The Rich Roll Podcast - The Spiritual Entrepreneur Behind The Whole Foods Empire: Conscious Capitalism, Win-Win Dealmaking, & Making Dreams Manifest

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

John Mackey is a visionary entrepreneur, co-founder of Whole Foods Market, and a pioneering advocate for conscious capitalism. This conversation explores John’s journey from hippie to CEO and his unconventional business philosophy. We explore conscious capitalism, purpose-driven entrepreneurship, value-based business success, embracing challenges, spiritual practices in leadership, and finding intention through service. He also shares insights on personal growth and organizational culture that could transform how you approach business and life. John is a true original. And this conversation is a masterclass in conscious leadership. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order 👉seed.com/RichRoll Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF 👉 boncharge.com  Squarespace: Use the offer code RichRoll to save 10% off  👉Squarespace.com/RichRoll Birch: For 25% off ALL mattresses and 2 free eco-rest pillows visit 👉BirchLiving.com/richroll Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉gobrewing.com Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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into a $16 billion grocery empire. And along the way, forever changed how America eats and shops for food. The co-founder and former longtime CEO of Whole Foods Market, John is a natural-born entrepreneur, but also a curious and polarizing one. A pioneer of conscious capitalism who lives remarkably modestly,

John has always approached business as a spiritual practice, one that strives to reconcile things like love, happiness, gratitude, and oneness with the cutthroat pressures that accompany stewarding a massive Fortune 500 enterprise. You know what? I'm going to do what I want to do, not what everybody else wants me to do. I'm going to do what I want to do. Capitalism is an infinite game. The players change. It evolves over time, but the game goes on. Now 70 and having sold his company to Amazon, John reflects back on his fascinating journey with thoughtful, earned perspective. Perspective on not just his successes, but also his failures and the lessons he's gleaned along the way

about not just business and entrepreneurship, but about life and what matters most. John is a friend whose story I'm privileged to share with you today. One I suspect you'll find surprising, perhaps refreshing, but definitely profound. As we are kinder and more loving, we begin to experience more kindness and loving back to us.

You just have to be fully present right now. When you're fully present in the moment, you're no longer in your thoughts and your head. You are in the oneness. Good to see you. You're a very proud, unbridled capitalist in many ways, but you're also a curious one because- I'm pretty bridled. I don't know. I mean, by definition, you have to play by the rules. Yeah. I mean, I want to get into conscious capitalism and how you define that and how it's

distinct from what we might call traditionally pure capitalism. But first there's this other side to the coin, which is this deep spirituality that you have and a commitment to the interior life that I think is somewhat unusual for somebody of your stature and your position, but yet informs how you pursue your capitalist ideals in business. Yeah, I think that's true.

I think I'm in some ways so untypical of most business people. I mean, I am an entrepreneur. I never took any business classes in school. I didn't get an MBA. I've never took an accounting class. I never took a marketing class. I studied philosophy. I studied religion.

When I was young, I was seeking the meaning of life. I've done all kinds of spiritual explorations from psychedelics, meditation, breath work. And always questing to, as you say, I like the word interiority, to develop in my interior part of my being as much as and grow as a human being to become a more caring, more loving person. And I just think that's, most business people aren't, most business people are not entrepreneurs, A. And B, most entrepreneurs do not engage at this interiority level to the same degree that I have.

And maybe makes me just a little bit different. From the get-go go really, I mean, you were sort of iconoclastic or a bit contrarian as a young person refusing to read any book that was, just because somebody told you that this was on the syllabus, like you wanted to only read the books you wanted to read and had a sense of yourself. I don't know if it's confidence

or just some level of conviction about what the right path was for you. Yeah, the right path came a little bit later, but I mean, or came gradually, right? But I guess I got pretty clear at a young age, like, I mean, I'm just gonna say it, I was gonna die. I don't think most people really, they don't really focus in on it the way I did. I'm going to die.

I'm going to cease to exist. This body, this separate ego is going to disappear. So I don't have that much time. What do I want to do with it? Most people play it safe in life. They're afraid and they don't want to take risks because they're afraid they'll fail or people will laugh at them or judge them. What I was conscious of, I don't have that much time, I'm going to be dead. What am I going to do with the time that I have to me? You know what? I'm

going to do what I want to do. Not what everybody else wants me to do. I'm going to do what I want to do. And then it's a question of what do I want to do and that's the discovery process that you go through and that answer is interior answers from knowing yourself, knowing your heart, knowing your soul, communicating with it and following it because it's a lot wiser than the separate ego that would like to run everything. So I think that's what's guided me

from the very beginning. Even as the book starts out with the name of the first chapter, well, there's a prologue when I'm coming down off this massive LSD trip where I experienced my ego... It's a heart open. Well, more than that, my ego died, my ego dissolved and I was part of the one. And then after that led me to move into this food co-op and become a vegetarian.

I wasn't a vegetarian. I just thought, man, I was interested in the counterculture. You know, I was interested. I liked hippies. And I thought, I'm gonna meet the coolest people living in a vegetarian commune. And I did. I met super cool people.

They took me under their wing. I learned how to cook. I had a food awakening. I became a vegetarian. I've been vegan for 21 years. I just awoke to my, that's my first inkling of my higher purpose was then because I was so excited about this. I just couldn't read enough books.

I studied. I read cookbooks. I still do. Cookbooks are fun. I read your wife's cookbook. It's a great cookbook. And fun to explore this whole world of food. And I got super interested in it.

Went to work for a small natural food store and I thought, man, this is within my realm of competence. I could operate a store, pitch my girlfriend on it at the commune and Prana House. And the next thing I know we've launched SaferWay. So vegetarian store, I might add. So that was when I was following my path because I was, and you kind of know

when you're on your path, Rich, because people say, how do you know if you're on your path? I say, it's simple. If you're happy, you're on your path. If you're not happy, you're not on your path because following your path is leading you down the road to your own awakening, to your own liberation, to your own evolution of consciousness. And that's a happy journey. It's full of love and joy of discovery as you go along it. And if you, by the

way, when you get super unhappy, ask yourself the question, have I stopped following my inner guidance? Because for whatever reason, and generally when I get unhappy is because I'd lost my way. I had to get back to it. I think for a lot of people, that's a very challenging and confronting question that's generally met with resistance.

Oh, well, you know, I can't change. I have responsibilities. I'm in this situation where, you situation where I have to keep this job and we constrain ourselves out of fear or perception or the uncertainty of what might happen if we were to take a different tack. Yeah, remember, I knew, I knew I was going to die. All the rest of the stuff.

And this is like the inciting incident. This is the genesis of it all. But where did that awareness come from? Like, how did you arrive upon that? Like what was... Everybody knows they're gonna die. They just choose not to think about it. You brought this into the forefront

of your conscious awareness for some reason. Well, because... At a young age when we don't really... Because I'm studying philosophy and religion, right? I'm trying to figure out the meaning of life. And so that was a starting point for me because it's like, okay, I only have a finite amount of time.

I could die tonight. I could die tomorrow. You just don't know when your number's up, so to speak. So what is it that I really care about? What is it that I really want to do? What is it that I really want to be? Those existential questions, I asked those questions and I continued to ask them. I still ask them.

And that gave me a sense of urgency that I think most people like. Most people think when you're young, particularly, I got my whole life ahead of me. It's like I was quite aware I'm running out of time. And what is it that I want most people like. Most people think when you're young, particularly, I got my whole life ahead of me. It's like, I was quite aware I'm running out of time and what is it that I want to accomplish? What do I wanna do? Who do I wanna be? So that awareness of death, the inevitability of it,

which people do not like to think about, we'd rather put that out of our minds. But it's very liberating to reflect on it because there is no escape to it. We'd like, I mean, we will move on past this particular reality that we're in. And death can focus your energies in a way that nothing else can really.

So it really led to me to wake up in a lot of ways. It led me to, I guess, because, you know because also I talked about it in the prologue. The first chapter in the prologue and the first chapter is the game of life. And the last chapter is the infinite game. So there's this philosophical element running through a thread, running through the whole book. Until I have a conclusion to it all, I do share the meaning of life or what I believe is the meaning of life at the end of the book. And I share it all the way through.

The meaning of life is love and to awaken to deeper, deeper, deeper levels of love, to express that, to become, as my wife says, John, it's a lot more simpler than you make it out to be. Just love everyone all the time. The book is, beautifully put, thank you. all the time. The book is, beautifully put, thank you. The book is this, it's basically a beginning to end story

where we, through your perspective, go through everything that you went through to go from where you were to who you became. From the first market, Safer Way, and the Victorian House, all the way up through, you know, IPOs and venture capitalists and, you know, eventually the Amazon deal, et cetera. And it's just peppered and littered

with every obstacle you faced and how you overcame it, every victory, every failure, and reflections on all of those. But for me, what stands out and makes your story so indelible and unique is the very thing that you just shared, because throughout the book, when you're faced with a decision that you have to make, or there's a big moment in which clarity

is going to be very important, you resort to your spirituality and to these practices that were so formative earlier in your life as a means of tapping into your intuition and trying to make sure that you are making not only the correct decision, but that you are honoring that intuition. And it's not like one particular practice.

I mean, it's, you know, you're an avid hiker. Nature is very important in this story. And for you, there's the psychedelic practices, but there's also breath work and, you know, these retreats that you're going on repeatedly and course of miracles and meditation, et cetera. And you're very conscious to continually return to these practices and reference them throughout the book

as instrumental in not just your success and making the best decision that you can, but as really fundamental to living an examined life. Yeah, I'm gonna make a couple of points. One thing I haven't mentioned so far is, and it goes back to this meaning of life question a little bit is that I really believe in the metaphor of the hero's journey.

I actually believe every person's called to a hero's journey and because that's a call from our soul, it's a call from within us. That's our path is a hero's journey. And most people don't answer the call. They're too afraid. And so they don't. They settle in life.

And I just answered that call, and I'm still answering it. I also have the second point is that I have the title of a chapter, which is a metaphor for everything you just said, which is evolve or die. We're constantly being challenged, sometimes with too much that we don't think we can deal with it. And those challenges are the best opportunity

we have to learn and grow. The stress of, and we know this is true in evolution, that a species is stressed and sometimes it can mutate and evolve and sometimes it goes extinct. So I had so many challenges at Whole Foods, four different coup attempts really,

and lots of other problems and challenges. And I had to continue to grow or I was going to die and not maybe literally, but figuratively, I was gonna die and the journey would be over for me. So it's kind of like that kind of stress, if you view it in a different direction or a different framework, which is what I did, that's the best opportunity

we have to become a better person. All those challenges, although it's so unpleasant when we're in it, right? It's very, very difficult, but that causes us to have to go deeper within our being to find the answers, to become a different person. Sometimes the solution is that you have to go higher, you have to go deeper, you have to evolve yourself.

Whole Foods was always causing me to, I always used to joke Whole Foods is my ashram because it's forcing me to grow as a human being. And I never really could sit on my laurels very long. I was constantly being pushed. And I do believe that's called the hero's journey. The hero's journey, if you study the hero's journey, the hero's constantly, you know, Star Wars is a classic hero's journey. The hero's journey, if you study the hero's journey, the hero's constantly, you know,

Star Wars is a classic hero's journey, but the Lord of the Rings is a classic hero's journey. A lot of our favorite books and whatnot are hero's journeys because the person starts out not wanting to take the journey. It's like, I don't wanna do this. This looks really hard. And yet they get on the journey and then they usually have a mentor, an Obi-Wan Kenobi.

