Whole Foods Founder: The Biggest Myths About Capitalism, Getting Rich, & Finding Happiness
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It's easy to be a critic. It's actually hard to be an entrepreneurs. For years I was told that this was never gonna. My mother was begging me on her death bed to give up the stupid grocery dream.

I remember feeling that many times you're on whole fees is going to grow where to change, roth, you're not willing to sees that opportunity. Somebody else will. We really did all feel like we were a part of this movement that was going to change the way amErica eight life is short than you think IT is. It's too short to not be doing something that you really are passionate about that you're drawn to.

Welcome to the knowledge project on your host shame perish in the world where knowledges power this podcast is your tour kit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out.

If you're listening to this IT means you're not a supporting member members get access no ads, my personal reflections at the end of the conversation, access to videos from the books, some reading hand edited transcripts and so more check out the link of the show notes for more information. My guess today is john mckee, founder of whole foods market. I wanted to hear john story all the way from the creating of safer way to amazon buying whole foods and everything in between.

John is a master at resilience. Let's look at some of the things he had to overcome. Consider this right after the opening of the first whole foods market, this huge store where they had apple juices filter on the shelves to make IT look for because they couldn't afford enough story a hundred dear flood hit Austin and put the store eat feet underwater.

John didn't have any insurance, and he had no money. And if that was not enough, he had to deal with risk averse investors, four different crew attempts and so much more. John has interesting takes on lots of things, from investors and capitalism to the clash between the idea of whole foods market and the reality of running a retail business. He also has fascinating way to deal with critics. It's time to listen and learn.

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Go to join overlap dot com that's join overlap dot com. Think the best place to start is going back, although way at the beginning to safer way that would be was the precursor of whole food, right? What did the idea for that come through?

And we in my book, and the whole story I I actually talk about at the psychodeviant experience where experience ed ego death, ego dissolving when I was twenty two and pretty soon after that.

That's why, that's why started the book there not i'll start that answered to your question there and then that that really just changed my I got off path my parents wanted me to be on and um I would just moved in to this vegetarian cop housing cop sort like a coming and I wasn't vegetarian that time and I really didn't even know much about food. I'd just been a typical american kind of jack food heater, and but I had my food awakening my conscious ness, or woke there. I I always thought my body is kind of like, you get food to get fuel, like a car is to get gasoline.

That mechanistic model doesn't do credit to the fact that you actually need to nourish trillions to cell in your body with super healthy food. If you do that, feel Better. You mean system is strugling.

We'll get sick as frequently. Ly, you'll live longer and you will just probably in an overall, have a Better life. I kind of got that when I moved in, that cow sort of had some older, wise or people in the cow, and and I love got a cook.

I became the football for the go off. And I got deep into IT was like, wild, this natural and organic food stuff s pretty interesting. Then I went to work for a small natural food store in Austin, texas, at that time called the good food company.

And I became assistant manager there. And I loved IT. I I never worked retail. I loved I became friends with customers, friends with the the employees that I was working with. And then I remember coming back to the cop one day.

No, before I came home at night, I was looking around, closing up the store, and I thought, I love this. I could do this. This is, this is within my realm of life competence. And I could run a store, and I came back and I touch my girlfriend at the cop, renee and I, at this time, i'm probably just about twenty three year, rennes nineteen.

And I, Serena, what do you think we open up our own natural fit store and to changed my life, they looked to me, grab my hands and looked me in the eyes and said, he was a hippy. And he said, oh, my hael, that is so cool. Let's do that.

And so we did. And and if she's said that's a stupid idea, my life might I wouldn't be here with you today. My life might have taken a completely different sectors.

But he said, so excited about IT. We did IT together and IT was called safer way. IT was a vegetarian store and IT was was very pure.

We didn't sell IT is some meat and we didn't sell White sugar. We didn't sell um alcohol. We need some coffee. And and and I was like to say if we did very little business, we were not meeting the market where we found that, so to speak, with our own ideals. And we did that for a couple years and and we manage to lose about half of capital.

We would raise which of forty five thousand dollars, but we began to figure out the business and is luck or fate would have IT. I found another location and had a lot of trouble persuading the investors to relocate. And they would only do if I found another big investor, which I did.

But I play basketball with, baseball with, and he inhered a lot of money from his parents who died, and he he put in like a hundred thousand box and one of fifty thousand dollars. And then we got more money from the shareholder, and we relocated and change the name to whole fish market. And that was the first natural food supermarket in texas.

I've been inspired by a bread circus in boston, in mr. Guacho and L A fresh of farms and Sandy ago and thought this is an idea whose time could be coming. And that became immensely successful. And we and we sold meat, we sold alcohol, we sold our coffee and we were still features natural organic food. But we were also now a more uh a grocery store that more people could identify with, particularly our generation um which was a kind of a counter culture, long hair hippy generation that was looking to reinvent world, starting with one of the first places, reinvent was food. And so um that store was densely successful.

That was a lamer location. Yes.

IT was in fact within six months to became the highest volume natural, which during the entire and united states based on everything I know about the world back then.

Let's pause there, but we're going to come back to this in the second talk to me about the attention between the idealism know me yeah the process foods attention.

who is there? I always say you've for this class is easy to be a saint on the mountain type. It's easy for critics to judge and say you're selling out. You're betrayed your ideas like as i'm point based, I hear I heard all the time from vegans you're just a know you're hydrate.

You say you're ethical vegan and yet health ital needs so you're just a hypocrite, liar or you're not even ethical bean I don't believe IT but is like, what exactly have you done if you think a vegan store will work? Do IT don't just criticize other people if you think you can make out a available business. The problem in that instance is that about half of one percent of americans are vegan and two percent are vegetarian.

So you just don't have a big for that big of a market. And in in another cliche, which is true, is you can have to meet the market where you find IT, not where you'd like IT to be. So the attention between your ideals and as layers indicate shades, i'll give a third one, which is the perfect is in the enemy of the good.

If you just want to have your ideals, you can have them, but you may not have a business. So you have to engage with the market. You can try to influence the market, you can try to educate the market.

But at the end of the day, they vote every day with their pocket books exactly what they want. If you're not prepared to serve him what they want, then they're gonna find IT somewhere else. And you and your business may end up fAiling because you so there is attention between your ideals, but then you have to you have to mediate between them, you you as well.

I always like to say we're always pushing our ideals, but always listening our customers is like a dialogue you're having or a dance. And if you don't dances with your partner, your partner gna dance away from you. So you have to, you have to meet them more. You find them.

I'm always noticed that most of the people, actually, all of the people who criticize other people doing things, they are usually not doing the same thing. They're not trying to do the same thing. They're not in the same space. They're just sort of like loving gades from the safety of the sid loans and not yes.

I think that was absolutely true and also think there's a tendency for all of us, including myself, to project our own our own fAilings out under other people and criticize them. Then it's like you're not doing what I think you should do. Course, i'm not doing anything.

Uh, so it's it's easy to be a critic. It's actually hard to be an entrepreneur. It's hard to actually create anything. It's really hard particularly think it's gonna successful and me to test time, but it's very easy to find fault with what other people are doing. And you know, i've learned the hardway, for example.

I just don't read comments anymore like if if if win this podcast is if you allow comments on your podcast, i'm not gonna ad them because i'm going to get all those hates gna come my wait. They hate all foods, it's gone down and amazon hate on A A hb. The comments just allow people to prevent all this negativity um and so i've learned just Better to um just let that your stuff .

out you and me both so coming back to lamar, see you open the who was at ten thousand three .

thousand five well that would be like the tiny store at no. But I mean.

compared to the Victoria and house .

had IT was he .

compared to that? And you got all this inventory, you borrowed money, our location, you convince the guide lend IT to you because he didn't want to land IT to you and one hundred, dear flood hit.

yeah. So nine months had we opened up that really successful store, the whole first whole fids market in one thousand and eighty when we were building IT, the owner of the building, uh, texas, good old boy, and been pile, he let me know that this, what we were building in in one hundred year flood zone and I said, well, what what does that mean?

Exactly one hundred year flood zones says, well, john, what that means, partner, is that about once every hundred years OSS is can experience a hard to your flood is going to be eight feet of water that show crease, can overflow its banks, water can be come down, the laws can fill up your store and I said, really ID kid, right? He says, no, no, no, it's in one hundred year flood zone and I, well, when was the last time that happened? He says, well, i'm not rightly sure IT happened over seventy years ago when I was born, but that's what happened.

I'm thinking, all right, well, what are the chances were going to a hundred year flood flood in any time soon? And I thought, well, i'm going to still take the risk and he said, well, as to be on on the less. To give you a little bit margin error, let's build a slab is too fee high.

So our store was caught two fit concrete slaps. You had to step up to get there, which made a little hard for Garcia cars to get down in the front. But we built a rap for them to get down.

Anyhow, we had one hundred year flood in the first year. We were all in. And rene, my girlfriend, was working that night, and SHE swam out of the store because IT IT happened kind of in late afternoon, early evening.

And IT was a memorial day weekend. IT was a sunday night with memorial data next day. So that had some good things to IT. But you're asking about the banker that this was the thing I didn't know about stakeholder and I didn't have language for. but.

