Habits and Hustle - Episode 495: John Mackey: From Living Above a Store to $13.7 Billion Exit - The Whole Foods Story

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

What really happened behind Amazon's $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods? In this episode on the Habits and Hustle podcast, John Mackey, founder and former CEO of Whole Foods, reveals why he walked away from the company he built over 44 years. We dive into how Whole Foods went from a single vegetarian store to a 540-store empire that revolutionized American eating habits. We also discuss why only 0.5% of Americans are vegan despite the plant-based movement, why protein obsession is misguided, and how Erewhon is disrupting the company he created. John Mackey founded Whole Foods Market in 1980 and served as CEO until 2022, growing it from a single store in Austin to a Fortune 250 company. He's the author of "Conscious Capitalism" and "The Whole Story," and now leads Love.Life, a revolutionary wellness center combining health, fitness, and medical care under one roof. What We Discuss:  03:27 - Why Erewhon has become "the new Whole Foods" and John's strategy to compete 07:46 - How John built Whole Foods with zero business education 14:50 - From pickles on hamburgers to vegetarian: John's food awakening at age 22 21:21 - The 100-year flood that almost destroyed Whole Foods after 9 months 26:50 - The hostile takeover attempt 29:17 - Meeting Jeff Bezos: The six-week whirlwind romance with Amazon 51:56 - Why John only took $1 salary for his last 16 years (and never got paid) 59:26 - Conscious Capitalism: The four pillars of building a purpose-driven business 01:09:00 - Love.Life: The one-stop wellness center that's "Whole Foods for health" 01:21:14 - Why only 0.5% of Americans are vegan and vegan restaurants are failing 01:24:42 - The protein myth: Why Americans eat too much protein and not enough fiber …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off  Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code Jen at checkout. Momentous: Shop this link and use code Jen for 20% off  Manna Vitality: Visit mannavitality.com and use code JENNIFER20 for 20% off your order  Prolon: Get 30% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program! Just visit https://prolonlife.com/JENNIFERCOHEN and use code JENNIFERCOHEN to claim your discount and your bonus gift.   Find more from Jen:  Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen   Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from John Mackey:  Instagram:@iamjohnmackey Website:  https://johnpmackey.com/ 

Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it. On today's podcast, I have somebody, John, by the way, that I have been dying to get on the show because of who he is and what he's done and all the things in between. We have John Mackie, who is the founder and CEO, was the CEO of Whole Foods, a place that I've been obsessed with for, I don't know, 25 years in my life. And he's on today. We're talking about all the things about Whole Foods, Amazon, his new project, Love Life. And I'm really happy to have you. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Oh, my gosh. This is like a pleasure. This is, this is my dream come true. Because like the amount of times I've I've said to people, the one person I think would be really interesting to interview is a guy who found a Whole Foods since I'm like spending half of my life and most of my paycheck, as you know. at Whole Foods. On this show, by the way, we do healthy shots on here, not alcoholic shots.

So we do these magic minds. Are you cool with that? You want me to do a shot? That's what you're saying. Yeah, I want you to do a shot with me. These are, they're healthy, though. Macha, ashriganda, passion fruit. Well, it looks like it's got lions, me, corticeps.

All right, let's do it. I have to do with the founder of Whole Foods. This is like a big day for, well, big day for magic mine. Bottoms up. Cheers. Do you like it? I wonder if they're sell at Whole Foods. I know they're at Arrow One.

I don't know if they're at Whole Foods. Oh, you know. Sorry, the nemesis. I mean, it's like if I were still CEO Whole Foods, we'd be approaching Air One differently than current management. Let's put it that way. Let's just start with that because that was one of my questions down the road on my many questions to ask you.

Because I feel that Arrow One has become the new Whole Foods. Like back when, you know, Whole Foods to me was like you'd walk in. It was like, oh, like it was beautiful. And it was the shelving and everything was perfect. And the food was really seemingly very healthy, right? And I feel that it's changed over the years. We'll get to all that stuff. And now Aero-Wans become like the new like panacea for like, for health. What's your take on Aero-1 and that whole thing? Well, I hold, I have a lot of respect for Aero-Wan. I think they're doing a great job. job and so I admire what they've accomplished. If I was still CEO of Whole Foods, I did retire

about three years ago now, we'd approach, we'd approach everyone differently. I wouldn't concede sort of the high end of the market to them. I would compete. In fact, we were, we had created a new brand called Ideal Market. We had the trademark for Ideal Market, and we had one and we had an original one in Colorado, and then we opened a second one in Boulder, and then we had a second one in Denver. And it was similar to a lot of the things that Erwan's doing. And the idea was to open ideal markets in the L.A. market. Let's just say the head of marketing really didn't like that idea because she believed that it would be difficult to support another brand, a brand name. It's just, you know, and that Whole Foods could compete. And I thought, well, we can't really move

Whole Foods to quite where Irwan's going, but we could create a different brand. We didn't agree. But when I knew I was going to retire, I gave a year's notice. So it's like, I don't want to force this down the throats of the management team because they're going to clearly not do it after I go. So I just dropped it. But if I was staying on, I would have definitely done that. And it would be a good competition. We'd push everyone a little harder and they'd push whole foods or ideal market and we'd

see how it turned out. That's so interesting because, you know, it's become like a bad joke actually, error one because it's so expensive. It's become, it's to the point where it's like, it's stupid expensive. And we used to think that Whole Foods was expensive. Remember the whole paycheck thing? Trust me, I know, I know that well. Right? And now I feel like Air One's now taking it to such a crazy level. I think, like, who could even, like, people are standing there in, like, there's lineups just to get in. Like, like, it's become like a tourist attraction. Yeah. Well, one of the things that Amazon helped Whole Foods do.

There are some things about Amazon that I wasn't really happy with from a cultural standpoint, but one of the promises they made to us that they kept was they really helped us drop our prices. In the first two years after that merger, acquisition was back in 2017. For the first two years,

Whole Foods was able to drop its prices significantly four separate times to where I almost never hear that whole paycheck. We're far more competitive price-wise. You are. So we do have that advantage versus Erwan. But I was wondering Whole Foods. Our first core value is to be the highest quality natural and organic foods in the world. That was our first core value. And so I would want Whole Foods

to be able to do that if it couldn't do it under the Whole Foods brand. We'd have another brand. So it doesn't matter because I did retire and it was a good thing I did. And the existing management didn't want to go that direction. So part of letting your child grow up, is it makes different choices than the parents might want. I led Whole Foods for 44 years. You might say as a parent, it's got a good foundation, it's got good values, it's good peeps. But, you know, it wants to do different things than the parents might want to do, and that's part of every parent knows.

You've got to let your child go in its own direction. It has its own destiny, so to speak. You did a great, I mean, listen, let's just go back to the beginning before. Because it's funny, you just mentioned Amazon, which I have a million questions about Amazon and the acquisition and all the things. But like the fact what you built with Whole Foods is just incredible. And what was so interesting when I like was looking through your book and reading your book and watching your interviews and knowing you're going to finally be on this show, it was that like there was such a juxtaposition between who you seem to be like in like your personal life and then how you built such a juggernaut like Whole Foods. because you came across so, like, spiritual and all the things that you do with the breathwork and the psychedelics, and you love, like, love life and all these ways of how you, like, this ideal version of, like, how you see the world. But at the same time, you, to build what you built, like, that takes hardcore, like, you have, like, that's an entrepreneur on steroids to be able to do what you did.

Was there, like, how did you blend the two things? Like, I guess your ideal and the realistic way the world works in corporate America. Like, you did it for many, many years. Yeah, but I never really was a corporate guy. And that was part of the conflict with Amazon ultimately. Right. Was, I mean, I'm an entrepreneur. And I had no business background. I took no business classes in school. So I started this business up with really very little business background, no educational background, but I think three things happened. One is that as an entrepreneur, I'm willing to take chances and innovate, but then also learn from my mistakes.

So I learned from many mistakes that I made. Secondly, I'm a voracious reader. So once I got interested in business, I may not have taken any classes, but I read hundreds of business books, accounting, marketing, finance, strategy, pretty much everything I could get my hands on, I read. And then my father, there was a good business person, and he became my mentor for the first 16 years of the company's history. So, yeah, I learned a lot and got better. That's one of the secrets is to keep improving all the time.

You never can let up. You have to get better and better and better. So, but I've always had a competitive side to me, which, just talking about Airwant, it comes out a little bit. But, I mean, it's like that just means I want to be the best. I want to reach the highest potential possible. it's not competitive in the sense that I hate my competitors or they're evil or bad. I mean, someone like Erwan, I got to be good friends with the former president of Trader Joe's, Doug Rao, and he actually and I were deeply both involved in conscious capitalism.

And Doug said, the Whole Foods taught Trader Joe's more than any other company. And Trader Joe's made Whole Foods a better company. That's what competition does. It makes you better. So Erwan viewed in that way is a, is some. someone that can make Whole Foods better if we would engage with them in that way. So that's how I blend it together. So you mentioned Trader Joe's.

I find them to be, the one thing I found, I feels very similar between the whole food and back then, because I feel that Whole Foods is different now. And we'll get, I'll talk about that in a minute. But Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, their corporate culture, the culture is very obvious when you walk in. Like, when you walked into a Whole Foods and when you walked into a Trader Joe's, you felt what kind of their position was and what they stood for. The branding was on point, is on point, right?

