The Joe Rogan Experience - #1569 - John Mackey

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

John Mackey is the CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods Market, co-founder of the nonprofit Conscious Capitalism, Inc., and co-author of Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello, John. Hey, Joe. Nice to meet you. Likewise. Thank you for welcoming me to Austin. Thanks for the food.

No one's ever brought me food here. I'm a grocer. That's what I do. I know, but you brought me actual frozen meat, so thank you very much. Frozen meat, some vegan cheese. Yeah, that will go to friends. It's really good. It's really good.

Does it taste good, or is it good for you? Both. It's just made strictly out of almonds. That's all that's there. Oh, really? Yeah, taste it. It's a cream cheese with chives in it. It's delicious.

I really just like almonds. Can I just have almonds? You can, but you'll like the cheese. Give it a try. I know you're an open-minded man. Yeah, I am. I'll try your vegan cheese. Okay.

But you're sending me mixed signals. You gave me frozen elk meat and vegan cheese. I'm covering all bases. What I want to talk to you about, well, first of all, you have a book. The book is Conscious Capitalism. No, that book that's out is Conscious Leadership, which is a sequel to, you already have that book. Right, but I have this one right here. Yeah, because I brought that today.

And Conscious Leadership, a sequel to Conscious Capitalism. Right. That, for a lot of people, that's an oxymoron. That's jumbo shrimp or military intelligence, right? Conscious capitalism. Today, in this day and age, this very strange time, there's a large segment. I shouldn't say a large segment, but it's a very squeaky wheel. There's a segment of our culture that thinks that capitalism is evil.

Yeah, I'm not in that classification. In fact, I think the opposite. I think capitalism is the greatest thing humanity has ever done. If you go back just 200 years ago, when capitalism was really getting going, 94% of the people alive on the planet Earth lived on less than $2 a day. And that's adjusted for inflation. 94%.'s under 10 if you go back 200 years ago the average lifespan was 30 now it's 72.6 we're heading and in advanced countries it's about 80 illiteracy rates 200 years ago where 88 of the world couldn't read now it's down to 12 but can you attribute that solely to capitalism or wouldn't you attribute that to innovation and technology? That's the right name for capitalism.

Karl Marx called it capitalism. What it really is, a better name, which we talked about in Conscious Leadership, is innovationism. Continuous innovation is how humanity progresses. But it's business that takes the innovations of science and puts them into forms that create value for other people. So it's been capitalism or innovationism that's lifted humanity out of the dirt, that's transforming our world. Even as we speak, it's amazing just what's happened in the last – in my lifetime, it's astounding all the progress that humanity has made. And we're going through a tough year right now, So it doesn't work in a perfect linear line, but the trend lines are clear. The book I always try to get everybody to read is Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now. You

ever taken a look at that book? No, I haven't, but I'm a big fan of a lot of his work. Yeah. That book just documents, it's just unbelievable how he documents progress since the enlightenment it's incredible the the problem that a lot of people have with capitalism is they they attribute capitalism to to greed they attribute greed and the problems of the world and environmental destruction and ignoring climate change and they attribute that to capitalism and they think that the way out of this is socialism some type of socialism but in my opinion the people that are saying that they i don't think they i don't i don't think there's anything wrong with contributing and contributing to a better community in terms of making health care

more affordable or free making education more affordable or free but you gotta human beings need incentives in order to perform and that's that's just human nature whether we like it or not if you want a system that allows for a continual progress of innovation, like constant innovation. You've got to give people incentives to do that. They have to incentive. Just the human animal strives to achieve for whatever reason. Totally agree.

I mean, it's not like socialism hasn't been tried. Yeah. In the last 100 years, 42 countries have tried socialism, and there have been 42 failures. Isn't it amazing that it's still popular? Because people just believe, well, because a new generation doesn't know their history. Yeah. And they just believe it hasn't been done right yet.

Yes. It'll this time, give me the power and I'll make sure it gets done right. Yeah. But it can't be done right. It's intrinsically flawed. And they fall back on the Scandinavian argument. What about Sweden and Denmark and Norway? But those, if you look at the economic freedom index, those are some of the most capitalistic countries in the world. In the economic freedom index, for example, Denmark's

listed one place below the United States. It's like number 12. Sweden's like number 20. United States is like number 13 or 14. So Iceland is the freest of those Scandinavian countries. So Sweden's held up as an example, but what people don't realize is the corporate income taxes in Sweden are only 21%. They have no inheritance taxes at all. They have universal vouchers for education, so free competition in education, not a monopoly. They are probably in a lot of ways more capitalistic than Americans are. So what is it that they point to when they point to these Scandinavian countries? What are they using as an example of them being a shining light of socialism? In some sense, they're still stuck in the 60s when Sweden did an experiment with

socialism before it moved away from it. They're still living in the 60s. And yet they tried it and their economy tanked. What did they try? How'd they try it? They socialized industry. They had government own the means of productions in most of these large corporations. And they had very high business taxes. And a lot of people like Beyond Borg is a good example. It was driven out of Sweden. Or Ingmar Bergman driven out for unbelievably high taxes. So, hey, just like you've been driven out of California.

Yeah, I wasn't driven out of it because of that. If California was still open the way Texas is, I would have stayed. I saw the writing on the wall with many things. One of them was that they were closing restaurants and bars and comedy clubs, and they weren't closing them in other states. And I didn't think that they were recognizing that there's an impact health-wise, but there's also a health impact if you destroy the economy. And that impact, like you're not, people that get COVID, most people survive. When your economy tanks and 40 plus percent of your businesses are gone, I don't think economically you're going to bounce back nearly as well i think i think it's a very dangerous place to be like los angeles right now if you're a business owner it's a dangerous place to be because all of a sudden governors

are acting like autocrats and they're they're i mean there was a recent ruling where he lost in court because he's passing legislation on his own. He's making mandates on his own that the rest of the state doesn't agree with and they're not going through the normal process. And they've stopped him from doing that now. But look, they still just imposed a curfew in Los Angeles of 10 p.m. Just a random curfew.

How is that stopping? All you're doing is limiting people. You're limiting... There's no emphasis whatsoever on strengthening people's immune system or on health, and all this emphasis on tanking the economy, all this emphasis on closing businesses down. And I just saw the writing on the wall,

and I'm like, this place is fucking doomed i think you're i think you're telling the truth there joe i agree i just can't believe that see before it didn't matter that much who your governor was or who your mayor was when everything was going well people didn't think about it that much you know you would like oh you know the mayor whatever the fuck his name is he's kind of goofy who cares let's go to work and you would just do your normal thing go this is america how bad can they fuck this up and then you realize in time of crisis when they assume these powers that they never had before and then you realize how insanely hypocritical they are well thankfully our governor the governor of california not my governor anymore i got a texas license now give me some knuckles congratulations thank you um but when they caught him at that restaurant the french laundry right

you know eating with no mask on inside no social distancing all the things that he tells everybody do tells everybody to put a mask on in between your bites of food. And he's not doing it himself. You're like, okay. This is exactly like his aunt, Nancy Pelosi, when she got busted going to a beauty parlor with no mask on while they were all closed down. It's rules for you, but not rules for them.

And it's disgusting. Right. I mean, is it really about the COVID or is it about the rules? I mean, that's really the question. Well, human beings love telling people what to do. They do. They really do. And if they have a reason where they can justify that,

that it seems feasible, like COVID, then they just start imposing those rules. And if people are frightened, they're more likely to go along with those rules too. Imagine if instead of doing what they did, imagine if they spent a lot of time telling people how to strengthen their immune system. Imagine if they distributed free vitamins. Imagine if they put money into keeping these hospitals well-staffed, hired more people,

and maybe even possibly tried to talk about opening up alternative hospitals if there was some overflow, but allowed people to go to work, told people, look, wear your mask, social distance, take care of your health, take your fight, do all these things. But we can't fucking tank the economy for nine months and not expect disaster. Well, we actually have some good examples out there. And even though it gets a lot of criticism, the way Sweden handled it is probably, again, more aligned with how America might have handled it in the previous decades. Is that comparable, though? Because Sweden is so small in comparison. I mean, you have Stockholm, you have some cities, but you have all these,

like, small villages. And people are generally healthier there too. I think it's comparable in the sense that in general, people are the best judges for what's best for themselves. I mean, government can give advice. They made recommendations to people in Sweden. They just didn't coerce them. They just didn't force them to have a curfew here. Their kids went to school and and um people in general people can make good decisions for themselves and their families they're the ones

that should be making the decisions not the government a hundred percent i couldn't agree more and that is the difference between the way texas approached this and the way california did that's what drove me out of california yeah the high taxes are stupid, but I liked living there. All my friends were there. Because where is it more beautiful in the whole world than California? It's an amazing climate. It's just a very, very incredibly beautiful place.

I got tired of running from fires, too. Well, that's true. I love to visit California, but I wouldn't want to live there. The comedy community there is pretty awesome. It's the Comedy Store and the Improv. I mean, it's just two of the best clubs in the world, and they're right in this one city. And the community of comedians is just fantastic.

And the fact that they closed all that down. Was it the Silicon Valley, so to speak, of comedy? Maybe better, yeah. Because Silicon Valley is, I mean, there's other parts of the world that have technology hubs, right? There's not really another comedy hub other than New York. Chicago? Not really, no.

Chicago has Second City, which is an improv hub. It's different. There's a great history of sketch comedy out of there, of course. Second City is where Belushi came from and a lot of know, Belushi came from, and a lot of great sketch comedians came from. But as far as stand-up, it's really L.A. and New York.

It used to be Boston had a big part of it, and Boston still is a small community. Austin has, right here, Austin, Texas, has a small community. It's always been very good. Like, Kenneson and Hicks. Hicks actually came out of here. Have you done stand-up in Austin here? Yeah, I have.

Yeah, I did Stubbs Barbecue at Chappelle last week. There you go. And then I did Vulcan Gas Company the week before. So, yeah, I'm getting rolling again. Ultimately, I'm going to open up a club here. So you still love doing stand-up? It's the most fun. It's the most fun, John.

I know I'm not interviewing you, but when you were like a kid, were you the class clown? No. That came later? Yeah. Yeah. You were a good boy? No, I wasn't a good boy at all. Most of my friends thought I was crazy. They never thought I was going to be a comedian. If you talk to the people that I went to high school with. You told me earlier that comedians, as a general rule, are kind of screwed up. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. As a general rule, to want to do that, to want to humiliate yourself, get on stage. And the failure, the bombing, is some of the most intense emotional pain a person can never subject themselves to or be subjected to. Is it worse than getting rejected by a girl that you're in love with? It's like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. That's how I usually describe it. But it's different and worse because some guys would probably like doing that. There's some people that would be like, watch, Mom.

This is who I am. And then they would enjoy it. Get over it, Mom. Yeah, get over it, Mom. No one likes bombing. Somebody might like sucking a thousand dicks in over it, Mom. No one likes bombing. Somebody might like sucking a thousand dicks for their mom. No one likes bombing. It's just an awful feeling.

Because you're demanding attention, and you don't deserve it. And the audience is like, you don't deserve this attention. And you know you don't deserve it, so you have this deep self-hate. But you have to get through that to get good at it. It's an inevitable part of the whole process of doing stand-up. You kind of sync up with the audience. Can you kind of tell what's going to land that night? Do you change your show, so to speak, as you pick up the feeling in the audience? You move around a little depending upon how you feel and how they feel. But you have an

act and your act is... But you have a lot of different things, a lot of things you could do. Yeah, there's a lot of things you talk about. I mean, as you say, I don't think this joke's going to land with this particular audience. No, sometimes I'll force feed them. They need to hear this.

It's, you know, it gives you an opportunity to try to figure out a better way to word it or a better way to justify your position or a softer way to land it. You know, it's like there's a lot of different weird things that are going on when you're doing comedy. Comedy is kind of like mass hypnosis. That's what it's like. You know, I do a lot of public speaking. So I have learned that there's, you know, you have to sync up with the audience. And I can just tell whether this is going to land well with this particular group or whether it's not.

And I sort of adjust on the fly. I still have a speech I'm going to give, but I do alter it as I go along. I shorten some stuff, lengthen other stuff, and I substitute if I think that's going to bomb out. Well, I think public speaking, like what you're doing when you're standing up and talking about a very particular subject, is almost more open-ended because you really never know what kind of crowd you're going to get, whether they're going to be in a good mood or a bad mood, whether they're bored or hot or cold. When you go to to see comedy generally people go there because they want to have fun so they have a good perspective when they get there like i've come here to have fun

laugh i hope these comedians are funny like you go there with like a little bit of a smile on your face when you sit down like here we go it's gonna be fun yeah and so they have a predisposition to want to laugh anyway yes they're not going there to judge you they're going there to laugh and some people are but those people are you know that they already didn't like you before they went there or that you know there's some people that think they're gonna oh i'm gonna go and i'm gonna heckle i'm gonna show them what's up there's this kind of people but generally clubs kick those people out really uh most people that come to comedy clubs they go because it's fun look i still love comedy as a as an audience member i enjoy it as a customer it's fun i love watching great comedians it's it feels good to laugh i love

i love their creativity do you learn a lot from other comedians yeah you do yeah you do you learn what makes you laugh you're like sometimes i'll i'll see someone performing and it'll give it'll inspire me i'm like wow that guy really put a lot into that. Or, wow, her writing is so clever. And it'll fire up your neurons. It'll get you excited. Do you do all your own writing? Yes.

Yeah, I do all my own writing. Is that common or unusual? Most comedians do that, yeah. There's only a few comics. Like occasionally... Am I giving you any material right now, Joe? No, not yet. Okay, good.

Maybe. It'll happen. Occasionally, comedians will write taglines for each other. Like Michelle Wolf gave me a great tagline after we did a show together the other night. She gave me a really nice tagline. I was like, oh, right when she said it. What was it? That's nice.

It's a secret? I'll tell you later. I have to pay to go to the club. No, I'll tell you. I just don't want to say it online. All off. I didn't know you censored yourself when you were doing the show. I'm not censoring myself, John.

Why are you making me uncomfortable? You're making me sensitive. Austin's a particularly good place to do comedy because there's a great history of stand-up comedy in Texas. Like, Kinnison, who's arguably one of the greatest of all time, you know, this is where he cut his teeth. This is where it all went together for him. So, Austin, like, when I first started doing stand-up, I was selling out in Houston before I was selling out anywhere.

Because for whatever reason, they had this longing for that kind of raw comedy that you really, it's hard to get in a lot of places. That are maybe a little bit too politically correct. Like, there's certain places where they're so woke. They're almost like they want to laugh, but they want to call you out on your comedy almost as much as they want to laugh. And they don't want to get criticized for laughing on something that they shouldn't laugh at, right? Yeah. We were talking about this before the show.

They should go in disguise. Yeah, right. Like a Groucho Marx nose. Exactly. Exactly. Glasses and mustache. Exactly. Well, you could get some great disguises today.

You know, like the prosthetics and all the stuff that they can do today. Yeah. If you want to go to a comedy show and just laugh at the most horrible shit. Maybe some of them are doing that. I don't think they are, John. I don't think people think that far in advance. Maybe like a very, very small percentage of the population. Have you been to a lot of stand-up comedy?

I haven't. No? I confess. I've just been working my ass off for a long time. I think it would be interesting for you just from the perspective of the fact that you do a lot of these public speaking gigs. You know, like I think whenever you get the chance to see someone else perform in a different way. I like going to see musicians because i have zero talent i have no musical talent at all so when i go to see a musician i can just enjoy it solely as an audience member

i don't have to remove myself from the like like as a fellow comic i'll judge someone's delivery or timing even though i'm trying to just enjoy it you're there's always going to be a part of you that's like oh this is kind of clunky like uh why is he setting it up like this but when you go to see music i could just enjoy someone performing i think i get something out of that i'm gonna give it another try i'll tell you i'll tell you when I'm in town next. Back to the subject of capitalism. Capitalism and Marxism and socialism. Right now, we're in a wave of this, right?

It's become more popular now. I would say over the last, particularly during the Trump administration, the concept of socialism, at least, has become more publicly discussed than any time that I can remember in my life. Why do you think that is? I think it's because the generation that's coming up is, I mean, you have to understand the academic community is, I always say the intellectuals have always been the enemy of business, certainly the enemy of capitalism. But why is that?

I think because in a market society, which has been rare in history, we haven't mostly had market societies, but they're not very important in a market society. The intellectuals aren't very important? Generally not as important, no. But aren't they the ones that inspire the minds of the people that create and maybe innovate in the industry? They don't have the same social status that the entrepreneurs have. Oh.

Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. So you think it's an ego issue? The social status issue? Think about it this way. You're going to school, okay? And the people that end up teaching in the universities were always the smartest kids in the school generally. And they did well in school. I mean, smart in terms of doing well in school. And they go on to college and then they go and get a PhD and then they, that's all they've known is school. That's been their universe, right? And they excelled at it. And they were smarter than the other kids in school. And now these other kids, they go to

college and they get a degree in business and they're in a fraternity and they make a lot of friends and relationships and they make more money than the intellectuals do. And that seems like that's completely unfair. It's an unjust world that the less smart people are making more money than the smart people do. And they have more status in the society. And I think that's underlying it is a resentment or an envy of a society that doesn't judge them to be as important as they judge themselves. That's interesting, but I think it's a very flawed perspective. And first of all the the term smart is a weird term i said smart in terms of school i didn't say in terms of street smarts or ability

to do things to connect with people uh there's emotional intelligence i'm merely saying they're good at taking tests writing papers uh abstracting thoughts essentially yeah but this is what i'm saying that just the term smart it's almost like the problem is it's like a blanket term right it's like drugs you know like applies to a bunch of different things that don't necessarily seem to be related but the people that are interested in that pursue that the fact that they can't understand that there's an, like Elon Musk is a great example. If you don't think Elon Musk is intelligent, you're either, you're not very intelligent yourself,

you don't think Elon Musk is intelligent. You're delusional or you're a liar or you're in denial. It's one of those things. There's something wrong with the way you think. He's clearly intelligent, but there's people that call him a fool and they're like the guy's running like four different businesses simultaneously they're all successful and he's innovating with when it comes to space travel in a way that you would

assume that someone have to dedicate most of their life just singularly to that task to be able to figure out past nasa how to shoot a rocket up into space and have it land and then reuse it. No one's been able to do that besides him or up until he did it. And I think Jeff Bezos' company is doing the same thing. Yeah. Blue Origin. Yeah.

They're obviously two of the great entrepreneurs of this particular era. But I don't think Jeff Bezos is actually engineering these things. But if you think about it, the intellectuals have always disliked business. They've always discriminated against the merchant classes, the Jews in the West, Chinese in the East. There's really been no historical period where intellectuals praised business. Maybe a little bit around the time of Adam Smith up until probably Ricardo and Malthus wrote in the early 19th century. For the most part, business people have been seen, they're disruptive. They change things. They upset the status quo. They innovate.

Well, a lot of people don't like innovations. It's threatening. It changes social status. It changes wealth relationships. It's almost like capitalism is like a genie that got out of the bottle. And they're trying very hard to stuff the genie that got out of the bottle, and they're trying very hard to stuff the genie back in the bottle as much as they can. And I think if you think about it that way, you'll understand we're never going to win the intellectuals over. I mean, I speak in universities all the time, and the students, I'm an entrepreneur, I self-identify that way. Students love when I talk about conscious capitalism. I say you can do good and you can do well. There's no contradiction here. You're not,

you're the good guys here. You're not the bad guys. Do you debate people about this? I do. I've debated a number of socialists. And what is their primary argument? Their primary argument is, is that business is greedy and selfish. And it's about motivations, that business people have the wrong motivations. In a lot of ways, conscious capitalism is an answer to that. It's a complete answer to that because in the book and in Conscious Leadership as well, we're basically arguing that business isn't primarily about maximizing profits. Business is primarily about creating value for other people. And through creating value for other people, you do make a

profit, but it's the value creation that comes first. The profits come second in exchange, right? And it's almost, if you are creating value, then you are profitable. And then you can reinvest those profits and you have this upwards spiral. So business has this potential for higher purpose. It's not primarily about greed. Greed is found in human nature, Joe. It's not just found in business people. There are plenty of greedy governmental officials, plenty of greedy politicians, greedy lawyers.

Greed is endemic to the human nature. Business people either have no more or no less than it. It's just part of who we are. Has anyone ever laid it out in a way that's very compelling? Like when you have these debates with socialists and someone, has anyone ever laid it out in a way where they have a point where you see their point? The best way to do a debate is to completely understand the other side's position. Yeah. Understand it as good or better than they understand it. And so I've read widely in socialistic literature.

I think I do understand it. It's a type of utopianism. It's an attempt to change human nature. If we would all love each other and if we'd all share equally, then the world would be a better place. And, hey, guess what? It probably would be if we were naturally that way, but we're not naturally that way. We look first generally for ourselves and our own families

and then our growing circle of relationships that we develop. We want, we don't, it's not natural to, it's natural to want your own children to have advantages. That's just human nature to want your children to flourish because you raise them, you love them. And somehow or another to say that's unfair is cutting against human nature. People are always going to look for advantages or privileges, so to speak, for their children. Yeah, people don't like when people have advantages and have victories because then someone has to lose. And when someone loses, they equate that someone losing with a bad feeling, with that person being victimized. So here's a big idea we talk about

in Conscious Leadership. We have a chapter called Find Win-Win-Win Solutions. The metaphors that we use to think about society tend to be very binary, good versus evil, light versus darkness, win versus lose. And so they tend to think of business as a win-lose game. Somebody wins and somebody else is losing. But the beauty of capitalism is it's a win-win-win game. It's an infinite game. It's a game because the customers are winning or they wouldn't trade. The employees are winning. How are the customers winning? They're getting products and services and there's competition to make those services and products better. The employees are winning because they have jobs and opportunities to grow.