In my case, it was my dad that helps them in the early stages as they get their skills developed. Eventually your mentors are taken away from you. They pass on or they're eliminated and you now are on the journey and you have to figure it out. Your soul is your only guide. I just think this, I think it's a metaphor for my own life, but I actually think it's a metaphor for most people's lives. I really do believe in that hero's journey. And if you can become aware of it and make it conscious, then you can be freer because you realize, oh, wow, I'm being challenged here. You don't have to be a victim. It's like, wow, this is an opportunity here for me to become a better human being.

How do I do it? How do I do it? How can I rise to this challenge? How can we rise to this challenge? It also allows you to put a little distance between you and whatever you're experiencing because you understand that there's a framework at play here. Whole Foods is your ashram. you're in the dojo, right?

And when life throws an obstacle at you, you don't have to be a victim. You can say, well, this is the hero's journey. Of course there's an obstacle. I've got this. Because this is the way it's wired. It's supposed to be this way. And even though I don't see the solution right now,

I know there is one and I will find it. I will find the win-win-win solution here. And a challenge accepted and you rise to the occasion. Or even if you fail, you don't always rise to the occasion. Sometimes you get knocked down. That's okay too. It's like, all right, that didn't work. I got to try something different here. But you're always seeking to thread your way through it and go on to the next challenges down the road. Yeah. Early in your career,

you know, you're coming from the counterculture and you know, the early years of Whole Foods, this, the market was the counterculture. Like it's just embedded in the DNA of what you were doing, but with growth suddenly, you know, it becomes, there's the threat of it being sanitized by the corporate forces that be. You're sort of castigated as wacky Mackie all of a sudden

when you're like, wait a minute, but this is how we got here, right? And you're also confronted with people that don't share this compulsion to grow that you have, right, which is the other kind of distinguishing factor about you because most people, once you reached, I don't know, four or five stores or whatever, say this is a good life.

Like, why am I killing myself? We don't have to have 20 five stores or whatever, say this is a good life. Like, why am I killing myself? We don't have to have 20 stores, 50 stores, 500 stores. What was it about you that felt so compelled to spread your wings so far? Early in the book, I talk about how one of my co-founders, Mark Skiles, once we had opened the first Whole Foods market and it was hugely successful. And it was just, it became the highest volume we had opened the first Whole Foods market and it was hugely successful and it was just, it became the highest volume naturally store in the United States and it was

very, very profitable. And Mark really never wanted to do anything besides that because it was like, John, we've got it made. We can retire on this store. We don't have to do anything else. We get, we've hit easy street here. We can just,. We can just take these profits and split them up and we can have a great life. We're rich. Let's not blow it. He didn't wanna, because opening more stores would mean risk.

And then the first few stores we opened after that first store, they all started slow. They struggled. We went out into suburbia where it wasn't the hippies and it wasn't immediately embraced. And so he got so disillusioned with me. He's the one that came up with the nickname Wacky Macky because here I was talking about,

I'd done NBMA for the first time and I wanted to spread love. And he just said, gee, Wiz, you're totally crazy. We're running a business here. I don't know, your new age hippie stuff is just crap. You need to get control of yourself. So he and I had been good friends and we began increasingly to get alienated. The takeoff point for when I thought Whole Foods might really be a big company

is we'd opened up and we had three stores in Dallas, one in Houston and one in Dallas, and they were all successful. And it's like, okay, my girlfriend and I took, Mary Kay and I took a vacation where we did a driving trip. And we drove all the way, we looked at stores in Southern California, and we went up through Northern California, and then we were backpacking, camping.

It was six weeks after we'd gotten our Dallas store up and running. When we got to the Bay Area, this was like the origin of the counterculture. This is San Francisco. This was the summer of love. This is where the hippies originated. This is the nascent Silicon Valley.

This is Berkeley. This is Marin County where the affluent hippies are hanging out. This is, And there were lots of good natural food stores doing a lot of business. There were no natural food supermarkets. And I remember talking to Mary Kay and I said, Mary Kay, you know what I'm thinking? She says, yeah, I know what you're thinking. I says, what do you think I'm thinking?

You're thinking we ought to open up a store here. That's crazy. That's like, you know, 3,000 miles away. How are we gonna do that? And I said, I don't know. We'll figure it out. It'll be fun though. We're coming into the Bay Area.

We're going to have stores in San Francisco. How cool is that? I just thought it would be an adventure. I see life as an adventure, Rich. Life's an adventure. And when you go on an adventure, part of it is unexpected things happen and you have to,

but adventures are fun, aren't they? What I like is that you're always throwing yourself into these unknown treacherous waters and figuring it out when you're in the middle of it. As most people like, let's figure out how we're gonna do this. Let's be strategic. Not that you weren't strategic,

but you weren't afraid to jump with both feet in. And that's true in the very beginning when you're in the Victorian house and people show up and say, you need all these permits. And you're just like, well, we'll figure it out. You know, like plead ignorance, whatever. You know, I'm like just trying to like, you know, band-aid your way through all of these situations.

And, you know, it happens again when you're confronted with the fact that you're probably going to need VC money and you don't know anything about that world. Like, you're just, there's a propulsion, like there's a momentum to it. I think that's, that is, I do self-identify as an entrepreneur. I didn't even know I was an entrepreneur until I'd gotten, you know, several years into it. And then, and I was an entrepreneur until I'd gotten several years into it. And then I was talking to other people who were entrepreneurs and it's like, I'm just like these guys. Entrepreneurs, that's what we like to figure things out as we go along. Mind you, in a good team, the entrepreneurs can also lead you right off a cliff. You need balance on the team. I needed my planners. I needed people

thinking through all the details because otherwise I'd overlook things. Entrepreneurs can be careless. And so on a good functional team, I had my people that were, they were crossing all the T's and dotting all the I's and making sure that we had good plans. But of course, the entrepreneur is the one saying, follow me, follow me. And, but you need the planners to come along too. So they're both, both are necessary, a good organization, but there's an entrepreneurial spirit that I brought to Whole Foods that I think most, you know, if you look at these companies, you know, Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneur. Elon

Musk is an entrepreneur. Steve Jobs, a great entrepreneur. I mean, I'm sure the people leading Erewhon now are entrepreneurs. And so the entrepreneurs are willing to go into the unknown. They're the adventurers. And I think back about it. I've always loved reading about adventurers. I mean, who can read Endurance for Shackelford and like, man, that guy was a really brave guy. I'm not sure I've been willing to try to do what he tried to do there.

And, or people, explorers and discoverers, it's like, I mean, that's the grand adventure of life. We're all in some sense on our own little explorations. And I think that's the energy that I brought to Whole Foods. That's why Whole Foods became a big corporation. All the other peers, they ultimately sold out to us. They just cashed in. They wanted what my partner wanted.

They just got financial security. I got the adventure. I got the better of the deal. And you stayed in it way longer than most entrepreneurs do. I mean, it's a story as old as business that the entrepreneurial vision that gives birth to something special ultimately caves in on its own weight

once the vision leaves the building, right? You stayed in for a very long time. But I'm curious around what advice you give to the young entrepreneurs out there. Because when you started, being an entrepreneur wasn't like something people were clamoring to do. But now, like being an entrepreneur because of technology, the technology industry is sort of a rock star thing to do. It's more aspirational than it was when you began, but I don't think that it's something that you can teach any more than if you study acting long enough, are you going to become

Daniel Day-Lewis? I think it's something you're born with. It's a very specific and unique energy and sort of lens on the world that you either have or you don't. Yes, and what you said is true. However, entrepreneurs need to develop certain skills. And I'm a far more skillful entrepreneur today than I was when I was 24 years old. I still have this entrepreneurial spirit, but now I know, I know a lot of things that don't work. I don't have to. We have reinvented the wheel so many times and made a lot of mistakes along the way.

So you do, you didn't gain wisdom over time. It doesn't mean you have to lose your entrepreneurial drive or your entrepreneurial spirit. And it is a little bit, I think when I was an entrepreneur, entrepreneurs were, they certainly were not romanticized as much as entrepreneurs are romanticized today. Although increasingly the society is moving the other direction. Now entrepreneurs are oftentimes castigated because they're, you know, they're taking too big a piece of the pie, right? You have this worldview that there's a fixed pie and they don't see that entrepreneurs and business people are increasing the great societal wealth. They just see somebody like Elon Musk as he's too rich.

It's unfair. He should get such a big piece of the pie. But everything Elon got, he earned because he was creating the most value in the world because SpaceX and Tesla are amazing companies that are transforming the world. So most people don't see that. But in terms of advice to entrepreneurs, in some ways the book is my advice to entrepreneurs. I wrote that book partly thinking that entrepreneurs are going to really like this book. They're going to identify with it.

And I'm telling them about a lot. I warn them about venture capitalists, for example. I'm constantly warning young entrepreneurs about VCs. You want the capital, but it oftentimes comes with such strings attached to it, you've got to be really careful. I call them hitchhikers with credit cards. All I can think about is I want to get these guys out of the car before they hijack it and take it over and hire their professional management and throw the entrepreneur out on the

side of the road. And I do think entrepreneurs sometimes are, they're not aware of such risk. They're just not thinking about it until they're on the side of the road. So part of the book is written for that. Well, there's a difference between methodically kind of putting together a value-based business that can withstand the test of time versus what you see a lot of in technology startups, which is let's just raise as much money as we can, which is celebrated without really acknowledging the fact that you just gave away a gigantic amount of your company. And control. But nonetheless, it's all about, you know,

a rush to scale without any regard for, you know, sound economics or profit and loss. Because once you reach, reach reach gigantic scale then you figure that out later and you sell it and exit you know it's interesting i don't always think that's what the entrepreneurs want to do unless they i think that's uh that's one of the messages the vcs are putting in there which is um raise as much money as possible by the way you'll lose control of business because you don't have the money, and we do. And then it doesn't matter if you have a high burn rate.

Because the VCs, if they can get, their model is they have a lot of failures, a lot of burnouts, but they have the big hits, the blockbuster that makes so much money that- Yeah, it pays for all the other investments. Yes, it pays for all the other ones. But then there's a lot of dead bodies on the road of entrepreneurs who had good businesses

and tried to scale them too quickly and then they failed. And so I have a very different perspective on that. And I understand that tech is one thing, but I mean, I'm starting a new business up, Love Life, right? And we're not gonna try to scale it super fast because I don't think we can execute it super fast. I actually found at Whole Foods,

when we started to grow more than about 24% a year, our culture began to get seriously diluted. There's an optimum. If you try to go too fast, you can't take a culture with it. The culture is just, it impl fast, you can't take a culture with it. The culture just implodes. It can't integrate. It needs...

You ever heard of the rule of 72? It's a good little adage. If you divide your growth rate into 72, it shows how fast you'll double your sales. So if you're growing at 24%, you divide a year, divide that into 72, in three years, you'll be twice as big. If you keep growing at that rate, three more years, you'll be twice as big as you were then. So 18%, divide that in and you get, it takes four years to double. If you grow in 12%, it takes six years. So it's a handy rule because when I found whenever Whole Foods was growing too fast, and it happened a few times, our culture began to get diluted.

