The Daily Stoic - John Mackey on Conscious Capitalism and Doing Good | A Reminder This Spring You Cannot Miss

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to CEO John Mackey about how to be conscious of how your actions affect the world around you, the Stoic’s concept of the “circles of concern,” why you should do as much good as you can in the world, and more.Our new Memento Mori Life Calendar has 4,160 dots, each dot representing a week of your life and each row representing 2 years of your life. By filling in the Memento Mori Life Calendar every week, you will not only see how much life you've already lived (or as Seneca says, how much you’ve already died), but also how much life you've (hopefully) got left. To get yours now just go to dailystoic.com/mmcalendarJohn Mackey is the original, current, and sole CEO of Whole Foods Markets, which he founded in 1980 and has parented to Fortune 500 status, employing over 90,000 people across 450+ stores in the US, Canada, and the UK. Mackey is the co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism Movement and co-authored the NYT and WSJ best-sellers Conscious Capitalism and Conscious Leadership, which encourage businesses and leaders to be grounded in principles of ethical consciousness. John embraces a humble lifestyle, despite having the means to live otherwise. In 2006, John cut his annual salary to $1, donates all his stock options to charity, walks to work, cooks his own food, and meditates daily. Blinkist takes top nonfiction titles, pulls out the key takeaways and puts them into text and audio explainers called Blinks that give you the most important information in just 15 minutes. Go to Blinkist.com/STOIC to start your free 7 day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership.The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.Kion Aminos is backed by over 20 years of clinical research, has the highest quality ingredients, no fillers or junk, undergoes rigorous quality testing, and tastes amazing with all-natural flavors. Go to getkion.com/dailystoic to save 20% on subscriptions and 10% on one-time purchases.Bambee is an HR platform built for businesses like yours –– so you can automate the most important HR practices AND get your own dedicated HR Manager. Go to Bambee.com/stoic right now for your FREE HR audit.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. The Stoics talk, of course, about self-improvement a lot.

That is the purpose of philosophy in many ways, to get better each and every day. And I think the Stoics were pretty unanimous in their belief that reading is a way to do that. And that's why I love today's sponsor, Blinkist. Blinkist is a way to get better, smarter, and to do it faster in 2022. Blinkist has takeaways from some of the best books

on the topic of self-improvement, books that were written by friends of mine that I've recommended many times. Mark Manson's The Settle Art of Not Giving A Fuck. James Clears, Atomic Habits, Tim Ferris's The Four Hour Body, and more, they also, of course, have my books as well. When I read a book, what I'm really looking for is like one nugget, one insight, one thing I can

take away. And if you don't have time to read as much as I do, Blinkist is a great way to just get that. Right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash stoke to start your free seven day trial and then get a 25% off Blinkist Premium Membership. That's Blinkist BLI and KIST Blinkist.com slash stoke. Get 25% off a free seven day trial. Blinkist.com slash stoke. A reminder this spring, you cannot miss. Spring is the most beautiful of the seasons. Suddenly after a dreary winter, the colors come back, the birds are out, the days last longer and the breeze is light and the air is cool.

But as Philip Larkin's bittersweet poem reminds us beneath this turning of the seasons is a kind of darkness. The trillions of the seasons are coming into leafy, like something almost being said. The recent buds relax and spread. Their greenness is a kind of grief. The inherent grief is the passage of time. That's one more fall and summer and winter that we will not have again. As Seneca reminds us, death is not something in the future. Death is happening now.

Each season brings new life, yes, but also marks the cessation of life. It's a painful truth the poem reads written in the rings of a tree. Winter is dead and over, and all of us a little more so too. So soak in this wonderful weather and catch yourself looking and catch yourself if you start looking forward to summer because you're wishing away the present. You're wishing away a season of your life. And as we've said before, you should never, ever do that. The practice of momentum worry, the meditation on death, And as we've said before, you should never, ever do that.

The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Diosdok to illustrate that exact idea that your life in the best case scenario is 4,000 weeks. Are you gonna let those weeks slip by by or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall and every single week that

bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in that you really lived that week. You made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoke.com slash M.M. calendar. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I imagine you don't conceive of me as a grocer or a grocery store proprietor. You probably don't even really imagine me as a bookstore proprietor, which I do own. I've told you a bunch of times about the Painted Port here in Bastard, Texas, but actually right up the street, the same street on

Main Street, just a handful of blocks from the Painted Port. I have another business. I'm a my wife and I are part owners of like an institution of this little town that we're in. Tracy's drive-in grocery was started in 1946. It's been in business ever since and the owners who had inherited it from their family many years before were looking for someone to take it over, you know, wanting it to go in the right hands, not wanting it to close, wanting it to continue to be this neighborhood institution, which it was and remains. And so when we got asked if we wanted to be a part of it, we were just getting the bookstore going and, you know, thought one story is crazy enough, what the hell let's do another one too. And so we've been slowly, steadily improving

and restoring and adding to, but also maintaining and trying not to go out of business with this little wonderful place, Tracy's drive in, they make delightful sandwiches that I have for lunch all the time. On the weekends, we take our kids there and they get popsicles or snacks or juice or whatever.

My wife gets coffee there almost every morning when we're in town. It's just a wonderful little thing that we've been a part of. And if you're ever in Basterp, you should check it out. I say all of this because in a weird strange way, and I'm saying this primarily in a facetious way, it makes me a peer of today's guest who I am a big fan of, and I imagine almost all of you have frequented or experienced his work. And even if you haven't, there's no question that wherever you shop for groceries, however you get your food, it was influenced by decisions or changes or trends that he set. My guest today, John Mackey, is the original current and sole CEO of Whole Foods Market. She founded in 1980 here in Austin, Texas, and he's parented it to Fortune 500 status. As he says in the interview, it has more than 100,000 employees across 500 stores in the US, Canada, and the UK.

He's also a prolific author. We talk about this in the interview. He's written four books. He's another one in the works. But the two we talk about the most in today's interview are conscious capitalism and conscious leadership, which encourages business and leadership grounded in principles of ethical consciousness about purpose, not just profit. And I know that can sound like sort of empty slogan, but if you think about what Whole Foods is and the sort of revolution, it's ushered in, that's not just empty words. The decisions they've made about,

for instance, like the animal products in the stories, it affected the lives and yes, also the deaths of, as he says, again, in the interview, billions of animals. And so the consciousness of a leader of a business owner, this isn't just like empty burning man nonsense. This is like the things that we think about, that we prioritize, that we decide to make a focus of what we do can affect all the stakeholders in a business, not just like the owners or the investors, but the customers, the suppliers, the manufacturers, the other businesses, the decisions we make as consumers and capitalists,

and we live in capitalist system, ripple through. They have an enormous impact in the world. And I think that's really fascinating and deeply stoked. Sennaka talks about some, a contradiction for the stoked. To be rich, it just matters how one earns that wealth or has that success. And I talked to John about that and many other things. I think John's a fascinating figure.

