The Rich Roll Podcast - John Mackey On Conscious Capitalism, Building An Empire & The Power of Plants To Heal and Thrive

Episode Date: May 29, 2017

Creating a huge business is one thing. Building it on principles of conscious awareness? Another thing altogether. This week I sit down with John Mackey, the father of conscious capitalism and the unlikely entrepreneur behind a $16 billion grocery behemoth that ushered in a global organic food movement and permanently changed the way we eat, live and think about business. The Bill Gates of organic food, John is the original, current and sole CEO of Whole Foods Markets, which he founded in 1980 and has parented to Fortune 500 status, employing over 90,000 people across 450+ stores in the United States, Canada and the UK. A strong believer in free market principles, Mackey is the co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism Movement and co-authored the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller Conscious Capitalism, which encourages business grounded in principles of ethical consciousness. Consistent with this ethos, John has birthed a myriad of philanthropic efforts, including the Whole Planet Foundation to help end poverty in developing nations, the Local Producer Loan Program to help local food producers expand their businesses, The Global Animal Partnership’s rating scale for humane farm animal treatment, and the Health Starts Here initiative to promote health and wellness. Mackey has been recognized as Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Overall Winner for the United States, Institutional Investor’s Best CEO in America, Barron’s World’s Best CEO, MarketWatch’s CEO of the Year, FORTUNE’s Businessperson of the Year, and Esquire’s Most Inspiring CEO. Aligning his actions with his values, John embraces an extremely grounded lifestyle in stark contrast to his means. This is a guy who in 2006 cut his annual pay to $1, donates all his stock options to charity, walks to work, cooks his own meals and meditates daily. A vegan for many years, John recently released The Whole Foods Diet*. Co-authored by Alona Pulde and Matthew Lederman of Forks Over Knives, it's a powerful primer that unequivocally establishes a whole foods, plant-based diet as the optimum protocol for health, disease prevention and longevity based on the huge body of science, research, and advice that is available today. Enjoy! Rich

If you look at the pie chart of what Americans eat, it's very disturbing. The standard American diet is 54% highly processed refined foods. A lot of sugar, a lot of white flour, a lot of oil. And that makes up 54% of our calories. Then you've got 32% are animal foods. And again, most of those animal foods are also coming out of a highly industrialized system where the fat has been exaggerated, where the animals grow artificially quicker than they would in more natural conditions.

And then that leaves only 14% for whole plant foods. And if you were going to design a diet to kill people, well, you couldn't design a better system than that. That's John Mackey, and this, well, this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? What's going on? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to the podcast, the show where each week I bring you the best and the brightest, the most paradigm-breaking minds across all categories of health, fitness, diet, nutrition, entertainment, athletics, business, entrepreneurship. And I bring you all of these amazing people and personalities

with one goal in mind, to help you self-actualize, to help you manifest your best, most authentic self. Did I mention I have John Mackey on the podcast today? John is the founder and CEO of Whole Foods Markets. He's got a new book out. It's called, not surprisingly, The Whole Foods Diet. So that's all very exciting. And that's coming to you in a couple minutes. But hey. a couple minutes. But hey. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can

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I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, John Mackey.

John is one super interesting guy. In many ways, a very unlikely entrepreneur with a lot of compelling and often unexpected or counterintuitive ideas. Ideas different than you might surmise or presume just based on his bio or his accomplishments. But for those that don't know, John is the original, the current, and the sole CEO of Whole Foods Markets, which he founded in 1980 and has parented all the way up to a $16 billion Fortune 500 endeavor that employs about 90,000 people, I think, across over 450 stores in the US, Canada, and the UK. And in many ways, I think it's fair to say that Whole Foods Markets has played a huge role in the wellness explosion. It was really the first market to, in a big way, usher in the healthy organic food movement. And that's something that we get into in the podcast. Mackie has also focused on building and promoting a more conscious way

of doing business. And he's created a number of organizations to that end, organizations that are structured to help end poverty in developing nations, that help local food producers expand their businesses, and promote humane farm animal treatment. John has been recognized as Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year, overall winner for the United States, Institutional Investor's Best CEO in America, Barron's World's Best CEO, MarketWatch's CEO of the Year, Fortune's Business Person of the Year, and Esquire's Most Inspiring CEO. John is also a guy who is a strong believer in free market principles. He co-founded the Conscious Capitalism Movement and also co-authored a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best

selling book entitled Conscious Capitalism, which is all about encouraging a way of doing business that is grounded in ethical consciousness. And this is another thing that we talk about in the podcast. One thing I think a lot of people don't know about John is that in 2006, he cut his pay to just $1 a year and donates all of his stock options to charity. This is a guy who walks to work, basically lives a very grounded, minimal lifestyle, at least in comparison to how this guy could be rolling. He's a vegan for many years, and he's got a new book out called The Whole Foods Diet. And it's a great book. It's a book he co-authored with Alana Pulde and Matthew Lederman. You might know them from Forks Over Knives. And it's a book that basically, in very simple terms, lays out the case based on the huge

body of science and research and advice that is available today that a whole foods plant-based diet is the optimum diet for health and longevity. So this is a great conversation. It's a conversation about the state of the food industry. It's about fad diets. It's about health in America, the impact of the standard American diet and food addictions and our toxic food culture on the impact of our health and our environment. It's about John's ethical compunction to educateism, how John balances his personal commitment to living a plant-based lifestyle against his fiduciary duties managing this gigantic $16 billion enterprise. We talk about entrepreneurship. We talk about conscious capitalism. We talk about chasing your passion. This is a conversation about the incredible power of adopting a plant-based lifestyle and the impact that that can have on disease prevention and reversal and longevity.

I should point out one thing we don't go into in this conversation is this battle that John is currently mired in to save his company. If you've been following the news lately, you may know that a couple powerful hedge funds have recently taken large positions in the company, in Whole Foods Market, and they're pushing John to sell it, to sell it to like an Albertsons or an Amazon. And that's something that John does not want to do, I can tell you that. And he really didn't want to get into the details of that. He's under a tremendous amount of pressure right now and at the time of this conversation. And because of this, this conversation is a little bit more truncated than my normal fare. Frankly, I'm surprised and grateful that he made the time at all to talk to me, given everything that he's enduring that he's going through at the moment.

In any event, I really love connecting with John. I knew that we were going to get along great. And this conversation validates that. It's packed with great takeaways and a lot of great information. I think you guys are going to really enjoy it. So with that said, let's talk to John, shall we? Let's do it.

John, so great to finally meet you and be sitting here with you today to talk about our shared passion for healthy lifestyle and diet and nutrition and all good things. Feelings mutual, Rich. You're one of my heroes. What an honor just to meet up with you. I think you're the hero in the room here. What you've built and what you've created and the legacy of Whole Foods markets is going to stand the test of time. And it's a tribute to your vision and your passion around the things that we're going to get into today. So I commend you for that. Thank you. Of course, every founder

wants to, you know, it looks like every parent wants their children to live on. I certainly hope Whole Foods lives on past one of its co-founders. I think it's going to. Well, I thought a good place to kind of launch into, you know, talking about the new book and just your philosophy on life, et cetera, is to kind of note that we were both part of an email chain that circulated over the last couple of days that was initiated by our mutual friend, Garth Davis, who was sort of lamenting how in this age of alternative facts, there is so much misinformation that is getting spread across the internet through sort of well-orchestrated campaigns

to confuse people and obfuscate the truth around healthy diet and lifestyle. And I think in particular, this sort of high fat, high protein sort of craze that's going around that seems to have caught fire with people and is resonating with them as a counterpoint to the philosophy around food and lifestyle that we share. Yeah, it's very disturbing. I think there's many reasons why it's occurring. I mean, for one thing, you have powerful economic interests

who don't want to see their businesses shrink. So they fund various studies that are kind of doctored up, and they just want people to be confused. Because if people are confused about diet, healthy diet, then they'll just throw up their hands and say, I can't figure it out. So I'll just eat what I want to eat. Right. That is our product. And that's exactly what they want the conclusion to be.

