The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with John Mackey: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

On this Munk Dialogue we are speaking with one of the most successful and well known entrepreneurs of the past 50 years. John Mackey was a 24 year old self described hippie in 1980 when he opened up a small natural foods store in Austin, Texas. But what started off as a niche, counterculture company transformed into one of the most popular and profitable grocery chains in North America with annual sales exceeding $22 billion. Whole Foods transformed the natural and organic food market and made its CEO - John Mackey - a very wealthy businessman. But despite his financial success, John has stayed true to his counterculture roots and the conscious capitalism that still fuels his entrepreneurial endeavors. In his most recent book, The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism, John takes readers on the adventure of building Whole Foods Market from the ground up, And he joins us on the podcast for a wide ranging conversation about Whole Foods, conscious capitalism, income inequality, and what role the government has - and should - play in shaping the economy. The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Senior Producer: Daniel Kitts Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You don't help the poor by making everybody poorer. The media has a frame, and the frame is Israel is the oppressor, and the Palestinians are the oppressed. I shouldn't be forced to acknowledge my privilege unless I desire for that to be part of my interaction with somebody else. What I know to be true and what all of my fellow Gen Z know to be true is that this is the most talented generation yet. With respect to every indicia of disadvantage, there is still a racial higher. And though I am, of course, an Anglo. Certainly not a Frizzan. Hello, Monk listeners.

Rudyard Griffith here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this. Our continuing conversations called the Monk Dialogues. These are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. On each Monk dialogue, we go deep into the big issues and ideas

that are driving the public conversation. Today we speak to one of the most successful and well-known entrepreneurs. of the past half century. John Mackey was only 24 years of age, a self-described hippie when in 1980 he opened up a small natural food store in Austin, Texas. What started off as a niche counterculture company transformed into one of the most popular and profitable grocery chains in North America with annual sales exceeding $22 billion. Whole Foods transformed the natural and organic food market and made its CEO John Mackie, one of America's iconic businessman.

But despite his financial success, John has stayed true to his countercultural roots and his belief in conscious capitalism. It fuels his entrepreneurial endeavors, and it is at the core of his most recent book, The Whole Story, Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. He joins us now for a wide-ranging conversation about Whole Foods, Conscious. capitalism, income inequality, and what role government should have, if any, in shaping the economy. John, welcome to the program. Thanks, Roger. It's good to be on the podcast. Looking forward to this conversation.

Well, look, I'm a happy Whole Foods customer. I got to know the origin story because when I walk into the stores that you help create, the chain that you help build, I think everyone senses that there's something unique about the proposition about what Whole Foods is, what it stands for. John, when when was the the kind of moment of ignition when you realize that this one store could suddenly be something much bigger, much more kind of transformative to how we think and shop and consume and source the food and sustenance that we we love and know Whole Foods for every day? Ah, that's a good question. I don't know if there was one particular moment.

There was a series of different moments as we went along. The first store was called Safer Way. It's only about a half a mile from where I'm sitting right now. And it was an old Victorian house. And my girlfriend, Renee, and I started that store back in 1978. And we lived on the third floor of the store. And the initial vision for really it was simple. Just we wanted to sell healthy food to people.

We wanted to have some fun doing it, and we wanted to earn a living. And that was kind of at age 24 for me and 20 for Renee, that was about as far out as we could look. And then when we started to learn more about business, we decided we needed a bigger store to compete better in Austin. That's when we relocated Safer Way and merged with another small natural food store that was kind of a friendly competitor and changed the name to Whole Foods Market. That was back in 1980. So two years after Safer Way started, that store just took off. It became the highest volume natural food store in the United States within about six months of opening based on everything I've ever talked to anybody about that was in the industry back then.

So I began to see, wow, we really could have a good business here. And part of the reason we took off there is a good location. But Safer Way had been a vegetarian store, and Whole Foods was not. I think when we started selling meat and beer and wine, people saw us as a real grocery store. Then we opened a second store and we began to, after a flood, it almost destroyed us. And so the second store and that grew. But I think it was the big event for me was when I was actually on a vacation after we'd opened a store in Dallas. Actually, we acquired a competitor store in Dallas.

And my girlfriend and I moved there and read and basically got it profitable. And then we took a long vacation, a kind of a driving tour around the western United States. And I remember driving through Northern California. And of course, what we did was we stopped in all the natural food stores wherever we went. And you see, in Southern California, they had Mrs. Guges, which had been an early inspiration for us in Fraser Farms down to San Diego. But we got to Northern California. and they had nice, small natural food stores, but there were no natural food supermarkets.