Benefits are paid and they do that voluntarily, not forced to work for any particular company. They do it because they think it's in their best interest. Win for the employees. The suppliers who are trading with the business, they're winning as well, or they wouldn't make the exchanges. Investors are winning, or they wouldn't make the investments. And the larger society is winning because business is the engine that creates all the money that goes into nonprofits and governments. Without business, there is no government and there is no nonprofit sector because those are ultimately supplied through what business creates. So business is a win-win-win game. All of these stakeholders are winning. And that's why capitalism lifts society up. Socialism is an attempt to reverse

that back to a win-lose game. And that's why it always fails. And that's why capitalism always wins. How does it attempt to bring it back to a win-lose game? In what way? The ones that are winning, so to speak, the business people are clamped down. So they're not allowed to win. It's like, we're going to take your success and we're going to redistribute it. So that, as again, you said earlier on, incentives matter.

But we're going to take away the incentives for business to really flourish and succeed. They should do it from altruistic reasons. And we may do some things for altruistic reasons, but you cannot build a society around it. When you're talking about win-win-win, this is a very, in many ways, it's, I see what you're saying, but there are things that are negative that are associated with profit and innovation and particularly expanding industry, right? Particularly environmental impacts. Like when you talk, when you say win, win, win, like there's, there's very rarely when you're, especially when you're dealing with creating and designing and building things,

you've got a negative impact in some way environmentally. Two points. First of all, historically, socialism has been far worse polluter than in capitalist countries. Well, if you just look at the environmental destruction that the Soviet Union left behind it, it was a complete disaster. Right, but this is socialism done wrong, John. We're going to do it right here. Who has done it right, Joe?

No one. No one's done it right. But the Soviet Union is a bad example because Stalin was— Yeah, but all of Eastern Europe. There's no incentive to protect the common good in socialism, and they don't. When the government has a monopoly of all decision and power making, they don't tend to look out for the environment. That's one of the myths.

You also take away agency from people. And you take away their desire to improve and do better. And without incentive, people just don't perform the same way. But the beautiful thing about business, let's concede a partial truth to what you said, that there will be unintended negative consequences, as you say, environmentally. Well, that's why you have to regulate business to a certain extent. That's why you have to make people responsible for their environmental pollutants. And because business innovates and has an incentive to innovate,

business can innovate and create solutions to those environmental problems. Okay, let me stop you there for a second. When you say make people responsible for their environmental pollutants, then we're going to have to deal with another aspect of capitalism and that's the effect that special interest groups and lobbyists have on politicians because they create laws that shield these big businesses from consequences from these negative actions. So by saying that they have to clean up their problem, the only way that's ever going to happen is if they're not protected. If they don't use that influence and money. Totally agree.

So this is where I think a lot of people have a valid argument against capitalism. Capitalism has kind of fucked over our system of government in a way because money has gotten so deeply involved with super PACs and lobbyists. And there's so much money involved that it changes the way we govern things. Is that a flaw of capitalism or is that a flaw of government? I think it's a flaw of government, but that government has been influenced by capitalism, by capitalism's desire for universal growth, for constant growth.

The sad truth is that humanity is not perfectible. We can never create the perfect system. And the attempt to create the perfect system, the perfect seem to me the good. Capitalism is not perfect. It does not, because human choices and what people want varies. Capitalism will sell cigarettes to people

because that's what people want. It gives them pleasure, but it's bad for their health. But they're giving people what people want. It gives them pleasure, but it's bad for their health. But they're giving people what they want. It's the same thing in any type of externality. That's not deliberately done to harm the society. It's sort of a byproduct. Right, but this is why win-win-win doesn't really work. It's not really win-win-win.

It's win most of the time, but with some negative consequences that are better than the alternative. Right? win. It's win most of the time, but with some negative consequences that are better than the alternative, right? But what you strive for is to take those externalities or those negative consequences and try to, through good government, to minimize them or lessen them. I'll give you an example. So you used to live in LA. Well, when I went to LA back in the early 80s, it was like going to New Delhi today. I couldn't see. My lungs hurt less than 24 hours. Right. But through good regulations, the air in L.A. is a fraction as polluted as it was 40 years ago.

We have been able to clean it up. That is an example of how you can take the worst impacts of industrialization and ameliorate them or lessen them. take the worst impacts of industrialization and ameliorate them or lessen them. What do you think about the government of LA's decision or the governor of California, rather,'s decision to eliminate all sales of combustion engine cars after 2035? It's easy to... My first thought is that a lot of times people make these proclamations in the future that they'll never be around to see the ultimate that actually realized, meaning that it'll be somebody else's problem then. So a politician will make promises and claims for the future that they won't themselves ever deliver on. So I think that's well-intentioned in terms of lessening environmental externalities from the internal combustion engine or from carbon production. However, is it realistic?

Is it possible? I don't think so. Well, there's also people that argue that it's not even well-intentioned. not even well-intentioned if you look at the actual impact of dragging minerals out of the ground to make these batteries that the production of electric cars it's it's not a zero impact on the environment at all it's like there's profound impacts there there is there's no escape you know humanity ever since humanity's been around joe it's had a negative impact on the environment. Right. If the hunters and gatherers wiped out most of the large animal species that they could

that were wild, they did it everywhere they went. They did it in Europe. They did it in North America. They did it in Australia. Agriculture is when you take a lot of land under cultivation, you're going to mow down the jungles

and if you're going to graze cattle, that's going to have a negative impact land under cultivation. You're going to mow down the jungles. And if you're going to graze cattle, that's going to have a negative impact on the environment. There's no escaping humanity's impact on the environment. It's always going to be there. Because guess what? We're part of the environment. The question is, you can create the win-win-win. You just can't create perfection. We solve some problems and when new problems come up, every generation has to begin to solve the problems that the parents couldn't solve. I agree with you that capitalism is a better alternative. And I agree because of all the things that we talked about, that it gives more incentive, that having innovation and having

these incentives creates better alternatives for people in terms of how to live their life. It gives them, in terms of medicine and in terms of what's going on in the medical industry, saving far more lives, fixing far more people that have been injured. I agree with all those things. I just think that sometimes we tend to want to put things

in these very simplistic packages, like win-win-win. And I don't necessarily think that's a... Win-win-win is, it's an ethical framework that you can use to think about situations. Like you and I've met today, so we can create win-wins between each other, you know, reciprocity. We can create win-wins between each other, you know, reciprocity. In fact, we're probably doing that right now. I have a new book that I'd love people to read. And you gave me some vegan cheese. And you're not paying me anything to come on your show, and I usually get a lot of money when I speak.

So it's a win-win. We're both gaining or we wouldn't be doing this exchange. Who pays you to speak? Like generally, is it these business conferences where people want to learn about? Mostly business conferences. So people want to learn how you did it? Trade shows, trade shows. Mostly, one guy told me one time, he said, he was really honest. He said, this was a few years ago, and he said, and there were like three pretty well-known business speakers, including myself. And I said, how did you get all three of us? And he said, you're all three were a lot cheaper than Hillary.

And the point is, and he told me, he said, look, it's simple. We have a trade show. They're mostly going to be on the floor. This is the one time I can get everybody in around the industry because they'll come in to hear you speak or to hear the other speakers so we're paying you to put to put butts in the seats so we can hold our trade show together so that's a win-win it's good for me they're paying me money it's good for them we're getting butts in the seat to listen to their to their trade shows feel and also you want to give people...

I want to get my message out there. Yeah. I want to get my message out there about conscious capitalism. This message, is this something that you have sort of developed over the years of arguing with people about it? No, it's mostly from what we did at Whole Foods because I had no background in business, right? I'm an entrepreneur.

You guys started here, right? I'm an entrepreneur. You guys started here, right? In Austin. That's right. I first started here over 42 years ago. Jesus, you look great. How old are you? 67. You look very good. Well, thank you. Tell you right now. See, look, win-win-win. We're a win-win relationship. You're eating all that Whole Foods foods. I'm eating all that healthy Whole Foods. That is one thing that you guys did do that's very interesting, right? You created a market where like, if you tell people, I go to Whole Foods, you know, people are like, oh, well, you care about your health. Like, it's synonymous with healthy foods, even in the name, Whole Foods. That was our brand when we were up and comer. And then when we got really rich, America loves the up and comer.

But then once you have become really successful and you're making a lot of money, they start to turn on you. Oh, no. Well, we became Whole Paycheck. Who said that? I don't know, but whoever did, I wish they – I never saw it. I never saw that until right now.

You just shit on yourself in a way that I never – all I heard was Whole Foods. I never heard Whole Paycheck. Then your team didn't do good research I have no team so does this when you sold to Amazon no no the whole paycheck thing has been around for a long time oh because whole paycheck meaning because it's so expensive yes because initially when we were up and comer you if you shop at Whole Foods you were showing everybody you were sort of you were with it yes and you were hip and cool and then the narrative went sour because it's like um you're a fool for shopping there because you can get the same food cheaper elsewhere so you're going to whole paycheck so the narrative

turned uh negative so to speak i still see that pretty much all the time although since our merger with amazon we've cut our prices many, many times. How'd you do that? Amazon allowed Whole Foods to think long-term again. We needed to cut our prices. But when you're a public company, if you're selling something for a dollar and you say, you know what, we need to sell this for 90 cents and you start selling it for 90 cents. In the short run, you just cut your sales 10% because you're not selling any more of it. Over the long-term, people will realize, man, I can get a good deal for 90 cents. I used not selling any more of it. Over the long term, people will realize, man, I can get a good deal for 90 cents. I used to pay a buck for it. And they start to shop with you more and your sales will go up. But when you're a public company and the market's very

short-term oriented, you pay a heavy price in the short term for reducing your prices. And Amazon is willing to think long-term and let Whole Foods do that. Does Jeff Bezos got that long money, son? think long term and let Whole Foods do that. Does Jeff Bezos got that long money, son? He has long money because he's had a lot of brilliant ideas and put together a pretty good team. Yeah. What keeps that guy working?

When you have $150 in the bank, $150 billion, what keeps you going? Well, most of it he has it in. He doesn't have it in the bank. He's got it in stock. He's got a few in the bank. He's got a few in the bank, probably. I feel like he could probably relax. I mean, I think the same thing that keeps me going at age 67. I mean, building something is great fun. Building Whole Foods, I mean,

I've got plenty of money, Joe. I don't need to work. I just like it. It's fun. Do you still run Whole Foods? Like, what's your relationship there? Still CEO. Still CEO. So you still work long hours? What's your relationship there? Still CEO. Still CEO. So you still work long hours? I don't work as long today as I did when I was in my 20s and 30s.

There's no question about it because I was putting a lot of 80-hour weeks in year after year after year after year. You know, it wasn't work. It was play. I was having a blast. It was fun. Elon Musk has famously said that if you're in a tech startup and you're not working 120-hour weeks, you won't succeed. Yeah. I've never been in a tech startup, so I can't speak for that.

The grocery business wasn't quite that hard, but we did put a lot of 80-hour weeks in. That seems like not a lot of time to sleep. And I'm a great believer in sleep. Sleep is how you— How many hours are left? How many hours are in a week? Well, let's see. There's 24 hours, 168 hours a week hours 168 hours a week 160 he's only got 48 hours to sleep that is ridiculous elon so that's well i don't know if you all you did was

that's 48 hours divided by seven that's almost seven hours a night if all you did was work and sleep i don't know when he eats maybe you have to eat when you're definitely have to eat i would recommend eating and you got to go to the bathroom sometime. You got to scratch that out. So you sleep seven hours a night and just stay at work. Yeah, I don't actually think... You have to put a lot of energy in to build anything. Yes.

But if you're doing it right, we talk a lot about conscious capitalism is about higher purpose. If you have a purpose that's animating you, it doesn't feel like work. It feels like play. It also attracts people to you that share that same purpose. This is something that I find very frustrating in people that don't recognize that it is incredibly difficult to build a successful business when they just want to tax the shit out of people and take all that money. Do you think it's easy to make something like Whole Foods? Do you think

it's easy to make a company like Tesla? Do you think it's easy to make a company like Tesla? Do you think it's easy? It's not easy. It's an insanely difficult task. That's why most people don't do it. But when someone does do it and they have become successful, then other people start looking at it and go, well, they have all this money. They should contribute more or they should do this or you know you're talking about uh some people have suggested some extraordinary tax rates in order to get us out of this current recession and uh then i talked to

business people and they say that is the exact wrong approach because that's actually going to stifle business and business is the only thing that's going to bring us out of this if you incentivize businesses to take risks and to be open and to make more profits, then more people are going to get jobs, then the economy bounces back. But if you give them a gigantic tax burden, they're going to be less likely to take chances. They're not going to be able to survive. And people on the outside who've never built a business like Whole Foods, they don't seem to see that. They don't see it. The reality is that people like an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, they're good capital allocators, so to speak.

They're not going to waste that money. so to speak. They're not going to waste that money. That money is going to be reinvested to create new and more dynamic businesses that will help, the innovations will help our society move forward. When you just redistribute that money, there's no more additional innovation. It's just being consumed. This whole idea that it's consumption that drives the economy is fundamentally a myth. It's mostly creativity and innovation that drives the economy is fundamentally a myth. It's mostly creativity and innovation that drives the economy. So we need to keep that money in the hands of our most creative people, which are entrepreneurs, the creative business people. And for some reason, I probably, I think because of envy, it seems so unfair. Again, we are in a win-lose model. If Jeff Bezos has $150 billion, then that's unfair.

In some sort of cosmic way, that's unfair. And they believe that somehow or another, others have less. So there's like this fixed pie, and Jeff took a big piece of it, or Elon Musk has taken a big piece of it. But it's not a fixed pie. That's the wrong metaphor. Innovationism is continually growing the pie. And in fact, humanity is demonstrably better off because of the capitalists, because of the innovationists. Let me play devil's advocate, because this is the way they look at it.

They would say, well, when you get to that sort of a position, like a Jeff Bezos, where you have $150 billion, you can exert your influence on people in a way that's detrimental to society. You've achieved too high of a position. You have too much power. And you will probably use that power to loosen regulations, to bribe politicians or influence politicians, and to get laws passed that are better for your business and stifle competition.

I think that's a powerful argument. And if and when it happens, you have to push back against it. You have to resist it. I think most business people are not doing that. I think I don't see that Jeff's trying to pass or I don't see Jeff trying to pass laws that favor Amazon. No, I don't think he is either. I'm not saying he is.

If he was, boy, would they come after him because he's balling so hard. They'd be like, that motherfucker he is doesn't have enough. But I know that when Whole Foods was – we were a public company for 25 years, and we had the government go after us a few times. For? Well, they tried to stop our – we tried to make an acquisition of a company called Wild Oats back in 2007. We actually made the acquisition, but the FTC tried to stop it. We ended up going into court with them. And we actually won in court.

And very interesting, the FTC has their own court. And after we won in the federal courts, they said, well, now we want to take you into our court, the administrative court. Oh, terrific. They have their own court? They have their own court. Don't you wish you had your own court? Take you to Whole Foods Court, motherfucker.

I'll take the FTC to the Whole Foods Court. Right? But, you know. Like the People's Court. You don't win in the FTC court. Don't you wish you had your own court? I'll take you to Whole Foods court, motherfucker. I'll take the FTC to the Whole Foods court. Right? But you know- At the People's Court. You don't win in the FTC court. You don't win in that court. Well, how many people have won in that court? I think when I looked at it at that time, this back in 2007, I think 46 of the 48 previous cases, this is from memory, so I could be wrong, had lost. They should go to court. So someone should take them to court. But here's the thing. I asked our attorney, so, okay, we're going to lose in this court, in their court. Then what happens? He says, well, then you appeal that back to the federal courts.

And then after that, if they want to, they would go to the Supreme Court if they'll take it. I said, how much is it going to cost me to just fight them in their own courts? They said, it's going to cost you $30 million in legal fees, not to mention a lot of executive time. And it's like, man, $30 million, and we know we're going to lose, and then we're going to have to spend another $30 million to go to the appeals and beyond that. The lawyers love it, by the way. Of course.

They want you to do it. Like divorce lawyers. Yes, exactly. They love it. That's how people fight. You guys should not talk. Don't talk this out. Don't try to work this out, because he's going to try to steal your money.

He's going to try to steal that money from you. He's a piece of shit. Look at him. Look at him. So again. So what did you do? You wound up settling? We ended up, yes.

We ended up, they let the merger go through and we agreed to sell off a bunch of stores. And that was the best we could do. How many stores did you have to sell off? We put up about 30 for sale i think that and we we only about about i don't know i think five or six we sold about five or six when someone is involved in that kind of a fucked up scenario where you bring them to ftc court where no one wins if you do win like ultimately a supreme court they should take it out of the salary of the people that forced you into doing that it should be worth it for you to go to war those

rich guys should make the government do that with all their power yeah you know if the rich guys are so powerful how come we have such high tax rates uh because you make a lot of money but don't you shield it didn't donald trump pay like 700 bucks in taxes? I don't know what he paid in taxes because we never actually saw his. We just heard what the New York Times said he paid, but we don't really know for sure because we never really saw the taxes. Well, the New York Times would never lie. But.

Of course not. Isn't that funny that that's a funny thing to say now? Boy, that used to be. If you said that in 1980, people would agree with agree with you depends on how you say it to today well there's a lot of dummies that think the new york times never lie today but they've been caught lying unfortunately there's there's a problem with journalism in particular today and it's that it's not just journalism now it's a business that is sort of in a very fucked up place where sensationalism is very important to the business model. Yeah. The click throughs, the click baits.

It's very important. It's very important. Nobody's buying physical copies anymore, so they can't just rely on subscriptions. Did you see that recent documentary, The Social Dilemma? Yes, I did. That was kind of creepy. I had Tristan Harris on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, really? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's very disturbing. Yeah. Because you see how this all plays out. And you're seeing it right now online with the election results. We are. Yeah. Civil War. It looks like we're heading to a civil war.

Yeah. And then you have the real wacky sections of both. You have the QAnons on one side and the Antifas on the other side. And, like, oh, it's so nuts. It is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. That Sidney Powell lady, she seems unhinged. We'll see what she can deliver the goods or not.

I'm very curious to see how this all pans out. But it just seems like the most divided I can ever remember this country being. Definitely in my lifetime the most divided. Which is exactly what they were talking about in the social dilemma. They were literally saying that what's happening with these algorithms, what's happening with these echo chambers that people are involved with in social media, what's happening with the way it influences the mind to gravitate towards these things that upset people and to rile people up and get people more and more interested in these particularly polarizing subjects. We're headed towards almost like a civil war. Yeah. You know, of course, I do.

Well, I think The Social Dilemma is a good movie and a lot to learn from. And I do think it overstates it. And in our book, Conscious Leadership, we talk about cultural intelligence in the book, particularly the very last part of the appendix. And we talk about how there are three major types of worldviews that exist in the United States that are clashing with each other. The first one is more of a traditional worldview of heritage values that might be traditional Christianity or traditional Judaism, or traditional Judaism combined with belief in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, sort of very traditional values. And then you have the modernist worldview, which is science, rationality, capitalism, success, getting ahead.

And that's the second. And now we have a progressive worldview that hasn't been around that long, but it's a third major worldview. And I think statistically, we think about 30% of the population is in the traditional worldview, about 50% is in the modernist worldview, and about 20% is in the progressive worldview. And all these worldviews are struggling with each other to dominate, to have their values become the law of the land. And everybody must conform to their values because their values are correct. So we think that's the essence of this cultural struggle going on. And we argue in the book that there's a fourth we call post-progressivism, which basically recognizes all the values have good things about them and they have some bad things about them, right?

So they have dignities and disasters. take the best things about each one of these worldviews and integrate them together so that we can give each of the worldviews enough to feel like this is a society worth belonging to. If we try to cram one set of values down everybody else's throats and force that into law, we're going to have a civil war because America is not going to stand for it. Yeah, I like that perspective that there are good things and bad things about these sides. And that's one of the things we're talking about, like we're so polarized today. And something you were talking about with capitalism because you were saying, hey, John, it's not perfect. And capitalism is a modernistic sort of part of the modernistic worldview.

And it's not perfect. There are problems and challenges with it. But the dignities of it are tremendous. And we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater just because it's not perfect. Because there is no perfect solution to any of these problems. We're going to muddle our way through like we always do. Now, when you look at the positive aspects of all these different schools of thought, and you look at progressivism, which is the one that is probably the most on the rise today. Why is it the most on the rise? What do you think? When you say you look

at both sides of things. You might say that you can see each of these worldviews comes out of the previous worldview. So if you go back 200 years ago, 250 years ago, the modernist worldview was just being born. The founding fathers of our country were early modernists, people like Franklin and Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton. These were early modernists, but almost everybody else was a traditionalist. But we created the foundation to create really the world's first modern society, which was the United States. Now, progressivism, in a way, is a reaction to the disasters of modernism. Like, modernism does have negative environmental impacts.

And so part of it is we have to solve those problems. And so progressivism is partly a solving of that problem. And so progressivism is partly solving that problem. Things like racism and sexism and homophobia or whatever, these are also aspects that progressivism is reacting to, striving to give dignity to all these different sort of marginalized people that were always, you know, used to get beat up when they were young, so to speak, in a more modernistic traditional society. The problem is, is that when you begin to force your values on everybody else, then we begin to get a lot of blowback on that. And that's true for progressivism as well. It needs to harmonize with traditionalism and modernism and not treat those as the enemies that must be conquered.