We were bringing people in before we could enculturate them. So this massive go-to-scale, you can't take a culture with it. You won't even have a culture. It's people are just trying to get rich. And you're not creating a long-term viable organization, in my opinion. Make the case for the value of culture. Why is cultivating a great culture so integral to the success of a business? It's integral to the long-term success of the business. The culture is, first of all, it's the purpose of the business, whatever the higher purpose of the business. The culture is, first of all, it's the purpose of the business,

whatever the higher purpose of the business is. Secondly, it's your core values and then it's your leadership principles, how you're managing the business, how you are executing day-to-day. And those things together are formed, we'll call out the backbone or the scaffolding of the culture. And those things have to be real. They have to be sincere. They have to be, but all great enterprises, all great enterprises in the long term, they either have great cultures or they fall apart. Because eventually what you're doing gets copied.

And your culture is what gives you the competitive and long-term advantage of loyalty, of people that are committed to the organization, people that love what you're doing, people that are giving their heart and soul. They're not just professionals looking to get a notch on the resume and move on to the next best, highest-paying job. The culture is what holds it all together and creates the possibility of creating something really great in the long

term um i i think culture's a very important job for the ceo and most of the time they don't particularly in the entrepreneurial ceo it's something they take for granted don't pay enough attention to it's it's, can you build something to last that doesn't have a great culture? I don't think you can. And the degree of difficulty of maintaining a great culture as growth begins to escalate.

Is very difficult. Becomes difficult, but that ultimately becomes one of the core, most important jobs of the CEO. I think so. Yeah. That's how I see it. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. In today's digital age, having a strong online presence is just crucial.

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I was actually surprised that you didn't cancel on me because you were in the throes of a very challenging moment in the history of Whole Foods. And I don't know precisely when we did it, but I know that the shareholder activists were chomping at your ankles. I believe that the talks with Amazon were underway, but I'm pretty sure that no deal had been sealed. So the reason I did that was I'd come out with the Whole Foods diet.

And the day that my book launch happened to be coincidentally, but not coincidentally at all, was when Jana Partners announced their activist attack on Whole Foods. I had to cancel most of the book tour. I don't know. I canceled all the national television. I was supposed to go on to the Today Show and the morning show. I think you had already gone to New York for that purpose.

And then you had to come home. Well, and the very first place I spoke was at Goldman Sachs. The soon to be CEO, David Solomon comes up and says, I know this is a difficult day for you. I know you must be in shock, but I want to let you know that Goldman is here for you. And then that could not be coincidence. Those guys invited me. I mean, are investment bankers really that interested in plant-based eating? I don't think so. It was all orchestrated. It was all planned. was not, it was all orchestrated.

It was all planned. That guaranteed that I was not gonna pick Goldman Sachs to be our bankers. Yeah, it's kind of a brilliant move though. A little transparent, but nonetheless smart, knowing that you were going to need a solid investment banker to help you navigate this quagmire. And we got a good one, but it wasn't Goldman Sachs.

Yeah, have you had any run-ins with Solomon since where you can say, hey man, tell me the truth. After you sell your business, we sold to Amazon, then we have no future business. In fact, what was very bizarre is when we were negotiating with Amazon, after we'd announced the deal, but we're trying to get the legal documents done and move towards the merger, I had the distinct impression that neither our bankers nor our attorneys were on our side because they had no future business with Whole Foods.

All their future business was going to be with Amazon. So it's like we had nobody in the room that was really looking out for our interest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a sort of hidden truth in a lot of business relationships. I'm thinking of, we're here in Hollywood and agents who are meant to be representing you, but they're doing deals with the studios. Who are they really interested in making sure they are in good stead with? I think it's true. Let's just say they have conflicts of interest. And sometimes they're professional enough, they're able to disclose the conflicts and maybe work around them. But a lot of times they're just transparently biased towards who's really going to be there, who they're going transparently biased towards who's really gonna be there,

who they can get the, who they're gonna have the longest term relationship with. And this bears some relevance and truth in this evolving relationship with Amazon, right? I remember at the outset of this relationship, and I believe we went hiking one time and you were sharing with me your enthusiasm and your excitement about what might be as a result of this acquisition. And you talk about it in the book, but what are your thoughts? We're now how many years?

Seven years? Yeah, seven years. Post acquisition? Well, of course, I was CEO for the first five. I've been out. I resigned almost two years ago. I mean, I left almost two years ago now. The honest answer, Rich, when people ask me, the most common way people ask me that question is, do you regret selling to Amazon?

And the honest answer is, I regret the circumstances that made that the best solution for us. And it was the best solution in those circumstances because we looked at what our other options were. And the other options were, A, we can fight Janet and try to keep them from taking over the company. But we needed time. We needed to drop our prices. We needed time to turn around the company to get the prices down and get our sales and same store sales growth up. That was going to take some time. It was about a two-year turnaround. I didn't think we were going to have time to do it. We met with those guys and they did not want

to work with us at all. They showed this PowerPoint presentation that was, a lot of it was inaccurate. They wouldn't give me a copy of the PowerPoint presentation. I said, I'd like to, can you give me a copy of that? Because I really think a lot of these things you're saying are not accurate. And they said, no, we're not gonna give it to you. And then when I said, well, let's work together to help Whole Foods become more successful. I said, no, we don't wanna work with you.

Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take over your board of directors and then we're gonna fire you and your management team. And then we're gonna put the company up for sale. And there's not an effing thing you can do about it. And they got up and walked out of the conference room. So it's like, okay, we kind of know where they stand. They're not going to be partners at all. They're just in it for the quick buck here. So fighting them was, of course, I'm a very competitive guy. So that was my first instinct was we're going to fight these guys. We're going to beat these bastards.

And then it was like, well, what are their options? We could take the company private, which is something we seriously considered. The problem with taking the company private is that the private equity firm puts in, they put in some money, maybe 10% of the money. But the other 90% is borrowed against the company's balance sheet, against Whole Foods' balance sheet, against Whole Foods balance sheet. So we'd have been taking on about $13 billion in debt. And the interest rates on that, just servicing that debt would be enormous. If we hit like a 2008 downturn

in the economy, company wouldn't make it, we'd go bankrupt. I thought that was too big of a risk. And then there was also the option of friendly hands. Like we contacted Warren Buffett to see if he'd be interested. He'd be a perfect partner for us. But Warren just joked about it and said, I own Dairy Queen. I don't think Whole Foods is a good brand fit for me. It doesn't quite line up with his practice

of hitting the McDonald's drive-thru every day. Yes, he's very proud of his junk food diet. That's right. So Amazon was the best solution in those circumstances. And all in all, a lot of good things came from that merger. I mean, we were able to drop our prices. People don't realize, people don't really say the whole paycheck narrative

much anymore. Whole Foods dropped its prices four times in the first two years. It cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. They raised the compensation for all of our hourly team members within 30 days of the first two years. It cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. They raised the compensation for all of our hourly team members within 30 days of the merger taking place. They didn't take any of our suppliers away.

In fact, they studied our supply chain and then they picked up our best suppliers. So our suppliers gained from it and the shareholders gained from it. All of our stakeholders won in that deal. Now, we did lose control of the business ultimately, but they didn't try to change our culture. They didn't try to make us into Amazon clones. We became more centralized. Some things are a little different,

but all in all, if I had to do it all over again, I'd make the same decision. But I will always wonder what would have happened if we would have fought. I mean, I'll always wonder that. So for people that don't know, Jana Partners was this private equity firm. They acquired something like 8.8% of the stock. It's a classic, you know, Gordon Gekko, Wall Street kind of maneuver.

That's what they were like, by the way. It's ripped right out of that, you know, sort of narrative on some level. And it left you with very few options in order to survive. So the decision to go with Amazon was the best opportunity within the constraints of a very unfortunate situation in which you found yourself. But it wasn't the obvious choice. And I bring this up because I think it's indicative,

reflective of the way that you make decisions. It wasn't like people were walking around saying, you should think about Amazon. Right. This was your idea at the time. It was Albertsons look like, you know, it was gonna be maybe your only option to, you know, find an exit out of this.

I hint at this in the book, but I'm not going to make any accusations. I actually feel like there was a lot of pressure to take the company private. I was being courted by some big players like Mike Milken to take the company private. They really wanted to take the company private. As I said, I just didn't think that was the best option for the company. And I didn't think putting the private equity company in control would have been the best interest of Whole Foods either. But there was a lot of pressure to do that. The Amazon thing happened because I kept asking, the question I kept asking, I'm a great believer that if you have intentionality and you put it out into the world,

if you, answers come. And the question I kept asking is, what's the win-win-win solution? What's the best solution for all of our stakeholders? I kept asking that question. Every day I'd ask that question, what's the best solution? And I had met Jeff Bezos just coincidentally a year before at this conference we both were at. We both were on a panel together, the two of us,

and we actually hit it off pretty well. Jeff likes to read, so we talked about books, particularly like science fiction and fantasy, so do I. He also is a scuba diver, and we talked about that. And he's interested in whole foods, so we talked about whole foods some. And we kind of hit it off, and he actually said, man, this is a really interesting conversation. I want to follow up with you, and we'll get back together. I just didn't hear back from him. So then I kept asking that question, what's the best solution? And then I woke up one morning, right when I woke up,

you know how, you know, like I just woke up and all of a sudden this answer popped in my brain. And the answer was, what about Amazon? And it was like, whoa, what about Amazon? Hmm, I wonder if they'd be interested. They have the deep pockets. One thing I love about Amazon, which is they think very long term. They really do make decisions 10, 15, 20 years down the road. That's the kind of leader Jeff Bezos is. So I knew they'd give us

time to be able to drop our prices and reconfigure the company. And they did. In fact, after the merger happened. After I thought about it, then it was like, let's get together with them. So we contact them and Amazon was very interested. And just a few days later, I flew with three of my leaders from Whole Foods. We met with Jeff and three of his leaders. And I make this joke that when you fall in love, you have what is called the conversation, where you have this conversation, you might stay up all night and talk and you just have this connection, this sort of soulmate connection. We had that the very first meeting. We talked for like three hours and all the things we could do together. And they weren't the typical corporate types that I'm used to dealing with.

They weren't Wall Street types at all. These were really smart, regular guys. And we talked about all the synergies we could create. So we had an amazing conversation. And then they followed up two days later and said, we want to send a team down. Let's get going on this thing. And six weeks after that very first meeting, we'd signed an agreement. They were very, I love the fact that once Amazon decides they want to do something, they really move all in on it and they made a decision quickly, this would be a good merger for them. So the deal happened pretty quickly. And, you know, was it perfect? No. Kind of like most marriages aren't perfect either, but all in all, I mean,

again, I'd rather Whole Foods stayed independent. If that was really a viable choice, that would have been the choice I prefer, but I just didn't think we had that choice any longer and this was the best solution. In an alternate universe, you would still be happy to be at the helm? You know, I think in an alternate universe,

I probably would have retired by now anyway. I'm 70. I loved running Whole Foods, but, you know, there's a time to step aside and let the younger people take charge. All my peers, I was the last guy standing. All the people that I built a company with that were my age, people like Walter Robb and A.C. Gallo and Glenda Flanagan and Jim Sudd, they were all gone. So everybody I was working with was 15, 20, 25, 30 years younger than me. So I didn't have anybody there that was like, you know, that I could share at the same level.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were eager. I could tell. They just kind of wanted to. And Amazon was running it. And I was bumping heads with Amazon a lot, you know, because I was never intimidated. And that had an expiration date too.