So there is the vested interest, but then there's also the fact that, I mean, if you look at the pie chart of what Americans eat, it's very disturbing. The standard American diet is 54% highly processed refined foods. A lot of sugar, a lot of white flour, a lot of oil. And that makes up 54% of our calories. Then you've got 32% that are animal foods. And again, most of those animal foods are also coming out of a highly industrialized system where the fat has been exaggerated, where the animals grow artificially quicker than they would in more natural conditions. And then that leaves only 14% for whole plant foods.

That leaves only 14% for whole plant foods. And if you were going to design a diet to kill people, well, you couldn't design a better system than that. So people have these serious food addictions, and it's easy for people to sell books that tell people that what they actually want to eat is really good for them. people that what they're actually want to eat is really good for them. Or as we point out in the book, many people be willing to sacrifice sugar if they can eat all the cheese, butter, steak, fried chicken that they want to. A lot of people will make that exchange. So there's no lack of people who want to believe that message because that's the way they want to eat. So what's your take on this cadre of doctors who are out there who are advocating this high-fat approach to diet or this sort of ketosis diet as a means of not just weight loss, but really promulgating health and as a disease prevention mechanism. I mean, you see a lot of this out there right now.

Well, there's no science behind it. I mean, there's just no science behind it. Yeah, you can lose weight on a short-term basis. The argument is that if you stop eating carbohydrates, then your body's going to burn fat. And that's going to be, you're going to change your system to a ketosis, and you're going to be burning fat. But studies show that those are not more effective in weight loss than,

I mean, calories in, calories out. And one of the myths of the whole low-carb movement is that, well, it's not calories in and calories out. That, in fact, if you eat fat calories you don't you can eat more of them and not gain weight and the evidence for that is is is just not there except for some trumped up studies which compare refined carbohydrates against fats and and argue that uh that fats are better than refined carbohydrates, but there's no evidence whatsoever that eating a super high-fat diet full of animal foods is a healthier diet than eating a plant-based

whole foods diet based on healthy starches and whole grains and beans and fruits and vegetables. There's just zero evidence for that. I think there's a lot of confusion also over this vilification of carbohydrates and what sugar is. Specifically, conflating fruits and vegetables with refined sugars and essentially saying that they're one and the same. Whether you're eating fruit or you're drinking a Pepsi, sugar is sugar. Whether you're eating fruit or you're drinking a Pepsi, sugar is sugar. Yeah, again, I think they make sugar into the scapegoat nutrient. But I never want to defend sugar because I don't think refined carbohydrates are good for people. I think what people do is, what they're more guilty of is throwing out all the healthy starches.

And the paleo movement, you don't eat any grains, you don't eat any beans. And they might be allowed to eat a little bit of starchy vegetables, like sweet potatoes, but no whole grains, no beans. And those are like super healthy foods associated in all the blue zones, for example, with longevity and long life. So that's bad. And yes, most of these people think fruits and vegetables are okay, or vegetables are okay.

They're not so sure about fruit because it has sugar in it. Again, the scientific evidence indicates that fruit is extraordinarily healthy. It has so many antioxidants. It has so many phytonutrients in it that it's one of the healthiest foods we can eat. Right. So let's talk about the book. There's a lot of diet books out there, and there's a lot of plant-centric or plant-based books out there as well. So what motivated you to speak your mind in this space?

Well, this was kind of a bucket list book for me, Rich, because I mean, imagine that you know, and you do know, so I don't think you have to do a whole lot of imagining. I'm asking you questions I already know the answer to, but go ahead. But imagine for the listener that you know there's a health crisis in America. I mean 71% of adults are overweight. 71% it's almost three out of four and 38% are obese. People are dying from lifestyle diseases, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer. These are primarily lifestyle and dietary diseases and imagine that you know the solution to it. Eighty percent of the dollars you spend on health care,

which threatens to bankrupt our nation over the long term, come from these preventable lifestyle dietary diseases. So you know the solution. You know how to help people. It's an ethical compunction. I had to speak up. I had to finally say what I know to speak up. I had to finally, you know, I mean, I had to say what I know to be true. And I will reach people that the other books don't reach. Some I'll be preaching to the choir

that already knows it, but there'll be other people. I mean, our team members at Whole Foods Market, for example, the customers that shop in our stores, the people I come across in my many wanderings around the world in corporate America. So I have a reasonably big platform. So I just thought, I need to get this message out. And I don't think we don't really claim, myself and the co-authors, Matt Letterman and Alona Polde of Forks Over Knives, say that we've really done anything particularly original. But what we have done is we've created a synthesis,

and there's too much squabbling in the whole foods plant-based movement, too much squabbling about how much starches you should eat, whether nuts and seeds are good for you, whether or not fruit should be minimized. And it's a bunch of little quibbly stuff. And when the pattern is clear, eat real food, mostly plants. And if you follow those two rules, most of these health problems are going to disappear. So one other thing worth mentioning here that inspired me to write the book,

we have a program at Whole Foods, Market Rich, we call the Total Health Immersion. So we take our sickest team members, those who are obese, those who have type 2 diabetes, those who have heart disease, those who have just terrible biometrics, you know, really high cholesterol and blood pressure. And at the expense of the company, we will pay for them to go to a medically supervised total health immersion. We do four a year with doctors that we write about in the book and are well known in our

movement. Dr. McDougall, Dr. Furman, Dr. Esselstyn, and Dr. Stoll. We work with those four doctors, and we sent now over 4,000 team members through that program. $4,000 a pop, so I think that's like $16 million we've invested in this program to improve the health of our people. And Rip Esselstyn is pretty involved in that as well. I just ran into Adam Sudd, too, who now I know is on staff with that as well, right?

Yeah, Adam's on staff with, works with RIP, but he also is on our, we have a medical center here that's for primary health care for our team members. So I have seen so many people heal themselves quickly. My own health journey has been a long one, and I've had these various stages in it, but my health never got that bad. And it's gotten super good now, but I had to keep learning. But when people go through a total health immersion, and they come in, and they're sick, and they're obese, and they're diabetic, and they're on six different kinds of medications. They can cure their type 2 diabetes in just a few weeks. In a year, they can lose 100 pounds when they get their life back, and autoimmune diseases begin to disappear.

When I travel around to our stores, every store I go into, I have people come up and hug me and thank me for saving their lives or saving the lives of their husband, giving their mother back to their children. It's deeply gratifying. And so it's like, well, look, I know this works. How can I not spread the word? I just feel an ethical obligation to do so. And I think the book does a really good job of kind of comprehensively canvassing, you know, every aspect of how to do this and makes it really facile and simple to understand. I mean, you hit all the beats. You talk about heart disease, you talk about diabetes, you talk about, you know, the various sort of, you know, less appealing

diets that seem to be in vogue right now, and you share the pros and you share the cons, but you really lay it out in a pretty elementary way that I think anybody who looks at this book can totally understand where you're coming from. And then you've got the 28-day plan at the back where you can just, this is how you do it. Yeah. I think the book's, I am proud of the book.