The things that progressivism, the things that resonate with a lot of people is the uplifting of the impoverished. The education in poor communities where traditionally the education has been substandard. All these different things that I think, for whatever reason, our government or our society has, we've erred. There's a problem in not dealing with those issues. So I would take a little different interpretation. Actually, modernism is dealing with it. Modernism has been lifting humanity up, as I argued earlier in this talk. Okay, but it's not done a great job of it.

It's actually done a very good job, but it hasn't finished the job. So progressivism is correct to recognize that there are some people being left out, that the rising tide has not lifted all the job. So progressivism is correct to recognize that there's some people being left out, that the rising tide has not lifted all the boats. What about those that are being left behind? What about them? They're absolutely right. We need to take care of them. We need to find solutions to their problems. But it's not by throwing modernism out. It's by taking modernism and then adding on a greater sensitivity for those who are downtrodden, who have bad educational systems. This is where you can take some of the good aspects of progressive thinking. Exactly.

These are the aspects that I identify with. As do I. Yeah. So the ideas of progressivism when it comes to dealing with impoverished communities, dealing with crime-ridden communities, and coming up with strategies to help the people that are stuck in those spots. Right, exactly. Yeah, that, if you take away that, once that starts getting implemented on a wide scale,

then a lot of the arguments against capitalism will start to fade. Hence, Conscious Capitalism. Is that in your book right here? Yes, exactly. Conscious Capitalism. That's exactly what it's about. Right here by John Mackey?

Yes, and Roger Sassodia. Available on Amazon. And at Whole Foods. Oh, you can get it at Whole Foods? Probably Barnes & Noble, too. I'm sure. Dealing with this debate and dealing with this argument, has anyone, or just having these conversations over long periods of

time like i know you have has this shaped your perspective in any way like having to formulate these very clear arguments of course yeah i mean um you can't really think clearly at least i think dialectically joe I need pushback. I need a devil's advocate because— I'm always around, bro. Okay. Well, apparently you're not always around. You travel a lot.

I haven't been traveling that much. But you need a real devil's advocate, not a knucklehead like me. Well, your ideas need to stand the test of being struggled with. Right. That's a real problem with people that don't want to hear the other perspective. We're stuck in, that's your social dilemma issue. When we get stuck in an echo chamber, if we only, if you're a traditionalist and you only watch Fox News, for example, then you're not going to get a wider perspective.

But if you're progressive and you only read the New York Times and watch CNN and MSNBC, you may not be getting a wider perspective either. We need to expose ourselves to the wider context of information that's out there. That is a philosophy that I think should be taught in school that is as important as mathematics and history. There's a thing about challenging ideas and looking at your own ideas in an objective way. I think one of the things that I've worked very hard at doing is not being married to any of the ideas that I have in my head and that I don't, they're not mine, they're an idea. And even though I've espoused these ideas, even though I've defended these ideas, if something comes along that shows me that this idea is flawed or inaccurate, I have made a very conscious, positive effort to abandon those ideas.

So do I. Or reexamine them. I've got a metaphor for it that I'm happy to loan it to you. You can have it too. It's like ideas are like, I've got clothes on here today, but they're not who I am. I'm just wearing them today. Right. And I'll put these aside and I'll wear different clothes tomorrow.

The clothes are not me. And the ideas and beliefs I have are not me either. Right. When they don't fit any longer, I set them aside. And I get new clothes that fit better. And that's a very liberating way to think about your beliefs and your ideas. Because otherwise, if you identify yourself with what you believe, that means if somebody criticizes one of your beliefs, many people take it as a personal attack. That somehow they're saying, I don't have

worth because they disagree with my views. No, they're just saying they don't like the clothes that you're wearing, but that's not who you are. So I'm not my beliefs. They are just what I'm wearing for right now. That's an interesting way of looking at it. And I think there is a real problem with people looking at people's ideas and judging them and their value as a human being based on those ideas. But we do it because most people are married to their ideas. And we're taught to defend our ideas to the death, that these ideas are core to who you are as a person. They're core to how you identify, how you think of yourself. It's like the matrix.

You've got to free your mind. Yeah. Free your mind. Well, it's very freeing in being able to recognize you're wrong and say you're wrong. It's very freeing. It is. And we resist it. But when you resist it and you know you're wrong, It's very freeing. It is. And we resist it. But when you resist it and you

know you're wrong, you feel like a loser. Like inside your head, you know you're full of shit. You know, I don't experience it that way. So one of the things I try to do as CEO of Whole Foods Market is I always try to admit my mistakes in a very public way because I feel like that helps everybody else admit their own mistakes. And I'll just say, you know, I was wrong about that. I made a mistake. I'm sorry about that. And because then if you admit you made a mistake, you can learn from it. You don't have to make the same mistake again. And it also gives everybody permission. If, hey, if John is going to admit his mistakes, then I can admit my mistakes too. And you have a much more open dialogue with people.

Nobody's seen as infallible, as all-knowing, as never right, always right, never wrong. Yeah, that's a great philosophy. It's very important. I mean, nobody wants a dictator that they have to walk on eggshells around and, you know, they have to pretend that this person is only making good decisions when you think that... I mean, that's the argument against Donald Trump, right? I mean, never says he's wrong, never admits he's wrong, doesn't show any empathy. I'm not going to defend Trump. How dare you? I will merely say that which presidents in our lifetime ever admit they made any mistakes?

That's just not something I see politicians do very often. Well, Governor Newsom made a mistake when he went to that restaurant and he admitted it when he got busted. Well, only when he got busted and he couldn't deny your own eyes. Who are you going to believe? What I say are your own eyes. Well, then he lied, though. He said he was outside. Right.

He didn't anticipate photos coming out after he gave that apology speech. And he didn't know how many people were going to be there. And he says, I should have just turned around right then and there. But you knew he was going to be there.

Who knows? It's his buddy. I guess when you're caught red-handed, it's hard to continue to. Well, look, I'm not the governor, but if someone says we're having a party. Joe Rogan for governor. I think that's a great idea. I like our governor. I like Governor Abbott.

I like Governor Abbott, too. When you go to a party, if someone says we're going to have a party over my house during times of COVID, I'd be like, how many people are going to be there? That'd be like one of the first questions I ask. Like I don't want to go to a party where there's 500 people and I don't know anybody. No, of course not. And breathe in everybody's funky air. I would ask

that and I'm not even the governor. I'm not even telling people you have to close their businesses and I would ask that. Forget about looking hypocritical just for my own health. You know, the Newsom example, though, is kind of a personal example. We always are quick to point out hypocrisy in people. But I'm saying that very seldom do you ever see a politician or a president or a senator or a governor admit they made a policy mistake. Right.

So you don't see Governor Cuomo in New York saying that, gosh, I should never send those people to the nursing homes. No. I really made a mistake on that. Good point. We don't see the obvious mistakes ever admitted. Don't you think that in that situation, there would be a legal problem? Because if he did admit that that's a mistake publicly, they would probably sue the shit

out of him. You're talking about... They could still sue him whether he admitted it or not. Yes, but they would have the evidence. They would have his own testimony publicly that he made a mistake. You would not be able to argue against that. Look, I think we both agree. Good point.

Clearly he made a mistake. That's a giant mistake, and it's responsible for thousands of deaths. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to argue that. You take people that are COVID positive, you send them to a nursing home where folks are older and their immune systems are compromised

and a lot of them die. I mean, I don't know what number died, but I know that there have been reports in places where there have been COVID deaths where an enormous percentage of them were in nursing homes, like more than 20%. Oh, no, no, Joe.

I think it's over 50% in the United States or close to it. And I mean, 95% have comorbidities, right? And you imagine being in that situation where you're an older person and you're just like trying to ride out your last days and the governor sends sick people back to the nursing home and you realize that Mary down the hall is coughing up a fucking storm now? I mean, we're way out of where I'm kind of a little bit out of my comfort zone. That's what I like to do to people. I know.

But we don't know really what the governor might have been thinking. I believe his intentions were probably good. He was very worried they were going to have too many cases, they weren't going to have enough hospital beds for it. No, I'm sure. It's probably a mistake, but it was, it was, it was made with good intentions. And I don't think it was made with bad intentions to hurt people. I don't think so either. I don't think he did it to try to kill old people. Exactly. I think he just made an error. He was actually trying to save lives. He just made a mistake and people make mistakes. When you're in a situation like that where there's not much you can do when you are stuck you know um i was

talking to a nurse and she was explaining to me she's a nurse in a covid ward and she was explaining to me the decisions that they have to make she's like during like the peak when when it was you know all the beds were full she's like we really were in situations where we're like, we have to send this person home and they're going to die. And there's no room for new people to come in. So we literally have to send, we have to take people that are terminal. Triage. Yeah. There's not much you could do.

And I go, well, how do you protect their family from getting it? She's like like you can't i'm like oh my god so you're you're sending people who are dying of covid home and they were likely going to infect their family yeah you tell their family take all the precautions they can but if you have to do it you have to do it that's when you're in a situation where there's no good answer that's not a win-win right yeah that's not a win-win. Right. That's not a win-win-win either. No. Yeah, it's hugely unfortunate, but it's also unprecedented, right? Like when Mario Cuomo became governor, or Andrew Cuomo rather became governor, he didn't think that this was something that he was going to have to encounter. He probably had strategies in play for economic

growth, for dealing with law enforcement, all these different problems that a governor would face, taxes, all these different things. He probably never thought, well, there might be a thing that kills all these old people if I send them back to nursing homes. I'm sure there was not a plan for it. No, but that's one thing about this pandemic. That's why I never want to be governor, Joe.

Please don't. Everybody will hate you. I think they hate you when you became successful with Whole Paycheck. Way too, you know. Way too long governor. Yeah, oh my God. And then if you become president, it's even worse. Then literally

half the country hates you. Look how many people are trying to kill you. As far as I know, I don't have anybody trying to kill me. Congratulations. It's probably like one butcher is thinking this motherfucker. No, just kidding. Your time doing this, your time spent as a leader, do you understand better the pitfalls of these leaders

because of the fact that you've been a leader of a corporation for so long? Absolutely. Absolutely. You just have a lot of responsibility. And if you're a leader, you're also being paid to make good decisions. And if you make good decisions, a lot of people benefit. And if you make bad decisions, a lot of people might suffer. So you got to have a high batting average here, Joe. You can't, you're going to make a few mistakes, but you make those mistakes hopefully at a smaller level, not at the biggest level. And I've made plenty of mistakes at Whole Foods. And one of the reasons I've been successful is I've just learned from a lot of my mistakes.

As I say, I have a lot of scars, but they've made me better too. Now, when you do have these very strong ethics and morals that you operate your company by but you're also you're incentivized by profit um do you make a conscious effort to explain or to espouse these ideas to the people that are working for you and working with you we do i mean uh mean, our quality standards, our core values, our higher purpose, these are all, we actually have a program at Whole Foods now called Cultural Champions, where people go through a program and get certified to be a cultural champion. And it's very important because, I mean, we have 100,000 people working for Whole Foods

and every year we're hiring 10 to 20,000 new people. Woo! Exactly. And so they're not going to know the purpose. They're not going to know the core values. They're not going to know what the company's about, or even they're not going to know the history. You have to help, you have to continually educate and teach people who you are, what you stand for, or otherwise it's going to disappear. One thing you guys have done, and I don't know how you did it. A lot of people there are friendly.

How have you done that? In Boulder, I found people to be friendly. I found people to be friendly in Park City, Utah. I found people to be friendly in Los Angeles, in the Valley, in the city. You've got a lot of friendly employees. Is this something that's been a core tenant of the business? It is. It's one of our core values. We call it team member growth and happiness. We actually want our people working for us to be happy. And I'll tell you what I've learned. There's two

things that people want at work above all else. I mean, they want to earn a paycheck too. But besides, if you get the money right, there's two things that people want which will make them long-term committed to your organization. The first one is everybody wants to have a sense of purpose. They want to feel like their work is actually contributing. They're not just making widgets. They're doing something that's actually creating value for other people. Purpose matters. And secondly, they want to feel like somebody gives a shit about them, that they're cared for. And if you do those two things, if you give people purpose and love, then you're giving them probably the two things they most desire in life is purpose and love. And we try to do that at Whole Foods.

And to the degree people are friendly, it's partly because they're experiencing both of those or at least one of them. What's great about that to me is that because your business has been so successful, and it's such a popular spot for people, and people are very aware that it's like that. My hope is that this is going to be contagious, and that other businesses are going to go, you know, we're going to follow the Whole Foods model. And we are going to be contagious and that other businesses are going to go, you know, we're going to follow the whole foods model and we are going to create an environment where it's family, people are loved, they're cared for, and then the people that come there, we want them to be appreciated. We want everybody who works for us to be happy that they have a job here, feel like they belong, feel like they're doing something good. I absolutely agree. The second chapter of our book, Conscious

Leadership, is lead with love. Love is something that we don't think about in our corporations. And we have these sort of hyper-competitive models, mental models about the way the world works. They're war metaphors, kill or be killed. Let's go to the war room. Let's create our campaign. Let's go motivate the troops. We're using war metaphors or we're using Darwinian metaphors. This is survival of the fittest. It's a jungle out there. Only the paranoid survive. Or they are sports metaphors where we're winners, losers, and winning isn't everything.

It's the only thing. We've got this idea of hyper-competition. And when you're at war, there really isn't any place for love. I mean, love, check it at the door, because we got a war to fight. We'll after that. So do that in your personal life. And love, though, the love, I don't mean romantic love. I don't mean sexual love. I mean the love that you feel towards the people you're working with, the people that you're serving, your customers. That's part of the most important part of being a human being. We have to bring that part with us to work.

It can't hide out in the closet. We have to be able to connect with people. And that's one of the great things that we need to have happen in corporations. If you're asking how can we make corporations better, Cindy Powell's talking about release the Kraken. Is that what she said? That's what she's been saying. I would say let's release love. Let's let love out of the closet.

Let's let love be what we build our organizations around. It's so much better way to live. what we build our organizations around. It's so much better way to live. The only argument I would say against that would be that you don't love your competitors. You're out there to kick their ass, right? If you're playing on a team and you're supposed to go up against another team,

you want to be as amped up, as aggressive, as motivated, and as focused on victory as possible. That's why so many corporations adopt these sports metaphors, right? Yeah, but the reality is it's not that competition is not part of corporations or business. It is. Is it the main part? It actually isn't. The main part is about creating value for customers.

That's why the business exists. Competitors, and I never hated any of my competitors. The main part is about creating value for customers. That's why the business exists. Competitors, and you, I never hated any of my competitors. I mean, I always saw my competitors as people that could teach me things, things they were doing better than Whole Foods was doing. Like, one of the best competitors Whole Foods competes against anywhere in the whole world is HEB here in Texas. Very, very good competitor. And we've learned a lot from HEB heb they've made us better as a company and the word you learn from heb what have we learned from heb if i was to be specific about how to hire sketchy late night counter people no well heb opened up a

concept called central market and that was back in the early 1990s. And it took a lot of Whole Foods' ideas and expanded them and made them bigger stores. So one thing I learned from HEB was to do bigger stores. And we started getting progressively bigger stores. Those Central Market joints are pretty nice. They are. They're a worthy competitor. And so our competitors can be our allies in the sense that they help us improve. If you don't have a good competitor, then you're not going to be pushed.

Take one of my favorite sports, tennis. We happen to be blessed with possibly the three greatest tennis players of all time playing at the same exact time. Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, and Novik Djavokovic. Nelson Nadal and Novik Zivokovic. And 20, 20, and 18 Masters or Grand Slam Championships. Those three guys are the top three of all time in Grand Slam Championships. If they didn't have the other two, they wouldn't be the same player they turned out to be.

Because that pushed them to get better and better and better. And by the way, that is the beauty of capitalism versus socialism. There is competition. There is innovation that's occurring that you have to stay on top of. You have to incorporate yourself and then you have to challenge to out-innovate the other people to stay ahead, so to speak. And socialism doesn't have that incentive to innovate. And that's why it stagnates in the long run. So competition is part of business. I don't want to say it's not there. It's just not the most important part. It's not it shouldn't dominate everything else. It has its place. But it shouldn't be the be all reality of business. And all be all.

Yeah, and all be all. I understand what you're saying. And I agree with you in terms of competition. End all, be all. Yeah, end all, be all. I understand what you're saying. And I agree with you in terms of competition. Obviously, you know, I come from a martial arts background and that's everything. If you don't have people in the gym that are better than you, you will not get better. You don't want to be the man. Like you want to be surrounded by other people that are better than you. It's almost always the best way to improve and grow because you have a metric to gauge yourself by.

You can compare against them and you also can study them. Yes. You know, how are they doing that? How are they doing that sidekick that keeps hitting me? They show you. One of the beautiful things about martial arts, it's always been the case, martial artists are very open. Collaborative?

Yes, very collaborative because that's taught like from the beginning particularly in jiu-jitsu in jiu-jitsu it's there's no secrets like everyone is trying to show you what they're doing like uh one of my best friends is eddie bravo who's a world-renowned jiu-jitsu instructor and competitor and he he's like i am teaching my students how to beat me he goes i'm getting these younger faster stronger people i'm showing them all my tricks and that makes me stay one step ahead and this is like this is the philosophy of martial arts it's very you you never want to have no competition that's a terrible place to be it's the philosophy of excellence yeah and excellence is a big part of corporations and it's a big part of capitalism. Yeah, it's a big part of everything.

But when you actually go to a competition, you want to smash that person. You don't want to love them. Yeah, but you may be loving them after the competition. Yes. Might be your best friend. I mean, it's a friendly competition. You're not literally trying to kill them. Right. You're not really wanting to for them to crack their head and they never get up again. This is a concept, this concept that we're describing, whether it applies to martial arts or to business, that a socialist would have a very difficult time grasping that you can both be loving and ultra competitive. And that these things are not mutually exclusive. And in fact, they help. It helps.

They are yin and yang they they they work well together so this is if i'm i'm going to put words in your mouth this is probably one of the things that frustrates you the most about these ideas these progressive ideas is that they when they apply them to business they don't really understand business they don't work yes they don't really understand business. They don't work. Yes. They don't work. That's the problem, and that is the disaster of progressivism. You mean the people don't work or the ideas don't work? The ideas don't work. The ideas don't work.

But the ideas are – a great example is collective agriculture. We're going to put everybody – we're not going to do individual farming plots. We're going to – China almost put it – starved itself to death, and you had millions and millions of people die from starvation by collectivizing the agriculture, even though the Soviet Union had already failed to do it. So China did it, and they forced all the people to collectivize their agriculture, and the result was a terrible idea because they didn't have the incentives that were there any longer to try to optimize their production.

And as a result, starvation, mass starvation occurred. Until China wised up, they had finally, some communists said, let's let them own at least a small little plot themselves, that they get to keep what they produce for their families. And that proved to be so productive, it gradually took over the entire agriculture. They went back to capitalism in agriculture in China. Well, wasn't that the issue with the colonists as well in America? When they first started growing wheat, they combined all their food together.

And then they realized, like, hey, this is not working. We have to make people earn their own. You know, I think one of the reasons this idea will always be there, Joe, is that's how we operate our families. Right. When we're growing up, we're just small kids. The family shares, right? And then we ask when we get older, why can't we make the whole society like the family?

And the answer is because it's too damn big to do it that way. And when you try to do it that way, you get the slackers and the people who don't want to work being parasites on the others. And you end up with the free rider problem. And ultimately, that's the problem with socialism is a free rider problem that they've never been able to solve for except through coercion and putting people in labor camps and things like that, turn them into slaves. So they can't solve that problem except by sort of super coercion. And that's why it doesn't work, why it's never going to work, and why capitalism with all its flaws is a system that does work, that we can make better, we can make more conscious, we can do it better than we're doing it today.

What do you think about the concept of universal basic income? Yeah, I, you know, no, I mean, I don't think that's a good idea. But when you have a situation like a pandemic, where so many people through no fault of their own, are being forced out of work, they cannot work. That's a temporary situation. But isn't that a good argument for universal basic income, at least for a temporary situation? Well, when people are sick, they need to be taken care of. When they're healthy, they don't need to be taken care of. They need to stand on their own two feet.

Right, but when you have a situation where they can't stand on their own two feet because they're literally not allowed to work, like California. I mean, California, they're right now shutting down restaurants that serve outside. Yeah, well, I mean, the alternative is not to shut down the economy. No, listen, I agree. But there's a lot of people that they get really hysterical about this. And they think this is the only way we're going to save people. There's a lot of people out there with terrible health. And they think that what we need to do is shut everything down and that's the only way we're going to be safe. I was reading this woman's Twitter the other day. Someone said something ridiculous and I'm like, oh my God, I need to check this person out. And they were talking about, hey, I am ready to

lock everything down for five weeks. I don't go outside. I stay away from everybody. I order my groceries delivered. I'm ready to lock down for five weeks. I'm like, this is the most simplistic and individual perception of this problem, that everyone should do what you're capable of doing. Most people can't do this if they have a fucking business. Like they can't. I'm ready to lock down for five weeks.