I think so. But in every way out, I don't know how else they're similar, but I feel like, but Whole Foods was more high end, I would imagine. Right. Right. Yep. But what was your favorite book, by the way? You said you read all these books for business because you never took school.

It's hard to say because, you know, it's like you're on a journey for books, and so books have different impacts. I remember early on, I read, once I discovered Peter Drucker, management theorist. I read all Peter Drecker's management books. And his magnus opus was management, you know, practices, task,

something else that was a big, thick book. That became sort of a Bible for me for a while. I read that book several times. It was very well earmarked. Another book on business ethics had a huge impact on me. Former philosophy professor I studied under at University of Texas, Robert C. Solomon,

Bob Solomon, his book was called Ethics and Excellence. I'd probably I've ever read that book a dozen times, and it had a huge impact on me. So different books along the way have had a big impact on me. And also, I read a lot of business biographies of entrepreneurs, right? I like those. I mean, you know, John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow, who wrote, who did Hamilton, now has a new book on Mark Twain, books on Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Andrew

Carnargette, Carnegie. Oh, you mean Carnegie? No, it's pronounced Carnegie. It is? Yes, it got New Yorkized, but that's how he pronounced it. Oh. Okay. Yeah.

And so I read all those biographies, and these guys were inspiring to me, Andrew Mellon, James Hill. There's just the business biographies. In fact, there's a podcast, which I'm going to pitch, because for anybody that's an entrepreneur, they need to listen to the Founders podcast. It's a guy named David Sinner. Do you know about this podcast? Yeah, very well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he reads these biographies of entrepreneurs and business people and does a podcast on him.

I've gotten a lot of, I've read a lot of books from listen to his podcast. Yeah, that's a great idea. Because I know that when you just mentioned, you know, you read a lot of books. The first question I'm going to get is, if I didn't ask you the question, well, what would be his top three business books? I think I just named about 10 books. I think I was going to say, that's why I had to do a follow-up question on that. Otherwise, I would be like, oh, I don't know, you know? Yes, exactly.

So those, people always come on here and they always say rich dad, you know, rich dad, poor dad. Yeah, I read that book. That's pretty good. Did you like that one? Sure. I mean, think about that as a good personal finance book for people that, you know, one of the things we don't teach in school, which is criminal in my mind, is personal finance. That should be something that's taught in high school. I know. People get to become adults and they don't have the slightest clue about money, what to do

about how to manage it, how to save it. If you can master the basics of personal finance, you're well on your way to becoming a wealthy person. Just by saving and letting it compound over time. A hundred percent. It's interesting because there's a lot of life skills, foundational skills that are not taught in school. I know. Why is that? I don't know. I talk about it all the time. In fact, I'm doing a TED talk on it in two weeks. So I'm a big believer in a What? One of my homework assignments is, which when I was reading the review of you, is that you've got a TEDx that's got like 5 million views. Oh, more than that now, but yes. Whatever, that's a good one. That's five million more times than I've watched it. So I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to listen to it.

Thank you. That one was about being bold and asking for what you want in life. And this thing called, I created this thing, I coined this thing called the 10% target, which is make 10 attempts at whatever you want in life. And either two things happen. Either you will get that thing or another opportunity will present itself that you never do. I mean, 10 times is, that's very persistent. Most people would quit after two times. Well, that's the whole thing. Research has shown that most people don't even make one attempt. Almost nobody makes two. Makes one. Really? Almost nobody makes two. Never mind one. So if you're somebody who makes 10, the chances of you getting to the, you know, kind of even like bumping yourself up is just, it's immensely higher.

You know, so funny you say that 10, because there's two ways that connects with my brain. How? Well, one is I tell people that you can learn to love any food if you will expose yourself to it about 10 times. Really? Yes. I've learned to love every vegetable by simply, it's like, it starts out, I don't like this. Right. And then it goes to, you know, it's not bad, but I would never pick it on my own to.

no, it's actually pretty good. Really? To, it's my favorite food. I love that food. And it's just, you know, our taste buds turn over about every two weeks. Did you know that? No, really? That's why it's easy to re-educate your palate.

Taste buds are, they're just constantly. The cells are being recycled all the time. So you can teach yourself to like any food. So, moral of the story, teach yourself to like the foods that are really, really good for you. Yeah. What do you eat them? What kind of foods would you say did you not like that now you've done? trained your brain to like. All the vegetables. Name one that you didn't like and now you eat it.

I mean, broccoli, kale, cauliflower. Oh, so you didn't like vegetables at all? No, when I was, before I moved in this vegetarian co-op, I think the only vegetable I'd ever eat in my life was a pickle on a hamburger. Really? Yeah, that was about 22. So this is so, like, like I said, you're such a like dichotomy. Like, so here you are, you built the biggest, most well-known, like, natural grocery store on the planet. And you were someone who didn't even like vegetables or eat vegetables or do anything with vegetables until you're older. One time in my life. But I mean, I'm just an individual, Jen. I'm just an individual. I've just gone my own. I followed my own heart and wherever it took me. And people change, people develop, people grow. My life's been

an adventure. It's a grand adventure. I mean, so let's go back a little bit chronological so we can gives people more of your backstory. Because you initially had like a store called the safer way, which was a better take on Safeway, right? And that ended up being whole, can you just kind of give your better you say it than me? So can you just kind of give a little bit of a background? So yeah, I'll give a little background. So taking up with you when I was, didn't eat any vegetables and pickles on hamburgers. I moved in this vegetarian co-op when I was 22 or 23 years old right around that era and it was a I wasn't a vegetarian I actually was just I was very interested in all things counterculture that was very influenced by people that were you know

hippies going their own way and so I moved in and thought I just meet really cool people and I did I think people taught me how to I had a food awakening I learned how to cook I started eating vegetables getting myself used to it and liking it I became the food buyer for the up. And I had thought previously to that, Jen, that it was like, my body was like a car. You take it in, like you go to the gas station to get fueled up, you go to McDonald's or the jack in the box to get fueled up. So I never occurred to me that we were like a living being that has tens of trillions of cells that need to be nourished. And food could make you feel better, give you more vitality, help you be supercharged your immune system. That was all new to me.

And so I began to learn that at the co-op. And then I got interested in it. So I'm reading cookbooks for fun. I'm practicing. I go to work for this small natural food store called the Good Foods. And I came home back to the co-op one day. I started talking to my girlfriend, who I met at the co-op, Prana House, his name was co-op. And I said, Renee, what do you think if we opened up our own natural food store?

You and me. And she said, oh, Maco, man, I think that'd be really cool. Renee was definitely a hippie. She was like, so I'm 23 now, and Renee's 19. We had no background in this at all, except I'd worked a little bit in this natural food store. But it was going to be fun. So we went out and hustled money,

we raised $45,000, found safer way. Saper way. It was very idealistic store because it was vegetarian, and we didn't sell alcohol, we didn't sell coffee, we didn't sell sugar. We did very little business. That was the take place. That was the takeaway, yeah.

We were very idealistic, very pure, but we didn't meet the market where we found it. And we were also on a residential street. We lost half our money. We lost $23,000 in the first year. But then it was like, I started reading all those books. My dad's mentoring me, making mistakes, learning from them. And I realized, oh, we need a different location, for one thing. We're on this residential street.

Renee and I moved out of the crop. We're living in the house now, this old Victorian house on the third floor, sleeping on a futon couch at night. there's no shower or bathtub in this place. We're not supposed to be there. It was his own commercial. We just lived up there and we actually took showers in the Hobart dishwasher from the cafe. Oh, wow. Yeah, exactly. I'm pretty sure that violated most of Austin's health care. I think so too. We didn't promote it. Anyhow, so to speed up that story a little bit, we decided we got to get a bigger location. We found some additional capital to invest and we opened up the first Whole Foods market. We merged with another small. small natural food store like Safeway, Safer Way that was, I might say, a friendly rival.

And together, we co-founded the first Whole Foods Market, which was a great, huge success right from the beginning. Within six months, it had become the highest volume natural food store in the entire United States. It just took off. It was one of the world's first natural food supermarket, not the very first, but one of the first three or four. And it was very successful. We're in the right place, at the right time.

It just went bonkers. We had a flood nine months after we opened, which almost put us out of business. business, but we learned a lot from the flood. We learned A, don't build stores in a hundred-year flood zones because the hundred-year flood happened the first year we were open. It's the biggest flood Austin had in 70 years. And I might add, the biggest flood that's happened in the hill country since that tragedy that just happened recently in Hunt, Texas. That's, that's the biggest flood since the flood of 1981. Really? Yeah, really. Mm-hmm. So. But you rebounded? We rebounded, we got reopened, and I learned about stakeholders that I didn't have the word for, but we should

have died, and our stakeholders saved us. Our customers came and helped us, neighbors and customers helped us clean up the store day after day to get reopened again. They didn't want us to die. They loved us. Our team members worked for free until we could get reopened to pay them, and if we didn't get open, we wouldn't be able to pay them. Our suppliers gave us more inventory. Our investors put more capital in, the bank loaned $100,000 to us on my signature, which I assure you was absolutely worthless. And we got reopened, and we never looked back. And we just went on from success to success after that.

So how did you go from one store to like four stores? Did you have, like, what, did you have some type of, like, mission statement that you were involved with? It's such a good, it's a great question. So I believe the hardest expansion a retailer over does is going from one to two stores. Actually, that's 100% growth. And now you have to create systems for the first time. You can't just, it can't all be tacit knowledge that you keep in your head. You need to write things down and create policies that both stores will follow.