People that love your business because the day after the flood, we had, I don't know, dozens of people come in and help clean up the store. They didn't work there. They were neighbors.

They were customers. They don't want us to die. They love us. We had the suppliers gave us new inventory. Our employees worked for free while we were because we couldn't make a payroll, we didn't have any money, they worked for free. And so we can get back open again, which there was no surge that we would.

Um but the most remarkable story that I found about the flood I didn't actually find out about, told about ten years ago well um I met this conference and this guy I can help to meet you because you know john, you don't you won't remember me, you know um but I used to work for city national bank back in the day you know, terrible thing that flood and that flood happened to you and I said, yeah yeah you work for city back you must known our banker a mark mini suggest mark now are really good friends and that was quite a thing he did for you and I said, well, yes, sure was. I don't know if we could have reopen without hundred thousand dollars. One in the bank gave so IT always puzzled me though, bit because i've surprised the man would give us in long because you was just my signature guarantee and my signature was kind of worthless.

And he looks at me and he says, you don't know what happened and I said, well, I think I did. The bank gave us money and he says, no, john, the bank did not give you that money. I suggest they did.

We got a check from the bank. He said, john, the bank turned the loan down. The only reason you ve got that money was mark mono personally guaranteed that one. I said, what he personally going to don't know why the how would you do that and he said he did IT because he said he really believes in you and he believes in whole foods and he knew you. You'd pay him back even if he took you the rest of your life and and so he took the chance on you and I said, that's incredible.

I've got A I need to thank him as as well, you're too late he passed away about five years ago so that's a good story but that's that's when people asked me about stakeout ders. That's what stakeholders are. There are people that are invested in your business, care about your business, and then you have certain responsibility.

Lie s too. Did you realize you were on to something when you saw other people helping clean up that our customers and didn't work there?

I was only in retrospect later that I realized we were on to something that I could see the patterns because I didn't I hadn't really been exposed in a kind of stakeholder thinking before. But then later, when i've got exposed to that, I realized that the they were stakeholders. They were, they were our customers and neighbors.

They were, they cared about us. IT also says something about that. This we're talking about now, may of one thousand nine hundred and eighty one, literally forty three years ago, and the world's different back then.

Then IT is today. I really wonder whether people would come in and help cleaner, maybe they would. But Austin backing was a much smaller city than IT is today, is a much more neighborhood based, much more in and that and IT was just a different consciousness back then. It's mean up. So as you make progress, you also lose certain things .

you didn't want to give up after the flood. I mean, a lot of people, I think what I just throw her arms up in the air.

sort of try to walk away, you know, that's a very good common in question. And I think the answered of that honestly is that I thought, I thought maybe your name, I were going to the universe, decided we weren't going to do this, going to do something that else in life. But I had a lot of friends and family to invested money.

I had really, I felt I can let these people down gotta a way to get back home again. And in in the book I talk about whole food that does its IPO fourteen or in thousand nine hundred ninety two or or even years later, when the happy st days in my life. Because finally, all the investors that believe in me and believed in our vision, believed in renae, they could leave.

Now they could, they could cash out. And so that really took a load off. And my my chess, so to speak, talk to my back.

talk to me a little bit about learning the exco s of retAiling are the accent OS of retAiling in a grocery store that you have you've learned over the years.

But he started out with no experience. Yeah, well, I mean, there's literally thousands and thousands of things I mean, I can just give you. So in the most important things, you realizes that, hey, nobody has to shop with you.

I thought IT was so funny later on when the f federal trade commission said whole future was a monopoly. It's like, you be kidding. We ve got we got less than one percent of the grocery business, and they sort of made up this category that we were the mid or a monopoly, a premium natural and organic food supermarkets.

But my point is, of course, you're going to want to play with anything. And what I wanted early on is that customers always have choices if you know if if they don't like your Prices, your service, your quality for not convenient, if they can't get in and out fast, that you don't have a business. So I learned that the most important stakeholder is and always will be the customer, that number one, stay holder.

And and if if a business doesn't realize that or forgets IT, their business probably is going to suffer in the long run because people do. Your competition are constantly innovating. You're costly studying what you're doing, copying your best ideas and then iterating on them.

And this is how the human race makes progress, to be honest, is that um people have choices and you have and you have to compete to serve your customers. Does that mean some people do a poor job? Of course they do.

I mean, that happens, but there is this competitive drive to serve your customers Better. That's what I that's the single most important lesson I learned in business period. But certainly, it's true in the retail business.

We don't have any patterns. We don't have any monopoly. Everything we're doing is wide open for people to see copy. I mean, people used to come in and take you pictures of our Prices and and they'd be looking on our products and there's someone up in the supermarkets, everybody was studying and we know where to stop that. So that's one thing I learned.

Secondly, I learned that um yeah you got to take care your customers what who takes care of him? Your employees do, your team members do. And if they're unhappy, they're not going to take your earlier your customers well. So if you really want good service to your customers, make sure your team members are a well trained, well motivated and that they are rewarded for serving the customers well, that you have a high standard, and then you meet because happy team members lead to happy customers, happy customers leader prostate business that makes happy investors.

So I learned then about sort of the inner dependency of all these stakeholders that are that are connected together and that in a sense of businesses, this ecosystem of of, of, of stakeholder ecosystem of customers, employees, suppliers, investors and the communities that were all part of. And once you see that, then you see that there are a system and that you can you can create these energies between the different constituencies, between the different stakeholders to help this business to optimize itself at a higher level. That was what we call conscious capitalism.

At the end of day, it's being very conscious about how you you have these responsibility lie s to all these stakeholder and you're trying to create value for all of them. And that's very difficult to do. That's also some nothing I learned.

It's hard to do all of that. There are little trade, ffs, that end up being made. So but how do you minimize the trade, ffs, and maximize the energies? And also learn is the attach goes.

Retail is detail. There's thousand little details. I mean, typical stores got tens of thousands of products. And what's more irritating that if you go to the store and you you have a recipe that needs brockley in IT and they just have, don't happen, how many broccoli well, you're really pissed off first.

If you have to go to another store, it's like how can you run out of broccoli? So but then again, if you stock too much brockley, it's gonna rot on the shelf. So you have to you have to develop the skills, particularly in the grocery business, where all these parish ables to be able to keep your food fresh in in stock, but turn IT over fast enough if you.

And so there is that there is that relationship where you want IT fresh, but you also don't if you also don't want IT to be out of stock and sometimes those are intention with each other. There are so many other things like a day about it's just three tail businesses um hoddy Price stuff like okay, you know if somebody y's under pricing, do you match that which what do imagine what you go lower on is the whole the whole pricing strategy that you have to do. And this can be complex because you have a variety different competitors competing with you.

You're competing with the airport in L A. You not word about Price, but they may be having higher higher quality, higher more um more high ends product that you have to compete against. And do you choose to compete against IT? So I suppose what I like about business in general is that you never quite figured all out.

You're continually learning the world's continually evolving and changing. Uh let's say look at what happened to the grocery business when covered came in a always sudden you know um people wanted stop delivered at home. And fortunately for us, we are teamed up with amazon at that time. And amazon is able to step up and invest literally hundreds of million dollars and delivery in order to enable whole foods and aims on fresh to be able to deliver when the demand went from virtually zero to to a huge percentage of your business. So I don't know, I can T I can keep going on this, but you may want to have different questions.

Keep going. I love the detail here. Is, is parachutes the most important part of this start to get right. absolutely.

Partially, particularly in food retAiling, people choose their supermarkets based, usually partly convenience, but then if they half romi protest chrome meat of seafoods fishy, I mean, they are going to go some place. sales. Whole food is is competitive in the end, which has always been. I just thought we did a Better job than just about anybody else out there in overall produce, partial quality. And that gave us, can I gave competitive edge?

Why is purged the first part of the story you walk into?

Because that searches the tone for the whole store. People often times pick their store by how the how good the produces, and it's not easy to do a well. IT takes a lot of skill to be able to manager produce so that you keep your in stock position while you keep freshness.

It's it's a it's part part science and part art. And I mean, I just think produces is it's also the healthiest part of store. Produces is the most important thing is that we eat fruit. Vegetables are the healthy foods we can eat. And if you want to have a strong immune system and you want to have a highly gevingey are going to have to learn like vegetables in fort.

Let's go back till i'm a second here. See you reopen. And at this point, you're profitable. You're the most.

Now we became profitable. Safeway was a struggle. And that's also an interesting story here. We were struggling with safer way. We we relocate IT to a Better location, make a bigger, expand our product mix, and we went from struggling business to hugely successful. And then I thought, well, we've got a tiger by the daily you're let's grow this thing and we just had a flood, so we had to grow IT just so we'd have if we can have all of our eggs in one basket that might flog down the river.

But you had four founders at that time, right end, not everybody wanted to grow the .

business yeah one of my, one of my confounders, mark mark skiles, after we had a really successful store, he really didn't want us to grow because he said, john, we have a gold mine here, but just not screw IT up. We can be rich. We don't have to do anything else.

We can just live off this sank for the next twenty five years and and just, you know, have a wonderful lifestyle. And and I said, I don't want to do that. I I want to to grow the business.