Well, congratulations to you but some guy who runs some whatever figure out whatever store it is or whatever kind of business they need to be there in order to be open to stay to stay alive there's no other way to keep that business alive they have rent they have overhead they have they have employees do you know you know the history of the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic? That's the worst pandemic that we know of in our modern history. And that's only 100 years ago. And 50 million people died worldwide. I mean, how many people died worldwide in COVID?

A couple million at this point. And the population was four times greater then. They didn't shut anything down back million at this point. And the population was four times greater then. They didn't shut anything down back then. What do you mean the population was four times greater then? It was four times greater now than then. It was 25%. It was 1.8 billion people back 100 years ago across the world. So you could scale that up pretty largely.

Yeah, exactly. And that was a killer that didn't just take people with comorbidities. It took children. It took healthy adults. It was non-discriminatory disease. And we took precautions, people, you know, social distanced. But at the end of the day, the economy did not shut down. Humanity went on with their lives. and humanity went on with their lives. And this is not nearly the same type of pandemic that we had back then. It's very interesting the time that we live in, the reaction that we're having today to COVID being so very different than the reaction we had to the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919, which was far more destructive.

I don't know. It's just food for thought. It's very interesting. Well, what was the difference? What's the difference in the reaction of today versus the reaction from 1918? Their action back then was individual responsibility to do what was necessary to protect yourself and your family. But other than that, life went on.

And there was no governmental, not nearly the same level of. They had mask mandates, though, didn't they? If you go back and read about it, not any kind of national type of mask mandate. Certain small communities did it. It was just all so much smaller in scale. I didn't even know they wore masks. We've been looking at it because we've been looking at a lot of photos from back in the day. It's kind of crazy to see. And we don't see the harm that we're doing. We don't see the small businesses failing, the suicide rates going up, the domestic violence, the isolation, the mental or emotional health problems people have by not being able to connect with each other, not being able to physically touch. The kids that are missing out in school and in person.

Speaking as a man who was once a little boy, little boys need to play. They also need to connect. They can't just watch a screen. Yeah, kids, I have two kids in school right now, and it's soul-sucking watching them stare at a laptop. And then I sat in in my daughter's room once and watched the teacher teach the class, and Jesus Christ, this lady could have not been less motivated. It was horrible to watch.

Motivating or motivated. They're lazy. Well, hopefully these vaccinations are going to be as effective as they're reporting and will not have side effects. And that a year from now, this will be in the rearview mirror. Are you going to wait? Are you going to dive right in what if jeff bezos calls you up and says hey john got the got the vaccine right here buddy come over you know i haven't decided yet i've had to do four covid tests including one today to get in you only had four how many of you had oh my god i don't even know well you you do it every time you come in here i guess right it's we were trying to figure it out i remember i counted like 50 something of them

you've done over 50 tests way more than so you'll be an early adapter of the uh of the vaccination just so you don't have to do the damn test anymore um i want to wait and see what's going on but if uh if it's proven that it doesn't have any side effects and how the fuck are you going to do that it might take a few years to know that for sure yeah can you wait i don't know man it's like i'm i'm kind of a vaccination guy to be honest like i've had i've had all the vaccinations i have as well you can imagine i think no those and here's the thing about vaccines man like if you even have a conversation about vaccines people get their hackles up. What are you about to say? What are you saying?

Are you an anti-vaxxer? Not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch of the imagination. I've been vaccinated. My children have been vaccinated. I believe in vaccines. I believe vaccines are the reason why we don't have smallpox, why we don't have polio. When I hear about measles cases rising, I get angry because these fucking hippies don't want to vaccinate their kids and they send them to school with other people's kids and these people get

fucking measles. For adults, it's dangerous. Measles is a creepy disease. I believe in vaccines. However, I believe that this is a new thing. Did you have measles? I don't think I ever got because i'm

older than you i had measles i don't know if i hadn't i had all those diseases as a kid because there were no backs i had chicken pox i had measles yeah i had almost all that stuff i mean when i was a kid there was no polio vaccination oh my god i know so we'd when polio was running around in the community they closed the swimming pools down yeah that's when my mother would not let us go out and play for a while. Polio is an excellent example of why vaccines are so important. Exactly. Because it was a terrifying disease that destroyed people, and permanently. I know.

And when I was a kid, when someone would have chicken pox, they would bring kids to that person's house so you would get chicken pox. Because if you get chicken pox as a young kid, it chickenpox because if you get chickenpox as a young kid it's better than if you get chickenpox as an adult i do not know why but uh they would they would encourage kids to get chickenpox you build up an immunity to it yeah my wife had shingles recently so i went and got a shingles vaccination oh my goodness yeah that's supposed to be horrible that's really painful stuff right it was horrible yeah um listen i believe in vaccines but i also believe that

you're not going to be a guinea pig. No, but there's people that have already done that. There's brave folks that have already decided to get shot up. Yeah. But you want your friends to do it and you want your friends to say, I did it and I feel fine. Everything's great. No, I don't want that either. What do you want? Um, I want them to assure me that it's not going to be devastating in terms of the side effects i would hate to have encouraged people to take something and then find out two years from now that there's some residual side effect that's devastating some neurological thing your liver is starting to fail who knows what it could be and the way it's been described to me that won't be the case the way it's been described to me, that won't be the case. The way it's been described to me by doctors, that's an unfound fear because of what this is, a messenger RNA vaccine, that this is not the type of vaccine that you...

It's just essentially delivering your body this sort of message that encoded with a common cold virus, that what it does is it makes your body develop the proteins to fight off the disease. It sounds like these are vaccination breakthroughs. Yeah, it does. That might transform vaccinations in the future. I hope so. Listen, I hope so too. Look, I think modern medicine is amazing.

I do worry about stuff though. Look, I don't want to make a mistake and i don't think you do either and when it comes to i already admitted making lots of mistakes but this is not one i want to add to my repertoire when it comes to this virus though it's so difficult to be confident one way or another like if it was a virus that just you go oh you'll you'll survive 99 point whatever percent of people survive you're going to be fine there's people that are these uh this is what what gets me these long haulers covid long haulers who have like serious like there's a guy named uh cody garbrandt he's a former bantamweight champion of the ufc he got covid in august he's a young stud he's a healthy guy like a top flight um mixed martial fighter. And he has had blood clots.

He's had like some serious problems and fatigue and still bothering him to this day. He was supposed to compete last weekend. It's just this past weekend. He's supposed to fight for the flyweight title and he couldn't make the card. So they got a replacement for him, but it's because of COVID.

If you want to look at like young healthy people that is one of the best examples you ever going to get of a young healthy person he's a professional cage fighter i mean he's really fucking healthy but covid has done a number on him like he's got like some pretty serious issues yeah and certainly i don't want to get covid myself uh but the reality is pretty much you could have anecdotes for any type of disease as somebody that had a bad reaction to that disease yeah but that's a rare one right blood clots and all this the stuff that people fatigue months and months later for a coronavirus that is it's unusual and that's the problem is that this

well this disease has so many unknowns to it. There's so many mysteries. So many people get it, and they don't even know they had it. So it seems now that mono, which a lot of people get when they're teenagers, it turns out that that's connected to Epstein-Barr. So I know people that had mono when they were kids or teenagers, and now as adults they have this Epstein-Barr, which is attacking their thyroid. So that virus never went away.

It's still there. It's still affecting them. And it's the reality of existence. There are all these viruses out there. I mean, like I think a gallon of seawater has 10 billion viruses in it. I mean, we live in a universe of uh of seawater has uh 10 billion viruses in it i mean it's it's that we live in a universe of viruses and billion yeah and a gallon i think it's even less than a gallon isn't that extraordinary viruses are real little those mass people where those viruses you know unless you got the the n95s and plexiglass chances are that little piece of cloth is not really keeping the virus out.

That's one of the things that freaks me out. Like when people dive in a lake somewhere and they get some brain-eating amoeba. It's a surface drop of seawater. A surface drop? One drop's got 10 billion? 10 million. 10 million. Well, I guess maybe a gallon might have 10 billion.

That's a lot of viruses. So don't be drinking that seawater. A drop. 10 million for a fucking drop? What do you do when you get a mouthful of seawater? Here's the good news. We deal with viruses. We've got amazing immune systems and we've been

co-evolving with viruses for hundreds of thousands of years. Sure. And guess what? We're co-evolving with COVID now. Yeah. Well, this has been my frustration the entire time is that there's been no discussion about strengthening your immune system. There's legitimate strategies, including eating healthy foods, right? I mean, there's legitimate strategies for keeping your body healthy and strong and keeping your immune system strong. Absolutely. I mean, It's interesting, Joe, because I've watched my friends during the eight or nine months we've been dealing with this stuff, maybe almost, yeah, nine months.

They tended to go one of two directions. One was to say, you know what? I'm going to get this. I'm locked down. I'm going to get super healthy. I'm going to eat right. I'm going to exercise. I'm going to get enough sleep. I'm going to stop taking as many toxins. And they got healthier.

They lost weight. Their immune system got strong. And then I had other friends. They were isolated. They felt lonely. Their consumption of alcohol went way up, for example. And they gained weight and their immune system is less strong. So humans respond differently to stress like this. I went the route of saying my best chance to hold off COVID is to get my immune system as strong as possible. I went that route. Yeah, well, that's the right route to go. That's the route you better go if you own Whole Foods. Yeah, it's going to be.

I always say that it won't be good for my business if I die of a heart attack. Yeah. Right? At least not for another 25 or 30 years. You kind of have to be healthy. I always say that it won't be good for my business if I die of a heart attack. Yeah, right? At least not for another 25 or 30 years. You kind of have to be healthy. There'll be a lot of people that will secretly laugh if I do croak from something like that. It's like, see, a lifetime of eating all that healthy food, and he died at a young age. Do you practice what you preach?

Are you a healthy eater, or do you have a few bad habits? I don't think I have any bad habits but i don't think i have any bad habits but i do occasionally indulge myself but you said habit oh okay indulge with uh probably i mean occasionally might have a bowl of coconut ice cream that's it coconut ice cream that's how you go crazy i didn't say go crazy i said indulge myself but in general i mean i you know i'm i'm 100 plant-based guy so and i eat lots of fruits oh that's why you give me that fake cheese you're one of those it's not fake cheese it's almond cheese how are you gonna call it cheese cheese is a dairy product who says

i do okay well i'll yield forever cheese has been a dairy product there's cheese that's made from dairy cows what about uh sheep cheese or goat cheese um yeah it's still animals from milk it's coming from milk okay it's coming from animals and this is almond cheese coming from almonds yeah but that's like almond water or almond milk almond milk is it's almond milk it's no it's some weird shit you're doing with water and almonds there's nothing to do with milk there's no tits on almonds come on bro i i think you can if you look it up in the dictionary you will not see cheese saying it must have tits to be cheese. No, but it's a milk product. You need to come up with a new name.

I'm happy for it to come up with a different name. Yeah, someone needs to come up with a better name. I don't believe in the word police. Language evolves sort of organically, so to speak. New words get added all the time. And I don't believe in the police that are trying to say that word can't be said that way. I understand. So if you're a full plant-based guy, you don't eat any meat at all? No. Even when you're drunk? No.

You hesitated. That's what people do. Well, if I'm really drunk, I may not remember. Well, you know, that's the thing. They say that like 84% of vegans eat meat when they're drunk. Yeah. Did you ever hear the one about – I made that number up.

I know. That 93.6% of the people make up their own statistics. I think it's 100%. The thing about plant-based diets is you got to really make sure that you're supplementing correctly, right? You have to make sure that you have a good, healthy supply of B12 and all your different amino acids. I think B12 is the only one you really have to worry about. The only one? What about amino acids? What about proteins? You ever heard anybody being deficient in protein that's not also calorie deficient?

Well, by deficient, meaning the reaction to their body, are their bodies optimized? I would say no. Yeah. I mean, yes, I have seen it. Because people, they lose body mass, they lose muscle mass, they lose strength and vitality. And I think you probably know that muscle mass and body mass strength is directly connected to longevity. You have to have enough protein so your body can repair itself so that if you're lifting weights, you're going to grow muscles. You have to have enough, you have to have adequate protein stores. But the extra protein, your body has to then go through complicated reactions to convert that into fuel, which actually puts the stress on the kidneys. On average,

Americans eat about twice as much protein as they actually need. You're talking about glucogenesis, like when you're taking protein and converting it into sugar? That's damaging to the kidneys? Has there been real evidence that shows that? You can do a search on it. Yeah, I have. I don't think there is. It's actually a natural progression

when you're eating meat. There's people that are on meat-only diets and their body produces its own glucose. I mean, I think you'll... I hate to get into a debate with you about this. You're getting this weird plant-based debate. Plant-based people get real edgy when you start talking about their diets. I'm not going to get really edgy about it. Hey, I've got my book there for you, The Whole Foods Diet.

Take a look at it. Take a look at it. So you allow plants on this? Where's your steaks, bro? We actually allow—in that particular diet, we allow up to 10% of your calories from animal fats. Oh, you allow it? Mm-hmm. Did you always eat plant-based, or did you slowly gravitate towards it?

I was vegetarian in my early 20s, and then I added fish. And then back in 2003, I became 100% plant-based, but for ethical reasons. I think that's why in the book, The Whole Foods Diet, we allow ethics aside. We think a little bit of animal foods is consistent with good health, primarily based on— What about mollusks? You know, one of the things that I've heard about mollusks is they're so primitive. They're actually more primitive than plants. I don't know if they're more primitive than plants, but they don't have well-developed

nervous systems, so they may not be able to experience pain as we know it. Like as far as we know, plants respond to stimulation, but we don't have any evidence they experience pain. So mollusks might be consistent with ethical veganism. I've heard that argument said very well, that not only that but you could, they're sustainable, you can harvest them and grow them and that their nervous system is set up so they're moving in some way, like they close their shells and open their shells, but not in the sense that you wouldn't consider them an animal, but you can get animal protein from them.

By the way, really, we're talking about things like, to be clear, we're talking about things like clams, oysters. Clams, oysters, yeah. Because I think like an octopus. Skulls. We're not talking about an octopus. Oh, no, no. Those are super intelligent.

Exactly. They're creepy intelligent. You ever see them open jars? They spin the jar? No, but did you see that documentary that's just come out recently called My Octopus Teacher? No. Oh oh oh my god it's fantastic you should watch that show there is a great Instagram handle to follow is it octo nation is that what it is I think it's octo nation see if you can

fuck do you know what that what I'm talking about there's a fantastic instant is it is there's a fantastic Instagram page that just they're in love with octopus and octopi and they're constantly highlighting all the cool things about octopus and particularly their their ability to camouflage themselves and hide oh they're amazing I I just was diving just a few weeks yeah look at this oh my god and they can change their colors they're so cool they're one of the coolest animals there's no doubt just a few weeks ago. Yeah, look at this. Look at that thing, man. Oh, my God. And they can change their colors. They're so cool.

They're one of the coolest animals on the planet. There's no doubt about it. They're so strange. Like, my friend Remy Warren, he used to have a television show called Apex Predator where he would basically study all these predators and the methods that they used to hunt. And he studied octopus, and he's like, they're aliens.

They are. He was showing me what they're doing. He's like, there's nothing like this. There's no other animal like this. And during the course of his show, he developed this profound respect and appreciation for octopus. They're amazing. I was scuba diving just a few weeks ago in the U.S. Virgin Islands on a night dive

and actually saw an octopus get a crab. Plunged on the crab and it just sort of just sort of absorbed it. Did you ever see that video that they had to do a they put a camera in a tank at the aquarium because they were losing sharks and they're trying to figure out what the hell's going on so they put a camera in there to watch in terms of the octopus were killing the sharks

how big was the octopus and how big were the sharks well the octopus was basically the same size as the sharks not i mean it wasn't a big shark a small shark but you know they'd never thought an octopus would hunt a shark and the octopus was just sitting there chilling all camouflaged and shark sharks are kind of dopey. You know, sharks are not intelligent. They just swim around. They're just cleaners. They're just, they're the cleanup crew.

They eat a lot of things and kill a lot of things, but they're mostly cleanups. Yeah. And this, watch this. Watch, he's swimming by, and the octopus is like, bitch, come here. Just wraps him up. But the octopus looked exactly like the coral. Back it up again, Jamie, so we can see what it looked like. Go from the beginning. Oh, it's a long one.

Okay. But the crazy thing is, like, you literally, look how it changes color right before. It's almost like he sees red. And so it jacked this shark and slowly pulled it into its body and then just ate it up. For whatever it's worth, if you watch my octopus teacher, which is, you really got this unbelievable film work. The camera work is incredible. This guy follows this octopus around for a full year out to the coast of South Africa.

And he's a free diver, no tanks. He holds his breath for several minutes. And the big enemy of the octopus there were sharks. These pajama sharks, they were called. And they would hunt for the minutes. And the big enemy of the octopus there were sharks. These pajama sharks, they were called. And they would hunt for the octopus. And the octopus would have to get away from them. Pajama sharks. Here it is.

Yeah, here it is. My octopus teacher. Pajama sharks. I've never heard of a pajama shark. So this octopus is hanging out with his dude. Oh, yeah. They got to be buddies. That's so wild.

There's a shark. Oh, wow. Oh, no. He sees his buddy get jacked yeah that's kind of rough he didn't die from that though what the octopus uh released one of his arms uh he lost an arm and he grew it back do you know that female octopuses are much larger than the males as much as like 25 larger than the males, as much as like 25% larger than the males. And they sometimes have sex with the males. And sometimes they pretend they're going to have sex when they kill them and eat them. They cannibalize the males. They'll hold on to them and eat them for days.

Sort of like the spiders do? Black widow spiders and whatnot? Yeah, but different. Because the black widows do it every single time. There is one, they observed this one octopus. He got real greedy. spiders and yeah but different because the black widows do it every single time there's a one they observed this one octopus he got real greedy he mated with this female 13 times 13 imagine how annoyed she must have been well she waited till the 14th time and she's like not today bitch and she grabbed him and uh and ate him and killed him but because the female's far larger physically

the male has to be like real skittish about it. Like, hey, what do you think? How are you feeling today? Hungry? There needs to be a revolution in the social structure of octopus to make it more equal. There's an article about this. And the first thing it says, they have tricks they do. The first thing that they do is they disguise themselves as another gal, it says,

and sneak into a female's den. Oh, well, that's what cuttlefish do. That's the cuttlefish move. Oh, I love cuttlefish. Yeah. Male octopus. Hold on. Doesn't show it, sorry.

I have a big problem. Female octopuses. Each male wants to mate and pass on his genes to a new generation. The trouble is the female is often larger and hungrier than he is, so there's a constant risk that instead of mating, the female will strangle him and eat him. The males have a host of tricks to survive, though. Yeah, good luck.

Some of them quite literally mate at arm's length. Well, you know why? They actually release their arms. Each arm that an octopus has is actually a penis. And they got eight of them. Yeah, they have sex with their arm. So when... We have a lot we could learn.

There's a lot we could learn from octopus. Yes. I don't know how they masturbate, though. They could probably have a real problem. It's like rubbing penises together. It's not very productive. But I think each arm is a penis. But for whatever...

Either way, their arm is most certainly a penis. And when the woman, the female octopus is attacking, they will release their arm. They literally will give her the arm. They let her snap the arm off. And then she eats the arm. Better to keep the other seven arms. Well, I guess, yeah. If that's imagined.

I mean, there's a divorce metaphor in there somewhere. Sex is dangerous. What can you say? Well, it's also weird. They regenerate their arms, which is pretty crafty. Yeah. There's a divorce metaphor in there somewhere. Sex is dangerous. What can you say? Well, it's also weird. They regenerate their arms, which is pretty crafty. Yeah. You know, when they catch stone crabs, they catch them and they just snap off their claw and then throw them back and they'll just grow a claw.

Oh, you mean humans do that? Yeah, exactly. It's one of the weirder fish or weirder types of seafood because it's one of the rare ones where you can catch the thing, snap off one of their limbs, and chuck them back. You can keep part of them, and they still survive. And they don't even have a problem with it. I suspect they survive less long with only one claw than if they had a couple of claws. Yeah, I would imagine. But they have a chance to survive.

Yeah, they have a better chance. Better chance than if they just get immediately eaten. Just to correct that eight-arm penis thing. They only have one? It says that their main tool is their specialized mating arm. It works like the other arms, but it has some special ability to bend stretch and exert suction so they have one arm that's a special penis arm mm-hmm it has some extra bells and whistles as this uh says do they grow that one back if she steals it uh imagine

that's the one you don't want to offer up maybe maybe you're tired of it it's got a special tip obviously uh maybe they're tired of like worried about getting eaten like oh great she took my penis good i could relax for a couple weeks while it grows back to stay away from these vicious broads their goddamn cannibalistic instincts so he only has one of those yeah and it goes there's a quick there's a picture i haven't i haven't seen a picture find out that one quick, there's a picture. I haven't seen a picture. Find out if that one grows back. There's the picture of what it looks like when I do it. Oh, Jesus.

It has to go all the way. It's deep. Oh, wow. It goes into her brain. It's going into her head. Oh, my God. No wonder why she wants to kill him. It's probably annoying, right?

Her ovaries are in the back of her head. That's nuts. So are the testes. Wow. So his testicles are in the back of his brain and her... What a strange animal, man. They are. You said they're aliens.

Yeah, they really are. I mean, if we found them on some far-off planet, we would not be stunned. Like, if they didn't exist here and we found them somewhere else, we'd be like, oh, alien life. We're just so accustomed to some of the more bizarre things squid are also bizarre oh yeah and and and so are cuttlefish yes cuttlefish we were talking about cuttlefish before that um eric uh weinstein is the one who told me about the cuttlefish strategy that male cuttlefish will pretend to be female. And they'll do that in order to trick the females into being friends with them. And then they get some.