Yes. In the book, I described this thing that was kind of the trigger. I'm talking to Dave Clark, who was the CEO of Consumer. He was like the number two guy at Amazon. Dave and I were fighting and we have an argument via Zoom or Amazon's equivalent, Chime, about, I wanted to bring the people back to work at the offices. And this is February, 2021. They had basically not been there for a year, but everybody else is going to work at the stores. Everybody else is working at our commissaries. Everybody else is going to our distribution centers. We

just had this privileged class at our corporate offices that weren't working. And I thought this was ridiculous. Vaccinations are available. People need to come back to work. This is bad for morale. Everybody sees that these people won't have to work and go into work and everybody else is. So I was trying to get permission from Amazon to do it and Dave did not want to do it. And I triggered him because A, I was pushing back. And I said, listen, Dave, you gotta trust me on this. I'm like, I'm the general in the field here. I know what's good for Whole Foods and what's bad. This is bad.

This is bad for our morale. It's bringing people down. I need to bring people back to the office. It's been a whole year for God's sake. And he said, it's too soon. It's too soon. I said, look, trust me, Amazon, you don't have to come back to work.

Fine, stay all as long as you want. But this is what Whole Foods needs to do. Trust me, a general in the field. And that triggered him. He says, can't you just for once stop fucking arguing with me? You argue about everything. And I said, well, what do I argue with you about? Can you give me some other examples?

I don't argue with that. Mostly I just go along. And he thinks about it and he says, I don't have to give any goddamn examples. I know that you do and everybody else knows it too. And so he's really angry and really triggered. But then I got some unvarnished truth in that anger too. He said, you know, Mackie,

if you didn't wanna lose control of Whole Foods, you shouldn't have sold it to Amazon. And now you just kind of need to do what you're told. And it's like, whoa. Then when that conversation was over, it was like, I asked myself the question, why am I still here? Do they want me here? I don't think they do. I think, you know, I don't think they want me here. And I didn't make a pop decision, but I kind of made a decision that day. I think it's time for me to go. I waited a few months. You know, you gotta let,

when it's such a big decision after 44 years to leave, that I had to let that kind of marinate to make sure it was really aligned with my heart and talk with good advice from my people I love and trust, like my wife and some of the, and Glenda and some in AC, some of the people I love and trust. And increasingly I just saw this was the right decision. It was time to go.

Yeah. And it opened up the possibility for love life for me. So sometimes you have to let something go to go on to the next thing, right? You do, right? Well, I think that story, even though it's just, kind of one incident, it gets to the heart of what's really important to you,

which is like culture and people. And throughout the book, it's a recurring theme that whenever a crisis strikes or whenever you're faced with some kind of decision that you have to make, it's the culture that you have constructed and protecting that always seems to win the day. And that incident made clear that there was a clash

with respect to how you were perceiving culture or prioritizing it. And I couldn't protect any longer. Yeah. You know, it's like, imagine you're a father, you have children and, you know, he's basically saying, yeah, well, if you wanted to stake, if you wanted to keep control,

you shouldn't have sold it to us. Now we're gonna kind of do what we wanna do. So when you walk into a Whole Foods market now, I'm sure you do every time you travel, right? You walk in, walk around, you're looking around, like, are you looking at, oh, they did that? Oh, that's good. Oh, that's not so good.

I would have done this. Like, what is the emotional kind of response that you have? That's a great question. And I have complex emotions about it. You know, one of the gifts I wanted to give my successor, Jason Buechel, who is, I did pick Jason and Amazon did agree with that pick. So I got the guy I wanted to take my place. And he's super smart, loves Whole Foods culture. He was our chief technology officer.

Then he became chief operating officer. And he speaks Amazon language because he's a tech guy. One of my gifts to Jason was, I'm letting this thing go. I'm bringing closure. I'm not gonna be looking over your shoulder. I'm not gonna be second guessing what's going on.

I don't wanna be in the loop. Anybody comes to me to complain about changes that are happening, I'm going to say, I'm sorry. That's not my problem any longer. You need to go talk to the Whole Foods people. I can't help you. I'm sorry. And so I'm not, I deliberately stay out of the loop. I don't really know what's going on. I don't want to know what's going on. Occasionally I'll get together with Jason and he'll give me a little bit about telling me about, you know, what Amazon's doing. And it's like, yeah, I'm sorry, I can't help you there.

I'm trying not to judge the changes. There are changes occurring. I see it. They're doing things that I wouldn't do. But that's the gift, right? They have to evolve it as they see fit and with Amazon's input. It's gonna change.

I can't do anything about that. It's kind of like your children grow up, Rich. You've done the best you can to inculcate good values in them, but you're not in control of them any longer. And they're kind of gonna do what they wanna do. And you just still love them anyway. Here in Los Angeles, we have something called Air One. Yeah. You know Air One.

I do. You know Air One all the way from the beginning. Have you been into any of the Airwands in town here? Cause this seems to be the new, you know, kind of whole paycheck version of what, you know. It's good to be competing with somebody that's considered a lot more expensive. It sort of ups the ante in terms of luxury experience

with food and they don't shy away from their high prices. In fact, that's not a bug. That's a sort of feature. It's really kind of like a lifestyle brand or a beauty brand almost, a prestigious thing to go to this store, which is a very different ethos than Whole Foods. But in some way you could characterize it

as an heir apparent or the next evolution of what like a high end food market is and could be? So first, let me say, I have a lot of respect for Erewhon. I think they do a really good job. If I was still CEO of Whole Foods, we'd be responding to Erewhon in a very competitive way. I would not see that high-end position to them in LA or anywhere else without a fight.

But I don't think that's what Whole Foods is going to do. We developed, we're testing it out first in the Denver area. We opened a high-end store we called Ideal Market, which had a lot of Erewhonian elements in it. And that was going to be the brand for our upscale answer to Erewhon, going to be Ideal Market, where we could do similar things that Erewhon's doing. And, you know, I wanted to compete.

But again, after I gave one year notice, that's one of the things that got canceled when I gave up my leadership CEO mantle. They decided they didn't want another brand. They were willing to concede that part of the market to Air One and just be the Whole Foods. We're very successful in LA just as Whole Foods. So I'm a very competitive guy. I was not gonna concede that to Air One.

But I wanna repeat what I started out by saying, they're doing a really good job. I have a lot of respect for them. And I think your competitors are the ones that can teach you the most. I don't like Whole Foods getting outflanked on the high end. So I would have fought. Yeah.

And if you suddenly found yourself reinstalled as CEO, would you resuscitate ideal markets and go to war with these guys? But I think- In a win-win way, John. The beautiful thing about capitalism is you have competition, which makes you better. If there wasn't competition, you tend to rest on your laurels.

You know, I have a great metaphor for it. Do you follow tennis at all? A little bit. A little bit. So the three greatest tennis players who ever played the game happen to all be about the same age. The three highest Grand Slam winners are Djokovic, Nadal, and Federer. You know, Federer's a little bit older, and then Nadal, and then Djokovic. But those three guys, they won almost all the Grand Slams over the last 15 years. One of the other ones won it.

Everybody else has won fewer Grand Slams, and each one of those guys has won by themselves in the last 15 years. They made each other better. They had to keep counteracting each other. They had to take their game to the next level. And that's the beautiful thing about competition and capitalism is it helps you to get better. Erewhon would have helped Whole Foods to get better

if we'd gone to compete with them directly like I wanted to. And guess what? We'd have made Erewhon better, and Erewhon would have made Whole Foods better. Who benefits from that? Customers do. Customers benefit from that struggle for improvement, to serve them better. And that's how you make progress in a free market capitalist society. And that's why humanity keeps advancing. I'm all about sleep.

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and what those might be? You know, I talk about the psychedelics three times in the book. First time is I'm just turned 22 years old and I had a very massive LSD trip that was unscripted. I was, and I experienced in dissolving my ego and a merger into all that is, the one. And when I try to explain that to people, it's very hard for people to understand this because we're so identified with our egos.

Our egos are our separateness. Like you're rich, I'm John, it's a water bottle, that's Robin over there. And so we think that's who we are, that's what we identify. And the essence of it is separation. We're different. We're unique. We're separate. And when you have an ego death or your ego dissolves, that separation disappears.

There is no separation between me and you, between me and this water bottle. There's only the one. And that is, I believe, the deepest reality is the oneness. Only because we're in the ego state of consciousness, we don't experience it. So that was the most important experience. Well, one of the most important experiences of my life. Because before then, I just didn't really believe there was any deeper reality. There was spirituality, I believe in, you know, I mean, it's just...

I was an atheist. And there's no deeper spiritual reality. It's all just bullshit. Opium of the masses, you know, opiate of the masses. That, you know, it's a hard, I was existentialist. It's a hard, cruel world. You just get used to it. That's the way things are.

And I was like, all of a sudden, I'm dissolved into the one. It's like, oh my God, every, it's not just that there's a spiritual reality. The whole thing is spiritual. The whole thing is this deeper oneness. And it's like, okay, well, how do I experience this? Not through a drug, but through my normal life. And how can I get into this space all the time?

That's the first book. And that led me to move into the co-op, which launched me on my hero's journey and doing Whole Foods. Then in 1984, while it was still legal, I might add, I did MDMA for the first time. And which now, I mean, back then it was called Adam, then it became called Ecstasy and we had a rave scene that occurred. I was never in that rave scene that occurred after I really didn't use it. And then now it's called Molly, I think, among Shanks people.

And that was a very life changing because I'd forgotten that love is the most important thing. And I had such an intense loving experience on the MDMA. I just saw, oh my God, love is the most important thing. You want to get back and dissolve the ego and you want to be in the oneness. It's through love. Love is the gentle path to reintegrating into the wholeness of the oneness of the universe. And I just never have forgotten that. And I've gone back to it. And that led to breathwork and A Course in Miracles

and a journey, a gentle journey through The the course of miracles of awakening deeper to love and then the third time in the book I talk about it as I was transitioning out of whole foods and I knew after 44 years that was not going to be easy for me to do and I wanted a really good separation or a good letting go of that. And so I did a guided journey inspired by Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind. It's like, as usual, Michael Pollan's, he's at the cutting edge of what's going on.

And oftentimes he did it with food and then he did it with psychedelics, I think. And so I thought, well, I'm gonna do a guided journey. And so I found a person that I had a five-day retreat where I basically, it was all very, very, it was very sacred in terms of, I had to do preparation before I went in there. I had to, we did a lot of work around intentionality. What did I want to have come out of this? A lot of prayer around that, a lot of clarity about what I wanted

and then openness to what I needed to see rather than what I wanted. And so five days, five days of breath work. And I actually found the breath work to be more powerful in this context than the psychedelics. Although the psychedelics were very powerful, there were combinations of MDMA and psilocybin. Holotropic breathing?

Yeah. Well, no, the breathwork that my guy did was... I did a lot of holotropic breathwork, that was what the breathwork I was taught in and what I was doing, and that's what I started doing. And my guy, a woman, she said, you know, we're not gonna do the holotropic breathwork here, we're gonna do a gentler circular type of breathwork. So she gave me a different breathwork here. We're going to do a gentler circular type of breathwork.