So since we had four co-founders, we kind of divided it up into, you know, one, two people at each store. But then, so it took us two years to get, after Whole Foods, it took us two years to get the second one open. Then two years after that, we got the third one opened. And two years after that, we got the fourth one open. So I always tell people to show you how fast Whole Foods grew. at the end, when we went public in 1992, 14 years after we'd open the first Whole Foods market, no, the first Safeway store, we were up to 12 stores. It took us 14 years to get to 12 stores. When I retired, 30 years later, we were 540 stores. So once we got the formula down, and it worked,

we scaled it pretty rapidly. And we acquired Mrs. Gouches in L.A. We acquired bread and circus in Boston, Fresh Fields in D.C., we acquired a lot of our friends, and cashed out the entrepreneurs, made them very wealthy, and gave us new platforms for growth in different geographical areas. And then we took the best practices from each one of them. We didn't think Holfi's was better than everybody else. We just, these were our peers. And so we had an attitude of, what can we learn from them that makes us better? What would you say? Because what I notice is it did change over years. And I'm trying to remember, was it when Amazon, like, was it after? the Amazon acquisition, or is it already before the Amazon acquisition?

Well, everything's always evolving. Yeah. So Whole Foods for most of our history was very decentralized. We were, and there's always tradeoffs in organizational structure. We were very innovative. When we're decentralized, we empowered regional leadership to innovate, to create new things. A lot of them didn't work, but the ones that did work, we could copy and spread. So Whole Foods, in fact, Whole Foods drove a lot of the entire.

innovation of the supermarket industry for a long period of time. But then what happened over time, and this trend began before I retired, we had hired professionals, and the professionals were trying to, I'm talking about a lot of MBAs, and they were trying to make Whole Foods more efficient, cut our costs so we could lower our prices. Right. And the trade-off when you do that is that you centralize more things and you take power away from the regional people so they won't make mistakes and have a lot of waste. But the tradeoff is you get less innovation, you're less creativity, people are less empowered. That trend accelerated under Amazon. And after I left, it's really accelerated because I was kind of the thing that was holding it back saying, hey, we're losing our

innovative edge. We're not really, we're just doing the same thing over and over again. That's what most retailers do. So I do think Whole Foods has changed. But, you know, I didn't know how to stop it actually to tell you the truth. Really? Well, once Amazon acquired the company, I didn't have the power to do it any longer. Well, what happened? How did Amazon become the people who bought you? Like, why did you even want to, like, you were...

Yeah, most people don't know that backstory. Yeah. In my book, The Whole Story, which I'm going to pitch right now, I tell the whole story of Whole Foods. It's very, it's also my personal spiritual journey. It's a memoir. Yeah. It's very candid, very honest, and very authentic. But we didn't want to sell Amazon.

It's just that Amazon was the best solution to a problem we had. And that problem was we had Sherald or activist take a large stake in the company. I met with these guys. They were very unreasonable people. They, you know, I'll take my bad language that they were using out of it. No, you don't have to. I met with them, and they basically said, they showed this PowerPoint, which had a bunch of bullshit in it. And I said, I could get a copy of the PowerPoint because I think there's a few mistakes.

And they says, no, we're not going to give you a copy of the PowerPoint. This is Jana Partners. It's the name of those, private equity firm. And I said, why not? He says, yeah, we don't want to. I said, but I know, but there are a lot of mistakes there. We don't care. And they said, but we're showing it to all your investors anyway.

And I said, listen, Mackey, here's what's going to happen. First, the first thing I'm going to do is take over your board. And once we do that, we're going to fire you. And then we're going to fire every one of your executives that doesn't do exactly what we tell them to do. And then we're going to put you up for sale of the highest bidder. and there's not a effing thing you can do about it. And then they walked out of the room. And so it was like, okay, that did not go very well.

And then it was like we had like three or four alternatives we could do. One would be to fight them. That was probably what we thought was going to happen, which meant we'd have a struggle with them over the board first. And then if they got control of the board, we'd have a struggle with them over the shareholders. And so we could fight them all the way. the challenge of that strategy was we needed to lower our prices.

Whole foods, the whole paycheck thing had really stuck. And there's another even more backstory I'm not going to go into that is more complicated. But we had the government harassing us in certain cities and it was hurting our brand. And we were getting a lot of negative publicity. But I'm not going to go into that right now. But that led to Jan had taken this position. And then we needed to lower our prices, but we needed time to do that. Because you're selling something for a dollar and you start to sell it for 90 cents,

In the short run, your sales just dropped 10%. If everything went down, 2%. Your same store sales dropped with negative 10%. Your profits probably dropped 30 or 40%. And that's going to freak out Wall Street. And so then you're playing into Jana's hands. Then it's going to like, these people are a wrecking the business. We need to take it over.

So we needed time to do that. We weren't going to have time with Janet as investors. So then we looked, maybe we could find somebody friendly to buy it. So we'd like to talk to Warren Buffett. And Warren, Warren, he knew all about Whole Foods, but he made a joke, which was pretty funny. He said, you know, we own Dairy Queen. Right. And I'm famous for my junk food eating.

John, this is not a good brand fit for me. I think he just maybe thought we were still too expensive for a price. But anyhow, he didn't want to do it. And Albertsons, we had a talk with Albertsons, they really wanted to merge with us. But it was obvious to me that was a very poor cultural fit. And so then I kept asking this question. I really believe that if you put intentionality out into the universe, things happen. So one of my intentions I kept asking was, what's the win, win, win solution here?

What's good for our customers? What's good for our team members? What's good for our suppliers? What's good for our investors? And what's good for the larger community? And one morning when I woke up and the answer popped in my brain was, what about Amazon? I'd met Jeff Bezos at a conference the year before. He and I had hit it off. We had a lot in common, science fiction, fantasy, scuba diving. We were on a panel together.

Jeff says, this has been great. I want to follow up with you. Let's get together and talk. I didn't hear from him. Of course, he's going through. That's when his marriage was starting to break up and stuff like that. And then a year later, we contact Amazon, see if they're interested. They were very interested. We flew in, had a special meeting with Jeff and his top senior leaders And we had, you know, I was like to tell people, you know, when you fall in love with somebody, there's always what I call the conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The conversation where you connect and the hearts connect.

And it's like, whoa, I've never met anybody quite like this. And you fell in love. That happened in our first conversation with Amazon. These guys were not like I thought they were going to be. They were incredibly intelligent, which I thought they would be. Very entrepreneurial, very strategic. We talked about all the things Whole Foods and Amazon could do together. And I remember our team, the three executives that I brought with me, we went to a restaurant afterwards to process what had happened, and we were kind of looking around saying, that was incredible. That was incredible conversation. And then it was looking around, and then we asked the question, like, do you think they liked us too?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And it turned out they did. They contacted us a couple days later, flew a team down, and then it was a whirlwind romance. Six weeks after the first meeting, we were engaged to be married. and that ended up being our solution. What I'll never know is if we'd fought, could we have won? But I felt like this was the best thing. Whole Foods dropped prices four times in those first two years with Amazon. Our team members got all, got raises. All the hourly people got raises within a month. The deal happened.

Really? Yes. Amazon came in and set the new minimum wage back in 2017 at $15. So everybody that was hourly went 15, and then they staggered it up from there. So literally, I don't know, 80,000 people, people got pay increases. Cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars to do that, as did it did cutting those prices. Those were two things that were really, really good for morale, good for our customers. Our suppliers got, not only did they not get dropped by Amazon, but they studied our

movement, and they picked up a lot of our suppliers that put them into Amazon.com that weren't there before. So it was really good for a lot of our suppliers. Our investors got like 30% more money from that sale than they had previously to Amazon doing it. The price of the stock went up, and our communities also develop because of our philanthropy, our foundations. Not only did Amazon not change that, they made additional donations to our Whole Planet Foundation or Whole Kids Foundation. So they've been a good partner in a lot of ways. But culturally, that's been the rubbing point. We're different culturally. And to give Amazon credit there, they haven't really tried to change Whole Foods culture in any direct way. They like our culture. But the metaphor I'd come up with, Jen, is like,

Think of Amazon like this giant sun. And we're like a big planet in their orbit, like Jupiter. Okay, we're big. We were a Fortune 250 company when they bought us. But Amazon was a Fortune 5 company when they bought us. So even though they haven't tried to change us, the fact of the matter is their gravitational pull is so powerful that Whole Foods is nevertheless affected by it.

So we're still Whole Foods, but we are changing. The gravity is affecting Whole Foods. Well, they took away the digital. decentralization, which by the way, I guess after you said that, it makes sense. That does make a major difference in the customer's user experience, right? Because the problem I have with Whole Foods is that one is not the same. There's no, I feel like the quality or caliber has gone down to the majority. There's some that you walk into still, like the one near Love Life actually in Manhattan Beach or El Sagano. I went in there for the first time when I went to see,

when I went to Love Life, it was beautiful. It was immaculate. It was clean. It was very nicely, like, shelved. But I can go into five other Whole Foods, and it's going to be, like, kind of like, not, the quality's not there. I will tell you what my motto is now that I've retired in just about three years. Yeah. It's not my problem any longer. Right. You don't care. I do care. There's not anything I can do about it. Right. I do care. It's like, if you think of it, it's like my daughter, I make the joke that I married my daughter off to the richest man in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You actually did. Exactly.