I want to have more stores and he was willing to go along with that until the next couple storming opened up or were slow to they didn't take off at at the right off at the go point. Now remember that very first told foods market took two small stores because we merged with this other nurse history, we took him together and we had their customer bases from both stores as a foundation. And then we were unlike any other store.

And so we were able to pull in from a much wider geographical area, which is one reason so successful we open the second store. Well, we had to go out in the suburbs. IT wasn't hibbs anymore.

IT wasn't a counter culture market. And IT started slower, now grew really well. But IT took a few years before he became profitable. And that proved to be the case.

Any time whole foods went into a new market for the first ten to fifteen years we have existed, IT was a slow growth because people just never heard of this before. What are you that stores weird? And you guys, guys all dress weird.

You all look like a regular supermarket. So but once our brand got well known in, our stores started to take off. But in the day for mark, when he remembers when he was there, the new stores were slow. When they delude IT down the first party successful store, and he got he blamed that on me. He got angry and angry at me, angry at me that ultimately LED to a break or mark um decided to leave the company and he said I was going to correct the company with your growth dreams and um he sold out his interest and opened up a pizz place and um I probably wasn't the best decision you could made.

He isn't the only one who thought you were going to reach the company .

with gross dream over the years. I mean mark first nicknaming wmc, uh through the years, I think entrepreneurs always are climbing a wall of doubt because the entrepreneurs looking ahead, they're seeing possibilities that other people don't see IT. And so it's easy to be skeptical.

I just for years I was told that this was never gonna. I mean, my mother was begging me on her death bed to give up the stupid grocery dream that we had about four stories back in one hundred eighty seven and and just you know go back to school and make something in my life. So in general, um.

There's just a huge amount of skepticism about what new entrepreneur ideas an entrepreneur is got to have the the faith and confident to move forward, even though people are constantly telling is gna fail. In my case, all of that criticism and all those attacks, they just made me more determined to have an approval. These people wrong.

I remember feeling that many times you're wrong. We're a whole foods is we're going to grow. We're to change the role.

I felt that with mark and was told me I was going to rect the company. And he he didn't want to keep any of the stock and he want all of the stock out for. I rect the company. So yeah, that happened several times. I had, I had, I account four different crew attempts that occurred over the history of the company that I was able .

to beat back tark. Does that come from? Like is a chip on your shoulder was there at the time that was sort of like going going to prove your room?

I don't think I I had sort of an inherent ship on my shoulder. It's just in some ways i'm a very competitive guy and and when people will tell me IT won't work, you're gona fail, insist I just is IT a chip on my shoulder. I think a chip on my shoulder is something that you you're just kind of mad at the world about an I but when people would say what we were doing wasn't going to work, I just made me more determined.

It's kind of like, um you get a competitive chAllenge from somebody you could see I was, uh, talking about about everyone we were off camera that I would love to be competing more gressly with everyone if I was still the CEO. But because just general, I just I love I love games, I love play, I love to to compete to me. It's really fun.

And so when people would tell me that is not going to work, it's like i'd look at IT and I would you know maybe there are they right? No, they're not right. I'm going to prove them not right.

And as I would hear about a competitor, I just I feel like that's not unusual for entrepreneurs if they they they're costly being told what they are doing is not onna work. And so I think you have to have resilience. And that resilience, in my case, comes from kind of my competitive spirit, which is like IT would just make me more determined.

I think about a healthy thing, by the way, because too many people quit, they they hit A A road block, or they a setback. An entrepreneur gets set back so many times, get knocked down and you gotta get back up again. It's it's like, you know, you're fighter. Mean, you know, eventually, yeah, you might have to meet defeat eventually because you're going to die if you don't but in general, you just want to keep getting up and see if you can get the next function um anyway that's how i'm sort of water .

growth met more money, more capital needed yeah talk to me about the various sources of capital and sort of when you chose at first to take outside money.

Well of course, IT like the classic entrepreneurs ory. The initially IT was friends and family. And then my dad taught me, is with my main tour that the best capital you have, this is very different in the way people think about IT today, is the best captain you'll ever have is the captain.

Make yourself, and if you, if you don't want to lose control your business, then make sure you are very profitable. Don't scale too quickly, grow your business thoughtfully and painfully, patiently keep your cost down and play the money back in. And that's how hopefully Operated for the first many, the most first decade of our lives.

We took venture capital money in. We started trying to get there in one nine hundred and eighty eight to ten years that which started safer away. And we got our first investment in one thousand nine hundred and eighty nine. I call the vcs um I call them hit hikers with credit cards. And but what I mean by that is that they're getting into your car.

And as long as you taken where they want to get to, which is an exit, which either has to be a sale or an IPO, and we didn't want to sell a business, we wanted to we wanted to grow IT ourselves. And so we always had the IPO initial public offering was in the back of our minds. But I realized that the VC they have a little bit different agenda.

They want to exit the car, but they would exit the car too soon um because the'd like to have the compounding occur while they once once the company does an IPO most of the v because of their the way was structured with their with their own investors. They have to either distribute that within a year. They really have to either distribute to talk or sell IT on behalf of the investors.

And so in in whole food this case, we actually wanted to go public because the VC wanted to know around the VC financing. But I was going to give them control of the business. And talking to my dad about, we said we don't want those guys to get controlled the business first.

All first thing we do is replaced me and put in a professional manager, which they we're trying to do already. We we it's in the book, the guide that was supposed to start working. His president died on the day he was supposed to start work.

And IT was like, if that's not a sign of the inner verse, I don't know what is. But we didn't we didn't actually hire that person from the supermarket industry. And we ve got the VC to good eggs that they made a lot of money on whole foods.

They only were in the car for three years from one hundred and eighty nine, one thousand nine hundred ninety two. And so they they got out of the car. And now we had our own currency.

Once we once you do a public offering, you can go back to the public market. We did several rounds of financing over the years to raise additional money from public. So that's why it's an IPO. That's the initial public offering.

Corporations do other public offerings after that, and we did several, particularly when we made acquisitions, we needed to cash out the the investors in those businesses sometimes like with fresh fields, we needed to do another public offering in order to just cash out thy their their venture capitalists as well. So um and so venture capitalists there can be important to business. And it's just I always tell Young entrepreneur a couple things.

One is they're going to tell you to try that, don't worry about your burn rate, just grow, grow, grow. And I said that's not in your best interest. They say that because you they are the ones applying the money and eventually, if they need to, they'll do a cramdown round and basically ticket.

This do IT at a much lower Price and you'll have an opportunity to invest. But you've long, you've long exhaust your own funds to invest, and you will lose control. Your business scene happened many, many, many types.

So I always to say no, when you're entrepreneur, you need capital. You're often times aren't really thinking about the consequences of that are. So I always try to warn other entrepreneurs, look, when you take the v and just know what you're doing, they're not they're getting in your car.

They're not there for the long ride with you. They're there for their own agenda. You can go together for a while, but you need to be careful that distant my message.

the minute something happens, they are thinking you already.

they really are.

is an optimal level .

of growth. You know um I think there is, but I could vary from business to business. If you if you're a business like all fuge was which was A A retail business where culture is very important.

Um I found that once our growth got above twenty twenty four percent, do you know what you know the rule seventy two for listeners, the rule seventy two, if you take your growth rate divided into seventy two, that's how quickly you will double. So let's say you're growing your sales at twenty four percent a year, then twenty four and to seventy two is three. So in three years, you'll actually double yourselves.

Or if you're groing at eighteen percent, eighteen and to seventy two is four, so every four years, dw yourself. So um that's really we found that when we began to grow faster than twenty four to twenty five percent, that our culture would begin to get deleted and IT was we couldn't um the culture can I can incorporate a certain level of growth before the culture itself begins to fray? Too many new people coming in.

They're not getting in doctorate or inculturated and um and our business would suffer. We agree that fast. If you don't grow fast enough, there's another doubt.

If you're not growing fast enough, then people will lead. They want to sticky your company because they don't feel like they have very many opportunities. I don't I can't get advanced.

You know the person my my leader ahead me is the same age as me. And SHE is not going anywhere. But if you're opening up new stores, then you're opening up new opportunities.

And that really gets people excited because their own dreams get tied into the business. So there is an optimum level of growth. And it's not too little that you'll lose people and not so high that your culture gets deleted down and changes negatively. So in whole foods, that sweet spot for us was between about fifteen and twenty five percent. But I see other businesses, particularly digital businesses, that can scale the enormous rates without cultural problems because it's they're doing that with so few people.

I think of that out of us dividing the pie versus growing the pie and the midnight you stopped growing the pie. People are focused on dividing IT, that's true and that causes a lot of internal politics and organization and does sharp probos .

if you one reason got in. Another thing is if you keep focused on growth um then people are busy not in fighting because they ve got enough word to do that. They don't look around for something to you know occupy their their time.

You did over, I think, tony, our positions there.

What have you learned? Twenty three.

What have you? And you had one that went bad.

I think, yeah, that was not in because I was not retail stores that was ammi on IT was IT was a male lotters supplement company that we thought we could use that to spring board into the dot com boom back in the late. And the problem was the people that bite supplements with the cat ogun, they were slow adopters to the internet because they were mostly in their sixty seventies. They never, so they didn't really make the adoption. So that was a mistake on our part.