So she gave me a different breathwork. It was much gentler and I could relax into it in a way that I couldn't quite do with holotropic breathwork. She had me focus a lot more on the circular breathing of continuous but more gentle breathing and it was incredibly powerful. And I'm a different person now. That was two years ago. And I've really never come down from it, to be honest.

Different in what way? I just went deeper. I went deeper. I saw things. I had three, I had experiences I'd never had before in any other context. The first one was, I never really completely loved myself,

not really unconditionally. We all have an internal critic, Rich, that is finding fault, finds fault with everybody around us and finds fault in ourselves because we're not perfect. We make mistakes. We say things that hurt people or we do dumb things. And I have a powerful internal critic. And so I'd never really completely love myself.

And if you don't love yourself, it's very hard to really let other people love you because you're thinking, they don't really know me. If they knew me, they say they love me, but that's because they don't really know who I am because I'm this horrible person that hurts people and says nasty things and isn't perfect. So I first experienced this unconditional love for myself.

I got back in touch kind of with this inner child that had this beautiful heart of good intentions, really wanted to do good, really wanted to be loving and help people. And then I could see the ego, which was kind of like this, think about the crabbiest little old mean man you can imagine. That was my ego, just mean, mean as a junkyard dog. And it's like, I could see that wasn't me. That wasn't really who I was. In my heart, I was this very loving, innocent child who just wanted to do good and love people. And so I felt this overwhelming love for that little child. And I also felt love for the internal critic.

It's like the internal critic is the ego, the separation. And it's like, I named it, it's old Bob. Old Bob needs, he needs a little love too. And you know, just Bob, cool down, dude, I got this one. We're okay, all okay. Nothing to be scared of, just Bob, cool down, dude. I got this one. We're okay. We're all okay. Nothing to be scared of, nothing to judge here. Be okay. So you constantly, I'm always reassuring Bob that things are going to be okay. And then I had, then I had this, um, unconditional love for existence because I have this cap I like to wear that says, holy shit, we're alive. Because the miracle of life,

to be a living being with trillions of cells that are cooperating together and going through this whole adventure of being in human being and in the flesh, if you just think about it and get into it, it's such an amazing thing. It's extraordinary. Holy shit, we're alive.

What greater gift is there than to be alive? It's just amazing. So I felt this unconditional love for existence, for just life itself and just this particular reality that we're experiencing, this dream state that we're in. It's amazing. And then I felt unconditional love for all that is, for God, for the creator. And it was like, I'd never experienced any of those things. And they all came wave after wave after wave of this unconditional love. And I just was crying.

I went, I don't know how long it went on. I cried for, it could have been an hour just crying because I was crying from being able to release this. And quite frankly, I'm not the same person as I was before I did that journey. Incredible stuff. So what was it about this time that made it different than the other times and so profound

and something that you can carry in your daily conscious awareness? Was it the breath work piece? I think it was the combination of everything. Also, my guide was so loving, created such a safe place. She kept telling me, just trust the process.

Your soul is wise. Just trust your process. Trust the process. And I felt so safe with her there that it was able, I could let go a lot more than I ever could in the past. I also think Rich that in this case, I've been on this hero's journey a long time. I was ready for it in a way I wasn't when I,

20 years ago, I've moved into a different cycle of life, which the spirituality part is the predominant part, the thing that's most interesting to me, where I am today in my life. And also my wife is the most loving being I've ever known. And frankly, she's been working on me for 34 years. I've been her main project. I've been a difficult project for her,

but she stayed in there, hung in there with me and she sculpted me to a certain extent. When I think of that inner child or the young John who's brimming with love and I reflect upon the many ways in which life erodes our inner child and hardens our edges and turns us into our own worst critics. in which life erodes our inner child and hardens our edges

and turns us into our own worst critics. I mean, this is a primary malfunction of mine. So I'm very interested in this. I can't help but think about your mom in some regards, like she was a tough customer. And as much as you just wanted that approval from her, she was not giving it up all the way to the end. It's true.

And that had to be hard. I mean, you tell the story, but I wanna hear more about that because that's painful. My mother grew up, you gotta to always put things in context. One of the things when you get older is you can see your parents, not as your parents, but you see them as human beings and you see them in their own journeys in life. So like my parents, my mother was a small town,

grew up in Bastrop, Texas, a small town Baptist community in the Bible Belt. No drinking, no dancing, no card playing, no smoking, all of that. And she rebelled against that. My mother actually rebelled against that. She smoked and drank and danced and gambled. And so she was a rebel. That might be where part of my rebellion came a little bit from my mother to a certain extent.

But she also wanted to be respectable. She wanted, remember women, the patriarchy was alive and well. My mother was a very intelligent woman, but the patriarchy was very powerful. And there were really no opportunities for women. I mean, they didn't become doctors back when they, they were, they were allowed to teach. So my mother was a teacher and she got a college degree and she taught until then she's supposed to be a homemaker, right? So when she had children, she wasn't supposed to work. No wife of mine's going to work was kind of the saying, I'm going to be the breadwinner. And so my father was the breadwinner and my mother took care of the children.

That was, we lived in the suburbs. This was leave it to beaver time. And that was the romanticized worldview that my parents grew up in. And they remember, they grew up in the depression. So they didn't have anything. So, and then my dad was 20 when Pearl Harbor and World War II broke out in America.

Immediately, of course, signed up, everybody did. And he had to grow up really fast. He was in a war and now he gets married to his college sweetheart. And my sister's born pretty early on, seven years older than me. And he couldn't follow his dreams. and he couldn't follow his dreams. And my mother, they just wanted to live in suburbia and raise a family and not be poor because that's what they knew.

And so that was their reality. That was their own hero's journey at that time. I was more fortunate. I grew up in an affluent time. The money was not really, my dad was a college professor when I was young and then he went into business and became very successful there. My mother though, really, she named me after her father who was a doctor. She wanted me to be a doctor. At the very

least, she wanted me to be respectable. And here I was dropping out of college. That was just unforgivable. Why would you drop out of college? What are you going to do with yourself? And then I was downwardly mobile, Rich. I became a grocer. She never got her head around a hole. You're a grocer. You could have been a doctor and you're a grocer.

For her, grocers were the people wearing the aprons, just working at these little stores. And she just couldn't imagine why I would... I think she told me, she says, you know, John, I've seen all your IQ test. I've seen your aptitude test. You've got a great mind. You could be whatever you want to be. And you've chosen to be a grocer.

So she was always guilt tripping me about that. And she didn't like Whole Foods. It was hippie, worse, it was a hippie grocery store, which she just, you know, just thought was ridiculous. You know, you Look at your hair. You've got this big afro, and it's just embarrassing. A long beard. I mean, she was really embarrassed about me.

She'd get together and play bridge with her peers, and their children were going on to law school and medical school. How's that fine son of yours, John, doing? Well, he's a grocer. So on her deathbed, the last time I saw my mother was 1987. She died very young. All those rebellions did not work out well for her health because she smoked, was a heavy drinker,

never exercised, worried constantly. Almost all the things that we know lead to bad health and shorten lives. She did them all. Last time I saw her, she'd already had a stroke. She was already partially paralyzed on her bed. I knew she only had probably a few months to live. And she said, John, I want you to do a favor for your mother. You know, I'm dying.

I said, yes, but hopefully not for a while. She says, yeah, I know, but I don't know when we'll see each other again. And I just want one, just promise me you'll go back to school and just finish college, do it for your mother. And, you know, I was pretty young. I was like 33 then or 34, full of my own integrity,

very proud of what I was doing with Whole Foods. We only had about four stores then. And she said, yeah, do it for me. And I said, mom, I'm not gonna go back to school. I said, I'm gonna build Whole Foods into this great company and you'll see, it's gonna be amazing. And we're going to,

I'm gonna get an honorary degree someday. Someday I'm gonna endow some university and they're gonna give me an honorary degree. And Someday I'm going to endow some university and they're going to give me an honorary degree. And she said, oh, don't be ridiculous. Go back and make something of your life. And I just said, I'm not going to do it, which is kind of a little bit of a minor regret because my more older, mature self, gosh, I mean, I could have just lied and made a promise that would have given her comfort.

So she didn't die being disappointed in her son. She really was disappointed in me. So part of her rebellion is in me. And, but she never lived, she did not live, she died really a few days, a week or so later after the last time I saw her. So she definitely was disappointed. I had to break away from my mother.

I remember the first time I dropped out of school and I dropped out and I wanted to hitchhike around America for starting out in New York. I said, I'm going on an adventure. So I says, you're gonna go hitchhiking, you could get killed. And I said, nah, it's gonna be fun. I was going with a buddy, we're gonna be okay, be safe.

And she was really scared. And she said, if you walk out of that door, you can never come back. This is it. We're done. I got to tell you, Rich, I hesitated at that door. It's like, wow, my mother is like telling me I'm not ever going to be walking back in the house. And I thought about it. I said, that is so manipulative.

If that's the way she really feels, fine. So I said, I'm sorry, mom. I hope you let me come back in the house someday, but I'm going hitchhiking. And so I did. And needless to say, like a few weeks later, I was talking to her and she said, of course she can come back home. Please come home now. So yeah, I struggle with the mother thing. We got off on this topic because we're talking about the internal critic. Part of that is in internal critics, partly from my mother, I think,

judging me as a failure, not downwardly mobile. That was struggling with my own desire to be my own guy. Yeah, this sense of being less than and having something to prove and, you know, being someone who desperately wanted that approval and the way to get it was to just put the pedal to the metal on the business until it was so big, it would be undeniable to her.

You know, that's an interesting question. I've never quite thought about it that way. I wonder if part of my motivation there was, I'll show my mother. I probably, but I don't feel that. It wasn't something I was conscious of. The thing that's left out of the story is that my father, I always felt I had his tacit approval for what I was doing.

He not only did he become my mentor, but in some ways I feel like he was living through me vicariously because he might've been an entrepreneur, but he couldn't do that. And so I always felt his support, even if I felt my mother's judgment, I always felt my dad had my back and was supporting me. Yeah.

And so that was very helpful. Must've made for some interesting conversations between your dad and your mom when you were not around though. Probably so. He was probably defending me. And she was saying, Billy, you know, he really looks up to you.

If you would tell him to come back home, he would. And my dad was probably saying, let him be, he's okay. I'm pretty sure that's what he did. What is it about this book, The Course in Miracles that snapped you out of your atheism and gave you some kind of spirituality to hang on to? I mean, this book comes up a lot on this podcast. I had Marianne Williamson here.

She talks about it all the time. Yeah, I know Marianne. Yeah. And her book, Return to Love, was a really, really great book. So the story there for The Course in Miracles goes something like this for me. So I did the MDMA. I've had this heart opening experience. And then I'm doing, now I'm doing this holotropic breath work, which is taking me to new places. And one of the friends that I did that initial journey with MDMA was a guy named Curtis. And Curtis comes and he gives me this book called The Course in Miracles.

And it's like, what is this? And he says, well, it's going to sound kind of far out, but it claims to be. It's a channeling from Jesus. It's really incredible. I said, channeling from Jesus? That's got to be, that's bullshit. Because I had been, when I was 18, I'd very briefly for about two years, I was a born again Christian coming out of high school.