Like male feminists. Basically the same thing. I'm not going to go there. It says that they have the old school arm reach around. Like that guy's doing at the movie theater. But they don't even go inside the den. That's for them to safely mate they'll reach in slide it in and then just like they're not even in the same room

technically wow they just reach in and just get into her brain what a bizarre method of mating you know linking brains females have Females have different tastes. Yeah. Some of them do. Don't be sexist. Listen to this guy. Yeah, that's a weird animal to eat, octopus, because they're smarter than dogs. They're really smart.

Is intelligence one of the variables you use in determining what animals you'll eat and not eat? Yes and no. Because pigs are intelligent, but I'll eat wild pigs because pigs are invasive and it's a real problem in terms of management of wildlife and the amount of animals that you have. And what kind of destruction they can do to ground nesting birds and other species that are native to the area. Invasive animals are a gigantic issue. And pigs, in particular, are one of the most devastating invasive species that we have in North America, for sure, but worldwide. In Australia, they're a giant problem. There are actually now an increasing problem in the hill country here.

Oh, yeah. No, I have a friend that lives a half hour out of town, and he's got them. That's not very far. we wipe out their natural predators no there are no natural predators they've never had any here they were brought in here from russia and from other countries they like they're a very durable animal that breeds constantly and their natural predators are you know for if you're going to keep a population of pigs down, you've got to have some fucking monsters out there. Like if you want to have their natural predators, their natural predators are not just going to stop at pigs. They're going to eat all sorts of

other animals and domestic animals and livestock and like, yeah, they're invasive. Big cats or wolves would probably be natural predators for these pigs. But you need so many of them. They're so prolific. They breed so often. They breed three or four times a year. Joe, you've got to get out there and help protect our land. No, I'm not the guy.

But I will eat them, and I will kill them. But the pigs, the wild pigs, when they're six months old, they're viable. So they start having sex and breeding at six months old. And they'll breed a litter three times a year sometimes, which is crazy. So they'll have four or five piglets three times a year. So one pig could be responsible for as many as 20 other pigs, one female, in a year. And I have a friend who works on a ranch, and he says, you have never seen anything like the

devastation these things do when they move in and find a crop like so if they'll have a crop of of food that you know these folks need for their livelihood and then a pack of wild pigs come in and just destroys it wow he says it's pretty wild to see. And some of them are huge. We own a place 40 miles west of Austin, and we see a lot of the pig scat plus where they dig. So we don't actually see them because they're nocturnal. Yeah, they hunt them at night, which is really crazy. I have friends that do them with night vision goggles and night vision scopes and you know and there's people that hunt them with helicopters as well which is very unique to texas they have these helicopter hunts and they they they say that this other than capturing them in traps like this one of the most effective ways to do it well you've got me i'm a

grocer who sells meat but i'm a plant-based guy who doesn't eat it so you've got me i'm a grocer who sells meat but i'm a plant-based guy who doesn't eat it so you've got me in a paradox there well that is that weird for you do you have an issue an ethical issue with selling the meat or do you make sure that the farmers or the ranchers that do sell you guys the meat hold up very strict ethics? We try to do the latter. Although I'll tell you a story. The very first store I opened up before Whole Foods was called Safer Way. And it's a vegetarian store. And it was not only vegetarian.

It was very pure. We didn't really sell sugar or refined sugars or white flour. We didn't even sell coffee. And we also did very little business. We were so narrow in the marketplace, we weren't successful. And it wasn't until we relocated that store, merged with another store, changed the name to Whole Foods Market, and opened a bigger store that sold meat, coffee, alcohol,

all natural and organic foods, but a full spectrum that we became successful. So was that in many ways like a battle for you a little bit because you have this one idealistic perspective of what a supermarket could be versus this is the most profitable? It was a battle. I put it this way. It was a battle. I put it this way. It's like what I learned is that in order to do the most good in the world, in order to help the most people, you have to be willing to meet the marketplace where you find it.

If you try to stand above the marketplace and you're too pure for the marketplace, then you're not going to help anybody. You're going to fail. You're going to go out of business. Ultimately, customers vote. They decide whether you prosper or fail. And SaferWave was going to fail because we, would it be possible to do it today? Maybe so today.

The world's different today than it was in 1978. But back then, we were going to fail. We lost half our money in the first year. In 1978, Starbucks wasn't around, was it? No. No actually starbucks was uh they i don't think they were around they were getting close to being around nobody knew how addictive coffee was back then oh yeah they did but they didn't really they did but they were drinking instant coffee like folgers and actual house but or dunkin donuts that's where i used to drink but i never thought that coffee would be a thing that would be on every corner like there's a place in houston and lewis black

used to have a joke about it where you'd be on it was in river oaks it was across the street from another starbucks there was a starbucks across the street from another starbucks it was the strangest thing it's like well new york city City, they got them practically in Manhattan on every block. Yeah. But this was across the street. Yeah. Well, there was a cartoon once that said, I just opened up a Starbucks in the bathroom of Starbucks. But people are so addicted to it. It's so strange how addicted they are to getting their Starbucks fix. You know, they use their apps getting their starbucks fix you know they use their apps and show so when you were selling no coffee back then were you doing it because you don't believe in coffee you think coffee's bad for you or did you make a decision is it a fair

trade issue no it was uh we just um didn't think it was a healthy food so we didn't sell it and then now we do sell it we sell sell probably, I'm sure we sell probably one of the largest coffee distributors in the United States now, probably. Yeah, you probably are. I think out of, I think they've done studies on moderate coffee consumption. They've shown it to not have a detrimental effect. There's no nutritive value in coffee except for perhaps some antioxidants. But the studies do indicate that moderate consumption of coffee is consistent with longevity. So I don't think it's not like smoking cigarettes. There's a cognitive benefit to it, too, That some people think It's worth the squeeze

Mental stimulant Problem is I have to admit That I'm a decaf guy I got off of coffee But it tastes like shit I'm going to sneeze It's so dangerous today Thank god I've been tested

Absolutely unless you got infected And it hasn't shown up yet I didn't But tea tastes better Why would you want decaf coffee? I like decaf espresso. It tastes really good. I like regular espresso. I want to feel the juice getting in the veins. Well. The darkness. I've taken that. I was recovering. It took me, when I got off of caffeine back in the year 2000, I had, first of all, I had

physical withdrawal symptoms of headaches that lasted, horrible headaches that lasted about a week before the headaches went away. Really? And then I was exhausted. I was tired. And all I could think about, if I would have a cup of coffee or some tea right now, I'd feel good again. I'd have energy back.

Yeah. Exactly. You should have done it however however after 30 days after 30 days i'd gotten the caffeine out of my system next caffeine about seven days to completely leave leave your system and my my adrenals began to be re-established i kind of got my own energy back you know that's bullshit what adrenalsrenals. What you just said is bullshit. That you're taxing your adrenals. That's some voodoo nonsense that those holistic people like to tell you. I don't think that's true. No, I've read it.

There was a study on it recently where they were talking about what it would actually take to tax your adrenals. And then what people are talking about is a withdrawal from caffeine, which is real. Let me withdraw that statement because that wasn't the real point of it. The point of it was that once I got my own vitality back, I was no longer a servant of the caffeine, which would determine when I felt good and when I didn't feel good. I just had my natural flow of energy and

vitality. And having compared the two states, this is a preferable state in my mind. I feel a lot better. I believe that 100%. The problem I was having is that adrenal thing. It's a thing that people say, a lot of people say. That's what I've read, but I don't know it for any certainty. Yeah, I've read it too. But what I do know is I felt a lot better when I got off well I'm sure when I got off a caffeine you have a I mean it's a stimulant and that's what caffeine is and you got to pay that you create a debt you got to pay that stimulus back yeah but I was I recently read this article by a nutritionist

explaining like what would have to be what would have to go wrong in your system for you to tax your adrenals? That's just not how it works And you're just dealing with a stimulant and that your body is getting off of that stimulant and like any other stimulant There's gonna be a withdrawal right, but it's not that you're taxing your adrenals Okay, yeah, but see people say things like that like you're polluting your kidneys or damaging your kidneys by Eating too much protein. You know, what can I say?

I've read possibly different studies and articles than you have in different books. Well, I've had too many people explain things to me here. I had some ideas that I had in my head that I thought was correct in terms of nutrition and what's good and what's bad for you. Let me give you a couple of facts that you might find interesting. First of all, there's been only one diet that's been proven to reverse heart disease. And that is a whole foods plant-based diet. I don't think that's true. I know what you're saying, but I've actually read that that's not true either.

That this proven to reduce heart disease, that that's not true either that this proven to reduce heart disease that that's not what's reducing heart disease what's reducing heart disease is healthy behaviors and that you're making this change in terms of eliminating toxic foods and processed foods and so do you have any other studies that show you can reverse heart disease without being on a whole foods plant based diet reverse it reverse it, that's the thing. It's like nutritionists have explained to me that there's a giant flaw in these epidemiology studies. This is not epidemiology. People are citing.

This is not epidemiology. How would you do that? These are controlled studies. Dean Ornish and Caldwell Delsestin. They're the two giants. Reversing heart disease just because of a plant-based diet. No, not just a plant-based diet. A whole foods, plant-based, low-fat diet has been proven to reverse it.

I don't know if that's true. It is true. Okay. We're going to find out if it is. And Jamie will pull something up. Because I've read something about how that was bullshit too. And it was by... In my book, by the way.

So my studies are in the book. The whole foods diet. Oh, I'm sure you've read some things that say that. Let me give you the other facts. Okay. So do you know about the Blue Zones? Yes, I do. Okay.

Well, five Blue Zones, their diets are remarkably similar. They're basically eating about, on average, according to Dan Buettner, good guy to have on your show sometime. Like Yorba Linda, right? Yorba Linda, California? Loma Linda. Loma Linda, that's right. What is Yorba Linda? I'm thinking Yorba Mate. Yeah, I think you are. We're talking about caffeine.

That may be your choice, Yorba Mate. But you know that one, that's the Seventh Day Adventist, right? Yeah, but there's also the Okinawa, Ikaria, Greece. You understand healthy user bias, right? This is like the great example of the Seventh-day Adventists. They don't drink any alcohol.

They exercise every day. They have many more positive habits. And you apply those positive habits and the fact they eat a vegetarian diet, you could assume that the reason why they're healthy is because of the vegetarian diet. That's not what I'm saying, because none of the blue zones except for a small subset of the seven-day adventists are actually vegetarian. Most of them just eat small quantities of animal foods, about 10% of their calories, which is what we recommend in this book. Right, but they're almost all very active people. Yes, but we don't have any examples of longevity in any culture that eats a heavy meat diet.

None. Longevity. Longevity. Like the Maasai. Living, the Maasai, the average, you know the average age of a Maasai? No, I don't. 45.

Well, don't they fuck up lions with spears? Whatever. That's not a risky business. It may be, but it's not a good example. How about the Inuits? But I was just saying. That's another one that's used. They're usually, they have the highest heart disease problem.

Okay, but stop right there because that's not normal. This is a recent occurrence with them because of cigarettes and alcohol, Western diet, and changing the way they live. Like the introduction of cigarettes and alcohol is what's fucked those people up. I'm merely saying, and I put the challenge to you, show me examples of long-lived peoples that are heavy consumers of animal foods. Well, I don't know of any specific long-term studies that have been done on people who are eating a lot of animal food and are also very active and healthy and making healthy choices outside of that. The problem with alcohol and cigarettes and all these other things that people tend to take in and consume when they're also consuming animal foods is that all those things get lumped in together. I agree.

The Blue Zones doesn't claim that it's just diet. They actually believe there's many factors. There's the amount of movement that people do, the healthy community that they have, some type of purpose, higher purpose, spirituality. Jamie, just Google plant-based diet has not been shown to reverse heart disease. This article that I was reading, I wish I had saved it. Mind you, I want to keep saying it's not just a plant-based diet. A plant-based diet can be remarkably unhealthy if you're eating a junk food. If you're eating the vegan cheeses all the time.

You're saying whole food, plant-based diet, like eating vegetables. Lots of fruits and vegetables, beans, whole grains, small quantities of nuts and seeds. That's an extremely healthy diet. And if you add a little bit of animal foods to it, then it's still going to be a really healthy diet. And that's what the Blue Zones do. I think what we can all agree on is that eating toxic food, eating processed food, not healthy, not exercising, living a sedentary lifestyle, consumption of cigarettes and alcohol, all these things are detrimental to your health. Absolutely. alcohol, all these things are detrimental to your health.

Absolutely. I'll even go so far as to say that a vegan junk food diet is about the most unhealthy diet you can eat because you're just eating processed foods. Animal foods are actually whole foods and they have a variety of nutrients in them. You can get them all from plants except for B12. So what do you think is bad about animal foods other than the ethics? From a health standpoint, it depends on how much you eat. And if you eat too much of it, then we see the heart disease, we see cancer. These all correlate very closely with... Right. But now you're talking about epidemiology studies.

Yes. But epidemiology, we can't do controlled studies on people over the long term. Right. But you understand that the people that you're seeing, high rates of cancer and heart disease, aren't consuming grass-fed steak and salads. What they're consuming is cheeseburgers and fries and milkshakes and soda and all sorts of bullshit. So when they do a study on someone, they say, how often do you eat meat? And they say, I eat meat five days a week. And they go, oh, well, look at the incidence of cancer in people that fill out the study and say they eat meat five days a week. That's where they make these correlations and connections. It's like I do this debate all the time, too. And so I understand your position on

this. And all I would say is, where are the epidemiological studies that support your point of view? There aren't any. Well, epidemiology studies that support my point of view there aren't any well epidemiology studies that support my point of view what do you mean if you wanted an epidemiology study that supported the fact that animal foods are not bad for you you would have to find groups of people that only eat animal foods and don't consume alcohol and cigarettes and then comparing to people that do and find out what the variables are right i think people who do consume cigarettes and do consume alcohol and do consume processed foods and sugars and excess corn syrup foods and all the shit that we know is a part of a standard American diet, right?

Are you saying that people that consume animal foods are more likely to consume processed foods, cigarettes, and alcohol? Yes, they are because people have been told that animal foods are bad for you. So when people are like, fuck it, and they just have a cheeseburger, particularly if you're talking about the average American. The average American, they're getting their meat. They're probably not eating a grass-fed ribeye. They're probably eating a cheeseburger that they get from Jack in the Box or someplace like that. So you're getting processed foods.

You're getting meat, but you're also getting sugar and corn syrup and all sorts of other nonsense. That's the problem with these epidemiology studies, and you know that. Yeah, but you're talking about a pretty small group. If you've got the whole world to work from, lots of the world eats animal foods that are grass-fed, and the same type of results show up there. Generally, the more animal foods... Same type of results show up there generally the more same type of results in terms of what the term heart disease and cancer and and with people that occasionally

like what like what are the what are the studies you're talking about i can you'd like me to send you some studies no i want you to tell me right now because you're saying it like you know it for a fact. Like what studies are showing that people that consume grass-fed meat and vegetables are showing the same levels of heart disease and cancer as people that eat the standard American diet? Since I don't have those studies in front of me. They don't exist. Parsing out the standard American diet, I think we both agree, is toxic. I can send them to you. It's toxic.

Eating horse shit and drinking soda, it's not good for your body. No, it's terrible. Right. Well, that's where we agree. We agree processed foods are bad. So when you're getting this standard American diet and they're applying it to an epidemiology study where they're saying, oh, this person eats meat five days a week. Well, what else do they eat? The problem with those studies is they're so flawed.

If you're making someone fill out a form. You're having an argument with somebody besides me. Somebody you've had an argument with in the past. Because I'm not saying that you're overreacting to things that I'm saying based on some other discussions you've had in the past. I don't think I'm overreacting. If you're interested, I will send you studies. And I can tell you that the studies contradict what you're saying and that the epidemiology cannot be, because it's not as good as a randomized controlled study,

which are hard to do in nutrition, does not make them worthless. It just means that they're not a complete answer, but they do point in certain directions. But they're conveniently pointing to this meat argument versus all the other stuff they're eating, which we've shown to be bad for you. People have been eating meat since the beginning of time. But not in very large quantities, generally. Depends on what people.

Yeah, depends on which people. I mean, people that have been around buffalo, and that's all they could eat. They ate nothing but buffalo. So the animals that we are closest to from an evolutionary standpoint are the chimpanzees, the bonobos, and the gorillas. We're not exactly the same, but they're the closest relatives we have in nature. The gorillas are 100%. And by the way, they're pretty damn big. They get enough protein. Well, they have a completely different digestive system get enough protein. They have a completely different

digestive system. Not completely different. It's very different. They eat only leaves and grass and bark and shit. It's very different. The chimpanzees are about 95% plant-based. They're the closest to us. They're about 99% of the same.

I'm so excited when they kill monkeys. Have you ever watched those videos? They eat about 5% of their calories. Studies show they eat about 5% of the same. I think it's so exciting when they kill monkeys. Have you ever watched those videos? Like the David Attenborough videos? They eat about 5% of their calories. Studies show they eat about 5% of their calories from animal foods. And again, I'm not arguing that we don't eat any animals. Humans, we clearly evolved as omnivores. But in

general, we were mostly gatherers who, we couldn't preserve most animal foods. We didn't have the technology to preserve it. So we feasted when we could get it. But you could smoke some of it and dry some of it for jerky. But in general we didn't have massive supplies of animal

foods. We were mostly eating plants with a little bit of animal foods. That might be the optimum human diet. Right. But you also understand that most plants are inedible. Most plants are inedible, true. Yeah. And most animals are edible. That's probably true so yeah so whenever they do you think got a chance to eat plants there's a lot probably had to be real careful with what they could eat and what they couldn't eat because most of it was inedible and

not much of it even toxic most whereas if they can catch an animal and eat it they're almost all edible how many different animal foods do you eat? How many different ones? Give me a rough estimate. Eggs, meat, fish. No, but maybe 20 different kinds. Probably something like that. How many different plant foods do you eat? Well, I live in a Western society where I can go to Whole Foods

and I can get tomatoes and all kinds of avocados, stuff that's not even grown here. I mean, it's a different world. When we were foraging, we knew what were toxic plants because we'd had our grandparents. A bunch of people died from it. Exactly. Yeah. But there was a huge variety of plants.

We ate massively diverse diets when we were out foraging. Right. Probably far more diverse than we eat today even though there's a whole foods market. Just because there were so many different foods out there in the wild, in the woods, in the jungles. This will have to be a conversation that we can have at another time probably. But what's your point? I agree with you

that there's probably a lot of different plants. I was talking about, well, you were saying that we can eat any kind of animal but we can't eat any kind of plant. And I'm saying there's so much more abundance of plants to choose from than in our normal diet or when we were foragers than animals. Animals were a much smaller percentage of our total calorie consumption. Probably because they're really hard to catch. But they also think that one of the reasons why we became human beings was because of hunting.

And that's directly correlated to an increase of brain size. Cooking meat and hunting and having more access to protein sources. You understand that's a theory. That's not science. That's just a theory. Right. It's one of the most probable theories, one of the most accepted theories in terms of the increase in human brain size. the most accepted theories in terms of the increase in human brain size.

There's an equally theory that probably when we became root eaters is when we really got brain. I've never read that theory. When we became root eaters, that's when our brains grew? We started eating tubers, yeah. How come rabbits aren't gigantic brains? They're not big tube eaters. They're leaf eaters. Rabbits eat carrots, man.

You watch Bugs Bunny. So how do those blue whales get so damn big just eating plankton? Krill? Well, they eat a lot of things. They don't just eat plankton. No, I think the blue whales are plankton eaters. That's it? That's all they eat?

Yeah. There are other whales that are definitely eating that. Yeah, listen, we're not whales, right? This is going to be a weird conversation. The whales have still never figured out how to grow fingers. We're humans, so we're great apes, and we've evolved similar to other great apes. But I don't like those, how come this animal can do it? We're not that animal.

We know from the blue zones that the people that eat mostly plant-based diets live the longest. There's a massive amount of evidence if you'll open your mind to it. Oh, well, listen, my mind's open. Those blue zones are also people that are very active there's a direct correlation between physical activity i think the people that live a vegan diet that that follow a vegan diet but are healthy and exercise are far better off than someone who lives a sedentary lifestyle and even even eats healthy meat i think the key is healthy. If you're going to be a healthy person, you need physical activity.

And that there's a direct correlation between physical activity and longevity and health benefits. Of course, absolutely. Right. Well, this is what you see a lot in these blue zones as well, right? Yes. I mean, I'm merely saying what's true. There's one factor. Diet is a factor. It may be one of the most important factors, but it's not the only factor for longevity. But the longest-lived peoples, what they have in common is they all move.

They all have families and communities. And they also mostly eat plant-based diet, whole foods, plant-based diet. That's mostly what they eat with some animal foods. None of them are vegan except for a small subset of the Adventists. But they are mostly plant-based eaters that have a small 10% of their calories in animal foods. At least that's what the studies show. The studies also show that they're also very active. Yes, they are very active.

Yeah. Not because they're out running around, but just because their natural lifestyle moves. Do you find anything? I mean there's a lot of stuff On this topic I need to have my own researcher That I read recently I think the article was basically Stop saying that

A vegan diet reverses heart disease And it was explaining All the problems in that logic. I didn't find that specific one, but there's an article here from the British Heart Foundation that talks about this. And I think that started with a small study of 22 people that did plant-based, and four of them had some reversal.