That won't failed. What what did you learn about acquisitions that I mean that batting our work is just a tty good.

But but the thing about IT is we were always all the other acquisitions were retail stores and they had problems. The team could know how to fix them, but we had nobody in our team that knew how to fix a male or ricardo logue, that was slowly dying. So I couldn't send my best guy go fix that.

They didn't know what to do. But if I send my best guy to fix some stores we acquired in and detroit, they could go fix them. So that I learned is, sticks to your needing, stick to what? You know what stick what you know how to do. And also, if there are problems, you know how to fix. Some some of .

the acquisitions you made, you had choices. And one of the early ones was what was the california chain, mrs. mrs. Guy, you wouldn't have capital at that point to do the acquisition you .

weren't ready for. We were public. And so we did have our currency.

When when my dad was objecting to that, that merger, he was saying, john, you have your hands for with bread and circus, which was still less than a year old, you don't have the capacity to take on on the opposite coast. You're just you're going to you can handle IT this. You're going to delude your talent down.

And he was right. But as I get pointing out is like, you're right. But this opportunity not going to come again.

This is the crown dual natural food store chain on the west coast. If we don't take him, somebody else is we will have to figure out how to do IT. And we did and we did acquire and we did figure out how to do IT mostly by leaving them alone.

They were already we didn't have to integrate them. They were mr. gooch's. They already had great management.

We pretty much just left them alone for the first few years and didn't try to integrating our company culture. Just let him wow, ate independently. That was the solution and that worked.

It's a clever solution. I like the fact that you know often we're not ready for that next lep, that next level we just finished. You know maybe we just finished the opposition or something, but IT doesn't come up again, right? If you didn't buy that.

you were going to get another chill. You have to one of the secrets to success in life, in business. You have to see as the opportunities when then there.

If you don't see these great opportunities, only come they don't come around every day. And he he who hesitates loss. If you are not willing to cease that opportunity, somebody else will. You have to you have to know when to go all in, you know when to make the bets I knew is they're very profitable, had a great way and very successful.

Um did not want to lose those guys in plus they were if we didn't get him somebody else wood and they would end up me in this great competitor for us down the road. We just had to make that deal. We pay, we paid a really rich Price.

War too. You guys is created a network, I think, early on of sort of the Operators of the whole food stores, and you would meet regularly.

Yeah, people don't realize that when we invented the natural food supermarkets, they was co invented by a few different people in different parts of the country. And there are hadn't been there were small natural history. There hadn't been the supermarket, one stop shops.

And ones of us that we're doing IT. We connected with each other and we we develop friendships. We get together three times a year, a different Operator with host.

And that's how I got to be fringe with the people running this gooch's, the people running braden circus, the people running alf, alf in colorado and unique village and Flora that we were all meeting together. And we we were all in this common mission. We wanted to sell natural, organic food ds.

We're spreading IT, and we were helping each other else share in financial information. We're really bonded. Well, I was IT was a wonderful time because I felt like I was part of this larger movement. And eventually health ds ended up. All those entrepreneurs, all I allow me, sold out to us. So naturally, network candidate being is great vehicle of relationship building that allowed those entrepreneurs to all cash out and may become millionaires and make a lot of money and gave whole foods what we needed, which was various geographical platforms that we could use to expand and grow off of.

One of the curious parts of about this for me was you were so open about your books and and what you are doing.

you know, the best way to understand IT was that we really did all feel like we were a part of this movement that was going to change the way amErica eight, we were all very idealistic. H, the original founders were then. And later on you get the venture capitals coming in and seen.

This is a good opportunity. But in the early days, we were all, we were Young and idealistic and, uh, really thought the world would change the way at eight to the largest stand IT did. I mean, the world's very different.

Now the natural foods are getting movement came out. It's not the same as IT was. And whole foods how to big, I think IT over time IT IT changed the world. Why do you .

think you were the one to build to come out and buy all of those people versus the other Operators?

I think A. I think IT was a lot of them just didn't have they were like my friend mark. They they liked being um like code mark.

They just wanted to be a big wheel and their marches would be happy just to have be a big wheel with that one store. And I think that's true of the other people. They, they, they were just happy to get the money and they got local notoriety and what not.

They didn't have the vision or desire, really the building a chain. I just think I did. I had that kind of drive.

I wanted IT to me. I was like, those games get more, more fun. Let's just keep just keep growing in IT and building IT. And that's where I was wired. And I think the other people were wired a little bit differently.

Is there a difference between or actually or referred this um what's the difference between professional management and a founder LED company?

It's a huge difference. Nobody ever loves their business as much as founder does. Um and I mean, I LED whole food for forty four years I will always like like fear parent, your child grows up.

I raised that child's best I can. It's on its own. Now I can tell who who is what to do anymore.

And you just hope you put in coca a good values. They have a happy life. I will always love whole foods.

I will always wish the very best for whole foods, even though i'm not in IT any longer. In fact, I deliberately try to stay out of the loop because he'd lothbury me when I hear thanks. So I just try.

I just tried to leave IT alone and do other things. But professional managers, they're not I must think they couldn't be. But in my experience, they're they're not usually missioned riven.

They've gotten there. There are N B A. From harvard or warn or stanford. They're very intelligent. They work hard. But working in whole foods or amazon, it's just it's just part of their career path.

They want to put them on the resume and then they want to use that to levers to get the next promotion may be at another company. It's A P stone. It's a stepping don't.

Thank you. That's exactly correct. And I think one of the things that whole foot de for so long as we did most of our promotions from within. And so we built this very loyal, committed, mission driven business that was very unlike most of other businesses I saw.

And when we brought professionals in, we've spent a lot of time making sure they were good cultural fit released in the early days and later on, as we got bigger we be and more famous, we began to attract people who really were looking in IT as more of a career move um and not and and we never could get them to buy in to the mission. And I think what happens after the founders leave and retire that is very difficult for a compute to be anything but professional LED that going after that. That's one reason the most companies are last at one.

Um you you start to build this professionalism builds IT begins to a higher um more professionals and you you beer bureaucracy begins to expand as well. You get a bigger, bigger legal department, a bigger and bigger H R department. They have their own sort of professional ethics, their own professional goals they want to accomplish.

But it's hard. Demand is the cost now because the professionals are running their own little freedoms. And you either either say what every you have to do, sort of what amazon done from time and time is like everybody has to do a ten percent cut. Well, that's kind of arbitrary IT that hurts moral. But how else you check you'll drawing bureaucracy.

The way capital isn't deals with IT is, is that these big company, these big CoOperations eventually just get sort of chorost and entrepreneurs come in and create these very new businesses that are that are very nimble, that are Young, that haven't built up a bureacracy yet. I'm having this time is building love life now. And I am determined, you know, as long as i'm still run in the company, that we're not going to build up a big bureaucracy because I mean, you just have to have to hold IT in check.

I don't think I did as good a job at whole foods of checking that bureaucracy. Once I got that wants the professionalism got in there, I had trouble um controlling IT. I want to make sure .

doesn't get a good fit. Hold in the love life. How did that show up? Was that sort of through cost expansion? Or was IT .

you hire people to try to do something you you're unable to do or you're like we need to hire somebody to work on that. And then, of course, they can do by themselves so they have to build a team and what what's not happen. So like the federal government, they add new government departments, some they never they know sunset, they don't get red of, they just add new ones on.

Well, corporations have, moreover, profit. They just can't Operate and definitely building up a deficit the way the federal federal government can do. So there is the shareholder push to keep control of the cost to be, to be sure.

But it's hard to do IT surgically. You end up, you know, doing IT to take these everybody figure. I had to cut her to open five percent or ten percent or whatever.

That also kills moral when you started layoffs. So the Better way is not to build IT up in the first place. And that just means being skilled saying no, no, what not going to do that? no. And because there's always things that are nice to do. And if you when you're profitable and you have the resources to do IT, you start to add things on, but you don't do a good job of sun setting them or getting rid of them or just evaluating the cost effectiveness. I think the most successful businesses and the most successful entrepreneurs um spend a lot of time worrying about their cost and even when they are successful, one of my mistakes, I think in looking back words as we got more more successful, I tended to just not say no enough. I still do IT more than anybody else but I was IT was easy to just say yes and figure you can you can grow your way out of IT talk to me .

a little bit more. But the focus aspect of this and saying no and what you say no to, because you have an organization that you're running, it's large, you're successful, you're making money. People are coming to with these ideas, maybe great projections, maybe not. And they just need a yes from you at that point. You're disconnected from every year.

see the and you can easily a whether what they're proposing is gonna successful or not. And generally when something is fAiling, the people that um a responsible for don't want to admits fAiling in what they do is if we need more resources, I can make the short, but you need to give more resources. So at some point, you have to say no.

It's Better to say no early on. Or if you just want IT, you just have to set very limited budgets for IT and they're not let those budgets increase because IT ten is sure budget to sort to grow automatically is just, well, we're going to have a we know seven percent increase in the budget and slike well, is that worth IT? Yes, I remember that we did three years and IT was my least favorite day, the year we bring the leaders in to talk about their budgets.