I kind of got a crush on a girl and she was into it and she got me into it and I did it. And then I kind of ran into the problem of evil. You know what the problem of evil is? The problem of evil is if God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving, why is there so much suffering, and then we're making these choices, and it's not God's fault. And it's like, that just didn't seem to be true to me. It just didn't make sense. So that was really why I stopped being a Christian, just the problem of evil.

So I started reading The Course in Miracles with a kind of a bad attitude, like, yeah, I'm going to prove this wrong. a bad attitude like yeah i'm going to prove this wrong and i didn't around 50 page 50 60 70 somewhere around there reading the text and then i come across this um statement that basically answered the problem of evil and or at least had a unique twist on it that that really spoke to my heart and it said that um you know, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, you've looked around and you've seen pain and you've seen suffering and you've seen great wrongs occur. And every time you blame God for it, what's never occurred to you is that you are asleep and you are dreaming this. You are dreaming all of this pain and all of this suffering. And God just wants to help you wake up. Once you wake up, you will see that it's

your dream. You're dreaming it. And the reason it's a powerful metaphor is, think about this. When we dream at night, we are in the dreams. Have you ever had a dream you weren't in? Of course not. Well, who are all those other characters that are in the dream? They seem to be acting independently of you. Well, how can they be independent of you if you're dreaming them, right?

I've thought about this. Yes. So we wake up and have you ever had a lucid dream? Lucid dream is when you become conscious that you're dreaming and then you can take a lucid dream? Lucid dream is when you become conscious that you're dreaming and then you can take control of the dream. Whatever you imagine begins to take place. I can't say that I've quite gotten there.

I've had the first part, but not the second part. So if you get back in that state, the way to go into the lucid dream, it's not easy. You have to really focus on something. I mean, and it's interesting in the Don Juan, the Castaneda books, Don Juan said, look at your hands, focus on your hands. And what happens if you have an intensity of focus, you will stay in the dream, but you become conscious that you're dreaming.

I've actually, I haven't done this for a while, but I've actually had dreams where I actually think I stayed days in that, I went about my business and woke up. Whoa. That one of the challenges sometimes is that the two things that are difficult for me are one is, it could be a sexual fantasy that takes you out of it, or I really like flying.

So I get, you know, the best dreams are flying dreams. So sometimes the flying gets me going on it. And so anyway, the point is, just getting back to the Course in Miracles is that the Course argues that you think when you wake up at night that you've woken from the dream, but you've only woken to a different dream. You're still dreaming. You're still creating experiences all around you. And so the course says, we're going to help you wake up fully. And you wake up through opening deeper to love. And you do that through forgiveness.

Instead of that internal critic that judges you all the time and judges everyone else, we begin to let that critic go. We begin to practice forgiveness. We begin to practice kindness and compassion and gentleness. And as we're starting to take control of our dream, we're starting to become more conscious in the dream. We're trying to make this dream a lucid dream.

And when we do that, then everything begins to shift around us. As we are kinder and more loving, we begin to experience more kindness and loving back to us. As we forgive people, we begin to feel that we're also forgiven. As we are kinder and gentler, we begin to experience a kinder and gentler world.

So the whole point of it is you're sleeping still. You begin to wake up by understanding that you're dreaming, that you're sleeping, and then begin to practice forgiveness and opening your heart to more and more love. And then you, of course, teaches that you transform this dream into a dream of love. And then once it's completely a dream of love, there's no separation and you're fully awake. That's my working hypothesis. And it seems to be happening for me. So I'm gonna keep going with it.

In the game of life, in the infinite game, right? Like approaching life with, okay, here's the game board and here's the rules. Practicing these rules will allow you to transcend the constraints of conscious perception and allow you to see things more broadly and as they truly are, which is that we are not separated, that everything is one.

And this transmission of energy outward translates into energy that gets aimed in your direction favorably. Exactly. Do I get that right? Yes, beautiful. I like that. That's really powerful.

And so the hero's journey now goes into, how can I just love everyone I'm around all the time? Just love everyone. Do I sometimes, and I don't always do that, by the way. I have an internal critic that judges me and judges other people. But what I've learned, and I also learned this in The Course in Miracles,

is that the past doesn't exist. All that exists is the present moment. So when we forget and we do something unkind, we make a judgment or we attack someone, that's in the past. In the next moment, we can choose love again. If we forget, it's okay. That's in the past.

Now we can choose love. So we get a new chance every next instant. And then as we practice, we get more new chance every next instant. And then as we practice, we get more skillful at extending love until that's what we're doing all the time. Where do you get tripped up most with this? What's the handicap? Such a great question.

You know, I think where I get tripped up is a little tiny judgments. Like just driving over here, you know, somebody cuts you off and you're driving and it over here, you know, somebody cuts you off and you're driving and it's like, you know, you judge that person for cutting you off or someone says an unkind word to you and your ego takes offense at it. So you have to practice being conscious and you have to be aware, you have to be present.

And when you're fully present, you don't get tripped up, but we get lost in our thoughts, you're to be present. And when you're fully present, you don't get tripped up. But we get lost in our thoughts, you're right. We get into our mind games. And in the mind games, we start to practice judgments and we get defensive and we can criticize and attack others. We begin to have these little things. He shouldn't have said that to me.

That was really an asshole thing to do. So we start having the judgments in our minds. And so we have to go back into the present moment in there's the power in the now, power in the present moment. There is no judgment in the present moment. In the present moment, there's love. Stay in the present moment.

So over the course of your career, when you've had to kind of face and navigate, you know, some pretty heavy situations. Early on, there's the hundred year flood you have to figure out. And then later all these coup attempts, there's the wild oats indictment story, the Howard Schultz letter.

Like there's a lot of shit gets thrown at you, right? And you're like at the helm of this increasingly, you know, larger and more powerful company. That's a lot of responsibility and that's a lot of heat to shoulder. So how do you, like, what did you, what did you like return to, or what were the practices that helped keep you grounded

so that you could walk through these with some level of equanimity, practice these principles that you just shared and ensure that you are visiting your intuition and making the best decision and kind of detaching yourself a little bit from what's happening. So, great question.

And first of all, I don't always deal with it well. I mean, right? I mean, I forget. You're a crusty bastard sometimes. I can be, exactly. So I don't always deal with it well. I mean, right? I mean, I forget. You're a crusty bastard sometimes. Yeah, I can be. Yeah. Exactly. So I don't always deal with it well. I haven't always dealt with it in the past well. So, but the real question is how can I remember? And I always do ultimately remember, but it helps because I have a good daily practice, right? And, you know, I start my days off with first I do spiritual reading, usually in the Course in Miracles. Then I do gratitudes, because gratitudes are a total

heart opener. Then I do sort of intentionality, could call it prayer in another way, for what I really like to see happen in the world or in my relationships. And then I meditate. And then I'm gonna do exercise after that and do some of my smoothie and get on with my day. So that's the grounding. If I, it's very important that I have my, I get up early. It's very important that I have that 30 to 45 minutes of centering. If I get the day off right,

then I usually can go well in the day. I had to do it today, So today's a good day. Sometimes when I'm under a lot of stress, it's like, oh God, I just can't deal with, I just, you know, it's like, I can't do my meditation. I can't get my consciousness. It's so all out there and then, you know, I'm all shook up. But the practices are even more important when we're under intense stress. If all else fails, a breathwork can be very, very powerful. They do a breathwork and you can do it yourself, but it's easier to do it if you just have a breathworking friend come over and guide you or be with you while you're doing the breathing. That just sort of like cleans you out and gets you really well centered. So what is the form of meditation that you practice and what is the breath work practice specifically?

The meditation practice, I studied TM. So I did Transcendental Meditation and I had a mantra for, I don't know, 40 years. And then it was interesting when I was doing the guided journey, my soul gave me a new mantra. It said, I want you to practice this from now on. And the new mantra is, on the inhale is I am, I am or om.

And the exhale is love. And I am love. And I am love. And over and over and over again. And I've done that with several other people and they all find it very powerful so i'd i'd urge you to try that sometime just a very powerful meditation to just i am love and um in terms of the breath work there's lots of different kinds i do some other kind of breath work stuff now that other people have shown me i will show you one when this is

over with you might might wanna just try, because it's very simple and very powerful and only takes a few seconds to do. I'm not sure I think we should do that off camera. Yeah, we could do that. Of course, everyone's gonna be like, you didn't tell me what the breathwork practice is? You will be an initiate,

so you can share that afterwards. I will share that. But in terms of the breathwork that I do is this continuous circular breathing. The key to breath work is to lie down, generally lie down, and you can do this on your own. You don't need a guide at all. But you're basically just doing continuous deep breathing. Deep breathing.

For a circular breath where you're bringing it in and then into your belly and then out to your chest. But if you do that, you'll begin to have transcendent experience. Stuff comes up from deeper part of your being. Most people get scared and they stop breathing. The trick of it is to not let fear stop you from doing it. Keep breathing. Keep breathing. And that's why a guide helps you to remember to keep breathing. And you can do that on your own. And I almost promise you, if you will do it, but I'm saying you need to do it for an hour if you're gonna really have the most effects or even two hours. So that's why I'm having a guide to get you

to keep breathing because your ego doesn't wanna keep breathing. The ego is not in control. The ego, old Bob gets shunned aside and the soul is beginning to speak to you. So the breath work, we're gonna have breath work at Love Life. And I just think that's such a,

for people that are scared of psychedelics and have no sense of transcendence, breathwork is a very easy way to have a transcendent experience, to get in touch with a deeper spiritual reality within your own being. And it's just simple breath. When you do it on the daily,

I assume you're not doing it for an hour. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, it's a shorter one, but I guess I'm asking because I'm curious. That's the one I'm gonna show you when we finish up here. With experience, are you able to then drop into that state, you know, in a more facile way,

because you've done it so many times, so you don't have to go for an hour. You can kind of connect with it more quickly. The truth is, is that all you have to do to connect with it is just, this is a mindful type meditation, but so you just have to be fully present right now. And when you're fully present in the moment,

you're no longer in your thoughts in your head, you are in, you're in it. We're always there. We're just off dreaming our thoughts. But when we can be fully present in that present moment is the deepest part of our being, our soul, and it's love. That's what's there. When we remove the blocks to love's presence,

that's what we experience. And that is in the moment. It's just hard for people to stay in the moment. What is your relationship between that and your kind of creative voice or your ability to craft a vision and then pursue it? That all comes, all the creativity comes from the source. It all comes from within us.

So when you are less blocked, your creativity is flowing fully. And I say your creativity, the deeper creativity of the universe is flowing through you. A good way to think about it is you're like a channel for it. It's flowing through you. I get in my way way too much. So do I.

Yeah, it's practice. I do wanna talk about love life, but before we do that, there's one other thing that I wanna dig into a little bit. There is the spiritual John and there is the entrepreneur slash capitalist John. These things are not necessarily in conflict, but I'm sure at times perhaps there's some tension between the two. And I would imagine there is also some tension that you're always trying to find balance with between the idealist John and the realist John.

And if your story is anything, it's one of idealism in the context of how you create something meaningful in the real world. Yeah, that's really actually a really great question. And it's one I've personally, it's a challenging question, one I've struggled with my entire business career, is I'm very idealistic.