This article here, though, currently goes into deeper studies and says that there isn't really a good study about it exactly what i can find at least according to this mind you a study published in 2014 looked at 198 patients to further investigate whether eating a strict plant-based diet could stop or reverse heart disease it found that of the 177 patients who stuck to the diet the majority reported a reduction in symptoms and 22 had a disease reversal confirmed by test results. But that study didn't just rule out animal products. It also cut out added oils, processed foods, sugar, refined carbohydrates,

excess salt, fruit juice, avocados, and nuts. Physical activity was also encouraged and prescribed. Medication continued. This is the problem with saying that. And this is not just, there's not just one of these that's like this. It's basically the same thing. You're talking about people that make healthy choices, and that's what's reverse heart disease. Also, change their diet and eat healthier.

But not just eat plants and a plant-based diet, but also remove processed foods and sugars. Of course, a whole foods, plant-based, low-fat diet. That's the three that's proven to reverse heart disease. Yeah, but these people also cut out sugar, refined carbohydrates, excess salt, fruit juice. Those are not whole foods. Exactly. But they cut out the bullshit that was killing them. It wasn't that plant-based diets were reversing heart disease.

They cut out the things that were killing them. This is the other article that I wish I could find it. So I guess what I'm saying is show me a study that people eat, cut out all the processed foods, eat a high percentage of their calories in animal foods, say 30, 40% of their calories from animal foods, and reverse heart disease. There haven't been any studies? This is showing that the people are cutting out toxic things that we know are toxic. I don't believe animal foods are toxic. I think people have been eating animal foods from the beginning of time.

I think the problem is these things that we haven't been eating since the beginning of time. Processed carbohydrates, sugars, fruit juice, all the bullshit, vegetable oils, all these things that people have been adding to their diets fairly recently that coincides with a direct uptick in heart disease. So your hypothesis is, first of all... I don't have a hypothesis. This is just shit that I've read.

Okay, so what you believe from the shit you've read is that you could eat a high animal food diet cut out all the processed stuff and you'd reverse heart disease i think that if i have heart disease heart disease is because they eat shit and they don't exercise. I think that is where heart disease is coming from. I don't think plants are going to fix your heart. I think it comes from both. And you think it just comes from the processed foods. That's where we part company. Yeah.

That is probably where we part company. I think plants are good for you. Don't get me wrong. I think eating healthy and eating whole foods, we both agree, are good for you. I just don't think that meat is bad for you. I don't think in small quantities meat is bad for you. But I think in large quantities it starts to clog up your arteries and your propensity to cancer goes up.

Because I think that's what the science shows. I don't think the science does show that. I don't think the science shows that large – I'm going to send you the studies. That it clogs your heart? It begins to – It clogs your arteries? Is that what happens?

The high fat content of the meat over time clogs up your arteries, yes. Yeah. I'd like to sit you down with a doctor who disagrees with you and have you go back and forth with it. Because it's a complicated issue. Diet is a very complicated issue. And it goes along with so many different things that people choose, lifestyle choices. When you see the results, like how healthy or how sick you are, there's a lot of factors that go into there.

But people that are plant-based tend to lean on that one factor. They tend to lean on this one aspect of their lifestyle choices that seems to be improving health. And I don't think you can do that as much as I don't think that you can lean on meat as being a cause of cancer when you look at epidemiology studies with people that eat meat five days a week but also consume a bunch of bullshit. So clearly we're going to not agree on this one. or took a group of people, a large group like in that study, and they took them off of the standard American diet and fed them grass-fed beef and vegetables and then had them exercise on a regular basis,

I bet we would see similar results. First of all, again, it's a matter of degree. If you're feeding people vegetables, fruits and vegetables, and they're not, and you take out all the shit, that's a pretty healthy diet right there. It's just not the healthiest diet I think you could eat. But it's a lot healthier than the standard American diet. So you're going to get some good results on it. Studies that we know that have actually reversed heart disease cut out all the shit and also limit oil or don't have any oil, limit total fat consumption, and also limit animal foods. That's worked.

Now, maybe others will work as well. As you say, we should do a study where they eat 30% of their calories in animal foods, cut out all the processed carbohydrates, and see if that reverses heart disease. I agree. Let's do the study. But as far as I know, no study has been done. So that for now, based on what we know now, we do know that if you eat a whole foods, plant-based, low-fat diet, you can reverse your heart disease because it's been proven repeatedly. We do know that if you cut out all the shit that we know gives you heart disease, it will reverse heart disease. And if you eat whole foods along with that and exercise you'll be healthier what we don't know is that meat gives

you cancer we don't know is that meat gives you heart and I'm saying that meat hurts you first I've never said that meat what gives you cancer but you said that I'm saying plant-based diet has been shown to reverse heart disease I don't think that's what I'm gonna say. I think what we can say is that cutting out all the things that we know are very unhealthy, exercising and eating plants are probably good for it because they're whole foods. You can say that we aren't certain that the meat is a contributing factor, but we cannot say that the studies that have reversed it didn't include meat. but we cannot say that the studies that have reversed it didn't include meat.

Now, maybe meat was neutral. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. So you might be right. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying that you don't have any studies on your side in reversing heart disease. Meat has been cut out along with the crap, and heart disease gets reversed. Maybe meat had nothing to do with it. Maybe if they kept the meat in, they still would have reversed heart disease.

But no studies have shown that. That's all I'm saying. But this study is all changing lifestyle. It's not just a plant-based diet. That's right. I'm not saying it is. I mean, it's – well, actually – But that's the problem with saying it. Actually, Esselstyn studies, they only change diet.

Ornish changed. He had people moving and meditating. Esselstyn, if you read Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Caldwell Esselstyn's studies, they only change diet. Ornish changed. He had people moving and meditating. Esselstyn, if you read Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Caldwell Esselstyn in his studies, all he did was control for diet. And that – well, it's an amazing statistic, the amount of people that reverse their heart disease. So we'll have to have a further conversation. I'm going to send you – I'll send you some data and some studies. I think the idea that meat is not bad for you is a fairly recent idea. I think that people have been, first of all,

you have to go back to the sugar industry, bribing scientists to say that saturated fat and not sugar is what caused heart disease. And I'm sure you're aware of that, right? I've had a debate with Nina Tysholtz, and I've argued with Gary Taubes before. So I see it differently than they do. You see what differently? The fact that the sugar industry bribed scientists?

No, that sugar... You know about that, though, right? You're going to have to read through my book. Okay, but before I do that, you know that the sugar industry has been proven to have bribed scientists to alter results so that they prove – well, they're pointing to the idea that it was saturated fat that was causing heart disease instead of sugar. You know about that, right? I know that sugar is bad for people. But did you know that scientists were bribed by the sugar industry?

This has been proven. The New York Times wrote a whole story about it. And we already said they never lie. I think we didn't quite come to that conclusion. That's what we said. But you do know that they did that, right? That it has been proven. No, I don't know that.

I don't believe it's been proven that sugar causes heart disease. There might have been a bribe. No, that's not what I said. Yes, that's what I said. That the sugar industry bribed scientists to try to alter public opinion and show that it was saturated fat that was causing heart disease and take the blame off of sugar. I do believe that saturated fat is a contributing factor to heart disease and I believe the evidence is pretty overwhelming. 50 years ago sugar industry quietly paid scientists to point blame at fat. So what? Well that's a

big deal man. It changed the way people think about diet because people were saying oh my god saturated fat is giving you heart disease. I think it is. But this is why people started thinking this way. They were thinking this way because of the sugar industry, the sugar industry bribing scientists. Regardless of whether or not, but regardless of whether or not we agree or disagree on anything else, you have to admit that this is a giant issue.

You don't think the dairy industry, the egg industry, and the cattle industry bribe scientists they they they do i would like you to show me some studies oh my god they see how we can do this they find how we can both do this sure they yeah they fund studies yes they do in order to try to prove their products are healthy for people they fund studies to try to prove their products are healthy for people. They fund studies to try to prove their products are healthy, but do they bribe scientists to lie? And if they do, show me. No one's defending the sugar industry.

Right. I think you're making a logical fallacy. The fact that the sugar industry acted unethically, that proves that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease or contribute to it. No, it changes the perception of people when it comes to meat and health. And I think it did. And I think it did. And I think it has ever since then. The people saw this and read this.

And in their mind, meat became saturated fat. Saturated fat became heart disease. And it became a dangerous thing to eat too much meat. So here's an interesting question for you. How much do you think total animal food consumption has gone up in the United States per capita in the last 80 years? I would assume it's probably pretty high. Yeah, it's gone way up. Because we have more access to food, right, with factory farming and fast food.

We are eating more animal foods than ever before. Right. We're also eating more vegetable seed oils. So the sugar industry failed. The sugar industry failed in its task to get people to stop eating meat. No, it didn't. Because the task wasn't to try to get people to stop eating meat. It was to get people to not worry about eating sugar and consume more sugar and not have any fear about the health consequences of consuming sugar.

Because it wasn't sugar that was giving people heart disease. It was fat. Nobody's defending sugar in this discussion. I certainly not defending sugar why they bribe people they didn't bribe people so that people would hate fat they bribe people so they would take the blame off of sugar i i already concede that point but it doesn't make saturated fat good for people in large quantities it's not clearly not and I will send you studies on it and actually I've got it in my book and I've got studies quoted in the book well I don't know if that's true you know I mean there's been a lot of people that have eaten what they call a

carnivore diet and reversed a lot of symptoms that they've had with autoimmune diseases and there's different people that have different reactions to foods there's certain people that eat nuts and they get deathly ill there's certain people that eat them and they they're very healthy it's true there's people that have vegan diets and they don't have any problems with it and there's other people that have severe issues with it. That's true. There's diversity and there may not be one diet that could solve all human problems. No, I don't think there is. I don't think anybody would say there is. Anybody that's

being ethical and honest. I think human beings, biodiversity in human beings is pretty extreme. You know, depending upon where your ancestors came from, depending upon what body type and blood type, there's a lot of different issues. That's my problem. I don't think that you can say that a plant-based diet is the right diet for everybody or that it's good for everybody. I didn't say that. I don't say it in my book. Well, you did say it's the only diet that's been shown to reverse heart disease, and I don't really think it has.

But the burden of proof is to give me one study where that's not true. Well. So I've made the claim. I think. Prove me wrong. There's a lot of factors that led to reversing that heart disease. And I think when you look at all those factors, particularly the eliminating sugar that we know is a toxic substance, the adding of exercise, the eliminating of oils, all these different things that we know are not good for you. I think those are contributing factors.

If you wanted to say it's been shown that a whole foods plant-based diet plus eliminating all these toxic things have been shown to reverse heart disease, I'd be right there with you. Good. That's what I'm saying. Everybody eliminates that part, including you. You left that out. When you said it, you said whole food, plant-based diet. You didn't say eliminating all these things that have been shown to cause heart disease. What is a whole foods diet?

You go to Whole Foods and you fill your shopping cart? A whole food diet is actual whole foods, fruits, vegetables, beans. So it's not sugar. It's not oil so when i say a whole foods plant-based diet i mean no sugar no refined grains no oil none of the shit that you're talking about that's what a whole foods that's like exercise yeah plus these people eliminated all these things that they were eating before that gave them heart disease? Esselstyn's studies were only dietary-based. He did, it was a whole foods, plant-based, low-fat diet.

And if you read my chapter on heart disease and the whole foods diet, you know what? I'd love to have this conversation with you some other time. But even diet-based, you're still eliminating all these toxic things. Exactly. Right. That's a good thing. So, no one has proven that a whole foods, plant-based diet along with those toxic things, like if you had

all of the good foods that we know, whether it's animal foods, mollusks, all those different things, if we could just all come to an agreement, there's things that people eat, that we've been eating, particularly over the last few decades in this country that are just bad for you the problem is we get into these

ideological discussions of meat versus plants and this is where things people tend to sort of gravitate for towards one side or the other and ignore all the different the different aspects of this conversation like what we're talking about here with eliminating sugar, exercise. If you said a whole foods plant-based diet plus adding exercise and eliminating foods that we know to be toxic is better for you, there's not a single person who's going to argue that. The problem is everybody says it's a whole food plant-based diet, that this is what's doing the good.

But I think what's doing the good but it's i think what's doing the good is a lot of things so exercise eliminating toxic foods like sugar and all those vegetable oils and all the bullshit well whole foods diet eliminates those things so that's redundant you're if it's a whole foods diet it's not going to have sugar refined grains or oil in it because those aren't whole foods. Understood. But the problem is those people were consuming those bad things before. I want to put this challenge to you. I want you to just, because I think Caldwell Esselstyn's work on heart disease is worth looking at for you, because he didn't do anything but diet.

So he didn't have exercise in his program. He didn't have stress reduction. He didn't have meditation or anything else in there. He just had diet. It was a whole foods, plant-based, low-fat diet. It did reverse heart disease. But clearly eliminated all those other aspects that are toxic. Yes, it's a whole foods, plant-based diet.

So no toxins because those are all whole foods. Right. So let's see. Let me— See, that's the thing that's conveniently left out. You can say a whole foods plant-based diet, but it's not just that it's eliminating toxic food. It's not just eating good food. So what we need to do, what you need to do, or you need to come up with some evidence or somebody needs to, that you can throw in my face

is a whole foods meat-based diet eliminates all these toxins, will also reverse heart disease. If you can do that, then I'll – remember how we talked about beliefs earlier that they're just a suit of clothes? You produce that evidence, and I'll take off the suit of clothes because I'm actually about being intellectually – having intellectual integrity. I've come to my conclusions based on my own dispassionate study. So if you produce the evidence, I'll probably change my mind. What do you think people are doing wrong when

they're eating a vegan diet and they have all these health problems? They're eating a junk food vegan diet. They're not eating a whole foods vegan diet. They're eating junk food. They're eating all these toxic foods that we're talking about that's not everybody chris helmsworth was eating like he was having vegan um uh he was having like plant-based shakes in the morning and eating whole foods and he started developing all these kidney stones and had a lot of problems with oxalates i have no idea if he's having a lot of problem oxalates chances are he was eating a lot of, a huge amount of greens. Green leafy vegetables.

Sure. Right. Yeah. And eating in too large quantities has oxalates in it could cause problems in your kidneys. So all I know is that I've been doing this diet. It wasn't Chris Helmsworth. It was Liam, right? Yeah. Which one's Thor? Thor's Chris. Yeah. It's the other one, Liam. Which one's Thor? I love it. Yeah, it's the other one, Liam. Which one's Thor?

I love it. You got to go that way. So, Joe, what we agree on, let's go back to what we agree on. What we agree on is we should be not eating all this crap. Yes, 100%. We agree on that. 100%. And I think we agree that we should eat lots of fruits and vegetables.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Sure. Then we agree that we should eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Yes. Yes. Yes. Sure. Then we agree on 90% of it. Then it's a question of how much animal foods are good for us. And that's where we may differ. But probably we're not even that far apart there.

Because I'm saying you can eat some animal foods and have a really healthy, healthy diet and lifestyle. It's a question of how much. And at some certain point, I believe that the saturated fats, the cholesterol from the animal foods will begin to clog up your arteries. And it's not that they cause cancer, but they can be, I believe, cancer promoters, at least. You know, there's also been proven there's a big issue with eating cholesterol along with simple carbohydrates and things like processed foods since we agree on the simple carbohydrates we don't have to argue about that anymore you and I we are simpatico we sync up on that cut the sugar out cut the cut the what about oil how do you feel about that one

well I'm not a big fan of vegetable oils good yeah is there any other kind of oil yeah i mean you could have animal-based oils i mean you could i actually cook in beef oh you mean like booth beef tallow and butter yeah i was thinking those weren't oils but they're fat yeah well beef tallow renders down into oil right it's um i think that there's a lot of people consuming a lot of processed shit i think this is where we absolutely meet in the middle whether it's vegetable processed shit like i have a friend who's vegan who eats all kinds of wacky vegan delights all these little treats and all this i'm like read this fucking ingredients it's garbage preservatives and nonsense and but it's vegan so it's it's ideologically acceptable right you know things fall into

these they fall into these little groups like this this this aligns with my religion so i'm going to eat this there are plenty on the on the uh paleo keto there's lots of little groups on the animal food side too. Sure. So everybody, it's almost like diet. In fact, this might be a more interesting discussion than you and I batting each other about this one. It's interesting to me how many sort of little cults

there are in food now. There are all these little nutritional food cults and everybody thinks they're right. It's almost like a religion. Well, because- Diet is religion. You're eating one way and you hope they're right. It's almost like a religion. Diet is religion. You're eating one way and you hope you're right. And if you, you know, the problem with eating, right, is that if you're eating something and it's good for you, it takes a while before you feel it. You're not sure.

And then also there's a mindfuck going on. You know, a lot of people that get into a certain diet, whether it's keto or other, I tried keto for a while. There's, there's certain things that you do where you start mindfucking yourself that you're on the right path. And I do feel better. I feel better. But you know, there's people that do that with faith healing. You know, it's hard for people to decide what makes them feel better. There's holistic fake medicines that people, like, what is that stuff called? What are those? Homeopathic.

Homeopathic medicines. They're fucking sugar pills. There's literally nothing to them. And yet people take them and they claim they feel better. Chiropractors. Oh, I feel better. I feel better. Well, I do see a chiropractor and I do feel better.

Do you know how chiropractors were invented? Doesn't matter. A magnetic healer who came up with it in a seance in the 1800s came up with this idea that by adjusting people's spines, you're going to fix all these illnesses. And so do you know that when you go to a chiropractor and use a doctor? You know where doctors came from? They used to bleed people. But they don't anymore. You know that, right? Chiropractors aren't.

Doctors, like when you go to a doctor of chiropractic, how much time do you think they spend in medical school? Well, they didn't go to medical school. They go to zero, zero medical school. How many nutrition classes did doctors take in medical school? They don't take much, about eight hours. But that's why you go to a nutritionist and not a standard American doctor. But when you go to a chiropractor, they call themselves a doctor. Well, they're a doctor of chiropractic.

Right. And it was invented by a magnetic healer who was killed by his son his son ran him over in a car his son was a con man and that's the guy who went up spreading this whole religion of chiropractic medicine i don't adjusting babies and shit i don't think it's i don't think it's a religion but clearly you don't go to chiropractors i've been i do i've had good i saw a chiropractor today in fact yeah it feels good right crack crack pop pop feels like something but this feels good too i just did that with my knuckles i i chiropracted my knuckles i can't do that anymore okay you just did it there you go wow how about that wow amazing but my point is that there's no evidence that that is doing

anything to you physically. If you go to a doctor and you have a serious issue, like you've got a broken arm and they have to put plates in it and screw it in place and put it in a cast, there's real evidence that that works. They've shown it. They've healed people. Yeah, so doctors are pretty good at healing bones. They're not too good with cancer. They're not too good with cancer. They're not too good with heart disease. They're a lot better with cancer than they've ever been ever in history.

They're closing in on fixing that. In fact, there was an article just today that there was, I think it's in Israel. they figured out a way to have genes that actively go after like surgically go after cancer there was an article and was it scientific american there was an article today about a fantastic breakthrough in cancer therapy crisper yes they're using cris to do this, and they figured out a way to actively target, the way they described it was surgical. Revolutionary CRISPR-based genome editing system treatment destroys cancer cells. Breakthrough may increase life expectancy in brain and ovarian cancer.

See, so you can't say that doctors are not good at treating cancer because they're constantly working on it. They're constantly working. And they're making breakthroughs like this all the time. That's just a theoretical breakthrough. And I hope it's correct. But, hey, Joe, here's the reality. Hold on. That's not theoretical.

Researchers have demonstrated that CRISPR-Cas9 system is very effective in treating metastatic cancers, a significant step on the way to finding a cure for cancer. The researchers developed a novel lipid nanoparticle-based delivery system that specifically targets cancer cells and destroys them by genetic manipulation. They practice this on animals. This is not like a theory. This is something they're actually doing with CRISPR. I'm all for it, but I haven't seen it yet.

Look around. Well, here's the reality. The reality is that we spend 80% of our health care dollars on lifestyle dietary diseases. The doctors can't help us with it all. You can say there's a cure for cancer. The best way is to have a strong immune system because we get cancer all the time and our immune system just deals with it.

Yeah, but there's babies that get cancer. You know, cancer is a genetic issue. Sometimes people have a systemic, like their body has a vulnerability to cancers. And the reality is that... You can't say to that baby, suck it up and have a better diet. All biological carbon-based life forms have a propensity, or animals have a propensity to cancer. Right.

But that's why it's fascinating when doctors and researchers can come up with treatments, novel treatments like this. So to say that doctors and chiropractors are on the same tier. I didn't say that. But that's the example you used when I was talking about how chiropractors are full of shit. I don't have the same, I don't hold doctors in the same high esteem that you do. I've worked with lots of doctors and they generally don't know what they're talking about. Oh, man. How can you say that?

There's so many doctors that are experts in their field that have helped people. You know, you were talking about the sugar industry bribing somebody. The pharmaceutical industry bribes doctors every single year. All their continuing education are these junkets to golf resorts where they get continuing education about the new wonders of these drugs. sorts and where they get continuing education about the new wonders of these drugs that, except for vaccinations and antibiotics, most of these drugs don't cure anything. They just deal with symptoms.