S, and I hate IT that day because I was always the guns. I was always the one saying no. Or we're going to eliminate that. And probably we should have kept doing that. We stopped doing that.

And I eventually they said we don't need to do this anymore in because I was such a painful day for me because I ended up having to be the the ash le. I I guess um every company needs somebody that are really, really watching the focusing, watching the cost. Sometimes that's a chief financial officer, but in general, that needs to be kind of a cultural thing. Whole food was not as good as bad if we were other things and and I wasn't as good at that as I should have been.

There is a natural entropy to not only bureaucracy but expenses. And just the scope of the work that .

you take on IT is it's really it's something that um as a business grows, that you have to be even more vigilant about IT because it's so many things are happening. The you can even you can even see him anymore, your companies gotten and to grow beyond your ability to actually understand everything is going on in IT.

And so you have to you delegated that out and you have to trust those leaders and such why companies end up getting managed a lot by their budgets. And and you're determining where you're going to expand, give resources too, and where you going to take resources away from the all would make cases for why they need more resources. But your functions is the leader is to make the difficult decisions that were actually we're going to stop funding that or or we'll rutt let that run one more year, but you only to hit these objectives or we're going to pull the plague on IT.

So um I got to say because I identify as an entrepreneur as whole foods got to be larger and larger lot always I enjoyed IT less because it's the creative part. That's fun and that's what i'm doing again with love life. You know putting deals together, thinking about this, this whole health scene is changing rapidly.

Who you're gna partner with, what you're going to let go of, what do we need to invest in um and you are thinking about new ideas every day. It's it's that's very fun. But when you're beginning to manage a really big CoOperation ah it's more about um I know I didn't get to be as creative any long gry.

IT wasn't IT wasn't my entrepreneurs. Ira was sort of not nearly as as engaged as IT was for and that was only about the last ten years or so member forty four years long time. So there was a nice long creative and and IT didn't like change overnight IT just slowly as a bureaucracy got bigger, as I was dealing more worth problems rather than opportunities, my enjoyment of a business .

begin to shift. Are there are things that you said yes to that a more professional manager wouldn't have said yes to? I'm thinking things that don't make sense on a spread cheap but .

access for the company. Well, of course, I mean, that's the job of the entrepreneur is to see things of professionals. IT would not see where the professionals are making a more calculated decision on is is good for my career or not.

Or if this succeeds, well, they helped my career bit. If IT fails, well, I end up fired. Um the entrepreneur is just going to they're going to take a more of a let's try IT, let's see what happens.

And if IT works, will give more money to if IT doesn't work, will discontinue IT. I i've never had a problem toys and pretty easy for me to a to try things, make mistakes and admit admit that is a mistake and discontinue IT like we tried that he didn't work. okay? Um professionals sometimes have trouble letting go of that because they worry that this loss is going to be a big limit on the resume. The entrepreneur, I don't think quite things .

that way throughout this you had, I think, four crew attempts at your leadership admire his day to them to me about what that felt lake and how you dealt with them.

You know, I use a good metaphor, but it's it's only for the people that knows something about the lord of the rings. Watching the movies came out, but I those books had a big influence. Me, when I was Younger, I think I read the, the, the three books five times I got at the high school, was kind of like my cult reading thing when I was a teenager.

And then across the movies, came out of seen the multiple times in in the lord. The rings, there's this one ring, the IT. The amazon now has the rings of power show on there's showing how these rings were made, which is not actually in the lord rings.

So it's really, really interesting stuff. And the one ring, the ring of power, it's a great metaphor, because there are three things that I have found are very corrupting for most people, not everyone, but most people could be corrupted by money, fame and power. Because what people want is love, and they think those things will give them love if they have enough of them.

You have enough money or power of fame. But in fact, those things do not satisfy the soul, and most people can easily be corrupt and and addicted by those things. If you have money, you you start to compare yourself to people have more money than you and you're dissatisfied uh if you have fame, you have certain how an instagram followers or uh you see who has more and you want more IT doesn't really lead to happiness.

If you get more and power, you see this with politicians. They they want more power. And these things, again, do not satisfy the soul.

So these are rings during a power is corrupting. Well, in this case, i'm the C E. O.

hi. I am getting the most money or the most fame and the most power. And there people's covered those things and they always felt they could do a Better job. The two attempts were always, I think well intended um or the people doing them thought they were well intended. They thought they really would do a Better job than me. And if I could just get out of the way and they would be able to wear the ring and I wasn't going to just get out of the way so they did what they could get me out of the way, I think that's where the cows came from. And I just think partly human nature.

as you acquired more wealth and and power and fame as you go to grew, how did you stay so grounded?

Um well, of course, other people might tell you that I didn't think I say that grounded, so but I think I did. They were pretty grounded and I think it's because know I have this whole background in philosophy. You know my book is kind of of my own spiritum journey.

And I got really clear at a pretty Young age, like my back, my existence, al days back when I was in my light twenty years. And then the psychiatric took IT IT to another level. I got really clear about death.

What I mean about that is that we're all gone to die. I got that at a very in age. Most people, not in IT, they're always in denial.

There is a big denial of death and that when you're Young is like, well, that's what old people do, but i'm not old. And then I got my whole life, I had to me and and they just put IT out of their mind. I wish just to wear that I only had so much time that what I wanted.

So I might be question is, what do I wanted do with the time that I have? And so I always, always had this um awareness the time was running out and that I needed to get on with stuff. And so the success is I had it's like I once heard that somebody asked picasso what his famous, his favorite painting was and he said the one i'm working on right now.

And so I never, I don't think that stuff corrupted me because I didn't care about IT to me. I was creating the next thing I was, the next thing I was doing that was suffering me. If I didn't think money or fame or power would really be safer, satisfying and they they weren't um I remember when I met just basis for the first time uh we were IT was IT was well, not a second time I made because like many of this conference and we at all but when we were going after to talk about maybe ams on buying whole foods.

Um you know we were meeting at just boat house which is next to us, is mentioned on like washington and and they wouldn't tell us with the meeting place wasn't til we landed and then they gave us address sed but we got there. We were searched, our car was searched because they were worried about. So I trying to kill jeff, and I was taken to myself.

I would never want to be so rich and so famous and so powerful that I couldn't live a Normal life that I didn't have any anonymity. That was that like a real wakeup call. It's like i'm surge.

Jeffery was envy people in the world, but I would not want to have to live my life like that. So a little bit of fame, a little bit of money, a little bit of power, to a certain point, is gratifying with the soul. The past that point you get diminishing returns.

It's no longer bring A U. N count. Happiness is now a burden.

So I I got clear about death at pretty Young age, and I just wanted accomplish things. And I didn't think my accomplishments with that big deal. Other people are configuring stuff as well.

So I didn't spend a lot of time comparing myself to others either. People that had less, I had more. I was too busy creating the next painting because that was what was fun.

That was what was exciting. That was where the joy and the love came, and then the relationship for the people they are doing in with. That's the real satisfying part.

When did you realize that love was the sun of everything?

I think i've had glimpses of at many times. I mean, I talked about IT the first time I had that ego death. I S T. That I had this realization that we are all that was the one being that there was all found IT ultimately on play in love and games.

And then when I did in dma the first time, adam, in dma, excessive Molly, when I was legal back in one thousand nine hundred and eighty four, that just burst my heart open. And I wrote IT on IT as like, never forget this, there is nothing more important than love. And of course, you will forget IT.

But once you had that deep connection to IT, you never quite forget IT. And then my spirit, al path took me, you know, study the course of miracles, doing breath work, doing meditation. I I wanted to go deeper into love.

And so that's just sort of life. Part of my life purpose, life mission is because I just that's what makes life worth while everybody that gives to the, they're on your death bed so you imagine your own. You're on your death bed.

Do you think you'll be thin? I wish i'd made more money. I would.

H i've been richer. I wish i'd been more famous. Wish i'd had more power. Now you're going to be thinking about, I wish I told my son how much I loved him. I wish I hadn't let that relationship go.

I wish I hadn't said those things you regret are always going to be about relationships in the ways that love failed in your life. I mean that that's the clearest indication that loves the most important thing is because that's what happens when you're dying is you're looking back and you're thinking about the people that you loved and didn't love well enough. Um you're not thinking about the other shit. You've let IT go. And so i've just been clear about that for a long time.

How do you learn to love yourself? There's always like an inner critic of yourself in condition of course.

you know you're asking great questions and you're so leading me through the book pretty well. So um in my case, my whole life in some ways has been and IT attempt to be able to totally accept myself because I have and I think everybody has an internal critic. We now have ternate critic. An internal critic is judging everybody else and then frequently judging yourselves is inadequate, not perfect.

And in my case, in some ways, the the whole life adventure and you get back into the deep thing about the way I was raised, my parents, my um I was kind of that raised where if I brought a home a report card and had all a in one b was like what you going to do about that b on it's like there was no like that's really great fantastic report card. And then when i'd have failures, you know, my own self judgment would be pretty intense. So I think you come to love yourself.