One of the things that I figured out pretty early on, remember my very first store, Safer Way was a vegetarian store. I like to tell the, it's true, but it's also kind of a joke that Safer Way, we were very pure. We were vegetarian. We didn't sell any coffee. We didn't sell beer and wine. We didn't sell sugar. And we did almost

no business. And then when we went to Whole Foods and we started selling meat and seafood and alcohol and coffee and some sugar, the sales exploded. So there's this constant dialogue between the idealist of what you want to create versus the reality of the marketplace. And I always like to say, you have to meet the marketplace where you find it. You can work to evolve it over time, but it's in dialogue with it. Another good example in the book is when we were dealing with the animal welfare issues. We wanted to lessen animal suffering. And so we developed our five-step animal welfare rating system at Whole Foods. And we brought in the activists who are all vegans. We brought in the

scientists, the veterinarians and the scientists. We brought in the suppliers who were skeptical. And we brought in Whole Foods people. And we looked for win-win-win solutions. How do we create better welfare here that the market will be willing to pay for, right? So that's how we develop sort of this five-step standard. And it's not a perfect system, but it's helped billions of animals have a better life before they're slaughtered. And so it's made a difference. But it has to, the idealism always, it's kind of like, I always talk about looking for win-win-win solutions. A win-win-win solution is good for you, good for me,

and good for all of us. And I generally believe there is a win-win-win solution to almost every problem. When I was talking earlier about when we found Amazon as the solution, that was a win-win-win solution. It was the best thing for every one of our stakeholders. Every one of our stakeholders was better off because of that merger. That's why they were the best solution. However, sometimes trade-offs, I can't come up with a, I'm unable to find a non-trade-off solution where there's nobody losing. And so then that's when it gets tough. That's when the idealism and the realism clash. I like to say that's a failure of imagination.

There was a creative solution. We just couldn't manifest it. But sometimes you run out of time. So you just don't, you run out of time and you may end up making trade-offs. Those things are sort of the reality. And I don't have as much trouble as other people do about it

because I always feel like I'm doing the best that I can and we're making progress, but it's not perfect. It's not, all the idealism can't be realized. But because I think, well, this is progress. We'll do better next time. And so I have a saying that's not my saying, it's a common saying, but it's one I really believe in. The perfect is often the enemy of the good. It's better to make the good, to make the incremental step that's an improvement, realizing it's not necessarily perfect, not where you want to be.

But it's an improvement. And we take these steps of improvement and the world advances. That's frustrating to most idealistic people who want to transform the world into utopia overnight. people who want to transform the world into utopia overnight. But in reality, people change their minds, change their habits, but all they do it slowly and incrementally. And so I reconcile myself to the facts that I still have my ideals. I mean, a great example is myself to the facts that I still have my ideals. I mean, a great example is my first store was vegetarian. I'm vegan now, 21 years. I'm never going to eat animal foods consciously again in my lifetime. I'm an ethical vegan. But does that mean that all my stores have to, or my businesses have to reflect that idealism? Well, you can try to do that, but the facts of this are that

to do that but the the facts of this are are that only two percent of americans are vegetarian and only half of one percent are vegan that is a very very small market when you try to force people to eat a certain diet against their will they're just going to reject your business and so then your business is going to fail and then you haven't done any good at all. You've failed. So you have to look at what's possible. And you're in this dialogue with the marketplace. You're trying to persuade people, but ultimately you have to satisfy the market where you find it, which is one of the reasons a lot of people don't like business. Because business is messy. because it has contradictions in it because it can be chaotic. I have a high tolerance for chaos. As anybody that would go into my man cave at home

and say, how the hell does he find anything around here? And including my wife, who's constantly trying to reform my man cave, it's my one part of my house I completely control. There's never going to be anything but chaotic in there. It reflects me. So chaos is part of it. But for me, it's like, that's okay.

It's okay. We're doing the best that we can do. How far you can push idealism without breaking the viability of the enterprise itself. Yes, correct. And it is an, to sort of further explore the animal welfare subject specifically, you're an ethical vegan, have been for a long time.

You are making a personal choice to not, you know, not barter and trade on an individual level in these products. You don't consume them, but you're lording over this enterprise that is buying and selling untold millions of pounds of this every single year. And there are the idealistic vegans among us

who would like to take you to task for that, right? Like how can you live with such dissonance? You're not actually living your values. You're not a real vegan, ergo. You know, I'm thinking of somebody like, there's some uncompromising voices in this community, like Gary Francione, like you're perpetrating harm because you are greenwashing this thing

and making people feel better about this choice. You have to ask yourself, would the world be better off without Whole Foods Market and us having to go to Albertsons instead, right? But I would imagine there is also a toll, like a psychic toll that you're kind of dancing around when the compromises you make require the business to be somewhat at odds with your own kind of ethical moral compass?

Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, I, I, I, that was part of the, remember when I talked about on that guided spiritual journey, when I had that unconditional love is I saw my intentions were really good and that I am doing the best that I can do. And the people that judge, the challenge I always put back is,

hey, if you think you can do a vegan grocery store, do it. Don't just talk about it, do it. You think you have a better way, show it, do it. And if you do, I'll copy you and try to do it better. It's so easy to be the critic. You know what's hard in the world is to actually go in and do things that make the world better. It's easy to say, you're not doing it the right way. Well, what are you doing? Are you doing anything at all besides criticizing me? So that is always a challenge I put back on people now that

say, you should be doing this. It's like, why should I be doing it? You're the one that feels this way. Why aren't you doing it? And no one today has ever taken that challenge up. And yet I would imagine the idealist in you appreciates idealism and values those voices because they are quick to let us know where we are on the map of our own moral landscape. I listened to the criticisms, obviously, and appreciate it. And I'm always looking for new

ways to break through, right? The food thing is really difficult difficult i have found that people are very reluctant to change the way they eat not just for ethical reasons but for health reasons i mean people i mean americans are very much addicted to very unhealthy foods calorie dense foods that are processed foods fast foods that are destroying their health and it's i not in some ways, whole foods failed there too, because we had a better way. When we started out, bulk foods were 20% of our sales. Now they're under 1% of our sales.

People don't, they don't want to buy bulk beans. And most people don't really cook anymore. They just, they want, it's a complicated thing because our evolution of calorie density was so scarce for most of human evolution that we crave calorie density we anything has a lot of protein a lot of fat or a lot of carbohydrates in it or foods we like to eat and i might add salt foods has a lot of salt in it when you when we were not getting enough calories, that was survival. That helped us survive.

Today, it's killing us because today we can get, we can eat all these calorie-dense foods all the time and the market gives it to us. You want to eat ice cream? You can eat it every meal, absolutely. You want to eat candy bars? They're there. You want really salty stuff?

Have a go. It's destroying our health. So in a sense, you're meeting the market where you find it, you're giving it what it wants, but the market wants stuff that's really not good for them. And so my idealism is compromised

in the sense that I look what people put in their baskets. I see what sells. And it's oftentimes the least healthy things that we're selling that would sell best at Whole Foods, which is unfortunate. So again, I can't make those choices for people. I wrote a book about it called The Whole Foods Diet. I put out there what I think is the ideal diet. Eat a Whole Foods plant-based diet. If you do, you're probably going to live to be 100 and you're going to have excellent health. You're not going to die from heart disease, cancer, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I can't make people eat that way. I can only lead

by example. And I still lead by example in all my own idealism. It's how I show up in the world. And I guess I don't feel guilty about it. I really do feel like I'm doing the best I can do. And love life will be the same way. There'll be little compromises we have to make because the market demands it. It won't be perfect, but it's going to be good and it's going to help a lot of people. Well, let's talk about love life. Many years ago, I met Diego Tassoni and his incredible wife, Veronica Menon, we became fast friends. They opened a restaurant in Miami, in Wynwood, called Love Life.

When our mutual friend, Dan Buechner, moved to Miami, I was like, Dan, you gotta meet this couple. They're amazing. Dan, in turn, introduced them to you. And now you guys have formed this partnership and you're on the cusp of this sort of flagship opening for this new venture called Love Life. So what is this and why, John,

after 40 some odd years running Whole Foods, are you so enthusiastic about another entrepreneurial venture? That's a lot to unpack there. Yeah, sorry. First is going back to Love Life. another entrepreneurial venture? That's a lot to unpack there because we have a lot of questions. Yeah, sorry. First is going back to Love Life. We did acquire Veronica and Diego's business, Love Life Cafe in Wynwood.

We talked about that a little bit earlier. And I do like their food and I do like them personally quite a bit. There are some challenges there. They relocated the restaurant. But the food is really excellent. And that's where we got our name. So I love that name, Love Life, because I don't mean, how's your love life? I mean, love life, love your life, love life itself. The miracle of life is incredible. And so we made that the name of the company

after we bought them i said us this is a brand i think we should name our company love life and i've had this dream this dream goes all the way back to 1985 soon after i in 1984 i'd done mdma for the first time i'd done the breath work. I studied the Course in Miracles. And I was on this, in my own consciousness, development. And I wanted to open something with some friends that was called LifeWorks. It was going to be where we put our, in 1985, we opened up a Whole Foods market. And we had a consciousness bookstore called Book People. Consciousness bookstore called Book People. And we wanted to do LifeWorks, which was going to be a meditation yoga breathwork center.

And it was like, wow, we could have a – it was going to be small. It was 3,000 square feet. And we put it – I saw we could put this where we put Whole Foods and had a whole dream about it. It was a good dream. and had a whole dream about it. It was a good dream, but the woman that was doing the breath work that had introduced me to MDMA, she ultimately, right at the last minute, decided she wouldn't want to invest.

And so that kind of tanked the deal. It's like, well, she's the inspiration for this and she doesn't want to take the risk. I get that, but do I want to take the risk? And does my friends want to take the risk? So we decided maybe the time's not right for this yet. That's almost 40 years ago. That dream never went away.

I've always wanted to open some consciousness centers to help people to become the healthiest versions of themselves, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And that's what Love Life is going to be doing. And today is Monday. Tomorrow, we open a soft opening, but we're opening up our very first flagship location in the Los Angeles area here. It's going to be in El Segundo, kind of down in the beach city, south of the airport. It happens to be located, there's a home goods and then there's a Whole Foods market. This is one of Whole Foods market's highest volume stores in Southern California is in this particular center.

And so we're going in there because I think there's almost 100% overlap with Whole Foods customers and potential Love Life customers. So they're already coming into this area. And this, we took over an old Best Buy. And so there's really five components to the Love Life location. The first one is we're gonna have a healthy restaurant and it's gonna be primarily vegan.

It's gonna be primarily plant-based, but it's what I call a plant-forward restaurant, meaning everything starts out vegan, but we're going to let people add on if they want to add on some fish or chicken or beef, which we're buying all from Whole Foods. So it's all Whole Foods Market. It's gone through their certification processes.

And again, that's the perfect scene. I mean, they're good. We'd opened up a Love Life Cafe back in Culver City back a year ago. It lasted only four months and failed. And we lost millions of dollars on it. And what did you learn from that failure? I learned that-

The location was not great. That vegan restaurants are failing all over the United States, is what I've learned. And there's a lot of reasons for that. I think the young generation is not into it as much, for one thing. Secondly, I think that when you have that discussion, the internal politics of where you're going to go eat, and it's like, the vegans, I eat only at vegan restaurants, right? But if you're with a friend and it's like, well, let's go to True Food Kitchen because they have vegan stuff there.

