get a lot wealthier. But if they didn't sell out, then he basically undercut him in price and lose money until they until they were out. You can't do that today. One of the best quotes I ever heard from him,

he was trying to buy a competitor, and the competitor says, I'm not afraid of you. And he's like, well, if I cut off your hand, your body will suffer. That's a very crazy thing to say. But I think you nailed the fact that he was probably

one of the greatest strategists. Yes. I had the thought, you know, I reread things over and over again. I know you have that same habit, that you'll read a book, and then you'll read the entire, either read the entire book again a few years later, but you also read your highlights from them.

Yes. We talked about this at dinner when we had dinner. Read wise too. Yeah, they're excellent. The, when I was rereading Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters for the third time, which I think are very, I think I should read them almost every year because there's just, first of all, I can read them in a weekend and they're just so many insights per minute. And in my opinion, I think the two best strategists that I've ever come across and all the

reading I've done has been Rockefeller and Bezos. You kind of describe what they want to do, and then they go. out and do it, and it's very, very similar. Yeah, I think you've got to put Musk in that category as well. People don't understand what a master strategy strategist, Elon is, and think about the way SpaceX has evolved in a way. He's so many steps ahead of where people realize he is in terms of thinking it through. No, that's a good point.

I mean, he has that document, I think, called Master Strategy that he wrote 15, 20 years ago whenever it was at the beginning of Tesla. It's like, we're going to do this, and then we're going to do this, and then we're going to do this. And you go back, and it looks very similar to what actually occurred. I want to go back to your competitive drive, though, because we touched on it, but I think there's like a little bit more there. Well, I'm, you know, I'm a very competitive person. I always have been.

I mean, from an early age. Competition, I think, helps me focus. One of the things I got that I think in the Todd Graves that I just listened to recently is he talked a lot about people are always telling an entrepreneur it's not going to work. And Todd would use that as fuel. He'd say, I'm going to prove you wrong. I'm going to show you. I still feel that way from time to time.

People tell me the idea is not going to work, and it's like, no, it is going to work, and I'll show you. And you climb this wall of skepticism. A lot of people, they get discouraged when people criticize them. It's like, you know, maybe they're right. Maybe it's not going to work. The entrepreneur, I think, says, no, you're wrong. It's going to work. And it causes him to focus even deeper.

And part of it's an ego thing to prove the other person is mistaken. And I remember when that guy told me that, you know, you're never going to be able to compete with those guys. You know, just a bunch of hippies. It's never going to work. And, you know, I make the joke in the book. It's like the guy had just turned us down. Why is he telling us? Why he's not going to invest?

and I say it's like getting turned down on a date, and then the girl tells you, well, here's why I'm not going out with you. It's like, hell, who else to be told on here? I'm not going out with me. In this case, though, I remember having a slow burn in me, which said, you're wrong.

You're wrong. I'm going to prove you wrong. So a good entrepreneur uses that criticism, uses that skepticism, uses that wall of doubt that people are throwing at his or her as a fuel. It's like, no, it's going to work.

I'm going to prove it. They double down on their vision, you might say. And instead of many people would quit, for the entrepreneur, no, no. It just makes me more determined to succeed. I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep.

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that exact same stories in michael dell's autobiography i went picked it up off the shelf the other day and i wanted this because he said something that i think is very fascinating that i referencing conversations and other episodes that I make where, you know, he's like, I'm 19 years old, I have $1,000, I'm in a dorm room at University of Texas, and I'm going to compete with the largest company in the world in IBM. You expressed some skepticism in your interview with him about. I never doubt Michael Dell. He's one of my heroes, and I get to spend a lot of time with him, which I'm very, very thankful for. But on that page, he's like, you know, was I a little full myself at 19? He's like, sure I was. And he's like, I think you have to be to, you know, do anything

great. And you talk to him now. It's like the guy's so impressive, but he's so low ego and he's just very calm. I agree. It really is like just looks at things like a puzzle and I think a lot of the work he does comes from a very positive and like healthy place. And that's why like he is one of my heroes and somebody I'm trying to emulate. Fire still burns and Michael even though if you don't see it, it's still there. Yeah, but it's a positive, I think the positive source. But later down, I reread that entire page. And he's talking about this other guy at the time that was older than him, that was living in his city, that was doing the exact same business. And it sounds very similar to when you viewed some of your friends and then eventually competitors and some of the people you actually acquired where Michael's like, yeah, but I have ideas about where I could take this that this guy can't even contemplate.