He was the richest one. He married her off, and then he'd on the must pass. Yeah, right, right. At that point, it doesn't matter. Yes, no, it doesn't really matter too much. But, I mean, I can't do anything about it. So it's, and the greatest gift I can give my successor is not to try to interfere in any way. Let me share my daily routine game changer. with you. It's the momentous three. I've been using their protein, their creatine, and omega-3

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What do you say besides the fact, like if you were to go back or look, we talked about all the benefits that Amazon added to Whole Foods? What would you say besides my little rant? What would you say the things that you've noticed have been kind of like the negative things or the things that kind of haven't been up to snuff when you were involved? Well, part of it, part of it's not necessarily the fault of the existence. existing management. The people, let's just put it this way, when I retired after 44 years, I was like the last man standing. All the people that we built the company together with,

they all retired. They all retired before me. I was, and I was working with people that were substantially younger than me that had professional backgrounds. And so the thing about professionals, this is why most corporations over time begin to decline. Once the founders leave, that entrepreneurial spirit begins to go out of the company, and it's less creative, less innovative. It's true of almost all businesses, unless they're family-owned. So what ends up happening is the professionals are very smart people. They get MBAs from Harvard and Wharton and Stanford.

They're very bright people. But their first loyalty is to their careers. And oftentimes, a company like Whole Foods or Amazon is just kind of a stop along the way. It's an addition to the resume. And then they're going to leverage that to another higher-paying job. And so their first loyalty is going to be to their own careers. And then the second loyalty is to their profession itself, because they think of themselves as professional. So as we were building the company, it was very hard, it was very easy to enlist people that were coming up through the ranks into our purpose and our mission and our stakeholder theory. People

bought into that. It got harder to do that with the professions, professional. because there, again, their loyalties were not first to the company. And so I do think that's why, over time, despite all that intelligence and market research and all the things they do that sort of the creative spark oftentimes goes out of companies as they age. But, you know, capitalism solves for it. Companies like Airwant come along. Right.

So new entrepreneurs come up who aren't, it's like Whole Foods disrupted the supermarket industry. You could argue Airwans are disrupting. Whole Foods, at least in L.A. Exactly. I would argue that Airwans' business model may not translate into, it translate to New York, but I don't know if it translates, maybe the Bay Area, but it wouldn't translate everywhere. I was going to ask you about that, because one thing about Whole Foods is like you can go anywhere and it, there's scalability.

Most people in Ohio or Wichita, Kansas are not going to be able, they're not going to be going to Air One. It's just, it's kind of like when you go to a, when you go to a zoo and you see a lion, And that's why when you have these tour buses who come to L.A., and they all come off with their cameras, and they take pictures of the Haley Bieber smoothie at Aero 1, right? Where are they charged them for that now? $25.

Yeah, it's crazy. They're just insanity. And by the way, this is the irony of this whole thing, right? I was speaking with somebody who was a big executive at Aero 1 for a while. She left, and people have this optical illusion that it's healthy because it looks very pretty, and they talk about having, an organic bee or pollen or whatever. Most of the food there is not healthy. It's just not. When you put that much oil, like the food bar, like the hot bar, you're now spending a fortune on like food that you can

get pretty much even at Albertsons, honestly. Maybe it's like at one or two levels above, but you're spending, like I went there, I spent $45 on a piece of salmon and some vegetables that I literally could have gotten at Trader Joe's for like $11, $8. Well, it's not that much different from going to like a high-end restaurant, right? Right, right, right. You're going to pay more, but you're paying more for atmosphere, for service. But you're not getting that there. Well, again, I'm not going to throw down a near one.

They're doing something right there. They're obviously very successful, and I'm very happy for them. I think what they've done well is branding. Sure. And when you walk in, the feeling it you get, you feel like you're doing something healthy for yourself. It's the emotional thing. Companies are doing really well in the emotional piece.

Also, in L.A., probably because of the Hollywood culture that sort of, people want to be in the coolest, hippest places. True. And Erwan has got that niche now. That's why you say it's kind of like the new Whole Foods, because we used to be that niche. And now the cool people go to Erwan, and the people see the cool people going to Erwan, and they want to go there too because that's where the cool people are going. 100%. It's TikTok friendly, too. You can go there, get your little smoothie, take your little picture.

Well, also it's a different time, right? Hey, you know that Love Life, we're working with Erwan. Are you? Yeah, we've got a, we're on their, we're in, we have an alliance with them, a marketing alliance. People can, if you're Erwan member join, join one of their, their, their club, you can get a special deal at Love Life. Oh, you can. Yeah. What is the special deal?

Yeah, I'm forgetting it right now, but you, you, I think you get a discount on memberships. Oh, you do. Oh, you do. Because you went from, because before even, well, going to get into Love Life, but I want to, finished with the Amazon situation with Whole Foods. Did you step down because you wanted to from Whole Foods or did they push you out? What was the reason behind it? I signed a five-year contract with Amazon when the merger happened. So I had a five-year commitment. But I detail this in the book and some detail the whole story. But I was increasingly fighting with Amazon about

cultural things. And you might say the tipping point occurred. This is back in February of 2022, and the fight that I had with Amazon that tipped me was call back to work. I wanted to bring our corporate staff back into the office. And because everybody else at Whole Foods was going to work every day, everybody going into the stores or the distribution centers or everywhere else had to go into work. But Amazon, because of Amazon, our corporate people didn't have to. They could work at home. And after a year, I didn't, I thought it was wrecking our culture because we had sort of a privileged elite that didn't have to play by the same rules everybody else had. And that was so not Whole Foods. We had a much more egalitarian culture. Everybody gets the same

benefits. Everybody gets the same discounts. No privileged elite. So that bothered me a lot. And I could see it was affecting. People asked me about it when I go down to the stores. Hey, are the people back to work upstairs? Yes. I was there. But, but. Amazon didn't want us to force anybody to come back to work. And I wanted to. So I'm talking to Dave Clark, who was my superior, who in almost every the way, I really love Dave. I still love Dave. Dave and I, Dave was very smart, and he was a very decisive and a very good decision maker. I watched him make good decisions over the years, and he was a very good decision maker. But he was wrong about this decision. He did not want to let me bring him back. And I started, I was talking about, I said, Dave, listen, trust me. me, I'm the general in the field. This is bad for Whole Foods. It doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't want to do this. It's, it's, I just trust me, I know this is the best thing for Whole Foods. And he said, it triggered him. And when I start talking about being the general in the field, trust a journal in the field. Trust the Journal of the Field. And he says, God damn it, John,

why don't you just fucking do what you're told to do once? You want to argue about everything. And I said, Dave, can you give me any other examples of me ever arguing with you about anything? He thinks about it. He says, I don't fucking have to give you an example. I know it, and everybody at Amazon knows it. It's like, whoa, everybody at Amazon knows it? Knows what? I mean, it's like, and I said, Dave, I can see you're really triggered.

And I think maybe we should not have this conversation any longer. And so we got off the Zoom call. And Dave and I had this call. every month. He canceled the next two months. Really? I thought, but I decided that day, I decided, you know what, I don't have power anymore at Whole Foods. I can't do what I think is best for the company. I can't protect the team members. I can't protect the culture. It's time for me to go. However, that's such a monumental

decision that I didn't want to make that hasty. So I wanted to think about it for a few months. And I thought, if Dave will contact me and apologize for being a jerk, you know, maybe I'll stick around a little bit longer. But he canceled the next two calls we were supposed to have, and then they get back on, and it was like nothing had happened. And it's like, okay, so that's how it's going to be. And so then another three months, everything was kind of normal, but I kind of made this decision. But I wanted to talk it over with people at Whole Foods that I love and trust. I want to talk it over with my wife. I wanted to make sure it was really the right decision, because I knew it was, you know, there was no going back. So then it was pretty clear. My heart was guiding me, and

to say it was time to go. It's time to do the next thing, which by the way, leads to love life, right? Right. So I call up Dave and I go over it with him and say, you know, I think it's time for me to go. I think it's time for me to leave. And I'll fulfill my commitment I have on the contract. I'll finish out. So I basically gave one year's notice. And that last year at Whole Foods was arguably one of the best years of my whole career there because I had the new successor already picked. Jason Beagle. Amazon loves Jason. They want, that's who they would have picked anyway. And I'd already been mentoring Jason anyway. He'd be my chief operating officer. He'd been the chief technology officer. He spoke Amazon speak, so to speak. So I basically, for the next year,

let him run the company anyway. And I just made a grand tour. I visited as many stores as I could, maybe 100 stores around the country, and said goodbye. And it was so wonderful because I got so much love from people, and I gave so much love, and it was very teary-eyed stuff. And so I had a great last year. I wish people could, that's the best way to leave a company. And, you know, I still have so many good relationships with people there. Do you? Sure. People still know me. I go into a store, I go into that El Segundo store to shop here because next to Love Life and yeah, people know me there. They talk to me. They talk to me. They do. So were you really, like, so, so a lot of times this type of situation happens, people are like figureheads, right? They're not really doing much.