Well, I agree with you on that. And I agree with you that there is a gigantic problem with pharmaceutical industries having influence over doctors. My wife's mom's a nurse, and she would tell us stories about how these pharmaceutical companies would take everybody out to dinner in these fancy restaurants and pay for everything. And they weren't bribing you, but they kind of were. That is kind of a bribe. It's kind of a bribe. And they would let you know, like, hey, you know, if someone comes in and they got this problem, we got this. Reciprocity. I do you a favor, you do me a favor. Yeah, it's sneaky.

It's sneaky. And they'd send you on trips and go on these conferences that these pharmaceutical companies would put together. No, I agree with you. There's certainly some influence that the pharmaceutical companies have over doctors. And certainly there's an unpleasant exchange that goes on between them but to say that doctors aren't doing any good is crazy i didn't say they aren't doing any good you're i what did you say how'd you say it i just i just said i don't have a lot of faith in them yeah i i mean for if you have look doctors if you have first aid if i if I have cuts and I need stitches, I want to—

Orthopedic surgeon, if you have a blown knee. Absolutely. Hey, I've had both of my hips resurfaced. Oh, you have? Mm-hmm. And I found the best surgeon in America, I think, to do that. How'd you blow out your hips? You know, we don't really know. Probably the doctor thought I played competitive basketball in high school, college, and city league for years.

And he thinks that I was really small when I got to high school. I was only five feet tall, and I grew about a foot in a couple of years. And he says that there's a disease that when you're growing that rapidly, and if you have a lot of contact in the hip area like you might get from martial arts or you might get from football or basketball, from jumping and all that lateral movement, that my hips were not quite in the socket. So my cartilage wore out prematurely. And I was bone on bone when I got the surgeries done. But you know what? A miracle.

I don't have any real pain in my hips occasionally. But for the most part, I'm pain-free. Doctors. Yeah, surgeons. Just to make it clear, surgeons. I mean, if you need surgery, you need first aid, like a broken bone, they're great. I think we're on the same page. What you're saying is that doctors over-prescribe medication.

Correct. page what you're saying is that doctors over prescribed medication correct and under prescribed healthy living and diet and doing all the things that we know to be positive for the human body exactly no I agree with you because they don't get enough training and I don't get enough training in and in healthy living no that's a fact like I had a conversation with the doctor where he's telling me you don't need vitamin supplementation. You just, you know, just eat a good diet. I'm like, what's a good diet where you're going to get vitamin D3?

A business model that I'm kicking around investing in would be a business model where you have doctors and you have a whole team. So Joe Rogan goes in there. We do the complete workup of everything about your blood, your total health. And then we begin to customize our ideas to get you to live an extra 10 or 15 years and increase your health span. How can we optimize Joe Rogan? How can we optimize your health and well-being? And a team of people that are working with you, studying you, you're paying a monthly fee to get this. It's kind of concierge medicine, but not just dealing with getting a prescription from this doc so you can get your Viagra or whatever from the doctor. It would be about them optimizing your long-term health and well-being.

I think that is going to be a big future business model. Then you would have to have people actually go out and do things. Like, Mike, you're going to have to work out. Yes. Well, think about it. We have personal trainers. We have executive coaches that corporate leaders frequently get. Why not have a wellness coach with a team of a doctor and wellness coaches who are helping you to optimize your absolute peak performance that you can get?

Have you ever thought about implementing something like that for employees at Whole Foods? I have thought about that. It's pretty expensive to do it. implementing something like that for employees at Whole Foods? I have thought about that. It's pretty expensive to do it. Yeah, that would be the problem, right? One thing we do at Whole Foods, though, if you work for the company, we give you a 20% discount for being a team member. But then we measure your four biometrics.

If you're interested, you get a higher discount. If you don't smoke, if you smoke, we detect nicotine in your blood and you're out. And then it's about your body mass index. In a man as big as you, we do a height to waist ratio so that you wouldn't be penalized for being. Yeah, I'm obese. By a BMI measurement, but not by a height to waist ratio. So we do it both ways and give you the benefit of whichever one you get the best score on.

Why not just do their body fat so you know that it's just muscle? A little harder to measure because of the cost of doing the test. Calipers. Yeah, that's... It's not that big a deal. And they also, they have things now that electromagnet or whatever it is, they hold on to these handles and it shoots. So maybe we need to examine how we could do that more effectively.

Yeah. But we also do blood pressure and cholesterol. And then based on how you score on those, you can get up to a 30% discount based on your overall health. So we create an incentive for our people to be healthier. Oh, that's great. So the people that shop at Whole Foods that work there get a giant discount if they're healthy. They already get a giant discount at 20%. They could get an additional 10% if they're healthy. They could get, we have four different levels.

We call a bronze, silver, and gold levels. What do you have to do to get gold? What do you have to do? You have to have a BMI that's under 24, cholesterol that's either total cholesterol under 150 or LDL under 80, I think. That's a hot-button debate. Blood pressure, I think I don't want to have that debate with you right now. No, it's not me, man. It's Carnivore MD, this guy, Paul Saladino, had this.

And then blood pressure under 115, under 75. 115, under 75. And what do you get if you hit gold? To get gold, your blood pressure 120 over 80, your cholesterol... No, but what do you get? Oh, for gold, you're going to get a bronze, silver, gold, platinum. Platinum. Platinum's the highest level.

You get 30% discount. Oh, that's a sweet discount. Gold's 27. Oh, that's a sweet discount. Gold's 27. Oh, okay. Silver's 24. And 22 for bronze. That's nice. So you incentivize people to make healthy choices.

Do you give them any sort of a gym membership or something along those lines? That would help, right? That's a good idea. We haven't done that. Yeah, what if you had a thing at Whole Foods where you had a small gym attached to Whole Foods where you offered classes for employees? Take some of that Jeff Bezos money. Yeah. Put it in action.

The problem is we actually do locate close to gyms, and sometimes our stores work out deals with the gyms to consent people to use the gyms. Oh, that's great. But having a gym on to every store would be expensive. We don't even have one in our corporate offices, although we're thinking about. How do you not have a gym in your corporate office? I think it's the egalitarian culture. Would it be fair for the people at Global Support to have a gym when the people in the stores don't have one? I understand, but. We have the same benefits for all our team members, regardless of where they work. Oh, really?

Yeah. Oh, that's very nice. If you're a cashier at Whole Foods, you've got the same benefits I do. What do you do personally in terms of exercise and to make sure that you stay healthy? So when I was younger, I played competitive basketball, and I was a runner for a long time. And now I'm a long-distance backpacker. Ah, you're rucking. Yep. I've hiked the Appalachian Trail twice.

Have you really? Mm-hmm. Jesus Christ. Pacific Crest Trail once. Isn't that like months? The first time I did it, I took a sabbatical, four and a half months. You took a four and a half month sabbatical to walk? Yeah.

It was great It was so fun That's so crazy I made a ton of friends The guys I met on that trail I still go hiking with every year Really? It's kind of like being in the Marines

You have this deep bonding you have with people Well, you know you're walking all the way across the continent And Joe, you get so frigging fit Oh, I'd imagine Even when I got into Maine I was still getting fitter But you know what as soon as you stop hiking 10 hours a day it goes away it goes away pretty quickly yeah i've um

traveled with people that work on ranches and you try to keep up with them and like you just your ankles want to fall because they're moving all the time they're constantly doing it they're just it's and for them it's not even a. It's a normal part of their everyday life. So their legs are just totally conditioned to be able to hike up those hills and walk constantly. People don't realize how difficult hiking is. It's like, what do you do for exercise? Oh, I go hiking. Like, oh, slacker. Hiking is hard, man.

It depends on how – it could be if you go for a 30-minute walk around the neighborhood, it's not too hard. But the Appalachian Trail, that is another level. It's wonderful. I love being out in nature. If you ask me what my favorite form of recreation is, it's getting out into nature, some form or fashion. I love hiking, and I love long-distance backpacking, and I do it ultralight. So, I mean, it's like I've got it down to a science. So when you say backpacking, so you're sleeping out there in So, I mean, it's like I've got it down to a science.

So when you say backpacking, so you're sleeping out there in the wilderness. Oh, yeah, I'm camping. The whole deal. Yeah, absolutely. Now, there's not a lot of CEOs that are willing to do that. I don't know. But remember, the second time I hiked it, I did it in over four years because I couldn't take that much time off. When I retire sometime in the next few years, I'm going to'm gonna go hiking a lot I'm gonna be out on those trails there's so many people right now

that are aspiring CEOs that want to be some big-time baller like you and they hear this like oh when when when I retire I'm gonna go walking they're like fuck you well you're supposed to be out there balling you're supposed to be on a yacht and doing crazy shit. Well, I may do some of that too. They're not mutually exclusive. I can't hike 12 months a year. I like that. I can do some of that other stuff too.

They're not mutually exclusive. Now, when you do it, do you ultra light camp too? You bring like a very light tent? Yeah. So like my base weight before food and water is about six and a half pounds. And so that's pretty light and my tent weighs 12 ounces my backpack itself weighs about 14 ounces and my sleeping bag is going to weigh about 20 21 ounces and how do you know how much food to bring and do you've got that time out

like i know how far you walk you have to plan it it out and when you're going to resupply. But in general, I'm going to consume about a pound and a half to two pounds of food a day. And so I have to. And I know how much I need to take each day. What do you bring? Do you bring bars? Do you bring whole food? What do you bring?

On the first couple of days, I'll definitely take some whole foods like apples uh maybe even some snap peas and peanut butters and stuff like that yeah i do i do i do a lot of high calorie stuff here yeah i do a lot of nut butters uh trail mix um uh i i also uh I also, avocados, you know, whole grain crackers, things like that. But then once you're a few days in, you kind of can't do that anymore because you don't have access to supermarkets. I also might take a sandwich out for the first day or some hummus or something like that. Why don't you have dudes parachute you healthy foods down? Well, what I will actually do is, what most people do is they mail drops, have somebody mail drop the food. And what I generally do is, I usually have a car support that I meet up with every once or twice a week and get resupply that way. Oh, okay. That's a good move.

And I have to say, I'd like to spend one, take one day a week off and go into a town, get a massage, eat some town food, which tastes really good, after you've been on the trail food for a while. Is it hard to find vegetarian foods when you go to these towns? You know, I would say it used to be when I hiked the Appalachian Trail the first time in 2002, so it was pretty hard back then. But there's plant-based foods everywhere now. But if you're exhausted, don't you want a meatloaf, gravy? I know this will surprise you, but I have lost my taste for it. No, it's

not surprising at all. When you get used to certain types of diets, like that's what your body seems to crave. Yeah, you know, that's one of the big learnings I have about food in general is we will like whatever food we eat. So I've re-educated my palate. When I was a kid, I ate the standard American diet, junk food, right? I just ate crap, Cocoa Puffs for breakfast, sweet rolls, burgers and fries, shakes, you know, stuff that still most Americans eat. And I didn't eat any vegetables at all, none, zero, none. Pickles on a burger. That was it. Wow. That's hardcore.

Yeah. But then when I began to wake up dietarily and nutritionally, I taught myself to like every type of plant food. I like every kind of plant food. Because once you expose your palate to a food about 10 times or so, you'll start to like it. Well, I would 100% say that the standard American diet is fucking terrible for you. I think that it's a real problem in access when people are hungry. If you're just driving around, they should have some sort of a vegetarian-based fast food that's good for you.

How come no one's figured that out yet? Because there's all these Jack in the Boxthe-box and so a couple of McDonald's a couple of points um it's a real problem because statistically now 70 percent of Americans adults are overweight and 42 and a half percent of Americans are obese 42 and a half that's crazy that's crazy it's almost a crazy number and it and by the way it's getting worse we have not peaked yet. It could be 50% in another five or six or seven years. It's incredible. So we're escalating.

Yes, we're escalating. This is a crisis in America. We are eating ourselves to death. And it's mostly the things we agree about. Yeah. Junk. Sugar. Sugar.

Garbage. Garbage. Yeah. Yeah. Junk. Sugar. Sugar. Garbage.

Garbage. Yeah. So here's what I believe. Evolutionary is what's happened to humanity. So when we were out foraging, which we did for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, when we were hunters and gatherers or gatherers and hunters, our real problem was getting enough food.

That's always been humanity's major problem. And so we've evolved a palate that craves calorie-dense foods. We like food that has a lot of calories in it. It tastes really good. But we just couldn't get it in nature. Maybe you could occasionally get, you could pull down a wild game. Occasionally you could hunt it, eat it, gorge on it because you'd eat as much as you could because you couldn't preserve it well it still was kind of lean gamey stuff right because they weren't they weren't being fattened up on corn like the like the pork and and chickens and beef that we eat today or we get honey for example we might get a couple hundred bee stings if we could get that delicious honey.

But it was just scarce. And so we crave it. And that's our problem. Our genetics are working against us because we can eat calorie-dense food every single meal, every day of our lives. And we just get fatter and fatter and fatter. And that's our existential dilemma. Not just Americans, the whole world. Yeah, it's crazy. Because we've exported the American diet across the world.

Somebody said this to me once, and it really resonated, like that this is the only time ever where poor people are fat. Exactly. There's never been a time in history where you could be poor and fat. It used to be the rich people were fat, and the poor people ate the traditional diet, and they were not getting enough calories, so they were thin. It's almost reversed itself today. A lot of the more richer people, they hire personal trainers. They learn more about food. They eat whole foods, whether it be plant-based or meats or both,

and they just take better care of themselves. It's such a catch-22 for folks, too, because when you're tired and you're exhausted, and a lot of times when people have poor nutrition they're tired and they're exhausted it's very difficult to manage your your appetite like when i'm tired i have to stay the fuck out of the kitchen that's with me like last night i was tired i worked out pretty hard and I'm a glutton. I have a real problem. I eat way too much.

I just sit down. I'll gorge myself, and I'm like, stop. Stop, and I keep eating, especially pasta. I have a giant problem with pasta. I will just get fat as fuck if I can eat all the pasta I want. I just can't stop myself. Like if I have a big bowl of spaghetti, I just keep shoving it in my face even after I'm full. If I eat meat, I will stop when I'm full. It's the satiety, whatever it is, whatever causes you to be satisfied by consuming it.

I'm good. But fucking pasta, I will just keep going. So if you're eating typical white pasta, that's a very calorie-dense food. It doesn't have any fiber in it. I think part of what creates satiety is fiber. So when you're eating lots of fruits, vegetables. Then why does steak make you so satisfied? That's because of the fat also creates satiety if we don't eat it too fast.

So it's like fat sends a signal to our systems to say, wow, that's a big load I've got in there. So fat does a similar type thing. Fiber does it, though, without the calorie load. So I eat a lot i also eat a lot of food but i've just i'm just eating a lot of fiber i bet if you and i sat down you'd be astonished at how much i eat when you think a lot what you think of it as a lot i eat a stupid amount of food man well you're you're you're working it off somehow or another. Somehow, barely. I exercise sometimes just to keep from getting too fat. But my problem, my number one problem is pasta.

There is something about that food in particular, pasta with tomato sauce. I can just eat it until I explode. You need to keep that out of your house then. Yeah, I should, but I don't. That's also a problem. I shop when i'm hungry yeah that's not good you are you are you are just the kind of customer whole foods likes yeah i walked down that cookie aisle you guys have some awesome vegan cookies by the way this

is why you're you see that this you're tempted by these foods that are actually really unhealthy for you i think i think this this is good because we all are. Yeah. We are tempted by these calorie-dense foods. But once you're aware that calorie density isn't our friend, then we can start making different choices. You guys have these vegan cookies. Who makes these goddamn cookies?

It's like Auntie Something's. They come in a brown paper bag. Uncle Eddie's? Uncle Eddie's vegan cookies? No. I think it's an auntie somethings. They come in a brown paper bag. Uncle Eddie's. Uncle Eddie's. Vegan cookies. No. I think it's an auntie. Maybe I'm wrong.

There is an Uncle Eddie vegan cookie. Is it Uncle Eddie's? It's in a brown bag. Uncle Eddie's. I was right. Maybe it is Uncle Eddie's. There it is. That's it.

Those. Those. There's a peanut butter chocolate chip one. Why did I think it was auntie? Because I assume that it's a woman. Because they taste so good. I assume it's like someone butter chocolate chip one. Why did I think it was auntie? Because I assume that's a woman because they taste so good. I assume it's like someone's aunt cooking it. So you'll like this. The only time I really eat that food is when I'm going on a long-distance hike.

And trying to get enough calories is a problem because I'm hiking 10, 12 hours a day. And I'm burning 5,000 calories. And I've got to get more calories than me. I'm burning 5,000 calories, and I've got to get more calories than me. My wife says, John, you should admit to the world that really the only reason you like to go backpacking is because it gives you the excuse that you crave to eat crappy food. That's not crappy. They're delicious. They're just not something you should eat all the time.

They're just not healthy. Find the peanut butter chocolate chip ones. Those are the jam. I eat those with whole milk. Big glass of milk and dunk those suckers in there. I know you don't fuck with milk. I hate to tell you this, but when I need a snack like that, I just eat an apple. Oh, how boring.

What's wrong with you? Apples are so good. I love apples. Listen, I'm just joking. I eat apples before I work out. It's my favorite pre-workout food because i work out generally early in the morning and if i'm tired and i'm like god i need something i need something i almost always go with an apple that's it right there look at that those are the ones and if you're a vegan you could partake you won't have

the milk you you could drink it with some bullshit almond milk. What is that crazy cursor you're doing there? I just zoomed in instead of taking the way it seems in there. Look how good that is. Those are so good. Those are very good. Joe, that's your enemy. It is.

It is my enemy. Uncle Eddie is not your friend. Well, I don't have it a lot, but I do. You just said you come home, and i start devouring pasta and then i pasta i have that stuff once maybe twice a year i'll eat a bag of those like a whole bag that's the problem what else are you putting on your what else are you putting on your pasta um just garlic and tomato sauce that's really what i like are you using like a whole grain pasta? Mm-mm. You should use a whole grain pasta. No, no, no, no. I'm eating what's bad for me.

I'm not – when I'm eating pasta, I generally buy – what is it? Double zero pasta from Italy. I try to buy – I order it from Amazon. Is that Italian in your background? Yes. So you've got that excuse. You've got the genetic excuse. I don't have the desire to cook lasagna,

and I'm very fortunate that I don't have that desire because every now and then my wife will make lasagna. And if I come home, especially if it's late at night and I've just done stand-up and I find lasagna in the fridge, that lasagna doesn't have a fucking chance. It's going down. But I know it's bad for me you know i know but those you know carbohydrates in large just large quantities like that i know it's bad for me you probably won't want to do this but

my wife and i we eat we eat a brown rice pasta. Tastes really good. And then homemade delicious pasta sauce. A lot of garlic and onions and mushrooms. And then we'll add veggies on top of the pasta. And then we'll drown it in the sauce. It's really delicious. It's not that many calories. That doesn't sound too bad. I actually like hemp pasta.

I've been eating a lot of hemp pasta lately. I've never had hemp pasta. It's very good. Really? Yeah. It's guilt-free. Yeah. So it been eating a lot of hemp pasta lately. I've never had hemp pasta. It's very good. Really? Yeah, it's guilt-free. Yeah. So it doesn't feel nearly as bad for you.

But it's something I like about knowing that it's bad for me. Is it really hemp pasta or is it just white pasta that has a little bit of hemp seed in it? No, it's hemp. It's green. It's like a green pasta. Yeah. Yeah, there's a few different brands that I purchase. I wish I could remember the name, but I do not have it offhand.

But again, I buy that on Amazon as well. I love hemp seeds, so I might try that. Oh, I love hemp seeds. I love hemp protein. Hemp protein powder is fantastic. I use hemp seeds in my smoothies. It's good stuff. And it's easy to digest, and it's got all the amino acids.

It's one of the best, most complete proteins in terms of plants. I know. Yeah. That's why I take it. It it super easy for your body to digest there's something about hemp protein like if i know i have to work out in an hour i hesitate with some forms of protein like specifically whey like whey my body doesn't digest that well tastes pretty good like you can get a lot of like delicious whey protein supplements like powders and stuff, but it's a gas factory. It's rumbling in your stomach. Maybe you may not agree with your particular bacteria, because of the gas and all that stuff.

We have a microbiome that's increasingly become aware of how important that is for our health. Like people that say they can't digest beans. I say, well, it's because you've got to feed the bacteria that digest beans. So if you always avoid beans, you're not growing the bacteria to digest the beans. But aren't there some people that just have a genetic propensity to have a... I'm sure there's a genetic propensity for pretty much everything. So that's a definite yes. Because I know people that just can't fuck with beans at all.

But if I was their coach, I would say, you know what? Beans are really healthy foods. What we're going to do is we're going to first start with lentils. We're going to have you eat a couple tablespoons of lentils today. And what will happen over time is you feed the microbiome, and you'll get the type of bacteria that will be able to digest legumes. For example, I haven't had meat in so long that if I probably tried to eat some meat,

I probably wouldn't be able to digest it. You'd probably be in ecstasy. I'll cook you up an elk steak. I might have enjoyed eating it, but my digestive system wouldn't be able to handle it because I don't have the bacteria. I'd have to regrow the bacteria to digest. I wonder.

It'd be interesting to watch. You might love it so much. You might go, what was I might go what was i i was talking all kinds of crazy shit about not eating meat god it's so good you know i don't i i know that you're uh i i'm way past that i just don't have that craving any longer i believe you i've got it though i got it for both of us you got it and you got a pasta craving too that's the one i need to get rid of. But here's the thing, Joe.

I think you're just a guy that's, you know, you're just living a big life. You know? You're a big man. You're living a big life. You have a lot of passion. You have a passion for life. You have life. That's a nice way of saying I'm a glutton.