I think we, we the book it reads very well meaning it has a good cadence to it a good flow to it it's not difficult to read it's i think completely grounded in science we didn't want to go beyond the science or what we thought the science currently says today it's the kind of book where frankly if you read the book you'll know more than 99 of the other people out there about healthy eating. But also, we attempt to clear up many of the misconceptions out there. Things like, what about the paleo diet? What about low carb?

What about sugar? What about, what kind of supplements should you take? And we go also deeply, because we know how difficult it is for people to transition diet, we also have a few chapters on basically how to make the transition, the importance of dealing with the great book that Doug Lyle and Alan Goldhammer wrote, The Pleasure Trap, which is important that people understand those basic concepts because until you do, you have food addictions and you don't know what to do about them. Yeah, that's a blind spot, I think, for a lot of people addressing the psychology behind all of this because you can receive all of the information,

but if you're not mentally in a place to be able to manage the transition for yourself, it's unlikely to stick. It's really true, and also we live in such a toxic food culture that we're surrounded by fast foods. If you go out to eat, you're going to get a huge dose generally of fat and oil and sugar and salt. I mean, that makes the restaurant world go by or a big slab of animal protein, which people also crave. Here's one of the insights that I'm not saying is unique to our book, but I don't see talked about very much. The paleo people really try to make a big deal out of the way people evolved eating. I just don't think they get their facts right.

people evolved eating and i just don't think they get their facts right so for most of our history for hundreds of thousands of years i mean if you even go back beyond to our to our nearest primate cousins say the chimpanzees and and the bonobos and the gorillas i mean the chimpanzees and bonobos are 95 plant-based they do eat a little bit of animal foods but they're definitely plant-based the gorillas are about 100% plant-based. And by the way, those are very strong animals. I don't want to mess with the gorilla or a chimpanzee. They're like three or four times stronger than a strong man. So what humans were up against for most of evolutionary history was not getting enough to eat.

Starvation was always the issue. And they weren't able to preserve food for very long periods of time and the risk of not running out of food was very important. So we evolved in such a way to crave calorie density. When we can get concentrated sources of calories, we pretty much like it. We like things that are sweet and that's that's calorie density we like we like uh it's animal foods because they're a concentrated source of protein and usually concentrated source of calories of course the animals we eat today that have been fed full of corn and soybeans and a lot of marbling and fat with artificial growth stimulants is far cry from the

kind of meat that people might have eaten hundreds of thousands of years ago and but back then that was probably so rare right they were able to get any animal foods that's made a big deal out of hunters and gatherers it's really gatherers gatherers gather, gatherers, gatherers, and an occasional hunt because they just didn't score that much animal food. And also the amount of energy expended to track an animal and kill it, that was the luxury, right? Not the norm. The norm was eating readily accessible plants.

Yes, exactly. Which I have no doubt that our paleo ancestors were experts on plants. They knew every plant that was out there, what was nutrient, what you could use for herbs for healing, which ones were toxic and poison and could kill you. And they were like, if you take an expert herbalist today, they're probably a shadow of what pretty much every uh paleolithic human being knew they just knew the plant environment they were they were living in so we crave calorie

density rich and that's what we get hooked on so we like things that are super calorie dense and that's the hardest thing for people to make that shift because we strip down our plant foods to take out the fiber and fiber is like one of the most healthy things in the plant food we feeds our microbiome it's it's it's essential it scrubs our bowels and moves food through it's and yet people avoid or don't like high fiber foods they want the stripped down carbohydrate, the stripped down fat. So we get addicted to those things. It's very difficult for people to make the shift. Yeah, I think that the paleo diet, from my perspective, sort of observing it from the sidelines, has been bastardized in the sense that it's now the animal component of it has been overemphasized. And from what I think was the original conception behind it, because I thought you did a really good job of saying, listen, there's a lot of good things about this, too.

Like if you're eating a standard American diet and you adopt a paleo diet, like that's great. You're moving in the right direction. Maybe you're not all the way there yet, but in the Venn diagram of plant-based and paleo, there's a lot of overlap and there's a lot to like. And I feel like that kind of tone is a theme throughout the book where you're trying to say, listen, let's look at the commonalities. I mean, you spoke about the quibbling, you know, amongst the various subcultures within the plant-based community, which I think is problematic. But you're trying to sort of cast a wide net here. And I think behind that also was this, you know, conscious decision that you made to not make this strictly 100% plant-based, but to allow, you know, sort of some flexibility around, you know,

10% of your calories coming from animal products. And as somebody who's a longtime plant-based person like yourself, that had to be, you know, a decision that you had to think through quite a bit before including it in the book. Well, we did. Of course, all three authors are 100% plant-based. We're all vegans. But we just don't think the science shows that 100% is better than 95% or 92% or 90%. We do know that past a certain point, consumption of animal foods, your risk for heart disease and cancer begins to go up. And the more you eat, the more it goes up. On the other hand, there's absolutely no evidence i mean all the longest-lived peoples uh you ask dan butener and we did his meta-analysis of diet in the blue zones you know you've got the five blue zones you've got okinawa you've got sardinia

italy you've got icaria greece you got nicoya costa rican you got loma linda california all of them were plant-based, about 90%. They all ate about, on average, the meta-analysis showed about 10% of calories from animal foods. And by the way, they were eating real foods, not highly processed, packaged foods. And so we just didn't think the science was really clear. And if you think about it, I mean, the whole idea of being a vegan, and I'm an ethical vegan. We actually write about it in Chapter 13. I write about it from my own personal perspective.

But in the entire history, it was only the word came into, it was invented in like 1944. If you look at the historical vegetarians, most of them were like lacto vegetarians. They consumed a little bit of dairy products. And so the whole vegan movement is kind of a historically new thing, and I support it, and I'm part of it. But it's a giant experiment, and it's a giant ethical experiment. I mean, we know, for example, that there's no evidence that we ever have that there's ever been a vegan tribe or a vegan culture or a vegan civilization. And we just don't find that in the record. We find mostly omnivorous plant eaters who eat a little bit of animal foods.

people just uh they just so many people just don't want to identify as being a vegan that that that they don't want that label and they don't want to belong to that subculture and so we think the science does not show that 100 is better than 95 or or 90%. So we wanted to stick to the science. It's not like a cop-out. We weren't just trying to make the book more popular. It's generally what we believe. What is your own evolution into this lifestyle is pretty interesting. I mean, like you said, you've had phases with this, but when did you become totally vegan,

and what were the circumstances around that? I know it was initiated by an animal rights activist that you ended up in an email engagement with. Yeah, the story is, and it's about 14 years from now as a vegan. And it started in 2003 when I engaged. We had an annual meeting for Whole Foods Market, and we had animal activists show up, and they were very upset about the ducks we were selling. They were arguing these were very cruelly treated ducks, and they were factory farm ducks, and that Whole Foods Market shouldn't be selling them. Of course, I wasn't happy they showed up. They disrupted our annual meeting.

They were, I thought it was inappropriate behavior. But I did begin engaging in conversation with one of the activists, an activist named Lauren O'Neillius. And she was very passionate. She was about like five feet tall or 4'10 or something. Very small woman, but very, you know, very powerful. Firecracker. A firecracker, exactly. And we talked that day and we swapped email addresses.