When you were there, besides that thing that happened with David Clark, what were you really involved with before you kind of gave it to the helm to Peter? What's his name? Jason, Jason. Well, I mean, what you think about what does a leader like me do? Yeah, what do you do? What does a leader like you do? No, one of the things, this is a good tip for entrepreneurs out there. Yeah. One of the questions is I grew the business that I asked myself and continued to ask me at the very end, what does the company most need me to do now? And that answer will change. change over time as a business grows. At the early days, you know what they needed me to do is run a store. And then the next thing they needed me to do was get involved in real estate so we could get really good real estate decisions. And part of as the business would grow and I'd let go of things, one of the things that's difficult to do is let go of things that you really enjoy doing and you're really good at. But if you keep asking that question, what does the company

most need me to do? It's like, okay. At one point, it needed me to do something I wasn't very good at and didn't want to do, but I knew I needed to do it, which was I needed to be more public facing. I needed to speak publicly more often. I needed to tour around to the stores, connect with the team members, connect with suppliers, connect with Wall Street, just be sort of the face of the company. Hence the media training days. That's, and I funked the media training days, exactly. But nevertheless, and I wasn't very good at it initially, but I practiced it and I got better at it. 10 times. Now I'm a very good public speaker. I'm very relaxed in front of crowds and audiences

and stuff. So anyway, the point is it's changing and evolving over time. So what was I, what was the company most needing me to do? Well, the last year it most needed me to do was have a really good farewell and hand the reins of power over to my successor with, you know, not dropping a patam, but doing it in a very skillful way. Before that, so you might say after Amazon bought the company, what was my most important job? My most important job there was to a, protect Whole Foods' culture from Amazon, while at the same time integrating as closely to them as we could to make the business more successful and efficient. I'd acquire, Whole Foods bought 23 companies over my time as a CEO. So I knew a lot about what made a good acquisition.

And you know what, you know what an acquiring company wants? They don't want to hear about how good old times were before the acquisition. They want to hear about the good things that are happening now and how much you like Amazon and the good things Amazon's doing for the company. They want you to be a good team player. So I worked hard on that. I spent a lot of time selling Amazon to Whole Foods people and pointing out like I just did you a little while ago why this was a good thing for the company. And so that Whole Foods people would not be rebels, but we'd be good team players. Right. I also needed to work with the, you know, I knew anyway you sliced it, I was getting older. I knew at some point my time was going to end. I always kind of

thought it would end after five years. I thought that's long enough. Yeah. And, you know, it's clear to me, by the way, that when Amazon didn't say, oh, John, we don't want you to leave, please stay, we'd like you to have another three-year contract. No contract was offered. They were not, they were not. Right. I don't think they're going to force me out because I was too, you know, famous or, you know, that could be really bad if they forced me out. But they were glad I was leaving. That was pretty obvious. Really? They were happy. Sure. Because I was arguing with, them about culture. I was fighting back. I was pushing back. I was never a yes man. I'm curious what the, how are they doing now post-A-house, Whole Foods doing?

Whole Foods is doing really well from a financial standpoint. Yeah, from a financial standpoint after Amazon. Sales are very strong. Sales are growing very rapidly. I mean, I don't actually know, but when I, the last year I was there, we got enough to $22 billion in sales my last year. I'd say they're probably at $26 or $27 billion now. So they're $4 or $5 billion bigger, yeah. I'm pretty sure if Amazon wanted to sell Whole Foods, we paid $13.7 billion for it. It's probably worth, I don't know, probably almost twice that much, I bet. Are you a billionaire now? No, no, no, no, no, no.

You're not, because it was a public company. You had to give all the shares and all the people. So something people don't know about me is just simply that I'm a wealthy guy. I have enough money, but I stopped taking any compensation back in 2006. I gave all of my stock options to our foundations. I never took a salary after that. I had enough. Yeah, I read something that you capped your salary at a million a year.

No, no, that's inaccurate. That wasn't right. That was CHAPT. We capped CHAPT. We capped CHAPT. What did they know? I know. We capped any, the compensation anyone could make to, by the time I left,

it was about 13 times the average pay was the most anyone could make. So I think the very best paid people at Whole Foods were making close to a million dollars a year. I was still making $1 a year. I only took $1 a year from 2006 on. So I made nothing the last, when I leave 20, 16 years I got paid zero. Nothing? Nothing? One dollar, except they never gave it to me.

They never gave me that dollar. They never gave you that dollar. No, I'm thinking about suing them. They owe me like $13. Are you allowed to go to Whole Foods right now and like pick an apple? Would they charge you for it? You want to hear something funny? Yeah.

So at Whole Foods, we have what it called benefit hours. So you can bank those benefit hours if you don't use them. So I was banking. I have 1,000 plus paid time off hours. So I guess they probably owe me about $1 an hour. They owe me about $1,000. Oh, my God. Hold on a second.

So when they sold, and of course with venture company, you know, you were... No, I had stock in Whole Foods. Right. I mean, that's what I say. So you took a dollar salary. How much stock did you have when you sold it to Amazon, when you, when Amazon, acquired it. I'm not going to tell you how much stock I had or how much my net worth was simply because it just gets misunderstood and it's... Everyone wants to. I remember telling one guy, one of my

friends asked me my net worth one time and I told him and he says, that's it for all you did with Whole Foods? And I said, are you kidding? I'm fabulously wealthy. There's nothing I can't do in life. And so it's always a good question to ask yourself, how much do you really need? In fact, I want to tell you a story. This is one of my favorite stories. You might have heard this one. Did you know that Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, the author of Catch 22, were good friends? No. They were good friends, and they were both writers. So they're at this party on Long Island at a hedge fund at a party, and they were there, and Vonnegut was needling Heller. He says, so Joe, you know the guy that owns this place, he makes more money in a day than you've made

for all the books you sold of Catch-22 and all your other books combined. Every single day he makes more money than you do. What do you think about that? And Heller thinks about it for a few minutes or a minute or so, and he says, well, Kurt, I've got one thing he'll never have. And he said, what's that? I have enough. That's a good story. It's a good story, right?

Good story. And that's how I feel. I have enough. That's a real, you know, you don't hear that very often. when you have people like someone like you who created like you know that's like a massive household brand right like it's Starbucks whole foods like everyone knows that the assumption is you walked away with a lot of money I did and you did was I was going to say I know but the fact that like the way I guess it's this plays maybe into the conscious capitalism yeah thing right same

principle same principle well would you talk about that can you tell people what that is what what that means? How do you define conscious capitalism? Conscious capitalism. For the record, I've co-authored a book. It came out 2013 with Roger Sassodia, and we're working on a second edition of it right now. Oh, you are? Yeah, it came out 12 years ago. It needs to be updated. So conscious capitalism means that there are four pillars to it. The first pillar is every business has the potential to have a higher purpose besides just making money. And that's the biggest misunderstanding people have about business. You think it's just all about the money. It's all about profit. And that's why business and capitalism have bad brands,

you might say. But in fact, the best way to understand the purpose is to use an analogy or a metaphor. Let's take my body or your body. My body has to produce red blood cells or I die. No red blood cells, I'm dead. But it doesn't follow because I need to have red blood cells. The purpose of my life is to produce red blood cells. Business, similarly, business has to make a profit or it dies. It doesn't doesn't have the money to sustain itself. It can't meet payroll. It can't pay for repairs. It has to make money or it does.

But that doesn't mean that's why it exists. It does not exist to primarily make money. That's a byproduct. It exists always to create value for its customers. That's why it exists. And the higher purpose is involved in that. So for example, Whole Foods is higher purpose, which we articulated is to nourish people in the planet.

That's our purpose to sell the highest quality natural and organic food. possible help nourish people, help them be the healthiest version of themselves. And if we do that well, profits result in that. So that's the first thing. Purpose is very important. First principle of conscious capital. Second one is all the stakeholders matter. What's a stakeholder? Well, stakeholder is somebody that has a stake in the business who's voluntarily trading with the business for mutual gain. So like customers are trading with the business. You go to Airwan, you pay $25 for a smoothie. they didn't make you buy that smoothie. You did it because you wanted to, and so you made a trade voluntarily for all mutual gain.

Similarly, employees or team members, they trade their labor and their time and their creativity and their energy for paycheck or for other types of compensation, benefits, and whatnot. They don't have to work there. In fact, there's lots of other jobs they potentially could do in a competitive marketplace. So they do it for their mutual gain. Similarly, with suppliers, they don't have to supply it. They don't, you know, they'll like you. They don't have to trade with you at all.

They're trading is always voluntary for mutual gain. Same thing with investors. They don't have to invest their capital, communities that we're part of. So all the stakeholders matter. And so stakeholders, once you realize that, then you can see, wow, they're all interdependent. They're all connected together. Can we create strategies where all the stakeholders are simultaneously winning? Customers are benefiting, suppliers are benefiting, employees are benefiting,

investors are benefiting, a win-win-win. That's the beautiful thing about business and capitalism which people don't understand. It has the potential to be a win-win-win system that has an upward spiral indefinitely. That's why capitalism has led to so much progress in the world. It's totally misunderstood. It's been branded by its enemies, the Marxists, the Socialists, wrongly and inaccurately. Third principle, leadership. We need leaders who are conscious that have a higher purpose themselves to not just align their pockets, their own compensation, they're there to serve that business and make it a better business and serve all the stakeholders. And then the fourth principles, culture. We spend a lot of our lives at work.