He lives a humble lifestyle, despite that means of being able to live and do essentially anything he wants. In 2006, he cut his own annual salary down to a dollar. He donates all his stock options to charity. He walks to work. He cooks his own food. He lives a plant-based life, does he talks about it, and he meditates daily. So he's a fascinating figure, a controversial figure to some, but I've really enjoyed this

conversation. I've met him a handful of times. This is the most time I've ever gotten with him. I'm quite grateful. He took the time. I think you're really going to like this interview and we get into some really great Stuart themes which I can't wait to hear your thoughts on. So you can check out conscious capital. You can check out the conscious capitalism movement and read his two books, conscious capitalism, and conscious leadership. And of course, you can shop at Whole Foods stores all over the world. I have written many books, fueled by products from Whole Foods. I've eaten lunch at many Whole Foods.

It's just a part of the fabric of our modern lives, but that wasn't like a pre-ordained thing. Someone made that and that guy is who we are talking to today. Enjoy. I don't know if you remember the first time we met. I spoke at Voice and Exit and you also spoke at Voice and Exit. This would have been like 2015 maybe. Go ahead. I did that a couple times. But I don't I don't remember meeting but I did read your book Stillness is the key and I bought I bought and although I have I've just started it to your book on the short of the some vignettes on famous Stoics. Yes, lives of the Stoics. Lives of famous Stoics.

Yes, lives of the Stoics? Lives of the Stoics, correct. Well, so I remember I spoke at Voice and Exit and you came up to me afterwards. Obviously I knew who you were and you said, I liked your speech, but too many war stories. And I've thought about that not many times since. You know, I do probably,

I now I kind of, you jogged my memory a little bit, I think I might have mentioned that. And then if you looked at my book, Conscious Leadership, I made a point of part of the problem why we don't have more love and corporations is that the metaphors people use are primarily hyper competitive metaphors of war, Darwinian metaphors or survival of the fittest, and oftentimes sports metaphors with one winner and lots of losers, instead of a more win-win-win-win perspective. Yeah, I was just going to say that it seems like all what those three worlds all have in common is that they are sort of finite worlds binary world's where somebody wins

and somebody loses and that loss is almost always at the expect that that that that that somebody's game comes at the expense of somebody else's loss exactly zero-sum game and the thing that people don't understand about business and capitalism is that they're not zero-sum games. They are, well, they're infinite games in the sense that they continue to create value for multiplicity of stakeholders.

And the focus, as we tend to do in the media and intellectuals do, they're anti-capitalist focuses on somebody losing rather than the cascading effects of multiple winners. Yeah, so you obviously use that word conscious in conscious capitalism and conscious leadership. What is that what one is supposed to be conscious of? Like sort of that everyone is winning, that this is to the benefit of as many stakeholders as possible. What does one need to be more conscious of? Great question. So you're really kind of asking the definition of conscious.

Yeah. And obviously the simplest answer is to be more conscious is to be more aware. And when we talk about what's important to be aware of and in conscious leadership we dive into it deeper, it's to be more aware of what the purpose of your enterprise is. And all businesses do have some type of purpose, even if it's not articulated, even if it's tacit. So to be more conscious of it would be to be to make what's what's maybe tacit, to more explicit, more conscious, to be aware of the interdependencies that the various stakeholders have with each other, that customers

and employees and suppliers and investors and the communities that we are part of are all sort of interdependent. And that when you're more conscious, you will manage that in such a way to optimize gains for all of the stakeholders. And the difference between stakeholders and shareholders is one you've made several times before. It seems like maybe a definition of conscious is sort of the opposite of conscious leadership or capitalism is the kind of tunnel vision that leaders or companies have where they're really just focused on a singular stakeholder or a singular winner as opposed to expanding out that definition of who can

benefit from what you're doing. That's correct. I think that's exactly right. One of the problems that I have with the current ESG trend is that it still doesn't recognize when, when, when philosophy, it still doesn't recognize the interdependencies, although you might think it does, it's still in a win-lose game. It's just saying, you know what, we want the stockholders to win a lot less, and we want this money distributed to a, to distributed to the environment or to social causes or social justice causes. So they still got this binary win lose. They don't see the, that's not conscious capitalism and even though it sometimes masks itself to be that way. We know it's funny, the wine stirrup that I didn't include in Lives of the Stoics, his name is Harry Oakley's, and he came up with this,

basically his only accomplishment, which is why he's not in the book, because I was trying to talk about the lives of the Stoics as opposed to just the philosophies of the Stoics, but he sort of calls it the circles of concern. And it's this interesting graphic you can see, but it's like, obviously there's oneself, then there's one's family,

then there's your extended family, then there's your community, your neighborhood, your community, your country, the world, it gets bigger and bigger. And he's sort of saying that the purpose of the philosophy of stoicism is to kind of bring those outer rings closer towards the center, so that you're more conscious of the implications of your actions and the impact of what you're doing on a larger and larger group of people, which kind of sounds anti-stove, because it's just supposed to focus on what you control.

But I think what you've shown and what great companies show is that actually one individual can have an enormous impact on a large number of individuals. You just triggered a few thoughts. Yes. I use that particular metaphor frequently myself. That part of growing in consciousness is to become more your circle of concern, it might start with yourself, then it expands maybe to your

family when you're young, and then maybe it starts to expand our group of friends, and then maybe however you self identify, maybe it's your class, your race, or your gender, but then maybe it's your country, and then maybe it's just people in general, and then maybe it's include animals in that circle of concern, or maybe even all of life, or maybe even the ultimate, I guess, would be the multiverse. And the second thing you triggered is that we tend to underestimate the impacts that we have in the world. So when you say you're just what you can affect,

well actually you can affect a lot more than you realize. Let's take yourself for example, you've written these great books. And one of the unfortunate things about being an author is you don't always see the ripple effects that your works. Sometimes you get to see it back and it's like, well I read your book, I loved it,

made a big impact on me, and that always makes the author feel good, right? But there's also secondary, interstery, and effects because they pass that book on, or those ideas, they internalize them and they share them out with other people. So we have these much larger impacts in the world than we're conscious of, because we don't see all the ripples that go out from beyond our acts, what we say, what we do, how we behave, these affect people. And so when you become more conscious of it, you become more, you want to act in such a way

to make sure that you don't put out really negative ripple effects in the world that you're actually forced for good. Well, speaking of war metaphors, I spoke at the Naval Academy two days ago and I was talking about the sort of cynicism that is inherent in this sort of current view that like the great man of history theory doesn't hold up anymore because we think of everything as systemic or everything as structural. And it is true that those forces to exist. But where would the world be if everyone internalized

the belief that an individual couldn't make a difference? Like, I don't think anyone would want to live in that world. You have to believe that you have agency that you can affect change that a person can change the course of things. Right, and that's another example of binary thinking when it's clearly both. Yes, of course.