We continued our discussion via email. And after a month or so, we were both getting a little bit frustrated. And then I remember Lauren saying, she said, you know, Mr. Mackey, I don't know if you could get her to call me John at that time, Mr. Mackey, I can see that you're actually a pretty idealistic guy, and you really have good intentions but when it comes to animal and the way animals are raised for food in America and around the world you really aren't very well informed you don't know what you're talking about

and I was a little bit taken aback and but I thought about it I thought you know what she's kind of right because I'm getting a lot of my opinions just from other people at Whole Foods Market, and I don't know from my own firsthand study of it. So I took it on as a challenge. And that summer, the summer of 2003, or like in June or May or June, I began to read. I read over a two- or three-month period, I read about a dozen books on the way we raise animals in America and livestock production. And I was like, by the time I got to about the third or fourth book,

I was like, oh, my God, she's right. She's right. Were you like, I should have known this before? I know. Scaled up my markets? I was embarrassed, and I was a bit ashamed that I didn't know this. But then I made this decision I said you know what I just I'm not gonna eat animals anymore I'm not gonna eat any animal

foods at all and and I've been a vegetarian for many years a lot kind of a lacto-ovo vegetarian and and then I became a pescatarian and I just you know I just said that's it I'm not gonna eat anymore and for a little while we have chickens out at our farm, and I ate the eggs because these chickens were free-range chickens. We never slaughtered them. They just lived out natural lives. So I thought these were really ethical eggs. But I only ate them for about a year. And it was like I got so tired of talking to the media, who was fascinated that I was a vegan,

and then they'd always ask me about the eggs. And I'd always have to go and explain about these eggs. And it was like, I don't want to explain this anymore. I'm just not going to eat eggs anymore. So I stopped eating the eggs. I haven't had any eggs since and never have missed them. And so anyway, that's kind of the story. And I also wanted Whole Foods to step up and do more for creating a higher standard.

If people are going to eat animals for food, we can do a lot better job of the way those animals are raised. Right. So how did that translate into policies that you've put into effect over the years? Well, we've done a lot of things. I mean, we took care of the most egregious stuff first. We were the first company to go 100% cage-free. We did that, I don't know, 14 or 15 years ago. And we were the first company, I think, we banned foie gras, for example. The only veal we would sell in our stores was veal that we absolutely knew was not tethered

and also was not denied irons to make the uh you know they're denied those veal calves are denied iron so that their meat will be sort of this white meat and we so we we those were the first things that we did and then we began to work on creating a standards of of animal welfare. We brought in, we did it very collaboratively. We brought in the activists like Lauren and HSUS and PETA. We brought in animal scientists. We brought in the farmers and the ranchers who are raising the animals,

and we had a whole food market team there. And then we went through a process about how could we create a system that is more humane, that's better for the animals. And what we realized is that one of the things we realized about something like organic or fair trade is that it's an absolute system. You either get certified or you don't. But then we were thinking that there are these different stages in welfare. And it's hard if you don't set the standard up high enough, and people will just do the minimum required to get the rating. And you'll end up not setting the bar high enough so that more people can play. So what we did is we said you know what we're going to just create we're going to do a rating system and going all the way up to the highest

standard of rating for each of these animals which almost always involves not having any type of mutilation of the animal at all like uh branding or castration or or beak trimming or any of that stuff and but also no transportation you have to do on-farm slaughter and and there's there's hundreds of other protocols involved in it but i'm proud of that system we get attacked by many of the animal rights groups because they think we're we're keeping people from becoming vegans i I see it exactly the opposite. Once you wake people's consciousness up, people will go on a journey, and they'll begin to eat more higher animal welfare products, and eventually they'll move completely away from it at all.

I've seen that happen. I've seen that happen over and over and over again. Yeah, it's an interesting conundrum for you, being an ethical vegan and yet being the CEO of this, what is it, $16 billion operation with 90,000 employees. And how many markets are there now? About 465, I think. Three countries. Yeah. And also being the face of conscious capitalism and what that means and trying to align your own actions with your core values.

And you did that with your diet, and you've done that since 2006, I think. You have only taken a dollar in salary, and you donate your stock options to charity, foundations. And yet also being in charge of this operation that is an ongoing capitalistic concern that is serving millions of people in these markets all over the world. So how do you think about how that makes sense for you? You know, it's a good question. And to me, it's not a problem. Other people are much more troubled by it than I am, I guess because I understand I'm in business. And maybe the best way I can explain it is the very first store that I did before I did Whole Foods

Market was called Safer Way. And it's uh less than half a mile of where we're sitting right now having this conversation and it was an old house and on the first floor we had a a store natural food store the second floor we had a vegetarian restaurant and the third floor was an office renee and i lived up there as well so safer way was incredibly pure we didn't it was vegetarian we did sell eggs and milk but again i never heard of vegan back in 1978 and we didn't sell sugar we didn't sell white flour we didn't sell coffee we didn't sell caffeine we didn't sell alcohol it was very very high standard of food and this is back back, how old are you at this point? Like started it when I was 25.

Long hair, hippie, socialist tendencies at the time. Yeah. And here's the thing. Safer Way was very pure and very idealistic, and it did very little business. It's because we were not selling the food that people really wanted to buy. And the art of business is, how do you put forth high standards? How do you put forth your values and your ideals, and yet do it in such a way that it's going to appeal to enough people to have a viable business?

If you don't have any standards at all, then I don't think you are fulfilling your sort of ethical possibilities. But on the other hand, if you have too many, then you won't be able to have a successful business. So the art of Whole Foods Market has always been straddling those two. And we get some people are mad at us because they think our standards aren't high enough. And other people hate us because we won't sell their Coke or the products that they really want us to buy and have to go buy at another store. So we don't sell anything with artificial ingredients, flavorings, colorings, or preservatives, for example.

Now, a lot of people are starting to copy that, but we were like decades ahead of any conventional supermarket, and that's my answer. My answer is that I can try to educate people. I can put myself out as an example. I can write a book like The Whole Foods Diet. But I can't compel people to make different choices than they want to make. And if I tried to do so, well, actually, I'd be removed as the CEO if all of a sudden I said,

you know, just selling any kind of animal foods is wrong. We're just, I'm sending out, I'm a CEO. Beginning next Monday, we're not going to sell any animal foods. So get them out of your stores. Do a big closeout sale if you want to, or just throw them away. But we're done. We're done with it. This is the wrong thing to do.

You can't exploit animals. You'd be ousted. Of course. You know what would happen first, Rich? Everybody thinks, look, is it April 1st? It must be a joke. And then I would say, no, actually, I'm very serious about this. I've really troubled me for years, and I'm just going to do something about it now. So you got to do it. If you don't do it, I'm going to fire you. I think it brings up a broader conversation around advocacy in general. And, you know, when you look at, if you look specifically at the animal rights movement, you know, there's a spectrum of

philosophies around how to, you know, effectively communicate that message. You know, on the one hand, you have people like Gary Francione, who are abolitionists and think that any concession whatsoever is moving you in the wrong direction. And then you have more of a placating approach of just trying to entice people into thinking about things more broadly. And there's a psychology at play there that I think it's tricky in terms of how do you effectively communicate to the largest audience possible? And I think it brings it back to that email chain that we started this conversation about. I sort of think of it like this. If you look at the paleo movement or the low-carb movement, it's almost like the Republican Party. They have their talking points.

They're on message. They don't waver. the Republican Party. They have their talking points. They're on message. They don't waver. And the plant-based community is more like the Democrats, where they're arguing amongst themselves about quibbling, like we talked about earlier. And I think that ultimately undermines the movement's ability to really reach consensus with the average human being. Well, I think Republicans squabble, and I also think paleo people squabble. Because I've been part of lots of movements. Yeah, I'm part of the vegan movement.