And I remember looking at Mary Kay at that time, and I said, you know, what's weird about Northern California? This is like the birth of the counterculture here. This is kind of where natural foods really kind of got going, but there are no natural food supermarkets here. And she said, you're not thinking when I think you're thinking, are you? I said, yes, we should open up a store. in Northern California. She says, that's crazy. I said, I know, but it'll be so much fun,

let's do it. And that's when I began to realize that maybe Whole Foods could be a much bigger corporation. Maybe we could go to Northern California. We were very successful in Northern California. We started in Palo Alto and we did very well there and then Berkeley and the Mill Valley and then San Francisco itself. And then it was like maybe we could start to become a national company. We took venture capital in And the dream just sort of gradually got bigger and bigger and bigger. You have to understand that pretty much every store we opened for the first, I don't know, God, 25 or 30 years was a successful store. So we just went from success to success.

And John, how do you explain that? Was it that you identified a niche in the market where you really didn't have the type of competition that one might have expected? In other words, you identified a market failure and addressed for that market failure? Or do you put more weight on just, you know, people's, you know, changing trends, how people were thinking about food, people wanting to, you know, to move beyond some kind of utilitarian idea of food to, you know, the bigger type of values and movement and thinking that, you know, everyone associates with the whole food brand? Yeah. It's a great question. And, you know, I think starting out, we had to climb a real wall of skepticism.

Everybody said this was never going to work. It's never going to work. And we had a lot of trouble convincing landlords to take a chance on us. From the very first Whole Foods market, we had a problem with the landlord being, you know, sort of skeptical. And we didn't have a background in business or an MBA. So we did not identify a niche in the marketplace that wasn't being satisfied. we just were living this way. This was our personal lifestyle.

And I think that's the real key here, was people were skeptical. The older generation didn't eat this way. My parents, for example, they thought processed food was this incredibly great invention because you didn't have to spend all the stuff on cooking any longer. You could just open cans. And people just saw food as sort of like going to the gas station and getting gasoline. You just fuel up. And it doesn't matter if it comes.

it's frozen or it comes from a can or if it's fresh produce or if it's super processed. It was just, you know, it's food. It's fuel. So they were very skeptical about this. But sort of this counterculture that was taking, that had birthed in the United States, natural and organic foods became a lifestyle for a certain generation. And it spread from there. And we were always identified as sort of this hippie grocery store.

That was kind of accurate. We were counterculture types. We had long hair and we had a different vision of the world. And a lot of us had done psychedelic drugs. And we just thought our generation was going to grow and they become wealthier. And they began to eat this way. So sort of a generational change. And sort of like using a surfing metaphor, we kind of caught the wave.

Now, we also helped create the wave, but we also were the benefits of this generational shift. and Whole Foods grew as the countercultural ideals of natural and organic foods spread across the whole culture until all the supermarkets copied us. That was the biggest surprise. I did think when it became a little more sophisticated in business, I thought we were just a niche, right? Turned out, no. I mean, the biggest food trade show in the United States is the natural foods trade show now. And it was just this little tiny thing in its first year. And now it's the biggest one where all the supermarkets go to. So the world has radically changed.

Toll Foods helped change the world. It was a great ride. When you look back at that period of rapid scaling, what was the biggest challenge for you? Was it the availability of capital? Was it supply chains that could source for the types of foods and goods that you wanted to feature in the store? Was it just your own, you know, the number of hours in the day? that you could, you know, dedicate to this project. What was the kind of, you know, the challenge when you were scaling in that period?

Yeah. Well, there were different challenges at different times, right? Supply chain was not that big of a problem because the whole industry was growing. And that's the amazing thing. If you look at the initial store we had and what products we had in it, it was mostly just produce and bulk beans and grains and grains. nuts and seeds, the center store was kind of skimpy. But the natural foods industry began to, the manufacturers came along, producing processed foods that had better ingredients in them, that were less sugar, that were organic, that didn't

have artificial ingredients, flavors, colorings, preservatives. And so that industry grew along. So supply chain, we had a problem with produce and meat initially. We needed there to be regulations regarding what organic foods meant. That was a big, that really helped when the federal government set up regulations for that. Otherwise, there was a lot of fraud. Meat was tricky because getting people to raise animals that were not, that had a higher degree of welfare, animals that, I mean, you have a factory farm system in America. So getting pigs and chickens and cattle that were grass-fed.