Well, gluttons have a passion for life. Yes. But if you were just a glutton and you, gluttons have a passion for life. Yes. But if you were just a glutton and you weren't doing all these other amazing things, then that would be a true accusation. But you're sort of a glutton for life. I am a glutton for life. But if there's one part of my life, my personality that I'm embarrassed by, it's my consumption of food that I shouldn't be eating. Because when I start eat like particularly pasta it's just I know I'm not supposed to do it it's the one thing that I know I'm not supposed to do I just keep

doing it well you have to make a deal with your wife not to have it in the house there's no deals I'm gonna buy it but but you know so you know you're going to do things you don't want to do and you have it around anyway. Well, while I'm enjoying it, that's the problem. Is the mouth pleasure during the 15 minutes or so that I'm sitting down eating that bowl? Probably not even 15. Probably like five. I'm eating a big bowl of spaghetti.

The mouth pleasure that I get, there's times I'm just going to accept it. And that's worth it to you. The crazy thing is I will feel like shit for a full day afterwards. I'm trading five minutes of mouth pleasure for a full day of feeling like shit. You know, I feel that way about good red wine. Ah, me too. So what I've learned, partly from the watches that measure my sleep, is whenever I consume any alcohol, I don't sleep as long and I don't sleep as deep.

And I see it now. I see the statistics. And when I don't drink, I sleep longer and deeper. What do you use? What kind of watch you got there? This is a... I just switched over to this watch. It's fancy. It's only $350. It's a Coros Apex.

Those are really good. I've heard of those well i love about this is battery time since i'm a long distance backpacker this one this one goes without recharging for about 30 days whoa how does it do that it's just got the most amazing battery and if i want to use it full gps mode to to on my hiking and whatnot i can get like four full days without having to charge it. That's incredible. It is. A lot of those are good for a day when you go to GPS. Which is why I switched from the Apple Watch

to this one because it does this. And does it monitor your heart rate, your sleep, all that jazz? Everything. Everything the Apple Watch does. Yeah, I use a whoop strap. I use this thing, which is good for about five days. And I do notice that when I drink, my recovery is shit. But I'm telling this story because, to me,

the real pleasure of something like red wine is when it's convivial. When you're doing it with friends, and you're going to have a long conversation, and you're going to laugh, and you're going to joke, and you're going to tell stories, and you're just going to have a lot of fun. For me, red wine enhances that conviviality. And I'm willing to make the tradeoff occasionally.

I'm not sleeping as well. How occasional? You know, about every 12 hours or so. No, I'd say on average, I probably average probably a glass a week. But I tend to bundle that up. So it might be I might not have anything for three weeks and then i might have three glasses of wine over an evening yeah my problem is once i have one glass you're gone yeah well that's the problem right you then your inhibitions are

lowered and you're like look i'm home i'm not going anywhere look Look, look, look, look, look, look, look. What I do in order to not do that is I have my glass, and then I don't let them fill it up when it's only halfway, right, if you're at a restaurant or whatever, because then it's sneaky. Then you lose track of how much you're actually drinking. You're having a good time, so you just keep drinking. So I make a decision, okay, I'm going to have fun tonight, but I'm going to have two glasses or one glass, two glasses, or three glasses, never more than that because it's just not worth the pain.

Yeah, that's the problem is you have that third glass. You're kind of lit. After the third glass, there will be no stopping. Then it's four and five and you're doing shots. Exactly. Dancing on the table. And having one fun, hell of a fun time, but feeling terrible the next day. Do you ever supplement with glutathione afterwards?

I never have tried that. Yeah, it helps a lot with your liver's ability to process alcohol. It makes a big impact. Is that right? Yeah. A doctor told me about it, if you believe it or not. Doctors know some things. Well, this doctor's very good.

Shout out to Dr. Gordon. That's just a glutathione as an amino acid yes yeah it aids in your body's ability to process alcohol does this give you the excuse you need to drink more no but it does help it doesn't really it's not a good enough excuse you're still doing a lot of fucking damage but but it does help and another thing that helps with me is if I drink water and I supplement with electrolytes. Yeah, I do that too. Such a big. The problem is then you're going to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning and pee. You're just going to pee, pee, pee. But you got to deal with that.

You know, interesting thing I discovered about you today is that your man has these very great passions about things. You were to fend these absolutely, you know, we had, I don't know if you're going to edit any of this, but we argued probably for 30 minutes about heart reversal with meat and plant-based stuff. And you were so passionate about, you got to cut the crap out. You got to cut the crap out. And then you start saying, man, I just love pasta. These Uncle Eddie's cookies are so incredible. And it's like, I find that fascinating. But I also like that about you. A, you're not a hypocrite. I mean, you're not pretentious.

I'm not lying. You're not lying. You're authentic. That's what I'm looking for. You're authentic. The real Joe Rogan shows up. And so I like that about you because I like authentic people. And then you're willing to say, this isn't bad for me, but I choose to do it anyway. In a sense, you're doing it consciously then. You're making a conscious tradeoff. Although you say sometimes you lose control, then you go unconscious. Is that true?

Well, not that bad. If I do eat pasta, like legitimately, it's no more than once a week. It's rare. It's very rare that I sit down and eat a big – the problem is once I'm eating, I'm like, fuck it, we're doing it. And then I go. But the majority of my diet is very healthy, the vast majority of my diet. I eat mostly wild game. i hunt so i'm eating

elk meat i'm eating are you getting those pigs uh i haven't here i have in the past i've shot pigs in california um but i've been invited to do it out here in texas but unfortunately a lot of people in texas are not eating them they're shooting them and then leaving them there which is i'm not interested in that but i am interested in eating them. They're shooting them and then leaving them there, which is, I'm not interested in that. But I am interested in eating them. You eat what you kill. Yeah. I eat, I used to have chickens when I lived in California, but coyotes ate them all.

It was a rough, rough, rough couple of days in the house. But then those eggs are fantastic. And those are, you know know when you have free range chicken eggs and they have that dark orange i have eggs i mean i have chickens do you eat the eggs i don't why not but i give them away i should have brought you some today you think they're bad for you the honest answer is i did i stopped eating eggs for a very bizarre reason which was that when i first became plant-based, the media got really interested in it. And I said, well, are you pure? And I said, no,

I eat eggs for my own chickens. So every time I was talking to the media, they always wanted to ask me about the chickens and the eggs. And I always had to explain it. And I got so sick of explaining it. I said, you know what? I'm just going to stop eating these damn eggs so I don't ever have to answer this question again. Really? Yeah, really. I wish I was your friend back then. I would have said, John, fuck those people. Eat those eggs. It's like a zero karma situation. You misunderstand. It's not that they were scolding me.

I just was bored with the question. Yeah, I understand. And so once I just said, no, I don't eat any. I just 100% plant-based. I get it. But you can't alter what you're eating because you don't want to talk about it. That seems crazy. Especially chickens and eggs.

It's such a free ride. You feed them. They're healthy. You eat their eggs. They're good for you. We give them away. Our friends love us. Well, that's nice.

But do you ever think about frying one of them bitches up when no one's around? You know, I did the first couple of years and then i stopped doing it and i haven't had any sense and i haven't missed it bill burr is a good buddy of mine's a hilarious comedian he goes uh he goes you want to get fucking confused he goes google are eggs good for you and then just start reading i know that's worse than his coffee good for you. It's one of those things where you can find a hundred articles that say eggs are the greatest food in the world and a hundred articles that say eggs are going to kill you. And it's like you have to go through the research. You know why eggs are a paradox?

Because eggs have a lot of good things in them. That's why they show up. It's like they're really good for you. They have a lot of nutrients in them. But then they also have things that we don't think of as particularly good. So that's why it's a paradox. That's why you get opposite. Yeah.

Well, you also just get people that think they're 100% good for you and people that think they're 100% bad for you. Right. It's like he's just saying like – and it's what we're talking about essentially. Like the argument of plant-based versus paleo you know versus now the carnivore which has been introduced i had a very compelling conversation with paul saladino for three hours where he's talking about the benefits of a nose-to-tail carnivore diet eating yeah eating organs organ meats and the importance of organ meat and that it's like it's pretty interesting like a lot of people that eat

that way are very healthy and then a lot of people that eat vegan are healthy it's like you could get lost in these conversations and trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong in a lot of ways you have to find out what's right for you yeah but you have to be kind of um objective about it meaning you can't just fall into confirmation bias because if you do that it's like i've seen a lot of people say you know it's so confusing you you google or eggs good for you and you get such contradictory information so you know i'm just gonna eat what i want yeah then you're doomed then you're just gonna eat calorie dense foods that taste good for you and you're gonna screw yourself up get fat i think having cheap meals is not a bad move and uh that's what i

basically do when i have big bowls of pasta or sit down with a bag of cookies i don't think it's bad to reward yourself but i think the majority of what you consume should be it should taste good but be good for you and i think that that's where people need to make their choices correctly i agree i see it the same way way. You say a cheat meal. I think it is just an occasional indulgence. Yeah. Because life is not meant to be purely ascetic. It's meant to be joyous.

Yes. And we're going to die anyway, so we should have some joy in our lives. But we'll have the most happiness and joy in life if we're also healthy. joy in our lives, but we'll have the most happiness and joy in life if we're also healthy. So if we go too far in indulging ourselves, we may be sub-optimizing in the long run. Now, when you say you're going to die anyway, when you see these CRISPR people and all this crazy genetic manipulation, if they start rolling out some new technology that extends life far into the future, like I've heard that if you can make it to 2050, you're basically going to live forever.

Yeah, that's Ray Kurzweil's been making that singularity, right? Yeah, he's 2045, right? Yeah, if we get, since we're extending the lifespan a couple of years, a decade, and it's accelerating, perhaps we'll get to a place where, so the joke there is when I get to be 100, I'll be able to live forever as i age age 100 well they don't think that though they think they're going to be able to reverse it the idea is that whatever is causing aging what's causing the deterioration in the quality of your

life that that's all disease and that what's the disease that we've accepted we call it old age but really what it is is a slow disease that everyone has. And if they can get you back to your prime, wherever that would be. Imagine if you could be a 25-year-old man again, John. Out there flexing. With the wisdom I have. Yes. Living your life.

Just out there free and happy. Yeah. So here's the thing. There's another theory. There are a lot of theories, right? A theory that I favor is that DNA made a deal a long, long time ago, or it was a decision was made, maybe not consciously, it evolved this way. It said DNA is immortal, but the holder of the DNA is expendable.

And so DNA is immortal. but the holder of the DNA is expendable. And so DNA is immortal. We're all DNA. And the DNA, we send that on. The DNA is immortal. The DNA is in every species. Every life form has DNA in it. DNA is what's driving it. DNA is the immortal being.

And we're not. And the DNA is programmed. So they're basically saying we're going to reprogram the DNA. Maybe. But every life form ages and dies. And DNA doesn't. DNA is immortal. And I think that's the deal that was made. I mean, that's just what DNA did. It's like, it's hard to keep these life forms alive, but I can keep the sex part of me alive and I can through sex, I can spread it and I DNA will continue to live. That's what I think is going on. I think that's an interesting way to look at it.

But I think, as you said earlier, that the average age that people died at used to be 30 or whatever it was. to be 30 or whatever it was and now due to our understanding of nutrition and science and medicine we've extended it all the way to 80 in the western world right i feel like that's how we're going to look back at people who died at 80 like these poor fucks they didn't have genetic engineering they didn't understand that as you get older you have a better understanding and maybe you can achieve enlightenment in your lifetime. You can be free of all the bullshit that holds people back. Yeah, I read a great science fiction series. The first one was Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. And it's a long story because it has three novels based in it.

But the essence for what it relates to what we're talking about is the people, we sent some people to Mars and they evolved over time and they came back to the Earth. And they had developed certain Martian drugs that would extend our lives about another 50 years. And if you took the drugs. And they were quickly made illegal. So the whole black market formed. And so they called it the thirds. The thirds because they'd had this other third to their life. And the thing is that humanity became a lot wiser

because as we get older, we do tend to get wiser. I'm a lot wiser today at 67 than I was when I was 40, and a lot wiser at 40 than I was at 20. So if my brain doesn't degenerate through Alzheimer's or dementia, it seems reasonable to think I'll be wiser at 100 than I am at 67. Yeah. And think if we were able to extend that into 120, 130. A lot of these problems that we have, wars and all this irrationality,

would start to disappear because we just become older and wiser as a species. That's what we would hope. Or you have Donald Trump. He's 74 years old. He's not a young man. And he doesn't seem, I mean, he says the most ridiculous, preposterous shit. He says shit that you would cringe at saying if you were 30, right? Well, here's what—

Some people live longer and don't necessarily get wiser. Trump may be wiser today at 74 than he was at 30. Ah, that's a good point. So we don't—we'd have to have a comparison. I'm sure he is. I'm sure he is. Yeah. You'd have to compare him to his younger self.

That's the thing. Like, maybe if you give morons enough time, they eventually will get to a point where they're like 160. They just sort of apologize to everybody. Maybe so. Like I'm so sorry. I was so dumb. I didn't know. But, you know, here's the thing about politics.

You can afford to have half the people hate you. I can't. I can't have half my customers, half my team members boycotting whole things. Right. I can't have half my customers, half my team members boycotting Whole Foods. Do you know, Joe, back in 2007, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on Whole Foods as sort of what we were doing for health care. Because at that time, we didn't have Obamacare wasn't in place yet, and President Obama had asked for suggestions. So I just sent out what Whole Foods was doing. And the Wall Street Journal put an unfortunate title on that, which is Whole Foods' answer to health care or to Obamacare or something like that. And so it was just an op-ed piece.

It's no big deal. It's just one guy's opinion, right? Right. So we had hundreds of boycotts around the country of Whole Foods Market. Facebook, there was a signature page, and 350,000 people signed it so they were going to boycott Whole Foods Market. My board of directors got thousands of letters, emails, texts demanding that I be fired. Then it set this whole—that was when the Tea Party was going on.

The Tea Party then was doing bicots. And it was like, hello, everybody. I just wrote an op-ed piece. It was just an opinion piece. It's just my opinion. I didn't even, I didn't, but they attacked Whole Foods. Yeah. So what I learned in the lesson,

my scar on that one is, if I go out into the public and I express any kind of political opinion, chances are, now it's cancel culture. Back then, they were just, they were trying to cancel me back then, actually. Yeah, it just wasn't a culture thing. It wasn't a cultural thing. So I've learned to be a little more careful about voicing.

Someday when I retire from Whole Foods, I'm going to be unleashed. When that happens, you got to come back. Mackie Unplugged. Listen, get nutty. I'll help you launch a podcast. Why not? I think that that's very unfortunate, you know, because I think having an opinion about something is, especially when a person has achieved a level of success where they've

seen a lot of things and they've had to navigate a lot of things. Like, that's, those are the people that I want to hear from. Like, why is someone so upset about a person, just a public person, your opinion about an issue that we're all dealing with? I think it's because we talked about before earlier today that some people identify their beliefs with who they are. So when you express opinions that differ with their beliefs, they experience it as a personal attack. And that's why they get so upset and angry. You and I don't do that. You could be telling me that I think your plant-based diet is full of shit, John.

And it's like, okay, well, you're entitled to your opinion. And we'll have to compare notes here. But I didn't take it personally. Well, that's evidence that we're still having fun. As heated as things got. Exactly. Because we aren't our opinions. Yeah.

But we don't identify our opinions as an essence of who we are. But other people do. So opinions are very frightening and threatening to them. Politically, too, especially when politics are involved. And I remember those days of the early days of the Obama administration. People were so upset at him, all those Tea Party people. You think we're going to have a civil war in this country, John? I don't think we are, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility.

It's not good. It's the most polarizing, I think. I thought the Tea Party times were tough, but Obama wound up being the successful president and pulled us out of the 2008 crisis, even though there's a lot of dispute as to whether or not he should have bailed out the banks.

At the end of the day, things are going pretty well towards the end of his presidency. You know, whether people liked him or didn't like him, this is a different animal. This situation we have now where Trump is claiming that the election has been stolen and there's a large percentage of people that think that's the truth. And then there's other people that are like, you know, they voted for Biden just because they hate Trump. There's a lot of people that are really excited about Biden. Well, look, in this case, they're either going to be able to prove the claims or they're not.

Yeah. And. Doesn't look good. There's not much time. There's not much time to prove it. So we'll have to see it unfold and what happens. So I don't know. It's very bizarre.

It's the most bizarre political time of my life, or at least as an adult. Yeah, as we were talking about earlier, it's this situation that they talked about in the social dilemma, this same polarizing moment. But it's more accelerated now than I've ever felt it. Do you feel like you're being manipulated by social media? I'm just curious. No, I don't listen. Yeah, I don't either. Actually, I'm not on any social media.

I'm sure it's manipulating me in some way, though. I'd be naive to say it doesn't. It's got to have some sort of an effect on me. You have your tweet, though, right? Yeah, but I do what I call post and ghost, where I post and then I run away. I don't read any responses. So you don't get caught up in the hubbub? No. And I very rarely tweet. Most of, I post things on Instagram and they're very non-political. Most of it is just

interesting things. You know what? You need to learn the lessons from your social media and apply it to your pasta eating. I kind of of have because it sounds like you're very disciplined in the social media realm you don't you it hasn't taken you over i'm relatively disciplined with my diet relative that's why i'm not a fatso but i could be i think you're just working your ass off i do that too but i'm i'm i have a real weakness i just don't let it get me most of the time. But when it gets me, oh, my God, it's embarrassing. I'm going to go a little deeper on that with you and ask you a question. So is it something that you consciously decide, okay, tonight I'm going to eat pasta, or is it like you get a craving and you just do it?

Usually it's a craving, and usually it's when I'm tired. When I'm tired, I have a terrible— Like you said, after stand-up or something like that. Yeah, I have a terrible – Like you said, after stand-up or something like that. I have a – late at night. If I'm writing, even if I'm home writing late at night and I'm done at 1 o'clock in the morning, usually I'm like, just go to bed, stupid. But sometimes I'm like, come on, let's eat. Did the camera catch that glint in your eyes there? It's a real glint.

But again, I don't do it enough where i get fat but i do understand people that do i really do because it's like you know people think i'm disciplined i guess i'm kind of disciplined kind of but more than that i'm scared of not being disciplined so i work i work there's a weird like the gets done, but it's not like there's this like unflappable work ethic that never gets breached. No, it's like I have to, I have to play tricks on myself to get the work done. Actually, I mean, I, I just think you're a man that has strong passions and those passions carry you into life.

And when you're, when you're, when you're full of passion for whatever it is, I think you're probably prodigious in terms of what you do. But then you have these other periods of time where you're sort of, you know, you're not caught up in the passions and you're just sort of treading water, so to speak. Am I right?

It's the problem is that when I decide that I'm going to do something I know I'm not supposed to do, like eat too much. I don't decide it very often, but when I do, it's like it fucks with your self-esteem. Because you're like,

God, I let myself do that? Like, why did I do that? So you know what you could do that wouldn't mess with your self-esteem is if you just make a conscious decision, I'm going to do this today. That's what The Rock does. You ever go to The Rock's Instagram?

No. His cheat days are legendary. So he's conscious about it. Oh, yeah. He lets the world know. He's not sneaking. Dude, he'll eat stacks of pancakes. He's an enormous man.

He's a big guy. Ever met him? I have not. He's huge. He's so big, he doesn't seem like a real person. He's like a cartoon character. How tall is he? Oh, my God. He's at least 6'5". Wow, he really is big. I would imagine. How real person it's like a cartoon character how tall is he oh my god he's

at least six five wow i would imagine how tall is he like officially six five ish but he's enormous like 300 pounds all muscle giant just giant human when you're around him you're like that's not a real person that's a that's a superhero actually i like i like i like i like the rock and movies and stuff i like his personality he's a very inspirational person on social media. I liked Schwarzenegger when he was doing his Terminator stuff in those movies. I thought he was a great comedic actor. Yeah, he was great. That was really funny.

I don't think he intended to be comedic. I just think that kind of became his shtick because he was naturally sort of kind of funny. Well, The Rock's Instagram, at least once a a week or so he'll post what he's doing. He'll have a tray of sushi that's as big as his table. And I'm not kidding. Just ridiculous amounts of food he consumes. You can eat a lot of sushi. It doesn't have

that many calories in it. Well, there you go. Let people know. Or you can't eat a hundred pounds of it. I mean, he'll eat a plate as big as his table. But I mean, stacks of pancakes and cookies. Okay, well, those are calorie dips. Yeah, he goes off.

But you go to that guy's social media, and he's in the gym every single day. I mean, these go-off days probably help fuel his motivation and his discipline because he gives himself a little mental break. Wow. That, you know, also that's fascinating. And maybe that he's doing that and that helps because he feels a little bit guilty about it. Perhaps he says, now I have to double my workout to make up for it.

So it's actually using it to push him. I don't know. You know, that guy's so disciplined. I doubt that's the case. I think he really has a healthy attitude. Like I'm going to take a day and just go fucking crazy and then after that's over it's back to the grind i just think he's on the grind literally every day yeah all right dude we just talked for like four hours no way yeah we did it's four there it's 4 35 good we got a lot of shit you can edit um

we're not editing nothing conscious capitalism john mackie um and conscious leadership is also available the whole foods diet get yourself some books um thank you brother i really appreciate it was fun talking to you thanks and when you retire and you're ready to talk some shit come back and we'll have you go off all right thank you john appreciate it bye everybody And we'll have you go off. All right. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.