And he was not saying that in an arrogant way. He was just saying, like, you don't have any limits. Did you listen to the Daniel Eck episode? Yes. Okay. So Daniel, this is one of the most important things about that episode and about spending any time with him. You get around him and you realize he has no ceilings. He does, there's no self, I think a lot of people, it sounds like I want to, I want to go back to the people you're required.

This is one of my favorite. I'm doing this for selfish reasons. This is why I'm having these conversations because I have the opportunity to learn from you. One of the things that's so incredible is I think a lot of people, and I've done this myself, they put these like fake ceilings. They put self-limiting beliefs in. But it literally, like, I can't go any further than here. Right. And when you spend time with Daniel, he's just like, oh, like get that shit out of here.

like that doesn't exist and he does that not in a direct way he does that in a way of an example that it's like well i remember um one of the first times i talked to him spotify is obviously incredible and i was like but he's doing incredible like investing in business incubation and i know that team very well i spent a lot of time with them and i was like how the hell did you build this like incredible business that was so difficult and then now you're you have this other thing where like he's more like a co-founder than investor but it would you're talking about neko NECO, Helsing, everything he's doing with pre-material. And I was like, were you always interested in investing?

And he goes, no, I didn't even think about it until 2018. And then I go, how did you learn how to invest? He goes, I listened to Patrick's podcast, invest like the best. And then he's like, I would listen to what the guy says. I'm like, oh, let me try that idea. I don't like that idea. I would read the book he recommended. And he just essentially consumed all this information.

And then it's like, I like that. That fits me. That doesn't apply to me. I don't like this. And then created his cohesive philosophy. And then he actually applied it to a grand scale. And I'm like, oh, he's got no limits. This is one of the most valuable things that you could possibly,

if you can instill something in yourself, it's just like stop believing that you have a limit. You're at a plateau, but you don't, just like Bruce Lee said, you don't stay at plateaus. I totally agree with that. Human creativity is fundamentally limitless. There is no limit to the mind, except what we self-impose on it.

And once you realize that, see, most people self-censor themselves. They don't let these ideas come through because it's like, well, that's not possible. That's crazy. That's nuts. I think entrepreneur lets a little bit more through in terms of that flow from that emerges up through their minds. But not all entrepreneurs. Because we're seeing this in the story in the book where you have that. You have that slow burn, which I want to ask you a question about the slow burn in a minute,

and then you're meeting other people in your industry and realizing that they're not like you. I just had different, I just had different ambitions, that's all. They, they, they, I just had a, I just wanted to grow a bigger company. They wanted, they just didn't have that vision. Do you think your father played the role in your expansive ideas and your ambition? Or do you think that was completely like an inner drive? I credit many, many good things to my father. I actually think he played a counter, in force on, a force on that.

And my dad, for example, he was a depressed. depression kid in World War II. He was 20 when Pearl Harbor happened. Yeah. So one of the things that, one of the mistakes that I made was after Holbroves went public, my dad was, he got me to sell stock in the IPO. Just Todd Gray's would hate this. Stock in the IPO and he urged me to continue to sell it off.

He said, John, I mean, we don't know when the next deprecate. My dad said, he'd have made a lot more money. He was always thinking there was going to be another Great Depression. So he was always trying to protect himself from that because it was such a traumatic experience for him as a child. Growing up in that depression with his family, they lived through it and it never, it was the biggest thing that impacted him in his life. And so in some sense, that spread to me. So you might say that's more limited. I sold it because he advised me to do it and I trusted my dad.

But in retrospect, that was a mistake. And I really believed and I should have compounded it and compounded it and compounded it. still made us, I'm still really a wealthy guy, but I could have been a lot wealthier if I had just probably followed my own instincts instead of his advice in that regard. You're right about that because I forgot in the book, you ask him to step down from the board because you have this expansive conquering nature, which you're going to use the word expansive, I'll use conquering nature, and he was kind of like pulling you back constantly, and you guys were having a series of fights. Am I remember that correctly?