cattle and chickens that were allowed to roam. That took decades, honestly, to build that supply chain up. For us, one of the things that we were able to do that helped Whole Foods, I guess, scale quicker than anybody else could do, was we raised venture capital money before any of the other retail chains did, and then we went public. We did an initial public offering in 1992. And then when we were public, we had a currency, our own stock, and we were able to cash out a lot of the other pioneering entrepreneurs, bread and circus in Boston, Mrs. Gooches in LA, Fresh Fields in Washington, D.C., in Chicago, Unicorn Village, Bread of Life in Miami. And every time we'd cash those entrepreneurs out, we would get territory that we could expand and grow, new platforms of growth.

We also got talent. One of the challenges in growing a business is getting good people. So Whole Foods and of some sense absorbed most of the intellectual capital. Most of the best markets came into our company. And that enabled us to accelerate our growth tremendously. So at times capital was a constraint. At other times, good people were a constraint. But in general, the whole world was kind of flowing our way. And we had a great team. And we were able to overcome those obstacles. If you're enjoying the Monk Debates podcast, come over to our website at triple W monkdebates.com.

That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com and check out our free monk membership. As a complimentary monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and benefits, access to our weekly email, summarizing our best debates, vans ticketing privileges at our main stage debates, special news, information and offers all courtesy of the monk debates. You can grab your complimentary monk membership again right now at triple w monk debates.com. Simply look to the top navigation on the website and follow the links. Thanks in advance for joining our community. You're known as an outspoken proponent for capitalism for its kind of positive effects on society. It seems strange

John, for many people to kind of connect that with your own self-avowed kind of countercultural origins of whole foods. And I don't know if it's a pejorative or not, but the crunchy granola world of natural food. Were you always aware of the kind of transformative effects of capitalism? Was this something you discovered through the process of starting this business and growing this business? Give us that origin story. Well, first, it is true. I'm a very enthusiastic capitalist. Mostly because I just think the facts are so overwhelming.

You have to see where the world was historically. If you go back just 200 years ago, 94% of everyone alive on the planet lived on less than $2 a day in today's dollars. 85% lived on less than $1 a day. Illiteracy rates were 88%, only 12% of the population on the world could read, and the average lifespan was 30. It was pretty, honestly, it's pretty horrible for the average person. And it's been science plus capitalism, an free market capitalism that has lifted humanity literally out of the dirt.

And it started, obviously, in Great Britain and then the United States and Western Europe. But then it spread to like the four tigers. So it wasn't just a Western thing. And now it spread all over Asia. Latin America is rapidly beginning to embrace free market principles. Even Africa is now, you have certain states in Africa like countries and ask for like Botswana that are beginning to make tremendous progress. So capitalism is the fundamental solution to the question of prosperity. We've tried socialism all through the 20th century and it failed every time.

There's no successful socialist states that have ever existed. So I'm a capitalist because it works and because it's, It's just the science, the evidence is all there for that. But I didn't start out a capitalist. I mean, I went to the University of Texas and Trinity. I studied, I didn't study business. I studied humanities. I would have defined myself when I got going probably as a Democratic socialist.

But what ended up happening is that I think when I, I've been a big player in the co-op movement. I lived in a co-op. I belonged to food co-ops. And this was when we got safer way going and then Whole Foods, this was kind of the early days of Star Wars. And I got nicknamed Darth Vader. I was seen as I'd gone over to the dark side. I'd gone over to from food for people, not for profit, to, hey, capitalism works. I'm a businessman.

And the thing about it is, is that, of course, that capitalism is not perfect. And young people want utopious. And it's true today's young people. They look around and they see inequality, they see racism. They see gender disparities, and it upsets them. There must be some alternative that will solve all the problems. But the biggest challenge is just human nature can evolve over time, but it doesn't fundamentally change. We're still people that are both self-interested and yet also partially altruistic.