And what what I experiences when I finally did IT was just a few years ago. Now was little over two years ago, on a guard's spiritum journey I experienced, I got really in touch with my, like my inner child, this little boy that was so very beautiful and so idealistic and so loving, and just wanted to help people, and had been hurt, which we go through life. We get wounded, and the little boy had many wounds, and but he's still this beautiful little boy.

And I saw him very clearly. I saw this, that child like at myself, and I realized that my entire life I tried to do good and i'd made a lot of mistakes. I hurt people, but I knew that at the core, there was this good person that really laugh and them. I saw that, and that was the first time I really, I think, unconditionally love myself.

That's really powerful. Talk to me at let's go back to the amazon show. But before we get there, let's so crisis hit sales aren't what's expected. Jana partners, he's an optimist firm comes in. Walk me through from that moment to the meeting with bezos.

so.

All friends, you know, it's it's we warned in people think we are like fAiling or in decline. And that was not true. Whole food was actually incredibly successful.

We had IT at the time. The activist investors invest in all food. We end the highest sales per square fit of many public food retailer.

We've had the same store sales growth of eight percent over thirty plus year period by every we we almost every objective measurement. How face was the most profitable food retailer, a gross for Operate out there. We had so many wonderful things going for us, but competition was catching up with us.

We were being copied the whole paycheck near if the media just ran wild with that um and we were increasingly being tacked by governments. I talked to in the book about how we had the uh the first california in in new york um a tactics for mispricing at which we weren't deliberately mispricing anything and we were making more mistakes in favor of the customers and others. But is just on that, things like cut fruit, you have a little terror weight and you could be off opinion or two.

But if you have an ambitious weight and measures, department of consumer affairs, its economic extortion thing. And that's what happened to us, both california, new york, generating massively negative publicity that drove sales down. We lost a lot of customers from that when happened in new york.

Um and then what we needed to do was we needed to be able to drop our Prices a across the whole company. But we began to start that happening. We've got attacked by activists, activist or shareholder activist.

We've been attacked by lots of her actives over the years of from animal rights activists to ready a different count of activists. But these were particularly shareholder tiv st. They don't think the business is being managed to maximize shareholder value. And so this particularly group of activists was jana partners, and they we met with them soon. Now if they took a position and to find out what if we could work together to try to create more value for the shareholder.

And they had this powerpoint presentation, and they they showed up to me in my leadership team, a couple of my directors, and did there were some things in that were were accurate, and there a lot of things were not accurate. I asked them, could I get a copy of that presentation that you're making? Because I like to address some of these concerns.

I don't think everything you put in their actually, i'd like to correct but he said, no, I can have IT and I said, why not he says, what we don't want to listen. John, let me just tell you what can to happen here. Cut to the chase.

We're going to take over whole foods. Here's how we're going to do IT. We're going to take over your board first. After we do that, we're going fire you in any other management people that won't lined up with us. And then we're going to put this up for a bid in salad to the highest bitter.

And there's not an f thing you can do about IT and walked out of the run like, oh, I know that we're going to have a partnership with these guys. And we had our bankers, we had our lawyers and we we began to look around for what I would call the win, win, win solution. How do we get a win for everyone of our stay holders?

How can we do something would be best for our customers, best for our team members, best for our suppliers, best for investors, best for the communities? Are part of I could started asking that question. I was putting that question, you might say, out to my to the universe, out to my soul, give me an answer for this question.

And we looked at all the different alternatives. The off stories ones will fight. jana. They're all my competitors ors.

You know, we beat those guys and so that that was the first thing, but we needed time to do that. We know we needed to reverse our are our same source sales a to decline. We needed to have a chance to change our Prices.

But if you're selling something for a dollar and now you're selling up for ninety cents in the short run, in the wrong long one, that's a good decision probably. But the short run, your sales just drop from a dollar nine cents. Your same store sales just went negative.

Your are your profits. There's a lag period. Profits are are are going to fall. And then maybe a couple years or now, uh, when people become aware they have these lower Prices, you'll see your traffic go up and and lend up me in a really good business decision we need at that time.

Jane wasn't going to give IT to us, so fighting them was gonna be very difficult and they knew that. Uh, secondly, we could we could um we could find A A sympathetic investor, somebody he would wouldn't buy us and give us the time we needed to turn the business around, drop the Prices, not worry, we would be off the public markets in in the logic one, there are people to do that. Warn buffer s like the best example.

And we actually contacts IT warn and ask me if you be interested in. He has a good thing to humor. He said, dot, you know, I am dairy y quint. I don't think he is a good brand fit for me. And so nothing came of that. And then IT was maybe we could take a private my going private would mean we you'd work with the private equity firm to and they they would do it's a kind of a two step process where they they would put up some money and they'd borrow money from the rest of money and needed from a consorting of investment banks. And then after they get control of the company, the second step is they would pay back that bridge alone.

And they got the investment banks, and they would borrow longer term money using the company's own baLance sheet to finance the one, which means they would borrow, say they fell feeds or so Emily, for thirteen point seven billion, take a private for the same amount they put in about a billion, and theyd borough, twelve point seven billion. And so whole things would, beyond the hook for the interest strates of that. Now we had really good cash flow.

We were very had eba dollars very high. Think we're making about one point three billion dollars eb door when jane bar us. So it's again I did the heart was fAiling in some way that is just a media myth and um so we could have service to that provided that two thousand eight didn't happen again right in two thousand and eight that were they call IT the the plug went out of the tub and we saw that the whole economy shrinking, our half market stock drop ninety percent.

We were selling in three times our cash flow. We could have bought our company in paid work in three years with our own with our own cash flow. And so a situation like that occurred, again, we would have failed.

And and so that going private option was was when we certain ly looked at, but then the private equity firms would have control that. This remembred, I wanted to get those venture couple of hitchhikers out of the car. Now i'm taking a minute of the car, but they're definitely drive in the car.

You're not a control and you know there are a control and their agenda are very different. And I just thought I was very risky. You're risk in the business.

And if if IT works, they can make when they can make dealing into dollars as why they would be interesting, go on private. And so I couldn't find the right solution. And then I could I keep asking the question again and again, again. Watch the win when went solution for all the stakeholder.

And then one day I woke up, right? When I woke up, the idea flashed in my mind. What about amazon? That was a question.

What about amazon? And I D D. Met jeff the year before this microsoft CEO summit and I hit IT off with jeff.

We did a panel together um and he he was very interested in whole foods. We talked about whole foods a lot. He also was interested in science fiction and fantasy.

And we read a lot of same books like the low learnings, and he was in the scuba diving. And i've been a scup dive in a long time and dive at all of the world. So we hit off. We, we had a good report. So then he said, in fact, let's, john, let's, this has been a great conversation and let's get together sometime and let's talk further.

And I said, well, you ve got my number, but I didn't hear from him so but here IT is and i'm thinking, what about amazon? Because I knew they were getting i'd read that they were getting more, more interested in the food retAiling. I knew that amazon fresh was kind of struggling as a business, but they had note IT up any physical stores yet.

And so I said, what? Let's just fun out. And we call them up and they wanted to talk in. We flew into seattle and I had three executive with me and i've had three with him and and we had kind of like, you know, when you when you find love with somebody, you'll have this amazing conversation where you where your souls kind of meet that happened on that conversation with amazon that day.

We talked about all the things we could do to get and we got really excited um about the technology and and they told us about there they wanted to be they really wanted to be big in grocery and they bottles could help them and that also, I like the amazon team. They weren't these kind of professional financial types like I thought I was that I thought they probably were. They were really good guy as super smart.

And you know, jeff s really brilliant man himself and he hire really brilliant people to work with him. And but they were kind of regular people. They they weren't stuff shirts.

They were really interesting guys with diverse, diverse and clever minds like jeff. So I remember our team retreated after we talked about three hours and our team went a restaurant to kind of process. We can look and around at each other sign.

That was an incredible conversation. Wow, man. And those guys are smart.

I think we could dim amazing stuff together. And then we're looking around. And I I voiced for the whole group. I said, maybe so, but you think they liked us too and IT turned out they did because they they came down just three days later and six weeks after that first meeting, we had signed an agreement to get married to merge and um yeah what kind .

of questions to the the amazon team asked? That meeting of you goes everything.

The thing I liked about amazon was how good they are, questions where you can often times to tell about somebody y's intelligence by how good the questions there as much do you asking the great questions? And um they really were asking great questions and and then that would lead to answers. I'm very candid.

So I was answering very truthful to our questions unless, as I thought, with her hammer business in somewhere and then but they were they we'd asked some questions and they would be equally forthcoming. So IT was A A very, very good dialogue. Just they wanted understanding their business.

They just know they they were asking the right questions to how to understand IT. Why are your things for sales going down? So and then you could explain about competition, and I could explain about what we know.

We can get IT back. We need to drop Prices. So let me, let me just tell you so that when the deal got went through and I remember asking that question, what's to win? We win solution for all of us.

Take killers, the amazon merger, everyone of our take killers bits from from that merger. We really did drop our Prices. We drop our Prices four times significantly in the first two years of that merger.

I hardly ever hear the whole pay check narrative any longer. Pull fy is still in is expensive, but I don't hear that narrative any longer because we're farm more competitive at Price wise. We used to be IT costs him as on hundreds of millions of dollars to invest that. But they think long term, they jeff and his team think ten, fifteen, twenty years in the future, they're willing to make an investment. They race, they raised our wages.