That's correct. But I think in that case, my dad, He was in, he was already being impacted by the Alzheimer's that was diagnosed a couple of years later. But you didn't know that. It was unknown. Did not know that. I just didn't understand why he'd gotten so conservative because he'd been very supportive of my expansive mode. And at the time, I just thought, you know what, now we're worth so much money. And a lot of my father's wealth was created by Whole Foods.

He had his own business. But I think he made more money from Whole Foods than he did in his other business. I thought he just doesn't want to lose what he has. he's in a different era in his, he can't rebuild. So for him, he wants to be more conservative. And I just said, he's getting super conservative. That's why I said, dad, sell half your stock, cash it out, keep the other half, let me compound it.

But let me go. We're going to grow this thing. It's going to be an incredible company. Just let me do it. Do you remember how old you were when you had? You were 40 and he was, what, 70? Our dad was 72. Same as I am right now.

Okay. And so he had been around for the ride for 15 years up until that point? No, no. Yeah, 15 years, that's right. 15 years. Yeah. So that had to be one of the most difficult conversations you had in your life. That was the most difficult conversation. The most difficult thing I ever did was firing my dad from that board. Took all the courage I had.

I loved my dad so much and it hurt him so badly. It's so hard to do. But it was also a pivotal event in my own evolution because that was when my mentorship was over. He still advised me, but from that point onward, I really, you know, I was. On my own, I was not going to follow him any longer. Before then, I pretty much did whatever my dad suggested. I didn't buck him. I argued with him, but I often caved in because I had so much love and respect for him and his own.

And that was a good thing. My dad made so many good decisions that helped Whole Foods. But at that point, I was just basically, I'd grown up. I remember saying, Dad, I'm 40 years old. I'm going to make these decisions now. I'm not going to just do what you want to do. And that's why I want you to get off the board, because I don't want us to be. be fighting. It's turning our relationship apart. I remember he said, son, you think 40's pretty old,

don't you? And I said, yeah, 40 is old. He said, it's nothing. You think he knows some things? You know a little bit more than you did when you were 25 and started the business, but frankly, son, you still don't. He said, you've barely got your nose under the tent. There's so much he don't know. And I said, well, that may be true, but I'm going to find out on my own. I'm not going to do what you tell me to do any longer, particularly when it comes to growth. We're going to grow this business. And you should sell half your stock. You've got all the financial security you need. And watch what happens to the other half. And I tell the story in the book that a year later, the half that he'd sold was worth as much because we doubled the stock price in a year.

Had the half the stock that he owned was more valuable than it was prior to selling half of it. So he'd already made it all back. So he did he and a few years later even as the Alzheimer started to grip him, my dad told me that I had made the right decision and that he was proud of me and we know we were back on really good terms. That's incredible. There is a very negative and has to be heartbreaking story in the book, your mother's view of full foods. Yeah. I don't know if you want to talk about this or not.

Yeah. You know, my mom, again, another depression child. and I was named after her father who was the doctor. And my mother, growing up in Bastrop, Texas, kind of in a poor, you know, I guess almost white trash type of thing back in that rural, you know, a little tiny town, very small town ways, Baptist community. My mother, the most important thing for her was

she really wanted to be respectable. She wanted her children to rise in society and be seen as respectable citizens. And my sister, the eldest sister, you know, she went on and got a master's in French literature, went to Wells. They got a master's in French literature and a Ph.D. in psychology and, you know, went on to teach. Here I am scoring really high on IQ tests, you know, great aptitude, age when I was interested in something, maybe not so good when I wasn't. And, you know, I kept dropping out of college and I start this grocery store business. my mother could never get over the idea, really, that I was not respectable.

That she'd go to her bridge parties and talk to the other mothers, and their sons were going on, and their daughters were going on and becoming doctors and lawyers, and they were engineers, college teachers, professors. They were, they were, she saw them as respectable people in society. She thought a grocer was, you know, really a second-class citizen. And so her son, In her mind, I wasn't an entrepreneur.