Of course. Individuals do have a major impact and so you don't wanna take restructure study of history to simply people, but tell me somebody like Elon Musk is not having a big impact in the world today and I'd say then you're not paying attention. Right. He's having a huge impact.

He's changing our lives in multiplicity of ways. And he's just one example. There are obviously many, many, many, many, many others. We all have this potential to have an impact, although obviously Elon Musk creates a bigger wake, a bigger ripple effect than most people do. But then again, we're all products of our culture, our environment. So it's obvious to me that it's both. And I don't know why people argue about it really.

Yeah, no, it is strange. And also, I think there is a certain amount of ego in thinking that if you can't, it's both ways. It's like to change the world, you have to be Elon Musk, right? Or if you're not Elon Musk, you're not making a difference. But in reality, like I think about this as far as the Stokes go, Marcus Aurelius has a philosophy teacher named Rousticus. And Rousticus gives Marcus Aurelius a book. He gives him

a copy of Epic Titus, and this is the philosophy that changed Marcus's life, who in turn changes the world. And so, like that, obviously Rousticus goes on to do other things, but if that had been his sole contribution to humanity, handing one person a book. That would have been in that, that in and of itself changes the arc of history. And so I think the idea that we all have these roles to play, some of these roles are very large and very public. And some of them can be quite small. I imagine running a company with thousands of people, you see that too. Obviously some people have an outsized role and some people have a small role, but none of it works without the individual doing their role and doing that role well.

I totally see it the same way. I do think there's a tendency, particularly for young people who are a little bit less, mostly in spiritually mature. There's more ego. There's more of it. They may feel the impulse for the heroes' journey and they're being, but they don't know how to express it.

I see this all the time when I talk to young people. So they have some kind of grandiosity. I want to really change the world. It's like, well, you follow your path and some opportunities come your way and answer the call when they come. But don't be too hung up on having some kind of Elon Musk impact or it's not it doesn't count for anything. Yeah

It's and by the way if you're driven by that much ego chances are you may not accomplish as much as you would if you were to Be more emotionally and spiritually Intelligent I like the expression make a dent, you know, it seems a little humbler instead of changing the world. I'm just going to make a small dent in things. Well, that's, the metaphors in language kind of shape our thinking and think about what a dent is. It's, I think about like dense and the calm. That's not great. That's true. It's, if you used other metaphors like, let's, if we just create a little more love in the world, that's, if just with our children or with our friends, that, again, that ripples out.

So it's, it's more creative metaphors. Like, you know, Nietzsche said that our life can be like a work of art. I like that too. We're creating a work of art. We're creating something beautiful. The good, the true, and the beautiful, the three highest, arguably the three highest values,

at least has played or identified it. Some expressions of all of those, any of those is making the world a better place. So, why is it, do you think that leaders or businesses or capitalists are not as conscious as we might like them to be? Is it that in the short term, it's better for business to not be conscious? Is it easier to not be conscious? Like, I can see that the self-interinterested case in doing it but clearly not everyone is responding to that incentive.

Well, first I would sort of question the implicit assumption you just made which is somehow that business people are less conscious than other sectors of society. I don't think that's true. I think it's I where you can name your society the academy military government. Where exactly is this fountain of consciousness that I would say the concept is the is the is the exception unfortunately rather than the rule? I think that's true, and that's true in all fields of life, not just business. But I would say after I defend business in that sense, to make sure it's not in the second class, I would say part of the reason is business people tend to be more doers, entrepreneurs in particular, they're out there, I think, that I think Marx once said that

the problem with paraphrasing, the problem with philosophers is they just want to interpret the world, the secret is to change the world. Well entrepreneurs are more about, less about interpreting the world and a lot more about changing the world or doing something. So when you're focused primarily, unless you have balance in your life, where you have some type of inner work in some way, and you're just doing, then you're not gonna be as conscious.

So obviously again, I reject those binary sort of polarities. It's both, we need to be doers, and we need to be reflectiveers and we need to be reflective and we need to be growing in our internal being. Both are important. We'll be more effective in the world if we grow our internal being, but if we just grow our internal beating

and we don't do anything, then our impacts or our ripple effects are smaller. When celebrity feuds are high stakes, you never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or do moa or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle,

and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them.

It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other and it's about a movement to save a superstar which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany Follow disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon music or the wonder app Is this thing all check one two one two? Hey y'all I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now I've held so many occupations over the years

that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Kiki for bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bag love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the baby this is Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in

the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast.

Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app-free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. That makes sense. Is the connection between conscious leadership and then conscience? I'm sure you've noted that similarity before, but is there a relationality between those two things? I think so. I mean, conscious, when we talk about our conscience, we're mostly talking in the ethical realm. And so that is part of being conscious, is to be, have a conscience that, you know,

are well developed ethical intelligence and ethical sense. Having integrity, that's an important part of consciousness. But it's not, they're not synonyms because conscious, I would argue, is bigger than, it includes conscience, but it's not limited to it. No, that makes sense to me, because I suspect, and this is, I think argue is bigger than it includes conscience, but it's not limited to it. No, that makes sense to me, because I suspect, and this is I think true for business, but also just true for leadership in general, one of the reasons we maybe don't want to be conscious of certain things, in the awareness sense, like we don't want to know what's happening in the factory in China,

just like we don't want to know how a person is struggling under the weight of what we're asking them to do, let's say we're a military leader, we don't want to think about the effect of sending someone on this assignment or asking them to do this amount of work or subjecting them to this amount of stress. I suspect that part of the reason people don't want to be conscious of something is that if they were aware of it, it would weigh heavily on their conscience and then they might have to do something about it. I think that's an astute observation. I never quite thought about it that way. I think you're

correct. It's like we'd rather not think about what's happening in the slaughterhouse or in the packing plant or whatever. That's right. And, or I know that whole foods we've had many people eject, particularly in our past, when we had sort of cutting rooms that would show people cutting the meat. Yeah. That they would buy the meat, but they didn't want to, they wanted it out of sight, out of sight out of mind.