Culture matters. We have to create cultures that allow human beings to flourish and be happy and where they can find meaning and purpose and love. I always say that at Whole Foods, if you give people two things that want to work for you forever, give them purpose and give them love, that's what we most crave for. And by the way, that's why knowing when you have enough money is important. Because people chase after money, fame, and power, because they think, if they have those, they will get love. No. And those are very addicting. You can get addicted to any of those. You don't have to be addicted to them. But the people I know that chase after those things, they find eventually that it doesn't, no matter how famous they get or how powerful they get or how wealthy they get,

it doesn't fill the void in the heart, which only love can fulfill. So that's what you should chase after is love, not money, power, and wealth. So anyway, that's conscious capitalism in a nutshell. That the last, the one that you just said, though, I think is so true and so overlooked and underrated, because we're living in a world that values those things, money and power. We value those because if we think, if we have those, we'll be happy. Right. But there's been so, you know, no matter how many times people say that doesn't bring happiness, it doesn't seem to penetrate or resonate. People still chase it. Because what's you'll get when you have those things is you'll have some admiration yeah you'll have some respect

you'll have a lot of envy too though the more successful you are the more envy that you create people that want to tear you down but admiration or respect is not the same thing as love no love comes from the intimacy comes from friendship from really being connected and intimate with somebody we're trusting someone and loving as you love it returns back to you so we chase after the wrong things you might say false idols yeah How did you kind of steer away from that? I mean, you seem to be, how long have you been married? 35 years.

35 years. I would imagine after you sold Whole Foods or being the CEO and founder of Whole Foods, you're probably surrounded by a lot of people who are very, who admire you, right? How do you kind of like create a life of meaning and purpose and of authenticity when you can be surrounded by so much of that, other stuff? You know, I always say that you know who your true friends are twice in your life, or at two extremes. Right. You know who your true friends are when you are very successful, because your true friends are really happy for you.

They don't envy you. They see your success as their own success. Those are true friends. The other friends may not be your friends at all. They may secretly be wanting you to fall and fail. So you have to pay a lot of attention to be conscious. It's like you need to have a little bit sensitive. sensitivity to envy. If your friends envy you, they're probably not really true friends.

But a lot of times people feign friends. They pretend. I know, but you have to be discerning. That's the one. You've got to be discerning. The other time you know who your true friends are is when the bad times come. Yeah, that's for sure. Because your true friends really care about you and they're down there in the gutter with you or in the hard times with you. They're not secretly chortling happy. Oh, finally she got hers or he got his. They're there and you You can tell. You can tell they generally love you and they care for you and they want to help you. Right. So it's kind of interesting that the best of times and the worst of times is when our true friends reveal themselves.

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But the biggest win, it fuels your cells for real longevity. Think of it as like a cellular switch-on formula, not as a stimulant, but the raw power your body needs to create energy and repair itself. Try it now, and I bet you'll be hooked to. go to mannavitality.com and use code Jennifer 20 for a discount. That's manavitality.com. M-A-N-N-A-vitality.com and use code Jennifer 20. You said your dad was your mentor for the first 16 years? Yeah. Well, we're a couple of the big lessons that he instilled upon you were taught. you that helped you. One of the first things my dad taught me was the best, the best capital you'll

ever have in your business is the money that you retain for making money. And that's so different than what the venture capitalists do today with these startups. The venture capitalists are not necessarily your friends at all. And they may not have your best interest at heart. They have a business model where they, it's called a block, there's the blockbuster business model. One runaway successful idea is all they need to make billions of dollars. And so they can have a lot of failures. So they try to scale a lot of these businesses too quickly. And they tell them it's okay to lose money. We'll just keep raising the price round after round. And guess what? If you don't scale well or if you start to lose money, maybe you can't get a higher price. Then the

entrepreneurs get diluted and they get a cram down around and they may get forced out and they bring in professional management to take their place. So my dad taught me the best capital you'll ever have is the money that you make and then invest it back in the business. So from very early on, we never tried to scale whole food so much as we just tried to be successful and we kept reinvesting the money in store after store after store. That was a very big lesson. And the second lesson he really taught me was you've got to be able to build a really good team and the best team,

that means you have to be sort of very self-aware, Jim. It's like, you've got to be know what you're good at, but more importantly, they've got to know what you're not good at. And one of the things I've noticed about entrepreneurs that become successful is their egos can get really inflated and it's like they think they're good at everything. You know, I was so bad at so many things that I needed to build a good team around me

to compensate for all my weaknesses. And so don't hire and promote people that are just like yourself. You've already got that covered. You need to hire and promote people who have the qualities and skills that you don't have in the same degree. Because I'm a firm believer. Our culture makes heroes out of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. And I mean, all those guys, they're all brilliant people. But they also built great teams.

And those teams are what make the business successful. Entrepreneurs is the driver, but you're no better than your team. Would you say one of your strongest skills was your ability to build really good teams underneath you? Yes. Yeah? I do. What are some other skills would you say are you, what are your main? Well, so going along with that, well, I have a very strong sense of purpose.

Yeah. And I can infuse purpose and help other people to see purpose. I have a certain charisma in that regard. And because I'm so passionate and I'm intense guy. people are very attracted to passion in general. Anybody that's passionate about something, I find it fascinating. No matter what it is. No matter what it is.

They could be just a plumber, but who's really in there just working away, and you can see that they're figuring it out, they're solving, and it's like, wow, you're watching a master craftsman at work here. It's fascinating. Right. And great actors, any type of creative person, I just find it very, very, very. interesting. I find the people that are passionate to be the most people I most admire in the world. Yeah. And people follow passion. They do. Yeah. They do. Because passion comes from purpose for the

most part. It's kind of connected. So you think that your strongest skill set is building great, great people and teams underneath you, having a lot of passion and purpose, and being able to instill that and like kind of like invigorate that in others, basically. I think a lot of entrepreneurs have those skills. I don't think those are, I think. I think. Elon Musk has that. I think Jeff Bezos, I mean, Bezos has it. I know Steve Jobs definitely have it. Well, he had it for sure. Yes, for sure. Yeah. So, but that doesn't mean all entrepreneurs are like that. But a lot of them are these intense people that are very mission driven. And people follow them because they, you know, I remember, you know, you ever read the story about how Steve Jobs got

John Scully who ultimately replaced him in Apple the first go around to work for him? No, what happened? They really wanted to bring in this, the board was pressuring Steve to bring in a professional manager. So this guy was like president of Pepsi. Oh, okay. So he was a big corporate, you know, Apple was kind of a pipsqueak company back then. His name was John Scully. So Steve is putting the pressure on him to Scully.

He's going to have to give up a big, you know, to come in as a number two guy under Steve. And, you know, it's a big step down. You might say, and so how does Steve convince him? He says, so John, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water to people? Or do you want to come in and change the world? Because that's what we're doing. We're going to change the world. Which do you prefer?

Sugar water salesman or world changer? He had Scully with that with that argument. I think I did hear that before. That's a really good story, though. But I remember hearing that now that you said it. So let me ask you something, because then you step down from Whole Foods. You're 70 years old, you said. Why didn't you just retire and go enjoy your life?

Like, why did you think, okay, now I just, you know, I'm leaving Whole Foods. I'm going to now start like a health and wellness facility chain or whatever. It's a good question. And Beth, believing one I've thought all right out. Yeah. So imagine for a moment that you knew how to help thousands of people, maybe millions of people in the long run, live a healthier, more vital, longer life. And you did nothing. you just enjoyed the rest of your life.

When you got to the end of your life, how would you feel? I know I can help thousands of people be healthier. And maybe over time, after I'm long gone, love life continues to grow and develop, maybe millions of people. I can't not do it. I have to. Didn't you do that already with Whole Foods?

I mean, people probably, you disrupted that market, right? So you kind of did that in a big way. Yeah, well, you know, I could have, in my book the whole story, I talked about one of my co-founders who didn't want us to grow past one store. No, you laugh now. That first store was a gold mine. Yeah, I said that.

I wanted to grow, and he said, John, why do we want to grow? We've got this one store. All we have to do is not blow it. We're going to all die really rich. Let's just keep doing it. We don't have to do anything else. Let's just live the good life. And I said, Mark, I don't want to do that.

That's going to be boring. I don't want to do that. I want to build a company. I want to open Whole Foods markets everywhere. I want to help people eat healthy all around the country. And he says, that's ridiculous. We'll probably fail. He ended up quitting a few years later.

We'd gotten up to four stores, and we were struggling because the new stores didn't start as well, and so we had some growing pains, you might say. And he was so disgusted with me, he quit, sold all his stock for a couple hundred thousand bucks and opened up a pizza restaurant. That was not a good financial decision on his part. It was not. No, it was not. So how involved are you? It's called Love Life. How involved are you? Are you really involved? Are you tangentially involved? What's your, which you're, no good question. Yeah. So I am CEO. I own about 70% of the stock from the capital that I put in, but it is in L.A. and I'm in Austin.

Right. So Michael Robertson is the operator that's there running it. And so he's got chief responsibility for it. So I'm involved in all the major strategic decisions. I'm involved in the, we have regular meetings, executive team meetings. So a lot of the vision is not solely mine, but I was a driver of the vision and what we're trying to do. It was my idea. I'm the ultimate creator, although I have other co-founder.

but I was the one that brought everybody together. Entrepreneurs bring people together and create enterprises. Yeah. So I like to say that I've brought money, wisdom, passion, but I'm not going to work as hard at Love Life as I did at Whole Foods Market. I don't have that. I don't, I'm going to be 72 years old in a month. So while I'm vital and healthy, I just don't, I'm not young.