And every one of our early people, amazon decided we're going, if this was back in two thousand seventeen, within thirty days in the merger, they said we're gona raise the minimum of starting wage at fifteen x so that meant everybody got a raise because of people there were that were at fifteen, twenty five and you know the gap they couldn't stay a fifteen twenty five, they needed to go up to. Pretty much every party person got a raise. IT was good for our suppliers that not only the amazon not cutting them our suppliers out, but they studied our sales and they saw, wow, they picked up a ton of our suppliers and so that was good for them.

Um IT was good for our investors, right? They got about a thirty percent premium on the deal from what the sock had been before janna got involved. And then um IT was good for our government.

They got a massive amount of capital gains taxes from the deal um and good for our communities that we're part of because amazon did not change our philanthropic that we had. Half's has three foundations, nearly ly the name is not tell us we had to stop doing those. They contributed additional monies to IT.

So everyone ever take this was a winner in that. That doesn't mean that, that mergers has been perfect. There's been a lot of things I talk a little bit about in my book and stuff off the record I want to talk about here, but I had my share of disagreements with amazon. I I fought within many times and ultimately that LED to meet to to retire. What do you think .

of activist shareholders having been a public company, CEO and founder at that?

Yeah it's like um i'm not opposed to shareholder active is trying to help you know help companies and instructive ways to become more successful and profitable. But I think it's a flaw in the current in the united states flow on our system because we treat short term shareholder with the same type of respect that we treat long term shareholder.

I think that long term shareholders that are really making long term bets on the business and let's the team execute of the long term, that's really what you need when you have short term people that, that are just trying to make a pop to the stock Price in a short period of time, which are what your holder actors are trying to do, get a sale. Um I don't think that's good for the economy. Um and there's there's pretty simple solutions to IT.

We need to make a distinction in tax policy right now, a short term capital gains, anything less than one year. What i'd love to see is that if you held something for, say, ten years, maybe your taxes coup against taxes went down to close to zero. And if you sold IT in less than a year, maybe they would be much higher, may be maybe fifty or sixty percent.

So you create these incentives to hold longer and that would make a shareholder activist at least have to hold a stock for a couple of years. So they they have have less lower gains. Also, those gains that they need to make need to be the individual shareholders um are often times tax on those situations and the management is not thinking about taxation at all in those decisions.

So as almost as if they should be tax first and then the distribution shouldn't be taxed at all, I would be another solution. I think there are many ways you can make changes in regulations and laws that would make shareholder activists constructive and a good thing for business, rather than what is today to be seen kind of pirates. So I do think that its reform could be possible there.

A lot of founders today seem to be going dual class shares a where they either retain the super voting share or they issue non voting share.

IT may not surprise you that love life has ah that in our structure there that didn't really exist when whole foods got found back and I tip seventy eight, but now we have two classes of shares. I've learned that lesson.

Talk to me about sort of the clashing world views I S between socialism and capitalism and how you how you think about .

these things that's so much longer topic. So um you wanted dive into IT shit. Well, first i'm like A. I'm a totally enthusiastic capitalist and in meaning i'm not i'm not seen as unbiased in this when people talk to me about IT because I know my history. I know what the world is like two hundred years ago, as couples got started in the late eighteen centuries of last two hundred and fifty years. But just two hundred years ago, these statistics tell you, you need to know, two hundred years ago, ninety four percent of everyone live on the planet, live in less than two dollars a deck.

In today's dollars, eighty five percent in the lesson one dollar day the average life pain was a thirty or by the way so let's give IT today the only six percent of the worlds population lives on less than two dollars a day scores from um ninety four percent to six percent the last two hundred and fifty years um the average life span two hundred years ago was thirty now it's across the planet that giving closer to eighty were going from about seventy seven I think it's seventy six four men and seventy eight four women across the whole planet from thirty um a literacy rates two hundred years ago A D eight percent of people alive couldn't read, now is under ten percent and childbirth, I mean child death, death s and child death, children die before their age of ten. The type of advanced ments we've made in vaccines, in annibal tics, modern deniston, the amazing innovations that we have today and music, and it's the world is so much Better than IT was the people that complain about the world being in disaster. Don't put in historical context that we have problems today.

Sure, we do. Course we did. We always will have problems, by the way, but these are different problems than we had.

People talk about existent al threat of climate, and see the existential threats are far less today than they were two hundred years ago in its spin. Capitalism, science plus capitalism, has allowed humanity to prosper and collectively, so much for so much Better office. It's not utopia. It's not perfect. And that's why socialism still hold such an attraction, particularly for Young people, is there, they're born and they see, they don't see racism.

The way I see IT in the context of what I was like in the nine states two hundred years ago, or one hundred and seventy years ago, or even when I was a little boy grown up in human taxes and they had jim crowd laws, they had racial segregations legal. There's so much less racism today than there was in any in fact, with the least racist we've ever been there, there's always going to be inequality but there's no more inequality today than there was at the founding of our republic um and that just people change in terms where they are that hierarchy. But um there is always going to be inequalities because there's different there's inequalities due to people's certain constitutional abilities, intelligence, whether parents are raised them, the community they're born in.

There's just lots of reasons why people become more some people become more successful than others. And my point is socialism is utopian dream that's failed. It's a god that failed with there forty one countries in the last hundred and twenty years.

Hundred yeah was starting with russia, one thousand nine hundred seventy one, one thousand nine hundred and a that have tried socialism. Every one of them has failed. All forty one have failed. Socialism has never worked. And when people talk about what about the north countries? It's like they are not socialistic.

If you look at the economic freedom index, which which charge how economically free a country is, all the other countries are in the top twenty five in the entire world, and three of those five or ahead of the united states. And economic freedom. What about sweden? Like where freeze sweden, my favorite example, because when I talk about, when you talk about sweden, it's like OK.

Let's look at what sweden does. They locked down during code. They didn't. No, they didn't. They stayed open and they said that they never said that was a disaster. But now you look at deaths persuading over the last four years from coffee, they're pretty good compared to much Better in the united states, for example.

Um that's on a per capita .

on a per capital basis. Of course, there's much lower population there. Sweden economic freedom index is lower than the united states.

There are thinking in united states now up about number eighteen swedens like number fifteen or sixteen um four protag rates in sweden or like twenty percent. I always tell people like, so what do you father? Corporate CT rates dropping in the united ge damage twenty percent.

Well no. School choice. Sweden has universal school choice. Students can go into school. They want to. The students make the choices, the parents, the students make the choices. But school choices bitterly fought against the united states by the, by the well, the progressives and the teachers unions swedens very progressive country. That's the universal school choice. Uh sweden has an amazing um uh freedoms in other areas and and they're so far from socialist just they have A I have a big social welfare programme with our health care and but they're also that's kind of the idea though isn't you have capitalism .

and propose for but then you have a social safety I always tell people .

it's like if you want to use sweetness an example, you got to take the whole shooting match. I would take the sweetest if you gave me everything sweden has. But they don't want to take the local or protection as they don't want to take the universal, uh, uh, health care, health care.

They don't they don't want to take all the things to sweet do. They want to walk down the economy and they don't want to take all the way. They just want a chery picket.

But if you took at all, I propped, I beat because what the trade off is, you're going to have those big social welfare programs sweden has, and you're going to have higher personal income taxes, but you're going to have lower corporate income taxes, and you going to have more economic freedom. I probably take the swedish package if you could opt, but you'd have to give me the whole thing. And people don't .

see IT that week. Why do you think we're still we as a society, we as an individuals are drawn to IT still. I mean, there's talk about Price. There's all of this stuff. And IT seems to be this time is different, more smarter than all the other forty one items have been tried and failed.

It's very in in in a capitalistic society where you have economic freedom and free markets, no ones actually running, thanks. Markets are self adapting in correcting. Many people are very uncomfortable with that idea.

They think somebody has to be in control of IT all that. And so they're willing to give up their economic and personal freedoms for the security of thinking somebodies in control. Someone's doing IT. And they believe that despite all the other failures, which, by the way, they're not aware of, they they just can rationalize those failures away. Well, that was stolen or that was now or that was castro or that was few goes as these are dictators, if, you know, we just got to get the right people.

And if we get the right people in running things, it'll be different this time when they understand as the right people never get in, because the people that are most drawn, the power and control of others, the monster ers, they eventually eliminate all the well meaning professors and put them in the goolagong. And they hand the dictators end up in power and in charge, and you lose your economic freedom, and you end up these totality an nightmares. They started well intention with good intentions.

But when you take away the individual freedom, you by, almost by definition, socialism does cannot allow economic freedom. You can allow individuals to make these decisions. People have to do with their told.

And you end up using coersion and force to try to make the atop a word. It's very interesting if you study, like pick the cubitt in israel, which was such a well intention socialistic movement, and the people have found IT IT were socialist. And it's what happens that the first generation was so idealistic and made all these sacrifice of thick butt.

The second generation, they're not quite as much into IT. There were not they want to have more private possession ons, are not willing. They don't want their children raised by the collector.

They would raise their children themselves. They want to have their own possessions. So you might say that individualism starts to creep back in.