And socialism always believe you could create a new human being if you just raise the children right. But in fact, they never were able to do so. So I think that conscious capitalism is my philosophy, which is what basically is doing business in a more conscious way and recognizing that business has a higher purpose besides just making money. Making money is important, but it's not the sole reason business exists. Doctors are well paid, but their purpose isn't to make as much money as possible. It is to help heal people. teachers educate architects design buildings engineers construct things and business is a great value creator and it's not just about the money that's been a wrong brand of it secondly there are all these

various stakeholders that all matter one of my big insights early on possibly because of our flood where our didn't have that language for it back in 1981 but our neighbors didn't let us fail they came and cleaned up our store our team members our customers came and cleaned up the store with us. We had a banker loaned us money on his own signature, even though the bank turned the loan down. Our team members worked for free until we could get the store reopened again. We couldn't pay them. Our suppliers financed new inventory for us. And I realized, my God, we're part of this interdependent system here. All these stakeholders care about us. They don't want us to die. And so I began to realize that rightly understood businesses this win-win-win ecosystem where everybody

that you're trading with the business is simultaneously benefiting from it. And customers are trading voluntarily. They have other alternatives. They don't all shop at Whole Foods. And we have to compete with those businesses to give good quality and good service and competitive prices. Our team members have different jobs they could work at besides just us. and many of them take better jobs.

So our suppliers aren't forced to trade with us. Everybody's interchanging, exchanging for voluntary, for mutual gain. And once you see that as a system, you can never unsee it. And I saw it and I realized, well, conscious capitalism is just seeing the interdependencies of these stakeholders and seeking to optimize the larger system altogether simultaneously. So there is no contradiction. Conscious capitalism is just doing business in a more conscious way with higher purpose, taking care of all of your stakeholders, seeing that you have responsibilities for making the whole

system work better. Well, put John, I like to often think of it's just the amazing kind of reciprocity that happens in free market systems. Yes, people are maximizing for self-interest and personal gain, but the result of that is often that you're rewarded because you're also reciprocating to other people. You're providing them with goods and services they need. You're providing them with incomes and livelihoods that are essential to them, which is in turn essential to you. It's the mutualism, I think, of capitalism. This, though, John, seems to be largely falling on death years when it comes to younger people. There are recent surveys here in Canada and the United States showing that majority of young people prefer socialism. Maybe they don't necessarily understand exactly what that

means, but why do you think capitalism has gotten such a bad rap? And what are the risks here, the dangers potentially of a generation, kind of turning away from conscious capitalism, capitalism of reciprocity, mutualism, whatever you or I want to characterize it as? Very good questions. And the first thing is to understand that, again, young people turn away because they look around and they see problems. And they don't always have a historical context. They don't really see how things used to be. For example, is there racism still in the United States? There is, of course, but a lot less racism today than 50 years ago. A lot less racism 50 years ago than 100 years ago. And if you study the history of the United States, I see a continued progress. We've become

less racist over time. We are less of a patriarchy than we used to be. We are more diversified nation. I see progress. I don't see perfection. I see more work that's ahead for us. Every generation has their work cut out for them to help make more progress in our world collectively. But when you're young, you see the imperfections. You don't see it in the context of where it's come from. and you want a quick solution that solves all the problems. There is no quick solution that solves all the problems. There is no utopia. And the quest for utopia leads to totalitarianism where that's what the 20th century sort of proved.

I think the most interesting of the socialist stories is actually in Israel in the kibbutz, because those were set up as very conscious, altruistic, sharing bodies. And if you study the kibbutz and I have, they evolve. By the time you get to the third generation, the idealism of utopianism fades away. And people are thinking, I don't want to stay here. I want to get out into the bigger world and try my own paths, so to speak. Individualism is not extinguished very easily. So utopia is not really one of the answers.

And it's not really a solution. It doesn't really work. But people want there to be some beautiful state that, they can create. And instead, part of maturation and growing up is understanding that you can make the world a better place, but it's going to acquire a lot of hard work. People aren't, human nature is not going to turn over and just change because you want it to. And you work with what you have, and you push the pebble a little further down the road. And I'm proud of my generation. My generation did a lot of good in the world. It's still messed up.

I always put the challenge to young people. This is my challenge. I'll give you the entire history of humanity. Tell me when it was a better time to be alive than right now if you're an average person. There is no answer to that except this is the best time to be alive. And I suspect it'll be a better time to be alive 50 years from now than it is today. Well put. Just to push on this a little bit more, you know, the thing that young people seem to be focusing in on a long.

is the growth of economic inequality. And you're absolutely right, John. There's a whole bunch of metrics that we can go back over time and certainly see that, you know, over the last 200, 400, 500 years, inequality has been moving in the right direction. Is part of the challenge, John,

that maybe some things happen to capitalism in the last few decades? You know, there are these elements now in our culture around the glorification of wealth, the valorization of consumption, for consumption's sake, the Instagram culture of jet private planes and, you know, fancy restaurants, and again, a kind of conspicuous consumption that at times looks an awful lot like cultural narcissism. Do you think that's partly to blame, John, that maybe, you know, there's a cultural element to this.