I'm part of the plant-based movement. I'm also part of the animal movement. I'm on the board of the Humane Society of the United States. I've been part of a freedom movement. I've been part of the organic movement. So I've been part of lots of social change movements and they all have the same thing in common there's a polarity or a dynamic

between what we could call the purist and the pragmatist the purist and they're both necessary so once you see the dialectical at play you'll see they're both important the purist want and hold the movement to the very highest

standards. They want it to be perfect. And if it's not perfect, they will attack and criticize those who they see as sort of heretics, those who are not on the true path, because all the movements have elements of religious movements to them. And then there's the pragmatist who says, well, that's great, but you're not going to get anything done because it's easy to be perfect on a mountaintop, but if you want to be amongst the marketplace with people, you have to meet people where you find them. So if you become too judgmental and you are too idealistic,

then you're just going to turn everybody off. Yeah, you're alienating everybody. So both are necessary. Both are important. Yeah, you need the people to hold the line. Exactly. To set that standard. You do, and you also need people that can get things done.

And every movement needs it, and they need the dialectic, and it's in every movement I've ever been in. There's those that are purists and those that are pragmatists. You know, I do. I consider myself extremely idealistic, but at the end of the day, I'm about accomplishing things. I'm a doer. I'm a change agent. I'm a pragmatist. Almost all my best friends in every movement are also pragmatists and much like myself and we're always attacked by the purist all i'm i when i routinely speak now and i go out in public i'm frequently attacked by animal rights people who are upset that whole foods market has these animal welfare standards arguably whole foods is

doing more to help animals than any of these animal activist groups are in terms of lessening pain and improving the quality of life of these animals. And yet they're not attacking the factory farm supermarkets, the ones that are from HEB to Kroger to Safeway to everybody else, or Trader Joe's for that matter. Instead, they're attacking the one company that's trying to make it better. Instead, they're attacking the one company that's trying to make it better. Because we're seen as a heretic. As the founder of PETA told me, he says, you're keeping people from becoming vegans, and that's unacceptable. And I said, I'm not keeping anybody from becoming a vegan.

I'm trying to lessen animal suffering here by raising the standard of the way these animals are raised. I'm trying to create a race to the top. And no, they can't see that. They just see some people rationalizing, well, you know, I'm going to just eat humanely raised beef, and that's okay. And they blame that on me. Right, because the idea behind that is if somebody's doing that, then they're less likely to go plant-based because they feel better about that choice. Yes.

Their head hits the pillow at night, and they feel like they're being a good person. Exactly. And again, any movement needs people holding it to a high standard. And so I understand where they're coming from. But I am a pragmatist. And could I have my head hit the pillow every night knowing that I could have lessened the pain? I mean, Whole Foods Market's standards

literally make it better for hundreds of millions of animals a year. Is it a perfect system? No, it's far from perfect. But it's the perfect scene of the good. It does make things better for hundreds of millions of animals. The whole world's not going to convert to becoming vegans today, tomorrow, next week, next year, or even 10 years,

or probably even 100 years from now unless we can grow meat. And it looks like that may be something we can do. I'm pretty excited about those entrepreneurial initiatives. Yeah, I sat down with Bruce Friedrich about a month ago. We had an amazing conversation about what's happening in technology and food innovation. Bruce is a good friend, and he's an ally. He's a pragmatist, idealist like myself. We actually go out and we've debated about the ethics and health of eating animal foods and won at both Harvard and Stanford and had great fun at both places. And I've made donations to Bruce's work personally

because I think it's such important work. And he's introduced me to some of the entrepreneurs behind those organizations like Memphis Meats, for example. Right, Uma Valetti. Yeah, he's a brilliant guy, and I'm very excited about it. I mean, I'm not going to eat that stuff myself. Right. guy and I'm very excited about it I mean I'm not gonna eat that stuff myself but it's we could if we could raise meat that had no pain and suffering and death

I'm all for it even if I'm not crazy I'm still for it yeah all right well let's talk about conscious capitalism a little bit, if you can indulge me. I think it's a term that now sort of gets bandied about without perhaps a true understanding of what you really mean by that. So tell me how you define that. Well, first I can tell you how it's commonly defined, and then I'll contrast it with how I define it. So I think the commons view of what conscious capitalism means, it either means like socially responsible business, or it means doing well by doing good.

So it's not that those are you know it's not that those are like wrong so much as they're incomplete they're just a more limited meaning of it social that's more like social entrepreneurship exactly so what we mean by it and what we write about in the book is that we we identify four basic tenets of conscious capitalism the first tenet is We identify four basic tenets of conscious capitalism. The first tenet is every business has the potential for a higher purpose beyond just trying to make money. And if you think about, if you ask people, if you go to a cocktail party or go to a party and you just randomly ask people,

what's the purpose of business? They'll give you a quizzical look and they'll say, what do you mean what's the purpose of business? Everybody knows the purpose of business. The purpose of business is to make money. That's such an odd answer. Because if you ask what the purpose of a doctor is, doctors are extremely well paid. They make a ton of money. But nobody says, oh, everybody knows the purpose of a doctor is to make money. Or a teacher. A teacher educates. Engineers

construct things. Architects design buildings. Every one of the professions refers back to some type of social purpose, some type of value creation for other people. And business is arguably the greatest value creator in the world. It creates value for its customers, for its employees, for its suppliers, for its investors, and for the communities that it's part of. And yet business is put in this narrow box that it only cares about money. And it's like a bunch of sociopaths running around just trying to rape, pillage, exploit, and they're evil. And so, well, so we think business has a higher purpose besides making money, and you just have to be conscious of it.

So it's clear to me Whole Foods Market has always had a higher purpose. We've always been about helping people to eat more healthy. We've always been about creating more sustainable agriculture. We've always been about a special place to work that allows humans to reach their highest potential. We've always had a higher purpose from the very beginning. We've always had a higher purpose from the very beginning. Second pillar is there's more stakeholders than just the investors. The business should be creating value not just for the investors in the business,

but for the customers and its employees and the suppliers and the communities it's a part of, and it should be doing it to minimize its environmental impact in the context of all those stakeholders. So once you get stakeholders, then you never look at business quite the same again. And frankly, Whole Foods Market is being attacked by activists who argue that Whole Foods Market is not creating enough value for its shareholders over the last few years, and therefore the company should be sold. And it's like, that's not what we're about. Yes,

we want to make money for our investors, but we're much more than that. But they're not interested in anything more than that. They're like what I would call Lord of the Rings ringwraiths, if you know the books. These were people that were consumed by the ring of power. And I meet these people that are consumed by their lust for money. All they care about is money. And no matter how much they have, it's not enough. And Whole Foods is so much more than that. We're not just a corporation trying to just make as much money as possible.

So higher purpose is important. Stakeholder is important. And then the third pillar is leadership. Higher purpose is important. Stakeholder is important. And then the third pillar is leadership. And the best way to decide a conscious leader is one who, A, embraces the higher purpose of the business, but also serves it.

So we have a strong emphasis on servant leadership, meaning part of the reason I don't take any compensation for the last 10 years is I embrace the idea of servant leadership. I am there to serve Whole Foods Market. And to make it crystal clear, I'm there to serve it, I take nothing. I take no compensation at all. And it makes my motives, whatever you might think about me, I'm not doing it for the money. And that's actually deeply fulfilling for me.