Yes. And so that's a, I've seen that happen. And I think that's true. I think we have a tendency to, we don't want to feel guilty. So one of the ways we avoid guilt is to project it out. Words on to others. And to ignore it is another way to deal with it. And if it starts to penetrate our consciousness, we just push it away.

That's something I've been thinking about. Like obviously, I think we should talk about ethical stuff with food in a second, but I've been thinking about that with the sort of work from home shift that we're going through as a society, like with the people that work for me. If we're in the office every day, I can tell if someone's sad, if someone's overloaded,

if someone I can see that, oh, you're not leaving the office until very late. And so then I can calibrate what I ask of that person. And I've been having to talk about this with my employees. It's like, hey, I don't know that you're pulling an all-nighter because I put too much work on your plate. So I can't be conscious of that. I was just thinking about, I think, part of leadership has to be being conscious of things.

And if you're not conscious of those things You can't necessarily do the right thing and so there needs to be kind of visibility in transparency into stuff Because if you don't think about it that if it's out of mind then then you you you don't have to deal with it You know what I mean? I do I do I do know what you mean? I do agree with that. I'm not a huge fan of the work at home I do know what you mean. I do agree with that. I'm not a huge fan of the work at home. Movement Whole Foods, we've had a call back to office, but it's just two and a half days a week.

It's a start. But I get it, some people can, I get it. People'd rather work at home. A lot of people think committing into work. On the other hand, I can tell you, it's very difficult to maintain a company or organizational culture.

If you're not doing a lot of face-to-face stuff, you can sort of, if you're talking on the phone or you're on a Zoom call or some other type of video thing, you can sort of maintain it to a certain extent because you can see people's faces. But it's not the same thing as being in a room with people. It's not the same thing as the things that get exchanged in day-to-day passing or having lunch together or just connecting and feeling part of the tribe. One thing I've noticed is that turnover rates amongst the people that are working remotely is very high.

They don't have the same loyalty, they don't have the same commitment to the purpose and values. They're just more detached. They're more professional and less organizationally oriented. And as a person that's trying to build or has built a great culture and a great organization, I see the fraying of the weaves that our culture have made. I see it fraying. We've been spending our cultural capital

in the last couple of years during this COVID lockdown and it's time to make some deposits back in the bank so that we can grow our culture and make it strong again. It does seem that Whole Foods has done pretty much since it's beginning a good job or let's actually not even make a judgment. An active sort of deliberate, I think it's a conscious effort, to think about the things that maybe we just took for granted on the stuff that we bought, whether it's the packaging, whether it's

how the animal was treated, whether it was the environmental impact of the production process. Is that just something you always thought about? Like you just wanted to know where the stuff you were buying came from. Is it something that as you started a company, you started to get more insight in and you wanted to bring people's attention to that? I mean, obviously it's also kind of a marketing

differentiator, but what's behind that sort of cultural commitment to caring about where the stuff came from or how it was made? Great question, Ryan. I think it's best to understand it as a process because over time, because when Renee and I started back in 1978, it was our first store called Safeer Way here in Austin, and I was 24 and Renee was 20. So we weren't particularly conscious, but we had a lot of idealism, we had a lot of energy and a lot of enthusiasm, and I would say the higher purpose of Whole Foods when we got started was we wanted to sell healthy food to people, earn a living, support ourselves, and have some fun.

We're still doing all those things, literally 44 years later, but we've grown in complexity, we've grown in depth, and we just learned and grew, and not just Renee and I, but the other people that came on, the culture that we created, the values that we tried to articulate, not just for me, but from all the leaders, because it's clearly a collective enterprise, with thousands, tens of thousands, I'm going to, 105,000 people working for the company now. It's a lot of people contributing to who we are, what we believe in, what we put our focus on, and what we don't. And that's changed. And I'll say because of the interdependency of the stakeholders, Ryan, what our stakeholders, what our customers want matters, what our team members want is important,

what our suppliers are trying to do is important, and I'll say also the activist community because there's tons of food activists from environmental people to animal rights people, people working, worried about diversity, worried about gender differences. I mean, there's so many pressures that come into play now in a larger corporation. So many stakeholders that want to have a say that that all has an influence. They have their ripple effects as well. So they make you, if you listen to your stakeholders, they help make you more conscious

They help you become more conscious because they are seeing things that you don't see You're blind. We're all have blind spots But when you're and when you're embedded in a greater community of stakeholders and you're listening to all of them and interacting with them You're you're all learning and growing together, maybe not the same pace, but they definitely impact the way they've all impacted Whole Foods from the very beginning, really. Well, yeah, I didn't think about that in a company or a business or an industry or an organization

that is conscious. It's also made up of conscious individuals. And so what they're, if you're conscious of what they care about and they're conscious of things that you don't know about that you don't even know you don't care about, that's what creates those ripple effects because suddenly if you're a business and you care what your employees think

and your employees because they're younger or different or in a different socioeconomic background and then you, they care about this issue. That surface is up to you, just as the suppliers or the shippers or the the packages they all bring and surface different issues or concerns or needs up through the organization and then leadership's job is to decide which of those to integrate and how to accommodate for that. That's correct. I'll tell you two quick stories that kind of underscore the point you just made. The first one is if you look back on a Whole Foods market, it's called our Declaration of Interdependence, which we articulated way back in 1985 the first

time and we've updated a few times since then. In the initial version, we really called out the stakeholders. All of them, except for ones stakeholder that was important and that was suppliers. There is a tendency in business to take a zero-s sum approach with their suppliers, just try to get the best deals they can, and they're not thinking of them as partners. And I got sort of cornered at a national, natural foods expo convention many, many years ago,

now a couple of decades ago, saying, hey, you guys talk a lot about caring for suppliers, but it's not even in your mission statement. We're the one with the one stakeholder you don't even call out. And I said, that's not true. And I went red, free red, and it was true. We didn't, we had left them out of the narrative. We left them out of the circle of concern, you might say. And so, and then they also said, and you don't walk your talk, you're not caring, you have a more exploitative, you're like other corporations, you're having exploitative attitude towards your, your suppliers, and you say that you know, that you should be more conscious, and

you're not conscious in this area, they were right. And we had to go back and rethink our entire relationship with our suppliers. And we changed our value statement, our mission statement to include them. And we began to set up, we set up the suppliers, recognizing our suppliers for excellence. We began to reorient our training sessions so that we'd always talk about creating, we have a win, win,win partnership with our suppliers. That changed because the suppliers spoke up and said, you guys are not conscious enough in this area.

Another example, which is somewhat sort of well known because I've talked about it, and I might have written about it in conscious capitalism, conscious leadership. Back in 2002, 20 years ago, at our annual meeting, we were doing that in Santa Monica, California, and we were being protested and picketed by animal rights activists.