It's not all economics? Sure, there's a cultural element. And the biggest cultural element, which I think you're glossing over is, human beings need purpose. We need a type of transcendence. And a lot of the more traditional religions no longer draw people in. But I see a spiritual renaissance beginning to happen right now in the United States. And it has a lot of different outlets. But A, this use of psychedelics to create a transcendent type experience, people practicing meditation, breathwork. There's a a huge amount of interest in things that not dogma, not belief systems, but actually experiential,

experiencing transcendence of just your separate self, realizing that there's a deeper, bigger universe than is explained simply through science alone, so to speak, there's an interiority that people are not as conscious of. So sure, if it's just a materialism, if there is no purpose, if there is nothing really worth living for. Yeah, life's pretty grim place, no matter how much, how many nice restaurants you eat at and whether you fly in a private plane or not. Hey, think about how absurd that statement is. Wow, it's not fair. Some people get to fly in private planes. Nobody was flying in a plane at all 120 years ago. Now we can jet around the world at fairly inexpensive prices. So maybe one of the key.

words, I'm going to mention it because it needs to be mentioned. One of the key drivers in human beings, it's not a pretty emotion. And that emotion is envy. Envy is part of what drives people to be upset about inequality. I mean, yes, there are some economic inequalities. Whenever you have prosperity, some are going to have a bigger piece of the pie. But the whole pie is getting much bigger. This belief that we're in a zero-sum game, that there's a fixed pie. So if Elon Musk gets a bigger piece of the pie, then somebody else is getting less. No, that's an inappropriate metaphor. That's not what's happening. First of all, Elon Musk is not carving out a bigger piece of the pie. He's creating more value in his businesses for the world. And so people are exchanging with him.

And so he's creating that wealth by actually creating more for other people. And the whole pie is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so prosperity is growing, focusing on Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or any of the wealthiest people in the world, what's the point of that? I mean, they didn't become wealthy. They didn't steal it. They became wealthy. They earned it ultimately through the value that their businesses created. I have found that one of the best ways to be miserable in life is to constantly compare yourself to others and judge others that this is unfair. He doesn't have any more intrinsic worth than I do. He shouldn't have that. It's like, that's a good strategy to make yourself miserable. Instead, gratitude for the blessings that we have is the best way to be happy.

And I actually practice gratitudes every single day. First thing I do when I wake up is practice gratitude. There's so many things to be grateful for it. It's a miracle to be alive at all. My God, how amazing it is to be alive. What a gift. And then the beauty that we see around us in nature and friends that we have and love and adventures we can have. And it's, Life is such a precious thing. And to be upset that some have more than others is just a good way to wreck your own personal happiness. And there's not much you can do about it anyway, except you just try to create, if you create

more value for other people, you'll become prosperous too. Yeah, important thing to remember. What do you think of the increasing role that government has been taking in our economy in the last few years? I'm thinking of the extent to which governments now seem once again to be more confident about picking economic winners and losers, whether it's chip factories in the United States, battery plants in Canada, record government deficits that are now really straining public finances. It seems like government's pretty keen to try to shape and push and alter what the

economy looks like, what society looks like through the power of its own purse, no matter maybe at times how threadbare that purse is starting to look. What do you see, John, in terms of changes in the role of government and where do you think we're headed? So I share your perspective on that or maybe you were teasing me up on it. But yeah, I think government is, it's way too big. And in general, government's not very competent. It doesn't have competition. Unlike business, if you don't like whole food, you can go to H.E.B. here in Austin, or you can go to Wegmans or you can go to Kroger. There's plenty of alternatives, and that competition forces businesses to get better or fail.

Government doesn't have it as competition between parties for who controls it, but there's not any competition between governments, really. And so as a result, I think about, I have so many unpleasant experiences with the government. And from just the Department of Motor Vehicles is a good example. And the bureaucracy that you have to go through with government, it's like, ugh, we want to get more of that? Why? It doesn't work that well. Government is not particularly competent at most things.