Service is very fulfilling. And once you reposition yourself to serve rather than to take, you'll see things in a very different light. The fourth part is to create, fourth pillar for Conscious Capitalism and I'm almost done, is to create cultures that allow human beings to fully flourish. We're very proud that Whole Foods has been named one of the hundred best companies to work for by fortune 20 consecutive years. That's a big part of what our company is about, human potential, human fulfillment. Underpinning all of this is the idea that if you adopt these pillars and create a company

and a company culture around these ideas, that ultimately that will make you successful, right? ultimately that will make you successful right so that the idea of chasing blind profits or shareholder value you know above all else is ultimately short-sighted you know one of the things people that's a very I'm glad you asked that question because this is one of the things most people are most confused about business and it gives me an opportunity to explore it a little deeper. So we grow up in a culture that, you know, people play sports, and it's a competitive culture.

And we come to believe that someone wins, someone else loses. And that's the way the world works. If someone gets rich, then someone else must be poor. Zero sum game. Zero sum game. And the most amazing thing about capitalism is that it's not a zero sum game. That in fact, there are multiple winners because business is about creating value for other people. And it's based on voluntary exchange. So no one has to

trade. Let's take Whole Foods as an example. No one has to trade with us. If you think our prices are too expensive, or our quality is not good enough, or you have better alternatives in the marketplace, then you don't shop with us. And in fact, the truth is most of America doesn't shop with us. Even though we're 16 billion, that that's still like 1.5% of the total food market in the United States. So most people choose other alternatives. And so business is creating value for customers who are trading with it voluntarily, right? If they didn't like it, they don't have to trade there. Same thing, we're creating value for our employees, our team members, because they don't have to work there. They have other competitive alternatives in the marketplace.

If they don't like the pay, the working conditions, the way they're treated, they don't think they have better opportunities elsewhere, they go get jobs elsewhere. In fact, that happens every single day. Third, all the suppliers we're trading with, they're doing that for mutual gain. They don't have to trade with us. No one forces them. We can't dictate terms to them. They trade with us because it's in their best interest to terms to them. They trade with us because it's in

their best interest to do so. And we trade with them because it's in our best interest to do so. So by trading with us, they're winning. Investors don't have to invest. We're a public company. If you don't like Whole Foods Market where we do things, sell your stock. Don't buy it in the first place. So I'd like to be able to tell that to the activist shareholders, but I'm afraid they would not find that a compelling argument. But the point is, is that business is not the zero-sum game. It's this positive sum where everyone who's trading with the business is benefiting. And that creates these multiple ripple effects that go out. And that's how we make progress in society. We continually get better and better and better because competition in the marketplaces forces

business to create more value. And it does. Yeah, there's a distinction between that philosophy being woven into the very fabric of the culture, for example, that you've created at Whole Foods versus paying lip service to it. Because you sort of are at the vanguard of this and the sort of ripple effect down from that uh what you've seen culturally is other companies realizing like oh we need to get sort of on board with this but not doing it in a fundamental way more in a in a sort of surface level way like oh well oh, well, it's cool to be green. We should be green. And if we give a little bit back here, if we devote a small percentage of our profits to this cause and we create a lot of press around that, then we're doing the same thing. Well, again, if you adopt a win-win-win-win philosophy, sure, there's some shallow manifestations of it.

win-win philosophy. Sure, there's some shallow manifestations of it, but I would say that business is inherently value creating. It's only the ring race, the ones who have gotten totally addicted to the financial side of the business that are not creating value for everyone they're trading with. Now, most business people aren't very conscious about it, right? But inherently, if you just are trying to make money, you can't do that in most businesses without creating value for customers. It's hard to create value for customers if your employees aren't working hard and don't care. So you've got to take care of them. And you also have to trade with suppliers.

And if you're routinely screwing your suppliers, then they're not going to trade with you or you're not going to get very good quality of service from them. So most business is engaged in value creation. They're just not very conscious of it. So conscious capitalism is like making things very explicit, which are kind of implicit. And then once you become more conscious, you can do it more skillfully because it's like I want to create value for our customers. I want to create value for our customers. I want to create value for our team members. And that's how you win at the game of business.

And so by becoming more conscious, you get better at it, and you end up with these win-win-win scenarios, which is why I love business. It gives me great joy to see team members flourish and prosper at Whole Foods Market. I love the fact suppliers come up to me and they just sold their business and they got started at Whole Foods Market because we would pick their products up. Or I get excited when customers come up to me like they did yesterday when I was at the new opening of our store and say, I've been shopping at Whole Foods Market for 30 years. Thank you so much.

I love what you've done. You've made such a difference in my life. So it's about that kind of value creation, and it has positive feedback loops in our larger society. I think it's catching on. I think that especially with millennials and the younger generation who are much more rigorous and demanding transparency from the corporations that they patronize and are much more interested in these issues of sustainability and, you know, sort of workforce contentment and all of these things, that there's a mindfulness with younger people that doesn't exist in our generation. I think that's true.

I mean, Rich, I think that there is more consciousness. The younger generation is more conscious than my generation was at a similar age. And my generation was pretty conscious. So we're evolving. The culture is evolving. But, of course, there are some other negative trends as well. You've also got, like, we live in this more transparent world where, and we in the social media connect us and the Internet connects us. And now, but there's ways to just completely slander people.

And you launch these attacks based on basically lies. And people hop on the bandwagon, and if you get associated, for example, with being a racist or a misogynist or a sexual predator, and there could be a lack. I've seen this happen to friends multiple times where they're not actually guilty of anything except pissing somebody off, and then they go after them with this type of accusations, and the accusations become real to people because they see it repeated over and over and over again. It must be true. So there's that whole concept of a whole phenomenon of sort of fake news. And we live in this very transparent society, but yet we haven't created yet created rules of engagement, rules of, and people have not yet learned to become cynical of the things

they hear and read or more skeptical about it in any case. Yeah, it's a big problem. I don't know how we see ourselves through that. I think we're, I think we're belithely ignorant to the extent to which internet culture has just begun and the profound impact that it's having on us. Absolutely right. And we can circle back around to how we started our conversation today. Think about all the fake, inaccurate news that you read about in nutrition and healthy eating. There's so many different crazy philosophies. They're not grounded in science.

They're not grounded in research. So many different crazy philosophies are not grounded in science, are not grounded in research. They're just stuff people kind of make up and get excited about. And I'm not going to name names, but you and I were talking about some of it before we got on the air today. But there is so much false information circulating around nutrition and healthy eating. It can be very discouraging because sometimes I think we're taking, you know, two steps forward and three steps backwards.

I believe in the long-term truth wins out and science wins out, but it's not automatic. It's a long journey, and you have to vanquish liars and cheaters and people who just make stuff up. And I think we have that happening right now. Yeah, there's no question about that. I also think that we have strange, mysterious, psychological barriers because the stuff is not that complicated. It's like eat more fruits and vegetables, eat whole grains, eat whole foods. Don't overcomplicate it.

It's like, yeah, yeah yeah yeah but like take me behind the velvet rope like what is the one thing that i need you know what i mean like our human brains are wired to search that out when the truth is self-evident and is right in front of us i know one of the things i do and i've been doing my book tour is i always circle back around how simple it is look there's just two rules. Eat real, whole foods, mostly plants. Just do those two things. Don't worry about the rest of it. You can eat as much as you want to, as long as you're not eating a bunch of refined grains and sugar and oil and lots of animal foods. You can just eat however much you want, and you'll lose weight.