And they were protesting that we were actually selling, whole food shouldn't be selling factory farm animals. And we didn't think we were, because we thought we had the best well for standards out there. And so I ended up in an engage in this ongoing email dialogue with one of the activists, a woman named Lauren O'Neillius, and Lauren finally got frustrated with me, and she said, you know, Mr. Mackie, I see that you're a very idealistic person. I know you wanted to do good in the world, but when it comes to animal welfare, you really

don't know what you're talking about. You're not well informed. You don't even understand what your company is doing. And you owe it to yourself, you owe it to your company, and you owe it to these animals to become more conscious about what's happening. That's summer of 2000 and summer of 2000. This is all 2003. The summer of 2003, so 19 years ago, I read up,

I just, I read about 12 books about animal production in America, and I started to investigate what whole food suppliers were doing, and I woke up, I really did. I said, God, my God, she's completely right. We have really, this is horrible what we're doing to animals. It's, when we look back 50 years and now, 100 years from now, the things that will be most horrified, we can look back on some racial injustices today and say, good, believe, can people do that stuff back then? Well, 100 years from now, we'll look back and say, can you believe what they did?

Animals back in the 21st century, and 20th century, and 21st century, it's horrible. So we did change that and we started our animal welfare rating program and we began to vet our suppliers more carefully. We began to hold them to high standards. We set up an organization that actually certifies, we funded an independent organization to help certify the animal welfare. And so our consciousness about the treatment of animals changed because primarily these activists made us look deeper than make us, but they put enough energy out there where I said, I'm going to take a look at this.

And then I changed and then Whole Foods changed. But next sort of goes to what we're talking about, which is that this one activist talking to this one person happened to, he or she raised your consciousness, which you then had the ability to put into effect in terms of policies and actions that you took as a business. Then that business has grown considerably in the intervening 20 years. And so that individual person may or may not have had more impact on animal wellness and welfare, or let's just say that person impacted the welfare of millions of animals over the

intervening 20 years from one conversation that brought about a change or an awareness from you. I mean, it's hard. Everyone's responsible, but that's how it works. That's correct. In fact, it's a bigger impact than the realist because we're really talking about billions of animals. That's how big whole foods is and how much how many animals that we eat in America is astounding. Every year we slaughter over 10 billion animals in the United States. And that's not including marine animals, fish, shrimp, things like that. Then you're in the hundreds of billions. But so I wanted to focus on something because it's important in this concept. Consciousness is not like this binary thing. You're either conscious, so you're not conscious. Whoa, that's right. That's a good analogy. So this is an example of how my

own consciousness grew over time through the actions of other people and embedded in a network of relationships, whether it be suppliers or animal. Well, for an I could give you every stakeholder how my own consciousness has changed and grown over time. The point is we're all on this continuum where I am more conscious today than I was five years ago. And I was more conscious five years ago than I was five years before that. It's kind of an I hope and pray I'll be more conscious five years from now than I am today because we're and I think that's true for people. We're all kind of on a journey of becoming more aware, becoming more conscious. I don't think I don't know if there's an end point to that, but I have a strong feeling I'm not close to it, whatever it might be. So that's just very important because there's a tendency people ask me all the time, do you think that's a

conscious business? And it's like, well, it's conscious in some ways, and the less conscious in other ways, just like you are in your own life. Is it an unconscious business might be a question? But it could be a more conscious business is really what we should be focused on. Yes, and the truth is, every business could be more conscious than it is.

And part of what we try to do is get our businesses in the world to be more conscious. And frankly, we're making a lot of progress. The way I see it, it's not the same as it was 10 years ago. You know, it's funny about that story too. It's almost binary, too binary to think about it as this person had a conversation with you and that changed what Whole Foods did, which changed how you impact the animals. But the other way to think about it also is, what was the precedent that was set there? What is the trend that was set there?

As a market leader, what did your decisions and your moral leadership in that sense? What did that do to your competitors? What did that do to the consciousness of the shopping, of the consumer public as well? And so the impact ripples through even more than we might think it. We don't just impact ourselves, but by becoming more conscious, we can also sort of inspire other people to come along with us on that journey. I think that's true. And I think it did impact our competitors.

At least it impacted their marketing departments because they started to market themselves differently whether they change their actions or not. Unless you're getting third party certification, for example, on seafood sustainability or animal welfare, chances are it's just marketing, marketing ploy. Yeah. Well, we talk about, you know, virtue signaling and obviously that's not great. I'd rather people signal virtue than signal vice, but yes, a lot of the statements or actions that

people take are more symbolic than substantive, unfortunately. It is true, but we, if you view that also on a continuum, I think I don't know who said this, but hypocrisy is the honor that vice pays to virtue. Yes. Yes. And hypocrisy is kind of a step along the way because eventually people call you out on it and you have to try to walk your talk. So it's a stage that-

And David, at least accepted the premise that X is good, right? That's right. Not abusing animals is bad or that abusing animals is bad. They've accepted the premise. They haven't quite actually fully bought in with their actions or put their money where their mouth is, but they're at least pretending. Yeah, it's interesting to me from a, not really don't want to get into political discussion, if their actions are put their money where their mouth is, but they're at least pretending. Yeah, it's interesting to me,

from a, not really don't wanna get in a political discussion, but it's interesting to me how many people, how virtue signlings, by the way, I don't think we had that term until fairly recently. Yeah, very recent. Now we're very conscious of people that are wanting to signal to others

that actually I'm actually a very virtuous person because not because I've done anything but because I vote the right way or I say the right things, I'm against racism, I'm Black Lives Matter. It's like okay great what are you doing exactly? I mean are you what are you actively doing in the world except claiming that you care about these things? If you care about poverty, what are you doing to remediate it? I mean, except, you know, saying that you just vote for people that are trying to, that are poor poverty,

is actually not doing very much. That's a pretty small ripple effect. Let me put it that way. Well, do you think that that is kind of a problem? Like, I think we often think about affecting change as something that other people do or that needs to happen at the sort of the global or the national, like the federal level, right?

I had Tobias Lutke on the podcast, the founder of Shopify. And I was saying that what I liked about Shopify was so cool. Obviously, like most of my books I publish with a publisher. So like I send them a digital manuscript and then it just comes to an existence. I don't have any impact on where they print it, what materials they use. I don't have any impact on what fuel they put in their trucks. You know, like, I don't have any impact on that. But when I make my own stuff,

like I make these challenge coins, and like I make other stuff that I can sell directly to my audience as a capitalist. When I'm the capitalist, I get to make those conscious decisions because it's my call, right? So the decision to make it in the US, or to go like, hey, why are you wrapping, like, I remember when we first

started making these coins, they would send them to me. And each one was wrapped in plastic. And I'm like, the coin is brass. Why do we need to put it in a plastic bag that, that the, like, you know, we went to the, we went to the, the, the, the, the logistics center. And we're, we're watching them rip it out of the plastic bag to put it in the box.