She didn't even know what an entrepreneur meant, I don't think. I wasn't a successful businessman. I was a grocer, and I had squandered. I didn't finish college. I'd squandered all the money they'd in love they'd invested in me. And she thought I was a failure. And I remember, and I tell the story in the book, the very last time I ever saw my mother in my life,

was back in 1987. She had had a stroke a couple of years later, and she was basically partly paralyzed in bedridden. And I went to see her, and it turned out the last time I'd ever see her, because she died a couple of weeks after I saw her. And she, so I say on her deathbed, she begged me, she said, John, will you do this for me? Will you make this promise to me? I'm your mother. I've nurtured you.

I've borne you. I've given you so much. Please, please, please, please, please promise me you will go back to school and get your degree and make something of your life. you have so much potential, you know, you scored so well on all these IQ tests and aptitude tests, and you're just nothing but a grocer. As mom, I'm not a grocer. I'm a businessman. I'm building this business.

I'm the whole food is going to be this great company. She's, John, it's just a little grocery hippie stores, you know. Nobody's, you know, you're not doing, you're wasting your life. And she said, please promise me, please promise me. It's the only request I have. please promise me. Now I look back and I, you know, I kind of wish I'd lied and just did a white lie to make my dying mother happy. But I was, you know, it's 1987.

I guess now when I'm at 34 years old, and I just, well, I'm never going back to school. I'm not going to go back. I'm building whole foods. And it's going to be this amazing company. I already is an amazing company. It's going to be even amazing. I said, maybe I will get an honorary degree someday because I'm going to make a lot of money. and I'm a university's going to give me an honorary PhD, which actually did happen.

And she died, a very disappointed person, and, you know, that her son, who she had so much hope in, had wasted his life. So she died. We were alienated when she died. That was your last conversation you ever had with her? Ever last conversation, she died a couple weeks later. You know, the funny thing is my mom has been dead. I think about my parents. My dad died in 2004. My mom died in 1987. and I still have conversations with them, I mean, in my mind. And, you know, I ask for forgiveness for them, and I give them forgiveness. And what I wouldn't do to have, you know, I'd probably pay all my entire fortune to have one more night with my parents.

I'd be so great to be able to tell them how much I appreciate all the things they did to me and how much I love them. And also, hey, mom, I turned out okay. And so we'll call that a minor regret in my life that I couldn't make my mother happy on her deathbed. Give me one minute. That's fucking, that's heavy. Shardot, I take the energy down a little bit there. Don't apologize.

That was absolutely incredible. I think it's very important. You know, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, somebody helped me see this. I was doing a podcast, and they'd read the book, and they had an interpretation of my mother that I'd never heard before, which was, you know, and I realized they were right.

I'd always thought that, you know, I was much closer to my father than I was to my mother. But my mother had grown up in this, again, this small, vast-drop town. Here's the ironical thing. My mother was a total rebel. She rebelled against that, you know, she left that town. She went to Houston, went to Rice University, got a degree. She was in a Baptist town. My mother, she started to smoke in rebellion against their, you know, she started to gamble.

She started to drink. She started to dance. She was total rebel against a small town of Bastrop, Texas. And the guy, I was talking to about it, said, you know, John, you probably got your rebel side, not from your father, but from your mother. I never thought about it before. And I thought, you know what? I think. I think he's right. I'd never, I'd always credited my own rebellious nature to my father, but I realized my mother had it secretly inculcated in me and they didn't like it there.

You know how we oftentimes project out onto other people, the things that about ourselves that we don't like. My mother wanted to be respectable, partly because she had rebelled against all of her things that her parents had taught her and went her own path. And she enculcated that in me unconsciously. The other children were more obedient. I was this rebel, and I'd never credit her for it. But then I had my own little ceremony. I thanked your mom. You know, thanks for helping me become a rebel

because it's really helped me be successful in life. Thank you. I owe you so much for that. The reason that just impacted me, and the reason I want to talk to you about, because when my mom died, I was around that same age, and we were estranged. Like, the saddest thing is she died,

like a just horrific death. metastatic breast cancer spread everywhere. And the last two years of her life, like that's not life. That was not living. That was suffering. And what I'm like... That's my advice for you.