So I can't do the things that. I could do in my 20s and 30s and 40s. That's just reality. So I'm somewhere between deeply involved and tangentially evolved, someplace in between that. But I think about love life. I mean, I think about it a lot every single day. So it's, it is the main thing. It's the main focus of my life besides my marriage. How would you describe it, though? Are you trying to build a brand around, like, it's not a fitness. It's like a wellness facility? It's a one-stop, holistic health club, all under one roof. Remember, it's similar to Whole Foods in this regard. When Whole Foods opened up, there weren't any other national food supermarkets. They were small stores, and you had to go

shop somewhere else. Our idea was, we're going to be one-stop shopper for anybody interested in natural and organic foods. They don't need to go to any other store. People that are making this as lifestyle choice can just shop at Whole Foods. That was an original idea. It may seem trivial now, but nobody believed that would work 50 years ago. They all thought it was going to fail. And that's entrepreneurs always climb over a wall of skepticism and doubt. So we're creating a one-stop holistic health center. Everything you want is it love life. We've got the gym, we've got Pilates, we got yoga, we got physical therapy, we got pickleball, we got a restaurant, we've got a spa, we have primary health care, we have complete testing protocols so we can find out where you are.

We are doing everything. It's a club. We want it to be ultimately come a social club, like a Soho House, except all around wellness and health. We've got all the biohacks. We have all the recovery stuff. And the fascinating thing, Jen, is because of the boomers are aging. They're interested in longevity. The X's are interested in that, too. But now you have so much technology that's intervening in so many ways. We have testing's getting better. Measurements are getting better. I mean, think about AI. In five years, you know, like you see these meta-glasses, five years from now, maybe less. We'll be having a wearable that's plugged into, us. Maybe it's an earring. It might even be an earring that's inserted into, it's connected

to our blood. And it's an AI there that we're going to talk to. And you don't have to look at your phone anymore because the AI will do anything you want. And it'll also be monitoring you. It's like it'll say, Jen, your pulse rate's just gone up 20 points. What's going on here? Are you okay? Or your blood pressure, it just really, really zoomed up. I want you to take some deep breaths, relax, tell me what's going on. So I just think we're going to have this AI integrated and our wellness and health. We're going to become much more conscious. And I really think we're on the cusp of sort of a wellness health revolution that's going to change the world.

And I like Love Life to be part of that. Yeah. There's so many different modalities now and things like that it's such a noisy market. It is. It's incredible. It's very crazy. It's incredible. It's become like, you know, fitness, the wellness business is like a trillion dollar business.

I mean, you know all this. I think people are very confused because I don't know what to list. Like, when there's so much noise, everything becomes just difficult. Well, one of the reasons that you go to a place like Love Life is we're going to be a good editor for you. We'll be doing the research and figuring it out, just like Whole Foods was an editor for natural organic foods. Do you want, like, what's your forecast? Do you want to build out like one a year? What's your plan?

Our first plan is to get this one profitable. Right. And we're probably a year away from that. And then, but even before then, we're looking for a second. location, which we want to really do in Austin, because that's where I live. That's where we headquartered. We can probably finance that separately if we find, but I'm very picky about locations. Yeah. I'm very proud of the fact the first 250 locations, Whole Foods opened up, we're all successful. Well, I was going to say, you pick, like you picked locations. Great.

Like, I thought maybe when I went to Love Life, it was right beside that whole foods, like I was saying. Was that purposeful? Like it was like, yeah, it was like in the same mall. I happen to know where all Whole Foods Market's best stores are. Right. That must be one of the top stores, huh? It's like number three in Southern California. It is, right? Because it's so nice.

You know, heroin opened up just down the road. Oh, I saw that. I haven't been in there yet, but I need to go check it out. I wonder if that's going to do for business. I don't know. And you don't care. Well, I could guess my daughter. I always going to care about the well-being of my daughter, but I'm not interfering with her life anymore.

Exactly. If she wants to see me, she knows where I'm. I am. That is a great. I love that point. You're right. You married off your daughter to the richest man in the world. That's a great one.

I'm just trying to think of something else I was going to ask you, which I never did before about Whole Foods, because you're a vegetarian, right? Vegan. Yeah. So Whole Food sells, of course, meat and all the things not vegan. Was that also, like, again, like, but most people. Do you remember that lesson I told you I learned was safer way? It was a vegetarian store.

Yes. It just didn't do very much business. It didn't sell. No. Yeah. And Love Life opened a vegan restaurant here. They did? Yes.

About almost, is it two years ago? Three years, two or three years ago, I can't remember. Yes, it was in Culver City. We were going to have the first Love Life in Culver City. Oh, okay. Did you own that? Yes. It was called Love Life.

And so what happened there, it's very interesting. We thought it was going to be a great location. We were doing the restaurant first, we're going to open the medical and the wellness center after that. And we had a corner location. It's where HBO's headquartered. Apple TVs across the street. Sony, Amazon Studios, they're all within a mile of that location.

Netflix within a mile of that location. So this was like streaming headquarters for the whole United States. Guess what happened after COVID? Nobody came back to work. Nobody came back. And so there was, it was a ghost town there. There was nobody. HBO's was just empty.

Apple was going to build another 575,000 square feet onto that. They canceled that project. Wow. So pretty much every retailer in that center has failed now. And the other restaurant that opened up also failed. So we had to walk away from it, canceled out. So that was a big write-off for us.

We lost a lot of money there. But it was also a vegan restaurant. And so the little cafe we have in El Segundo is not vegan. No, it saw it. No. It's, we call it plant four. It's got a lot of plant, but you can add in, grass-fed beef. I'll get all our meat from Whole Foods, by the way.

Oh, you do? Yes, it meets Whole Foods markets standards, and we purchase it from Whole Foods. Okay, because, yeah, you can, the whole computer system I saw that was very, it was really good, because you can, like, take out any ingredient, it tells you how many calories and how much fat. It's a very, like, savvy technology there. Yeah, thank you. So the moral of this story is, is you have to make. meet the market where you find it. If you're an entrepreneur, you can't force your own values on other people. And the reality is, much as I don't like it, only half of one percent of the

population of the United States is vegan. That's so tiny. Yeah. Vegan restaurants are failing everywhere in Los Angeles right now. I don't know if you know, restaurants in general are failing, but the vegan restaurants are just going out of business, ones I love like Real Food Daily, which I always came here to eat. Yeah, is it going out of business? They're not, none of, they don't have anything open anymore. I thought they have one on Las Yenega. No, that's closed. I know, I know because I wanted to go there. Yeah. It's closed. But you know what's interesting, that was really popular for a hot minute. L.A. was, along with New York was kind of the vegan restaurant capital of the United States, but New York's losing them too. I think the younger generation, they're back

to the protein. Protein, protein, protein, protein. I mean, it's all about protein. Like, I mean, if you go on Instagram, social, TikTok, everything is about eating more protein, protein, protein, protein, protein. You know, if I can just take one minute to critique the protein obsessed. Please, go ahead. So, you know, there's three macronutrients that our bodies need, right? There are calories. You get protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And Americans are obsessed.

We eat more protein than any other country in the world. More protein than any other country in the world. We spend more money on health care than any country in the world, and we rank 48th in longevity. Have you ever heard of anybody having a protein deficiency? No, in fact, actually, you also, I'll be going to give you another factoid to add to that. People's liver now more than ever is more toxic, more, there's more strain. All these liver cleanses and liver companies are coming

out with things because people are eating so much protein. Your body, I think, can't even digest the amount of protein. So here's what else people don't know what happens to these three macronutrients when you eat them. So extra fat that you eat that your body doesn't need, it just becomes fat on your body, okay? The extra carbohydrates that you consume, they're the choice of energy that your body uses first. So first it burns carbohydrates for energy. Any excess carbs gets translated into glycogen and stored in glycogen, and then excess carbs beyond that will raise your temperature at night when you're sleeping, so it burns off. And if it gets past, then it'll be added to fat. Protein, on the other hand, cannot be saved by the body. You cannot save protein. So the

protein that you don't use in the day doesn't go into some protein repository so you can use it the next day if you don't need it to grow your hair your fingernails or repair bones or whatever you would need to do with protein new cells it's just it's just goes through a very complicated process to basically turn it into something else so it can be eliminated from the body this this obsession with protein comes from partly the meat industry and partly health influencer like Peter Attia, for example, and Max Huberman, they're... You mean Andrew Huberman? Andrew Huberman?

Sorry, they were pushing. And I like both those guys. I read their book, I read, I listened to Huberman's podcast, and I like Peter Hattie. He lives in Austin. But I think they're misguiding people on the protein. They just, they're not nutritionists themselves, and I don't think they're really following the science very carefully. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole thing right now.

You've got two camps, right? You have the, like, you know, the animal protein and you have the Vee. vegan people and they all go, like they butt heads a lot. Well, there's not much of a vegan. It's become politicized. There's not a vegan camp because there's too few people. There's too few of them. Yeah.

Too few of them. And I'm certainly not a, I'm an ethical vegan, but I'm not pushing that on anybody else. And I think, you know, I'm kind of believing the Blue Zones diet that you mostly eat plants. Yeah. That's how we evolved. But we also didn't evolve as vegans. We evolved as, as maybe if you go back far enough, to the gorillas. They're vegan. Chimpanzees are 98% vegan. In general, humans grew up eating

hunting and gathering, mostly gathering, but they ate some animal foods. So I think that's part of our genetic structure. It's hard to get B12. We don't know of a single historical culture or tribe that was strictly vegan. So what do you eat? What's your day-to-day? What do you eat, what's your diet like? I follow, we'll call it a whole foods plant-based diet, meaning I try to eat as few processed foods as possible. And I start out the day with a huge smoothie. I make a whole vitamin mix of smoothie that's half vegetables and half fruits. I really believe, when people are obsessed about protein, did you know only about 1% of Americans eat enough fiber? Yeah. By the way, I was just going to tell you, you know, fiber, 90% of Americans don't eat enough fiber. I think it's more than that.