And it was like, well, let's just stop putting them in these bags. Like, it's not having a huge impact, but I get to decide because I'm the stakeholder or I'm the owner, I get to make the decisions that previously, you know, we think are only up to the multinational conglomerates. Like, I think people are starting to see this now. Like, hey, do you, you know, uh think are only up to the multinational conglomerates. Like I think people are starting to see this now. Like, hey, do you, you know, uh, oh, the decisions I'm making are fueling, you know, uh, Russia's ability to do X, Y, or Z, right? And, and I do think the more capitalistic people are, as opposed to just being consumers, the more impact they get to have in the direction of

things, not at the level that you're making it, but still at a level that has an impact because suddenly you're in the arena, as opposed to just sitting on the sidelines and bemoaning what they're doing in Washington or Brussels or something. Yeah, of course I agree with everything you said, but there's also the risk of you won't even be able to act in the world. Sure. I mean, if you're, we're all, we all are doing things that might be having negative impacts as well.

So it's like, you know, well, where do I get it? Do you have to become conscious of absolutely everything you buy, for example? Do you have to know, you know, who made that? The, the, the, sometimes the demands active is put on a corporation like Whole Foods to completely make your supply chain transparent, ignores the realities of the complexity of the supply chain. There are literally, we have thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of suppliers around the world. We can't effectively go manage or rate how they treat all their labor. It's too big of a request. And then the people that are, they're employing that,

the supply chain that your supply chain is using to create their supply chain. Because it ripples off till you're at the end of the day, it's all interdependent, it's all connected. And we can't change everything. You can't, and you'll ruin your life by trying to analyze or research out the impacts that you have. And I've seen people get their lives so sort of overly complexified so they have trouble acting.

It's like, no, listen, I just don't fly anywhere. I just, I don't fly anywhere because, I mean, you know, the jets put out a lot of greenhouse gases and I really, I'm very concerned about climate change so I just don't fly anymore. I don't hear that very often, but I have heard it a few times, and I think, wow, you're really narrowing your life down, too. There are sort of these trade-offs that occur, that we have to be more conscious of.

For example, I fly a lot, so I have a large carbon footprint from that perspective. On the other hand, I'm plant-based, so I don't have a less of a carbon footprint on there. I would say one jet flight probably cancels out and lots of veggie burgers. But anyway, my point is the quest for perfection is impossible and will ruin your life. So always it's, how can I practically minimize my destructive harm and maximize the goodness that I do within sort of reason? And people's answer to within reason will be dependent on their own particular unique situation.

Well, that's what I was going to ask you. How does one think about that? Because you're right. You could if you were trying to be perfect, you become paralyzed. If you're trying to be morally pure, you could never do anything. And so it's almost not at odds, but it's a tension within consciousness because there's almost some things that you have to decide not to be conscious of or that you have to, uh, folk, you have to chew, you have to prioritize your consciousness about certain things or you can't, you can't do anything. I completely agree. And that's why I say it's based on each individual to, to kind of work out their own, I'd say own trade-offs, their own compromises

they make as we pursue to try to live a morally good life. There's no, we're all centers in that sense. We all do things that have unintended negative consequences because the moral perfection is not completely possible or The trade-off is so great meaning you would basically live and not consume almost anything and we'd be back into sort of a Kind of existence. We had in hundreds of gathering days if you were trying to just minimize all environmental impacts and quite frankly I don't even think that would be, I don't think that would be this, that doesn't appeal to me personally. And I don't think many people make that

choice. They were a man of size, but I think they might find if they went and did try to live that way that they were deeply unhappy and wouldn't be a satisfying life. And in any case, we really can't take the culture itself with seven and a half billion people back to hunting and gathering paleolithic stage because we're just that bus, that train left the station literally tens of thousands of years ago. Well, no, I've been thinking about this specifically and you seem like the ultimate person to ask about it because you've, this is probably been your life now for 30 odd years, I make like a premium edition of one of my books, and I publish it myself.

So I actually have to think about all the decisions. And I work with this small family company that's based in Dallas, but they do their manufacturing in Belarus, which is obviously both problematic now from an ethical standpoint, being allied with Russia in light of this invasion. And logistically, Belarus accesses the Black Sea through a cave, right? So like, even if I decided I didn't care,

you know, the chances of it actually getting on the boat and making it to America is very low, right? And so as I've looked at other, I would love to make this in America for a similar amount, but that doesn't seem possible. In fact, I can't really find anywhere in the world that I can do it other than China. And so this, I think sometimes people think things are pure, like that someone has chosen the unconscious choice or the less conscious choice because they don't care.

When really there's actually a lot of decisions are choices between evils or choices between less than ideal circumstances. And I'm just curious, how do you think about that? Because sometimes you say, we're not going to carry that kind of thing. You put in blanket policies, but then other times I imagine you go, look, this amount of welfare or consciousness is better than the status quo, which is they don't care about it at all. Yeah, it's, you're in the area, what I call the shadesades of Grey, that exist everywhere. People want this ethical purity.

They want, it's good or evil. And so we're back to the whole binary thing. And if you view these things more as Shades of Grey and I continue them, and there is no ultimately ethical perfection that we, Enievous, can achieve or attain attain because they're always in a complex, we're in a complex interdependent world and the reality is every day we're doing some things that have negative effects. If you were to trace it back, we're not conscious of it most of the time.

You're using a great example by the way of the whole, I think my answer would be, you know Ryan, I don't think that'll have that much effect on the Russian economy. Yeah, he should just let it go. And there, but there are other areas where things, you know, could have bigger impacts. And so that's why each person has to be a moral agent and make these decisions for themselves. And maybe have a little more tolerance in patience with other people since none of us are the absolute paragon or virtue.

We have our own sins. I think Jesus said the person who had the, throw the first stone who had, has no sense and nobody could throw the stone, right? Jesus, sorry, Seneca said something like, don't point out the pimple on somebody else when you yourself are covered in sores. Yes, that's a good, that's a good metaphor too.

It is, it's tricky though, right? Because obviously, yes, you're right. I'm not a, this is an exon mobile deciding not to do business with Russia or something're right. I'm not a, this is an exon mobile deciding not to do business with Russia or something, right? But, cumatively, it was what we were talking about earlier. Cumatively, individual impacts, individual decisions make a big impact.