You'll get to your optimum weight, and you'll stay there. Most of your disease and health problems are going to disappear just doing that. It's not complicated. Right, and then the hands go up, right? And what are the questions that you're fielding? Where do you get your protein? What kind of supplements do you take? And they get these complicated questions out there that are— one thing I have noticed, this is an interesting thing,

is Americans are much more concerned about being deficient in things meaning they're worried they're not getting enough of something when actually our problem is just the opposite we have an excess of bad things and it's people heal up when they stop poisoning themselves when they stop eating the bad stuff and eat the real foods, almost all their problems begin to disappear. And yet they're obsessed with maybe I'm not getting enough protein. Do you get enough calcium? And those that are a little more sophisticated might say, well, what about DHA? Do you take B12? And they get into the weeds, 12 and they get into the kind of the weeds but forget that it's the most important stuff is the simplest stuff just eat more whole plant foods it's not that complicated simple just do it and

and yet there's something about the way our brains work but we don't we want to we want to move away from the simple stuff uh-huh yeah that is interesting about deficiencies you know all the processed food and the you know the other junk that we're eating is crowding out the nutrition. Exactly. You know, if there's any deficiency, it's coming with that. So when you remove those, you know, poor foods, those empty calories, you make room for the nutritious foods and the deficiencies go away. They take care of themselves. Nature has this wired.

You know, we've evolved over however long we've evolved so that it's take care of themselves. Nature has this wired. We've evolved over however long we've evolved so that it's taken care of. We don't have to use our thinking brains as much as we think. We don't. I mean, I'm interested in it myself, but I wouldn't need to be. You don't have to be that well-informed. If you just follow the two rules in the whole foods diet, I pretty much guarantee you're going to get great results from it. Just eat real foods, mostly plants. I know I got to let you go in a couple minutes, but there's a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this show and reflecting back on your career as arguably one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time.

who's arguably one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time, how do you think about the arc of that? What do you attribute your success to? What can you impart to somebody who's a business owner who's trying to create a business of value? I never intended to be a business guy, to be clear. I was studying philosophy at the University of Texas, and I didn't know what I never intended to be a business guy, to be clear. I was studying philosophy at the University of Texas, and I didn't know what I was going to be, but I didn't have any interest in being a businessman.

And what changed my life was I was about 19 or 20 years old, and I was on track to get a degree in philosophy from the University of Texas of Austin. But I had a required course I had to take, and I just really hated the course. And I hated the books, and I didn't like the professor, but I had a required course I had to take and I just really hated the course and I hated the books and I didn't like the professor but I had to do it

I had to buckle down and get this I had to get a passing grade in this but I had this big debate internally it's like I don't want to read this book I don't like this professor I don't want to take this course well you have to otherwise you're not going to get a degree

it's like I don't want to take this course I don't want to like this professor I don't want to read these books so i'm at this internal debate you're a contrarian through and through yeah well one day one night i'm trying to read the book i couldn't concentrate on it and i stood up and actually literally threw the book down on the floor and said this is the sarcher book yeah i'm not going to read this book and uh uh i i dropped the course the next day and I started working through the implications. Okay, I get it. I'm not going to get a degree. And once I let go of that, I was like free

to completely learn whatever I was interested in. I no longer was on the track. So I just took courses I was interested in. I just read books that I was interested in. I took complete control of my education. And then that began to ripple through the rest of my life. It's like, you know, I'm just going to do things I really want to do. Life's short. I'd read enough philosophy on existentialism to know life was short. And it was that point that I made the decision basically be true to myself, to be authentic, to follow my own heart. And two years later, I started the company. It was like, to follow my own heart. And two years later, I started the company.

It was like I'd found my path. I moved in this vegetarian co-op. I learned how to cook. I became the food buyer. And I had found the purpose of my life. And if I'd stayed on that philosophy track, I never would have. So one of the things I tell entrepreneurs is it's all about following your passions. And if you follow your passions, then you'll be doing exactly what you're interested in. You're going to learn so much more rapidly. I mean, I didn't take any business

classes when I was in college. But once I started a business, I got a business education incredibly quickly, not only in the school of hard knocks in the world, but I began to devour every book about business I could find because I was interested in it. If I tried to read it before, I wouldn't have been interested in it. So entrepreneurs are people that are genuinely very passionate individuals. And generally, they're motivated by some type of dream that they have. They may not have been able to articulate it to themselves, but they're driven by some desire to realize some type of dream or passion. And that's what cuts entrepreneurs apart from kind of the, I think, the ordinary individual. But you need to develop all the business skills.

You need to learn about strategy. You need to learn about markets. You need to learn about it all. It's a complex game, and it's a complex game, and you need to get good at it. We're in a time right now where the ascendancy of the entrepreneur has been elevated to almost rock star status because of startup culture, etc. Everybody's a founder. Everybody wants to be a CEO. I'm not sure everyone who steps into that is appropriately well-suited to that.

who steps into that is appropriately well-suited to that. But I've never seen so much interest in business and entrepreneurship as what we have right now. Although statistically, I mean, that's an anecdotal experience. And I meet entrepreneurs all the time as well. But statistically, our amount of entrepreneurial startups is declining. We have fewer entrepreneurs today. Yeah, and there's good reasons for it. Regulations are extremely high and hard.

It's hard sometimes to even get started in business. You've got a lot of barriers to entry. You've got, in many cases, high minimum wages that the startup business can't afford to pay. You've got a lot of challenges. And as a result, there are fewer and fewer entrepreneurs. And there's a lot more social entrepreneurs. There's a lot more people that are combining the two. There's a huge amount of creativity and innovation going on.

But just sheer numbers or sheer percentage it's actually in decline at least i would have thought it would have been the opposite at least you know in the app space or in the software realm yes but and there i see tremendous innovation going on in the food sector where i am there's so many different kind of startups it's it's kind of a golden age for food innovation you go to exp West, it's crazy how much that has grown. It is. But in other sectors of our society, you're seeing a lot less innovation. So, you know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I've read that, but maybe that's worth checking out again. Well, I don't know for, I just know what I've read. And we were talking about how there's a

lot of fake news out there. So maybe that one's fake too. I don't know for sure. I'll look've read and we're talking about how there's a lot of fake news out there so maybe that one's fake too yeah i don't know for sure i'll look into it yeah check that one out if you woke up in some kind of crazy parallel universe to find out that you were now the surgeon general of the united states what would you put into place what changes would you make well i have to if i woke up that, I'd probably have to immediately check in to some kind of psychiatrist. I know it's not your plan, but you know. Dr. But I get the… You know what I'm getting at. Dr. I know what you're trying to get to.

You know, I really do believe in lifestyle medicine. I really think that diet and lifestyle are huge. Our medical system is spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on drugs and surgeries that really aren't good for people, and they ultimately aren't necessary if people would. So I like the whole lifestyle medicine, and that's early. But we're seeing more and more doctors get in there. We're seeing more and more holistic kind of coaches and holistic life coaches. And the surgeon general, I would promote those things. I would set up certification in medical schools. I would say, I want every medical

school to have a track for lifestyle medicine, and government's going to provide funding for that, say, to encourage it. Maybe not on a permanent basis, but enough to get it started. And I think that, yeah, I would come out definitely and urge people to change their diets. I would become, if I was a surgeon general, I'm the most public health official in the United States. Yeah, I would come out and I'd make a lot of statements that would probably piss a lot of people off, try to get me fired. I would talk about shouldn't be eating all these processed foods. I would be supporting these taxes on the super unhealthy foods. I would be probably wanting... I'd be trying to raise the standards for how these animals

are treated and trying to encourage people to eat fewer animal foods. I would definitely, I'd be on the soapbox. Surgeons should be on the soapbox for healthier living, healthier lifestyle, healthier eating, healthier everything. And they'd probably fire me. Yeah, I don't think you'd last very long. Exactly. But I'd like to see that, actually.