Oh, really? I just saw, I just did a whole thing on fiber yesterday because I thought it's, I did a whole thing. Let's say it's 90% fine. That means only 10% and get enough fiber. And who doesn't get enough protein? I know. So it's fiber is what, when people say, where do you get your protein? My answer now is, I get it from pretty much every food I eat. Where do you get your fiber from?

Fiber. Because you will not get any fiber from animal foods. You can get your fiber from your vegetables and your fruit. And whole grains and beans. And whole grains and beans. And some and nuts and seeds too. So that's like a total other area that people are like, their gut health is a wreck because they're not eating enough fiber.

And antibiotics also around. Yeah, and antibiotics, exactly. But I think protein, though, especially at like, you know, middle age, you know, you're talking about to keep on lean muscle mass and to satiate your hunger and all these things, there's like a huge push for protein. But things in life, as you know, ebb and flow, right? Now it's all about protein. In a year from now, it's going to be all about something else. And that's what happens. You know what I call the low-carb diet?

I call it the zombie diet. Right. Because no matter how many times it gets killed, it comes back and it's. new form. Oh my God. Think about the Atkins diet. South Beach diet. South Beach diet. Keto. Paleo. I mean, it's all the same. Now carnivore diet. Carnivore diet. It's all the same. Yes. And you know from your whole food's days, like, I bet one of your biggest money makers was protein. Anything protein. It is. Exactly. If you look at sports nutrition, it still, if you look at sports nutrition, it still leads the category in our nutrition departments for sports nutrition,

which is focused around protein and collagen. Protein and collagen. What else do you eat that? What do you eat for lunch and dinner? So my favorite food, I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. I probably get 15 to 20 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. I eat a lot. Number two, look at you, look how thin and glowing you are.

Oh gosh, thank you. I'm like normal thin, but yeah, I eat a lot of it. I don't know why people, this whole nonsense about don't eat fruit. is such a load of crap? No, it's fruits. Probably the single thing people could do to improve their health the most would be to increase their fruit consumption. Do you know there was a study done

where people ate nothing but fruit for 90 days and it controlled, they weren't even, they were locked up for 90 days. Do you think their blood sugar went up? No, blood sugar went down. Did they gain weight? No, they lost weight. They get as much fruit as they want.

It can only be fruit. And their health got better. Every one of their biometrics improved. Really? Every one of them did improve. And so, but the funny thing is I tell the story is because they set a world record. There's never been those large bowel movements in any controlled study before. Are you serious?

I'm sure. Well, think of, I mean, listen, I totally, I would agree. And number one, I just think that fruit is such a, it's become like this villain. It's been villainized. It's so stupid. Number one. Because it's sugar. They think it's sugar.

Because the sugar. I haven't seen any obese person because they ate, too many grapes. Oh, I have friends that are strictly fruitarians. Yeah, I'm sure. And they're very thin. And they're very thin. Because no matter what, like, here's one way to think about it. So a pound of vegetables, if you eat a pound of vegetables, you're getting between 90 and 100 calories on average. If you eat a pound of fruit, you're getting about 300 calories. So to get 2,000 calories, a fruit, you'd have to eat seven or eight pounds of fruit a day. That's a lot. I can do it. If all you ate was vegetables, you'd literally starve to death because you couldn't get enough calories.

I know. Although I will say I'm like, I'm a massive eater and I can eat four pounds of grapes in a heartbeat, like literally. But how many calories are in a tablespoon of oil? Probably, isn't it like a hundred and a dourine and 20? 120 calories. That's the most calorie-dense food that we have. If you show a plot for the obesity rate in America, it totally correlates with oil consumption. Really?

Oh, yes. Absolutely. I believe it. Believe it or not, because of all the negative propaganda, sugar consumption has leveled off and began to decline. Really? But oil consumption continues to go up, and so does weight. That's interesting.

I mean, are you talking to seed oils? All oils. All oils. Sugar is always a scapegoat, though. But having a sugar from a Mars bar is very different than having an apple or an orange. Oh, I mean. The studies show, again, because of the fiber that comes along with the fruit, and also particularly berries.

Did you know berries are like the super. superfood fruits because the pectin, the pectin and the berries slows down tremendously absorption of the sugar into the body. Oh, yeah. I've eaten strictly like fruits all day with a continuous glucose monitor on and my blood sugar never spiked about healthy normal. No. See, I know you're preaching to the choir. I'm a massive fruit consumer. In fact, like I can eat like again, I was at Whole Foods, sorry to say yesterday. I'm sorry to say. I thought. I spent like $25 on cherries. I'm telling you. God, the cherries this year are so great. They're delicious. I've been eating them like crazy. But that's my thing. And I'm not, I'm, I'm not worried about

getting fat from eating the fruit. I'm worried about getting fat from other things, like not moving enough. And having, like you said, too much oil. You know, when I have this, people think that, oh, I'm going to have a salad. It's very, it's very healthy. And they're using salad dressing. It can be 2,000 calories in salad dressing because of what we're talking about, 120 calories. I make my own salad dressings, and there's delicious. How do you make your? Vitamix. I can even tell you the principles of how to make a delicious salad.

Okay, tell me. So the first thing is you need some kind of fat. That's why they generally have oil. But a better, healthier fat will be either nuts and seeds or avocados. So first you have a fat. Then you have to add some kind of acid to it, which could be vinegar, like a good balsamic vinegar, or it could be lime or lemon, even mustard. It has vinegar in it.

So then you have an acid. Then you want to have something that adds a little bit of salt to it. I don't, you know, you don't want it to be too salty, but you want it to be a little bit of salty, which you could get from soy sauce, tamari, again, mustard would do for acid and salt, add a little bit of salt, and then you go either, then you either go savory or sweet. You go sweet if you add fruit to it, like blueberries or mangoes. And you go savory if you add herbs to it. I love that.

And so you, and then I almost never make the same dressing twice. That's so good. Because it takes five minutes to make the most delicious salad dressing as you can possibly imagine. Nuts and seeds taste so much better than oil. Yeah. So if you make it with almonds or walnuts or pecans or cashews or pistachios, and then you get the acid right. And then you can find, you can taste it, and then you can fine tune it. And then you add some kind of liquid to it, water most likely, but you want to get the right consistency on it.

Yeah, it's all about the consistency. see, I always try to make salad dressings, and I'm always off by a little bit. You know what I mean? I'm not good at it. But you can, here's the thing. If it's too thin, you just throw a little bit of nuts and seeds. Yeah. And that will thicken it up. If it's too thick, you just add a little more liquid. I'm going to try one tonight. Yes. I love that. Send me, send me an email or something to how it goes. I'm 100% I'm going to. This has been very fun. Thank you for being on the show. It's been fun. Wow, it's been fun, Jen. You're very interesting person. I really enjoyed talking with you. You're very interesting, and I'm so happy we finally got this on the books because I said I was

very, I really wanted to interview for so long. And I wish you so much luck with Love Life. Thanks. It's beautiful. It's by the way, guys, I went to see it, like I said, and just before, it's a beautiful facility. You have everything in there, and I think it's going to do really well. So, you know, even people that don't live close to Love Life, we do have a medical only membership. So you can just Join. Oh, yeah. You can just join. And we'll still give you occasional pass if you just want to come down to see the doc or whatever. But once you get the, you go in and you do the test and you do the Texas scan and we get your blood run and we do the we do the gut test and we get you, we get a lot back. Then you can always just talk to your doctor. Yeah. Via on Zoom if you want to. Right. So, and so, and they can still create the optimum plan for you. And if you're ever in the area, you can still come in and use the facilities. And the, and the real big. selling feature is the pickleball court because that's, of course, the most popular. Do you like to play pickleball? You like pickleball? I prefer other sports, but I know that people love pickleball. I love pickleball. Yeah, everybody loves pickleball. The reason why I don't love it yet is because

I'm not good at it yet. I got to keep on playing. Were you a tennis player? I'm actually going to take, I'm taking tennis now. Okay, because the tennis players are the ones that make the easiest transition to pickleball. But, you know, here's the thing. You can have fun playing poker ball, the first time you play it, it's much easier to play than it's kind of more like ping pong and it is. It is like ping pong. And then you just find people that are at your level. That's the thing. There's no fun playing against somebody that's a lot better than you. Exactly. That's what is with any sport, right? You want to find somebody who's just as good or bad as you. Or just a little bit better than you. That's how you get better. That's right. I was going to say,

I was going to say, I misspoke. It's not getting someone who's worse. It's someone getting a little bit better. And I think it's a great social thing, right? Like to get together. and do something interactive versus just staring at each other and like having a meal, like playing something together. It's like a shared experience. I love it. Yeah. Yeah.

One of the reasons we put it in a love life is pickleball is intensely social. Right. When you play doubles, it's like you're bonding with the person on your team. Exactly. And then you maybe switch teams and you're still bonded with that person on the other side. I love it. But now you're bonding with the new person. I totally agree.

And so we're trying to build this community. immunity at Love Life and Pickleball really helps that. Yeah, I totally agree. Okay, guys, if you live in L.A., check out Love Life. And otherwise, again, thank you for being on this show. It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed talking with you. Thanks so much, Jen.

Thank you.