I was just reading this book, Fairy the Chains, about the abolitionist movement in Britain, which abolished the slave trade. And I hadn't been aware that there was basically people in Britain, you know, that the slave trade was driven by their sweet tooth. They liked sugar in their coffee and their tea, and that was made in these brutal slave plantations in the British colonies all over the Caribbean. And part of what leads to the abolishment

of the slave trade is this sugar boycott. And the individual, like that somebody made that, I was fascinated, somebody made that link, publicized it, and it created a transformative moment in world history that rippled through not just the British Empire, but all of the world. transformative moment in world history that rippled through not just the British Empire, but all of the world. And so that, I think, again, the tension between, do I matter as an individual and, you know,

is it the right or wrong thing to do? I think that's a tricky balance. It is. And I didn't read that particular book, but I was, I'm very aware of that story and that narrative. And so that's a very good example. That of course, part of it is, in modern language, that one viral. And it caught on with the aristocrats who felt uneasy about slavery.

And it also gave them something that wasn't a huge sacrifice to be able to do that made them help them feel virtuous. That they were not supporting, they were put, it's a sense of virtue signaling in a way. It's like, I'm boycotting sugar. You're consuming it, and that means you probably don't care about slavery in the slave trade. And so that puts a lot of pressure on the community itself. And probably hypocrisy came about

where people would say, I am standing with you and they were sneaking sugar into their tea anyway. But it's a great example. And that's a couple of hundred years old. So it's just to go to show you that the ripple effects that we were talking about earlier, you can see throughout all history and that's a great example of it. Yeah, and there's an interesting question for the Stokes, obviously also the Stokes exist in a society that was slave-based.

But there's this question, like Sennaka is obscenely rich, like maybe the richest man in Rome other than the emperor in his time, but he's writing this beautiful books about philosophy and austerity and restraint. And there was the charge even then that he was apocritical, but I think he would have liked your joke about the homage that vice plays to virtue. But what he said is, there's no problem being rich. It's not a contradiction to philosophy. He says, provided that your money is not stained with blood. And again, hypocrisy, he is a lot of his money

comes from his service to Nero. So it probably was stained with blood. But I do like that standard. Like I think we often demonize success as if anyone who is successful must have done something wrong. Instead of what we should probably be doing is celebrate the least blood stained success. We should be holding up people who manage to be successful, become rich, or build something

big and significant that was as close to win, win, win as possible, that was as little, as far away from zero sum as they were able to be in their industry. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because it triggers a few thoughts here. First of all, if you go back to the time Cynica was alive, they had markets, but they did not have a market economy. And I think the case could be made that Cynica's wealth was based on exploitation at the slavery. And so it was an unethical wealth. But that type of bipolar thinking is far less applicable in modern capitalistic society in places like the United States, where wealth is created by not stealing it or exploiting

slaves, and I don't want to have an argument about Marx's labor theory of value at this time. But it's based on creating value for customers. Yeah. And somebody like Elon Musk, who's, well, Musk is a tricky case because he did get government subsidies. Yeah. Let's take an easier case, warn Buffett. He did not steal money from anybody to become wealthy. He was a brilliant allocator of capital. And he was investing in companies that were creating value for customers and growing and his wealth grew along with their success. So it was not, once you move away from the, somebody's, we have this fixed, many people have this

view that, like, there's this pie. And so somebody like Elon Musk or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, they went, they're greedy. They just went in and cut a big piece of pie. And that left smaller pieces of pie for everybody else. So we got to take that money away from them because, you know, they're just greedy. And that's not the way it works. It's not this fixed pie. That's the wrong metaphor. It's this, they're growing the pie by creating innovations that change our lives for the better. In the case of Elon Musk, I mean, the ripple effects of what Tesla is doing in the world are profound. And SpaceX, which people don't even realize, may even have a bigger impact in the world

than Tesla has had, primarily because of his global internet operation that SpaceX has created, like we saw utilizing in Ukraine right now, that promises high-bands internet service wherever you are in the world. So in places like Africa, they don't have to build an infrastructure of cell towers or land lines all across their country. They can just take easy satellites and get a high bandwidth experience for both telephony as well as the internet.

That's a huge, huge impact that Elon Musk is having. He's creating value for literally billions of people. And God, nobody had stolen the money from him. They traded because it was in their self-interest to do so. And that has created these ripple effects of win, win, win, all through the supply chain. So I would say somebody like Warren, I'm sorry, Elon Musk has done amazing amount of good in the world, although'm sorry, Elon Musk is done, amazing amount of good

in the world, although he's frequently not credited for that because people were envious and resent wealth. But it's different. I'm trying to argue that's different than Seneca's wealth back in a couple thousand years ago. Why do I try to talk to authors about this? We're not in competition with each other. Like, what we're in competition with is people not reading.

Your success, my success, anything that gets people reading books is better for all of us as authors. Yes, theoretically, people can only read so many books. But like, our first battle, the most important battle is with people not interested in reading, not with each other. We're not battling for, are they going to read my book, are they going to read your book? I want them to read your book, right? It's good for me that they read your book, just like it's good for you if they read my book. That's true. I think the reason authors feel competitive with each other are simply ego about who's

more famous, who sold more books, who stole whose ideas. That's my idea. Well, you know, ideas are kind of in the public domain, so ones that are out there. So I just think that's a lot of that's ego-driven, but I agree with you. The fact of the matter is, is that you and I both, you've authored more books thandriven, but I agree with you. The fact of the matter is, you and I both, you've authored more books than I, but I've got four of them out there, and I've got fifth in the works.

And I've read one and a half of your books, and those have enriched my life. I'm sure, of course, stillness is a key, is a great book. I've, you know how much I can tell I like a book. I tend to underline as I read and passage I think are important and I can say as your books heavily marked up. I love that.