You can eat that, but then I can get fish and I wanna eat fish. I want some animal protein. So that's the compromise. And so the pure vegans losing out in those conversations, because unless people are willing to eat vegan that one night, the internal politics of where you're gonna go eat, oftentimes,

it used to be that you couldn't get vegan stuff. Now most restaurants have vegan options. So that's my explanation for why vegan restaurants are beginning to fail. But again, this is a great example of perfect being the enemy of the good. We're going to have a plant-forward restaurant. It's going to be primarily vegan. If you want to eat a whole foods plant-based meal, you've got it here. And you've got a lot of different choices. And you can get it without any oil, without any salt. You can get 100% whole foods. You can add on to it if you want oil, if you want

more fat, if you want salt, you can get that too. We're trying to meet the market where we find it while keeping the ideal of a whole foods, plant-based diet there and clear for people that want to eat that like I do. So cafe, first thing. Then we've got a fitness center, a gym, a really nice gym. Think of Equinox in that regard. And then we've got, so we're going to have yoga and Pilates there as well. We've got a separate yoga studio, separate Pilates studio. And we have a really nice spa. So, and we have a really nice spa. So things that you would get in any spa from massage to facials to wraps to scrubs, all the different kinds of things you can do in a spa.

Not a medicinal spa, you can't get Botox, but you could get, it's not a medical spa, but stuff you get in a traditional spa. We have all kinds of recovery modalities from cryotherapy to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, to cold plunges, to regular saunas, to infrared saunas, and other esoteric sort of biohacking type equipment that we're bringing in for people to make recovery. We have three state-of-the-art indoor pickleball courts for fun and for community. And these are really, I just, I'm into pickleball myself.

Yeah, you're big time into that. And these are really good courts. People are going to join Love Life to play pickleball. I know they will. They'll take the other stuff they're not even interested in just just be able to have a great indoor facility to play with. And then the most important part is the medical center. We are going to have, this is going to be, we're going to have all kinds of alternative health,

including the medical doctors. So we'll have acupuncturists. We'll have Ayurvedic medicine. We'll have traditional Chinese medicine. We will have physical therapy. We will have ch Chinese medicine. We will have physical therapy. We will have chiropractic. We'll have all kinds of different practitioners there. But we'll also have, starting out with two medical doctors that are trained in functional medicine,

integrative medicine, and lifestyle medicine. So if you ask the question to most people, when do you go see a doctor? The answer you get is, well, when you need to, when you're sick. We kind of want to change that paradigm, Rich. We want people to... The doctor's job becomes a different job. The doctor's job is to help you optimize your immune system and your health at the highest level possible so that you don't need to see a doctor because in general when you get a chronic disease like diabetes type 2 diabetes or obesity

heart disease autoimmune diseases they don't actually the medical system doesn't cure you they just prescribe pharmaceutical drugs for you to manage your symptoms and we a want to prevent you from getting those diseases in the first place. We now have such amazing technology that can test and get your baseline established. And then wearables like my Apple Watch here or an Oura Ring or a Garmin that can, and we're going to download all this information.

We have an amazing technology app that people will get when they become members. And we can begin to create a customized, precision, individualized plan for you. Say you came in, we put you through a battery of tests, we got your baseline, and it's like then we work with you to say, okay, how do we get the healthiest version of Rich Roll here? And then you're going to have a coach and we'll have the doctor working with you and we'll track your progress over time. And so that's the physical portion of it, but we're also

going to be doing meditation. We're also going to be doing breath work. We're also going to be doing Pilates and yoga classes. We're also helping you. And so I'll jump to the, yes, and when psychedelic therapy is legal in California, MDMA and psilocybin, like they are legal now in Oregon and Colorado, when those are legal here, we will also be practicing that. I really do believe the combination of those two psychedelic drugs is amazing scientifically for PTSD. It's been proven again and again and again to really help and help people break through that are depressed or have difficult PTSD. So, the whole idea is to help each individual that's a member become the healthiest, best version of themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

If I was to design a mall that I basically wanted to spend all my time in, it would pretty much look exactly like that. Like I could live at a place like this. Like that's unbelievable. I wish it was closer to my home than El Segundo, but this is an incredible vision, but it's also lofty, it's very ambitious,

and obviously it's very cost intensive. I would imagine you had to raise a decent amount of money to execute on this. It's got a lot of my personal Whole Foods wealth into it. That's exciting. I mean, that's basically the solution, the antidote for what ails our modern Western society. And the great thing about this is that

once we prove this idea works, not only are we gonna open up more units, but capitalism goes to work. Other people will copy what we're doing and the ideas will spread. And so the world will be a different place 20 years from now. And people will be thinking about this stuff differently 20 years from now. I will tell you, about the first 20 years Whole Foods existed, before our brand got well known, people come into our stores. And if you knew what supermarkets were like, you probably do know what they were like 40 years ago.

They were terrible. They were really terrible places. And Whole Foods changed the industry. They started copying us. Over time, they copied our, they started to up their quality. They started to do natural organic. They made their stores look nicer. We had this major impact over time. But about the first 20 years, people come into Whole Foods for the first time and they say, oh my God, I've never been in a place like this. This is incredible. I love this place. This place is great. I've never been in a place like this. This is incredible. I love this place. This place is great. I still hear people saying, I'd love coming into your stores. Why? I don't know. It feels good when I'm in the stores. It's like, that by the way is culture. I feel the culture of Whole Foods when they're in the stores. So I believe the same thing is going to happen into love life.

When people go into this love life that we're opening up tomorrow, they're going to say, this place is incredible. Oh my God, how come nobody's done this before? This is a good idea. I wish this was closer to where I live. When are you going to open one close to us? That's exactly the, that's what we want people to experience because I do think this is an idea whose time has come.

What is the near and distant ambition for this? Like how many of these locations, obviously this is your proving concept. This is the infinite game. You know, I talk about the infinite game, which a couple of great books have been written on the infinite game. I did not make this up myself, but an infinite game,

a finite game is like, if I go play pickleball, there's rules and it's a finite game. You play, there's a winner, there's a loser, end of game, start a new game. An infinite game never ends. An infinite game is one that can go, intends to go on forever. So like life is an infinite game. DNA is replicating, going on, So like life is an infinite game. DNA is replicating, going on, evolving, changing, mutating, but it's meant to continue to go on indefinitely. Vince Lee trying to figure out how to get off the planet before supernova hits and get into some other galaxy. So DNA is replicating.

Similarly, business or capitalism is an infinite game. The players change, it evolves over time, but the game goes on. People are always creating and trading with each other. That's gonna continue. Well, I see Whole Foods as an infinite game. I hope it outlives its founder and founders. I will go on, maybe not forever,

but for it intends to be an infinite game. Love life is something that I want to be going on long after I've passed on the scene, but I intend for love life to outlive me and to go on and to hopefully do much good in the world long after I've left it to be an infinite game. So that's what I get people ask, why are you too old? Why are you doing this? It's like, you don't understand. I'm doing this partly because my soul is guiding me to do this, but people don't really understand that. But it doesn't matter.

I don't have to be around to see it fully flower. If I didn't do this, I would regret it the rest of my life. I would always wonder, oh, my God, you chicken shit. You knew you had the call, and you didn't answer it because you were scared. Didn't want to sit on your money. And it's like, no, I would, my internal critic would have a field day roasting me. This is like, I feel called to do this. My soul is saying, do this. It's an adventure. It's part of the continuous, my hero's journey. So we're going to do it. If it doesn't work out, well, sometimes reality knocks you back. Do you think about legacy? No.

I mean, that's the honest truth, I don't. People ask me that question all the time. And the best metaphor I can give to explain it, people ask Picasso, it's like, what's your favorite painting that you've ever done? He said, the one I'm working on right now, right? Those other paintings are in the past, but he's creating right now is what he's most interested in. I think it's the same way with

entrepreneurs. What I'm interested in is what I'm creating now, not what I've created in the past. And legacy is thinking about looking back and what you've accomplished and looking at it and saying, well, you know, it's your legacy or looking forward, trying to anticipate what your legacy will be. It's like, yeah, I'm just trying to be in the moment creating now, not worried about the legacy. It'll take care of itself one way or another. Yeah, well, it's a beautiful vision and it's a gift. You know, I would absolutely love to go to a place like that

every single day. Well, stop by. Yeah, I mean, I'm your perfect customer or something like that. Yeah, you probably are. But I think the moment is right. You know, the culture is receptive to this and people are frustrated with the healthcare system,

which is something you have a lot of opinions about and have written about. And the problem is that there's no other like solution other than, you know, going to, you know, trying to root out or find some obscure, you know, clinician who sees things the way that you do and that comes at a cost and is, you know, but the fact that you consolidate all of these at a cost and is, you know, but the fact that you consolidate

all of these things under one roof and create a system in which everything can kind of be tracked and there's purpose and direction and intentionality behind how all these things are interacting with each other, I think is really a fantastic one-stop solution to all of this. I know it's an adventure. I'm very excited about it. It's gonna be, we're gonna have all kinds of challenges and setbacks and problems. I mean, doctors, for example,

they have totally different views. You know, and doctors don't, they're not really employees. Doctors are independent. You can't really tell a doctor how to practice. So every doctor is gonna have their own philosophy, their own way of healing. And you gotta get doctors that match up well

with your members that have good synchronicities or synergies with the members. And you have all these alternative healings. And so here's one of the challenges. When does biohacking become snake oil salesman, right? How do you discern what's really effective versus what's scientific, what's cutting edge and what's just, you know. Right. Cause you could fill an entire Best Buy with just a bunch of crazy equipment. We have some crazy equipment. We do. Right. But

it's what's efficacious, what is still we're not sure about and what is just a waste of money. Yes, exactly. That's one of our challenges is to discern because we are cutting edge. We're on, we're crossed over to what controlled scientific studies have said. But ultimately the doctors are gonna say,

we wanna do this or we don't wanna do this. And so you gotta pick doctors that you sync up pretty well with. Right. I'm pretty excited about it. It's a new adventure, Rich. It's good. In life, we need new adventures.

We do. Well, you certainly have a lot of energy. So it's working for you. That's part of adventures, giving energy. Yeah. I love it. And I wish you luck at the, is the opening the soft open tonight?

No, tomorrow morning, 9 o'clock. We're missing about half of our gym equipment. That's why it's a soft opening, stuck in customs someplace. I'll drop in in August for the real one. August 10th is the official grand opening with media coverage and we'll have, everything will be working then for sure.

Beautiful, man. Well, I think we did it. How do you feel? I feel good. Yeah. Come back and share with me once you've, you know, have some stories to tell about Love Life. I'd love to hear more about it.

And I'm at your service, my friend. I think what you're doing is laudatory and beautiful. So thank you for coming and sharing with me today. The new adventures of Love Life. That's it. The infinite game. The infinite game. All right. Thanks, brother. Yeah, thank you. This episode was brought to you by Seed. Visit seed.com slash richroll and use the code richroll25 to redeem 25% off your first month of Seed to DS01 Daily Symbiotic. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and

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