That would be good. All of these ideas are woven through. Well I'd like to see that, actually. That would be good. All of these ideas are woven through. Well, someday when you're president, you could make me the first general. Yeah, that's about as unlikely as you being general. The book is great. Congrats. You did a beautiful job. All of these ideas that we talked about today are contained in this, you know, what is really a primer for getting healthier.

You know, anybody, wherever you fall on the diet and health spectrum, I think that you would be well advised to check this book out. There's lots to learn there. And like I said earlier, you lay it out in very basic terms that anybody can understand. And I really like how you highlighted the sort of heroes of the movement, all the doctors, many of which have been on this podcast, all the people that are out there working hard to kind of shift cultural perceptions and ideas around diet and nutrition.

Well, I wanted to be a uniter instead of a divider. So these are my personal heroes, and they should be called out, and they should be honored, and the differences are far less important than the commonalities. Right, so great. So pick up the book, The Whole Foods Diet, wherever you buy books,

and are you out doing the book tour thing and speaking and things like that? I'm doing some of it. It's been a little bit hijacked because Whole Foods has these shareholder activists now, so I can only do what I can do, and that's a lot less than I plan to do, but I'm doing what I can do. But I do have some other focuses right now. All right, man. Well, you're an inspiration. I'm in awe of what you've built. And like I said at the outset, the legacy of this will live on.

It's quite extraordinary. And it's really shaped how we think about food and nutrition. And now we see all these other businesses following in suit and kind of understanding some of the principles that decades ago you've been putting out there. But you really have impacted culture in a gigantic way. And so I appreciate you for that. Thank you so much, Rich. And hopefully we'll continue to do so. All right. Thanks for your time.

All right. Take care. Peace. Plants. Love. Amazing guy, that John Mackey, right? Unbelievable. I really enjoyed that conversation very much.

I hope you guys did too. He's the real deal, right? Do yourself a favor. Pick up his new book, The Whole Foods Diet, wherever you buy your books and hit me up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and let me know what you thought of the conversation. A couple of announcements before I let you go. Julie's brand new book, This Cheese is Nuts, hits bookstores June 13th, but it's available for pre-order now. 75 unbelievably delicious plant-based cheese recipes.

Julie has really figured this stuff out. So many people say to me, I go vegan, I go plant-based, but I just can't give up cheese. Well, Julie spent like two years in the kitchen trying to crack this wide open and figure out a way to make delicious, healthy, non-dairy cheeses.

And she succeeded. This book is just next level. The photography is insane. The recipes areeses. And she succeeded. This book is just next level. The photography is insane. The recipes are unbelievable. And she really takes you through how you can do this yourself at home. It's a really amazing book. I'm so proud of her. And it would mean the world if you would go ahead and pre-order it now from your favorite bookseller. Pre-order numbers are very important in terms of raising visibility of the book, and it influences bookseller order sizes. It's a long conversation to get into that, but suffice it to say that these pre-order numbers are really important.

So it would be great if you went ahead and took care of that now, if it sounds like a book for you. On that note, we just launched a Thunderclap campaign. What is Thunderclap, you're asking? Some of you might remember our Thunderclap campaign. What is Thunderclap, you're asking? Some of you might remember our Thunderclap campaign for the Plant Power Way, but for those of you who are new, Thunderclap is a free, simple, crowdsourcing online platform that basically, when you sign up, allows you to pledge a social media post in support of the book, This Cheese is Nuts. And that post will automatically publish to your timeline on June 13th. Our goal is to achieve a social reach of 1 million people. So

show your support for the movement and let all our voices be heard at once. I'll put a link to the Thunderclap campaign in the show notes to make it easy for you guys to find. Also, Plant Power Ireland is coming up July 24th through 31. This is going to be our amazing seven-day retreat on this James Bond-like manor that sits on 90 acres in the Irish countryside. It's going to be unbelievable. We've got the happy pair of lads coming by. We're going to cook. We're going to eat. We're going to run. We're going to meditate. We're going to do tea ceremony. We're going to have super intensive workshops on everything from relationships to creativity to mindfulness. There's going to eat. We're going to run. We're going to meditate. We're going to do tea ceremony. We're going to have super intensive workshops on everything from relationships to creativity to mindfulness.

There's going to be Ayurvedic treatments. The whole idea is that at the conclusion of this seven days that you will have transformed your life wholesale and be armed with the tools that you need to go back to your life and really live your best, most authentic self. If this sounds like something for you, go to ourplantpowerworld.com for more information. Also, if you go to srimati.com, S-R-I-M-A-T-I.com, you can enter to win a free slot.

We're giving away one free slot for this retreat when you purchase three copies of this Cheese is Nuts. And you can find out information about that on the homepage at srimati.com. just scroll down and you'll see the information there also we just launched our new plant power meal planner it's an online platform that offers you thousands of plant-based recipes unlimited meal plans and grocery lists everything is totally personalized and customized based on your goals your food preferences allergies, your time constraints. We have customer support from a team of experts seven days a week, grocery delivery in 22 metropolitan areas. And we're getting great feedback on the people who have already signed

up. People are really digging it. I'm so proud of this program. And I think it's really improving people's lives. It's really a huge value add, especially if you're time crunched or you don't want to fuss about in the kitchen. You just want to know, how do I make this? What do I need? How can I get these groceries? What exactly is the process to making these healthy foods? And the meal planner makes it super simple.

So to learn more, just go to richroll.com, click on meal planner. You'll see it at the top of any of the pages, or you can type in meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support this show and my work, there's a couple of ways to do that. You can share it with your friends and on social media. That's super easy and it's free. Leave a review on iTunes, subscribe on iTunes, both free and only take a second. And we have a Patreon for those who are interested in financially supporting the work that I do. And I appreciate everybody who has made that commitment. It means the world to me. If you would like to receive a free short weekly email from me, I send one out every Thursday. It's called Roll Call. It's basically a rundown, a list of five or six

things that I've come across over the course of the week that I found inspiring or informative or helpful. Usually a couple articles from, you know, anything from the New York Times to Outside Magazine, a product that I'm enjoying, a podcast I listen to. It's miscellaneous. It's fun. I'm not trying to sell you anything. There's no affiliate links or anything like that. I'm not going to spam you. It's just a way for me to share with people directly outside of the rubric of social media. So that sounds like something you'd be into. Sign up for it anywhere on my website. Any of the places where you enter your email address will do the trick. I want to thank today's sponsor, Squarespace, the easiest way to create a beautiful website, blog, or online store for you and your ideas. Save 10% when you use the

coupon code RICHROLL at checkout. That's squarespace.com. Squarespace, build it beautiful. And Health IQ, reward your healthy lifestyle with life insurance that makes sense and never overpay again. To learn more and get a free quote, go to healthiq.com forward slash roll. And also, as always, I want to thank my team, all the people that endeavored, that worked very hard to help produce today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering and production, as well as show notes. He's been upping the ante and taking on more and more responsibility with the show. And he's doing a great job.

Sean Patterson for help on graphics, all the amazing motion graphics that you see, the stuff I post on Instagram. That's all Sean. And theme music, as always, by Analema. Thanks for the love, you guys. I'll see you back here in a couple days next week. Until then, take the information you heard today and implement it. Use it. Take advantage of it to make those changes in your life that are going to stick, that are going to move you forward, that are going to shift your trajectory and set you on a better course for unlocking your best, most authentic self. And until then, peace. Thank you.