It's not to say we don't need government. We do need government. But I use a simple rule. If the private sector can solve a problem. or meet and need, they're best at doing that. And then if they can't, then I look to the nonprofit sector next. There are certain things like, if you want to protect animals, well, you can't make a profit doing that, but nonprofit organizations like the Humane Society of the United States do a lot of good in helping to protect animals. And then there's some things that neither the

private sector nor the nonprofit sector can take on that are governmental issues because they affect all of us. A great example of that might be climate change, where we need governments to work together across nations to combat any type of global problem like that. You have things like we're fishing out all the whales. I mean, whale stocks are 90% down to where they were 100 years ago. So you need international cooperation. Governments have an important role to play. But we tend to overrate what it can do. And anytime that the private sector can tackle a problem, they're going to do it with competition to serve human needs, and they'll ultimately do a better job.

That's why socialism doesn't work. When the government tries to run the whole economy, it's incompetent. It can't do it. And it fails. And people get poorer and poor and poor until there's another revolution or the socialists get voted out. I mean, look what happened to China and India in just the last 50 years. As those nations began to liberalize their economies and put more free market reforms in, they began to explode.

And the number of poor people in China and India have been reduced by literally hundreds of millions of people in the last 50 years. It's extraordinary. As we wrap up this conversation, John, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that are in businesses. right now who've come through the pandemic, who maybe are having a hard time, having a hard time seeing how to grow their businesses, how to help their employees. What kind of advice do you have for people in business today in this kind of post-pandemic world? Do the same timeless, you know, rules and adages that, you know, you experienced and pioneered growing whole foods still apply? Are there new insights that you think business leaders, business owners, entrepreneurs should be thinking about

today? Well, first of all, the timeless adages are still there and still applicable. Like, ultimately, business is about creating value for customers. Every business ultimately comes down to creating value for customers. And if it can't do that, it's going to fail. And if it does it well, it's going to prosper. So regardless of what business you're in, I always challenge you to be thinking about how can we create more value for our customers or their customers were overlooking that we could be creating value for. So that's a question that that will never go away. But then we live in a more complex world than we used to live in.

And a great example, the pandemic's forever changed, probably how many people are going to work in the office, nine to five, five days a week. That may be a permanent shift. So businesses are having to adjust to that. With AI coming in, I think almost all the knowledge professions like medical, legal, accounting, AI is going to play a big role in those. I mean, will doctors 20 years from now make any diagnosis that AI hasn't weighed in on? Possibly not.

In some cases, people will just get diagnosed by AI. So AI is going to change the medical profession. AI is a huge, it's bigger and bigger than the internet will be if you look down the past. So we live in a more complex world and all entrepreneurs have got to take on the innovations that, I mean, nobody does business hardly anymore without the internet. I mean, it's just part of our lives now. Everybody has smartphones. I remember walking around the university about 15 years ago and I was reflecting on how it was

different when I was there. the difference is, well, all the boys and girls, men and women were looking at each other 15 years ago. They were looking at their phones and texting each other. So that type of smartphone. Will people even be using smartphones 20 years from now? I very much doubt it. There'll be some kind of wearable where we have an AI that's on our finger or on our wrist or in our ears like AirPods are or some other kind of wearable account, even possibly implants that'll just be with us.

all the time. So the challenges of entrepreneurship always are changing. As technology changes, you have to take advantage of the new innovations that occur. But the same timeless business values also exist. You have to take care of your customer. You should be a good place to work. You need to be partners with your suppliers. You have to raise capital and you have to be able to create profits or your business will not flourish and be able to grow. So those things are timeless. context changes with innovations, technology innovations and cultural changes that also occur. You can't really be a racist business in the United States any longer and flourish. That's just, that's changed.

50 years ago, you probably could have been, not today. John Mackey, great insights. Such a pleasure and a privilege to speak with you. We had a far-ranging conversation. We've touched on all the issues and ideas that I hoped we would. So thank you so much for coming on and speaking with our community of 100,000 plus monk debate members who've hung on your every word. Let's do this again soon. I would look forward to it.

While that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, John Mackey. He certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have questions or feedback on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. We appreciate your insight and feedback. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of public dialogue, one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Roger Griffith. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk, charitable foundation.

The Monk Debates podcast is produced by Ricky Gerowitz and Daniel Kitts. Karen Lynch is the editor. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to leave a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.