I would recommend that you do, in your own way, if you haven't already done it, do some type of ceremony of forgiveness with your mother, just where you actually ask for her forgiveness and you forgive her. And it's like, and tell her just, I love you so much, Mom. Thank you for everything you did for me. I wouldn't be the person I am today without you.

You nurtured me in the womb. You went through labor and pain for me to be born. He wipes my butt. You breastfed me. You took care of me. You kept me alive. You nurtured me. You helped me get educated.

I owe so much to you. I'm so grateful for you. you so much. And I didn't tell you that the way I needed to tell you that while you're alive, so I'm telling you now, please forgive me. And then forgive her. I've done that. And I feel like I'm at peace about it. That actually is a good lead into, I think, one of the most important things that are in the book. And you also talked about this when we had dinner. You recommended MDMA therapy for me. Yeah. You said, no way I'm ever going to do that, which I still haven't. Talk about the inner work that you did.

But you know what I can recommend that you could do, and it would be just as powerful, you don't take a drug, but do some serious breath work. Because I always tell my friends that particularly don't want to do any type of, like MDMA or psilocybin, and don't want to do a psychedelic.

You can have a transcendent experience just through breathwork. You can access deeper parts of your unconscious mind that you've repressed, and you can relive those experience is in a safer environment, because what's safer than just doing deep breath? Do it with a guide.

You need to do at least an hour to hour and a half or two hours, and you have to do the deep breathing. But what happens? The breath activates parts of your more deeper self. It's mostly hidden from you, and it lets it come into your consciousness in a way that you can see it and not be overwhelmed by it.

It's a way to practice letting go of some of the stuff that we feel guilty about, that we suppressed, that actually drives a lot of our behavior and not even conscious of it. You can have a transcendent spirit's experience through breathwork, and it's completely safe, and, hey, if it gets too scary,

you just stop breathing. So you're always in control. When did you start realizing you needed to fix something that was inside your mind as you're building the company? Was it early when you were starting the company? Remember, I did psychedelics

before I even started the company. You tell this crazy story about doing LSD and I think you were. That's how the book starts out in prologue. So I'd already done, I mean, wasn't doing it therapeutically. I was doing it spiritually. I was trying to access deeper parts of the spiritual being that we don't normally do.

Think of psychedelics as opening a doorway to going into parts of our mind and our greater, there's an interior self that's every bit as the excellent, bigger as the external universe may be bigger. That we don't, because we're so focused on living in the material world, we're not conscious of this deeper part of our being. Psychedelics open a door to it, but there are other ways.

Meditation does, it pursued, breathwork does. There's different types of modalities that help us access deeper parts of our consciousness. And I think to grow as a human being, we need to go deeper so we can begin to release fears, yields, judgments that kind of holds us back. And I think every one of us can access that. Were you doing this the entire time you were building Whole Foods? Yes. I mean, sometimes more seriously than other times, but yes, it was a, that's why as you read the book, you know, I'm telling the narrative, but I'm also telling my own narrative, my own spiritual evolution, all the way to the very end of the book. And it's still happening now. I'm still evolving. So I think rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is also a spiritual journey. It's also a hero's journey. I talk about the hero's journey in the book. Most people do not go on their own hero's journey. We have a voice. The deeper part of our being is whispering to us, telling us,

urging us on to follow this, you know, entrepreneurs are following this inner voice. They're following this passion that they unleash and they create in the world. You have that voice whispering to you too, and that's why you're doing what you're doing because you're so passionate about it. That is the hero's journey. In my experience, most people do not answer that call because there's They're too scared. They're too scared to do it. They want to, a fear of failure, a fear of people ridiculing them, feel of fear of rejection. Remember how we talked a little earlier about how the entrepreneurs are like Todd Graves,

people are telling you you're going to fail or I was saying that would just make me more determined to succeed. When you're on the hero's journey, you are determined to succeed and you're going to have a lot of setbacks and failures, but that's all part of the path. That's how you're learning. how are you growing. Rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is a hero's journey, and a hero's journey is a spiritual journey. It's a journey of discovery. It's the journey of going deeper into yourself, knowing who you are and what really matters in life. John, that's a beautiful place to

close. Thank you very much for writing a book. Thank you very much for taking the time and have a conversation. Thanks for talking to me again, David. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I have a obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.