Yeah. So I was thinking another sort of standard too, like how do you judge whether you're successful or not? There's an, in East Austin, the yellow jacket track. It's like an old high school that closed down, but Hollywood Henderson, the football player went to that high school, and then he lost all his money

when he was in professional football, then he won the lottery. Anyways, he paid to refurbish the track, right? So he paid to refurbish the track. And so it's the Hollywood Henderson track or whatever. And I run there sometimes. But he has this sign upurbish the track and so it's the Hollywood Henderson track or whatever and I run there sometimes But he has this sign up all around the track It's like don't litter like if you see someone littering says call me It doesn't say how I'm supposed to call him but it says to let him know

But then but then he has a big sign that just says leave this place better than you found it Right, which to me is I think a great way I would curious how you how you would connect that to their idea of conscious leadership or conscious capitalism. But to me that seems like a nice somewhat binary metric is like, did you, did you improve things that you were involved in or did you make them worse, did you extract from them or did you add value to them? I do think that's a good metaphor

and a good way to think about it. I'll tell you a story that had an impact, big impact on me when I heard this story 20 plus years ago. It's, you know who Buckminster Fuller was? Because he's not, he's been dead for a while so people are forgetting about him. But what people, he was a futurist and he has like published, he's got, I don't know, I don't know how

many patents he's got 100 patents and published maybe 25 books, a very influential guy, particularly when I was young in my in my 20s. He was world famous. And when I read this story of him, and what Mr. Fully when he was young, when he was about 30 years old, Ryan, he almost commended suicide. He got to the brink of it because he'd lost his daughter from spinal men in jihadists. His wife divorced him. He was in a deep depression. He was on welfare, living in Chicago.

He just thought, you know what? The life's not worth living he was gonna kill himself and Right before I think it was jump gonna jump off a bridge and before he did it. He kind of had this spiritual Awakening where it's like a An idea flashed into his brain and the idea was this how about instead of killing myself I Find out how much good one person can do in a lifetime. Wow.

And so he devoted the whole rest of his life to sort of maximizing the amount of value, the amount of goodness he could bring into the world. I read that and chills when I've done my spine, when I read that and I thought, I'm gonna do the exact same thing. So I've devoted my life to like, how much I thought I'm going to do the exact same thing. So I've devoted my life to like how much good can I do before I pass out of here?

And so I'm very conscious of trying to do good and all circumstances and all situations and then to think strategically about it, how can I have even a bigger impact than I've already had? And so that's a good standard to live your life by in my opinion. No, that's a great story. I love that. Do you know the story of the starfish washed up on the beach? I'm sure you've heard this one. It's kind of a cliche. Tell me again, a kid walks down to the beach and he sees like, there's been some storm

in thousands and thousands of starfish are washed up on the shore. There's like more than them that could possibly count. And so he's just to one by one starts throwing them back in the ocean. And this, you know, a wise adult comes up to him and says, you're not possibly going to be able to throw all these starfish back in the ocean. You know, why are you doing this? It doesn't even matter. And then the kid just looks at him and he says, it matters to the starfish. So that you can't possibly impact all of the things, but each individual person that you help or do good for,

that is a certainty. And I think the Stoics would say, that is in your control. It's out of your control to save all the starfish, but you could save one or two or five, and that's enough. It's better than the alternative, which is doing nothing because it's too big or systemic or structural. I hadn't heard that story before, believe it or not, but it's a heck of a good story.

And it is how we should act in the world. You don't have to transform the world. It's just how much good can you do. And if you save even one starfish, that's a good thing. Yeah. Because it's a good thing to the starfish. It may not save all the starfish, but one's better than nothing. I love it. Well, this is amazing. I love your stuff. Obviously, I'm a huge fan of whole foods. And if I, if I could leave you with one thought, it would be, we desperately need a whole foods in Bastrop. So if you could work on that, I would appreciate it. I'll tell you, I'll tell you a story about Bastrop, which is, that's where my mother was born. Really? My mother, my mother grew up in Bastrop, but we're talking about, she was born in 1923.

So Bass Drop, there was no 71 or anything like that back then. And it was just a little tiny town, and all she wanted to do was escape from Bass Drop. And it moved to Houston and went to Rice and met my father and they got married. But Bastrop, we've had family in Bastrop. I've all passed on now, but we used to go visit Bastrop when I was a little boy to visit her family that was still there. Did you ever go to Tracy's grocery store in Bastrop, the little drive-in grocery store? It opened in 1941.

I never have been there. Oh, it was for sale. I bought it with some friends. It's as little like historic sort of mini-mart right up on Main Street. And then I have a bookstore here too on Main Street also. That's where I'm talking to you from now. So you're living the the idealic small town life while you're living the idealic, small town life while you've kind of retreated like a good stoic would do to contemplate the world while doing good in your and having this influence outside of Bastrop. While the big city is only 30 to 40 minutes away. I think Bastrop's the little hidden gem in Austin because I can get to the city faster

than some people that live in Travis County, but then I've got, I've got like a little farm out here and my kids are basically wild animals and then we've got the little small talent, maybe everything too. Well, I got good news and bad news for you. Your property, the good news is your property values are going to increase radically. The bad news is with, with Elon Musk just opening up the gigafactory in the east. The growth in Austin is heading east.

So if you think about a place like LA now, and you have all these areas that we think of as just part of the, they used to be small towns like Glendale or Sherman Oaks or I've been to the whole foods in Glendale many many many many times. It used to live in the LA area? I did. Yeah I lived in Silver Lake. Silver Lake, we have a store in Silver Lake as well. So anyway I predict that 30 or 40 years from now, Bass Drops just gonna be seen as a distance suburb of the Austin Metro area. I think so too. It's gonna be all you on Musk

because they're also opening the building a boring company out in Bastrop County too. Very cool. And it looks like a Elon Musk is gonna be the owner of Twitter. Oh my God. I hope that's gonna to move here too. It's going to be a whole thing. You think Twitter will move to all of that?

No, I'm saying if he buys it, is he going to move that here too? It's going to be, oh, gosh, you know, he might. He really might. So, hey, there's a guy that we talked about before though that is having this massive impact on the world. And so you can never say that individuals don't matter because they clearly do matter, just a matter of degree.

Well, likewise, I don't think he would be coming here if you hadn't for the last almost 40 years been transforming Austin into a place that people want to come in an ecosystem. And I also had Michael Dell on the two of you of our two of the tent poles of this wonderful city that I love very much. You know, Michael Dell and I,

I'm a little older than Michael, but we both grew up, we're in the same high school, and we grew up, you know, within about, I don't know, less than a mile of each other. Crazy. I didn't know.

I knew I had been a little kid when I was, you know, going to high school, but it's, yeah, it's interesting Michael's, I mean, he's one of my, I know Michael. He's one of my heroes. He's done a lot of good in the world. He's great He's great. Well, I love I don't do I I thought I had it here He gave me a great little mantra that I talked about please but never satisfied is I think a great way to think about Personal growth and success and all of that Isn't that kind of the title of his new book play nice, but win is I think a great way to think about personal growth and success and all of that.

Isn't that kind of the title of his new book? Play Nice but Win. Play Nice but Win, yes, exactly. You've got a bunch of those. Those are great. Well, those are good aphorism, both of them. I think so too. John, this was amazing and thank you so much.

All right, Ryan, I hope we get together sometime in person and continue our conversation. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoog podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Apple podcasts.