And by the third generation, they only wanna stay in the cobos. They want to get the hell out to the rest of the world. They, the world's a big place, lots of opportunities.

So those ideas ultimately are not when most people want. As the socialism bound to fail, it's IT will always fail. It'll never succeed.

It's a dream that doesn't work. IT always turns into a nightmare. But every generation is born, has to be there.

The Young, there are always ideal. I was a socialist when I was shown before I started to my own business. You know, surely we can create a topic together. It'll be different this time. But human nature is not changing.

And your ideals are I safer way was an idealistic thing and is like, I had to meet the market where I found in not where I wanted IT to be. I I just think that um it's always going to be this you can always describe IT as in this perfect terms, capitalism is always compared against its failures and and socialism is always compared to its ideals. And that's that's not a fair comparison.

You have to compare reality against reality or ideals against ideals because capitalism has noble ideals as well. They and so if you just have complete lazy, fair capitalism, you end up with the mafia. You have to have somebody that keeps the the violent people from beating up the ones who are their competitors.

So there is no perfect solution to we have to move along with freedom and some regulations and do the best that we can. But it's going to be capitalism is really it's never been done to for human. The economic freedom has always been under the thun of other people throughout history.

And tel the late eighteen century, when freedom broke through in this great upward lifted prosperity, the genie got out the bottle. And they've been trying to, intellectuals and people have ve been trying to cram that jane back in the bottle ever since. They have not been able to do IT yet. But if they ever do, then we're gonna see progress come screeching to halt and begin to go and reverse.

Well, I think we already have in some countries where they've gone more socialist and .

capitalists well, whatever they go, socialist um they started like venezia a is a great example of what the one of the richest there was the richest country in south amErica before before chavez got in there and he had the richest oil reserves and they completely screwed all up at which pretty much is always what happens.

How did you land on the win, win, win? Philosopher, is there like a moment or example where you started to think that way? Or did you always think that way?

I not always think that way. Um it's we I think we're trained to think concerns of win lose. I mean, think about almost every game, every sport, there's a winner and there's a loser.

We're taught in in the way what reason people don't understand that about capitalism, by the way. So I can tie this back into IT is capable isms win, win, win, win game. It's good for all the participants, the people.

Customers don't have to trade with the business. If they don't like the Prices or the service of the selection, they can go down. You don't like cold food.

You can go down to trade or jose and got alternatives if you um uh if you don't like working for whole foods, you don't have to there's plenty of other places you can go work at. So whole food has to do a good job or people wouldn't stay working there. If you don't do a good job of your MERS, i'll trade somewhere else.

Um if you don't do a good job with your suppliers, they don't have to trade with you. They can they they can cut you off. They don't have to be business and business any longer. Um same way with your investors. If your public, like all food, was probably trade IT, we could sell your stock if you don't like IT.

So you have all of these stakeholder and the business has to be managing to create a win for the customers, a win for the employees, a win for the suppliers and the win for the investors and win for the communities. At your part of that's when I began to realize the importance of win when win was to stay lor fossy. But i'll take IT one further once you really can internalize win, win, win in your life, and that's how you try to live.

You're always looking with every personal interaction or looking for a win, win, win. Good for you, good for me, good for all of us. IT really becomes an ethical system.

You pretty much can, just only you, you can resolve any ethical question by always going back. What's the win, win, win here? How do we all win? IT solves almost all ethical questions. It's kind of a an ethical code in and of itself.

I love that philosopher. It's also the only one that endures across time because we all know what it's like to be on a losing end of a relationship per felix. We're losing.

you know, it's true. And think about IT when you're with somebody, he's always looking out for you. He's looking for a win for you too.

You trust them, your relationship deepens. And with trust, there are so many more things you can do together. So part of the win, win, win is is nation people together.

But if there are people that don't think win, win, win, it's almost like you've got to be asking the question, is the person i'm dealing with, are they looking for a win for me too? Are they just looking to see how much they can get for me? So you you need to have the attitude of win, win, win. But you also to be conscious of people that are working from a different framework who might try to exploit you, and you need to be more cautious around them. But once you know you're dealing with somebody else who's Operating from similar framework, man or man, there's almost nothing you can do together.

And the interesting thing is like whole foods who didn't exist today without your your suppliers back after the flood thinking in a win, win way where they extended you more inventory.

It's true. And IT wasn't all tourism on their part. It's we had been a very successful business and theyve felt confident once we got back on our feet, we'd be able to pay in back. But still, they had to take a at least a little bit of A A leap of faith to do IT.

That's kind of win, win in action right in a moment of crisis you're going out of your way to make sure that you're partner that you want to have a long term relationship with not always survives, but thrives.

Exactly correct. Can we talk about dever?

First, second? sure. One of the most of the most interesting parts of the book for me was a your first state with debora and how I didn't go well. And then you you sort of mentioned this letter you wrote to her after you say, and that letter because you totally .

change her mind of IT. yeah. Well, in that letter I just kind of. Kind like i've done in this podcast. I just opened myself up and I just said here's I don't know exactly what I did wrong, but I knew I did something wrong, but here's who I am.

I got I really like you here's so I think you are I I realized that I kind of blue the state, but it's okay. Even having one day with you was very special, and I I think you're a very special person. I think you're going to I wish you the very best.

I hope you have a wonderful life. This is before email. I stayed up all night writing a sleut and polishing and then rewriting IT.

Then I stuck IT under the door about five A M. I mean, I had the very faint hope that I was. I was a hill merry past.

No, I didn't think I was going to get a second day, but maybe if you really like this letter, maybe sh'd give me a chance. So I was motivated. I looking for a win win there.

And IT worked because he did like the letter. He called me up and said, I wasn't going out with you again, but anybody they could write that good of a letter is worth a second date. So second date went Better. And SHE d likes to say by the third day we knew we were get married. So that's about thirty four years, thirty four over thirty four years ago.

especially. You know, I sort of read that story. I want to know what was in the letter, but then I sort of map IT to dating today, which is you you have a date.

Maybe IT goes OK just okay or less than OK. In your case, he has not going to give you another day, but you instantly go home. You flip open this up and all the suders, like fifteen people waiting for your attention.

You feel good about that. Where is this? Never would have happened back then. I old day.

know I never respond about you possible, right? Know my ego was hurt. And if I had other women that were already to go out with me out as well, you know, that's her loss or SHE would not have done the same, right? So I had done the same more likely you would have but you know that was a blind date and IT was hard IT was harder to meet people back in the day.

You couldn't just have an APP. And um I thought I was being very clever at the time. I I asked my married friends if they were singles anybody the'd like to be going out with, because I went going to get any tips for my single friends.

And so fortunately, I had a friend that was married and owned an art gallery. And debt was a customer, and his way got to meter. That way I think you're going to really like this woman. She's you know she's really she's beautiful SHE smart, she's really sweet girl next door types that you like and yeah SHE was like my and my all mate.

that's amazing on to come back to business a little bit but will sort of cover a lot more different topics. But what do you think of business? Ponting.

business planning? Yeah, I have mix feelings about IT. I think that it's a useful tool, but you need to always right remember is a tool and it's a useful tool because it's it's good to think about your business when you go in when you do in business planning, you're going into a different frame of mind.

You're going into what I call an analytical frame of mind. You you're you're going to you're going to analyze where you're at and you're to and then you're going to um create a like a spread he kind of projecting about the future and you're creating this plan around IT. That's all very useful to do.

It's good to think about your business that way from time to time, but the tool shouldn't become the master. Some businesses become slave to their business plan and it's like we're behind the plane now. So what are you be going to do differently to get us back on plan?

It's like, well, don't do something stupid. Try to get yourself back on plan because maybe your plans wrong. And so the tool is something that you think about the business, but it's the master.

If you start making business decisions to hit some stupid plan, he may not change the day planned. Um I don't think I i'll tell that story as a big body. Amazon, their real planning company, and I had some problems with made over planning, but I think I get the details about that.

No problem. Have what qualities do you think that most successful entrepreneurs have?

I think I think different entremets have different. And then I think there's not one size, if it's all, but i'll talk about IT. In general terms, I think there's some lot that have a lot of overnight.

While most entrepreneurs are very creative, you know, I think the average intellectual does not understand how creative entrepreneurs are or how and frequently intelligence they are because they're not maybe intelligent the way the electrons are. They're stream smart. They also see opportunities.

They see connections. Um entrepreneurs are very future ended. They often time see the world and the way the world could be.

They see possibilities when others see problems. An entrepreneur ten time sees a problem is an opportunity to be solved and and they frequently dissolve IT. So entrepreneurs are um that to be very resilient.

You really, you are gonna just nature, the beast, this trial and area, this failure. You're grouping your way. You have an idea that that could be a very successful idea, but you know exactly know how to put this into practice.

And so also, entrepreneurs are quick to see things that are working elsewhere. And it's like they can take ideas from one context and add IT to another as something I happen to be really good at. I see an idea here and this like wall.

We could apply this to love life or we could apply this to whole food. That's a terrific idea. Let's make that work.

Um they're also um willing and I told said earlier, often times entrepreneurs willing to go and move forward and others are not. They have others hesitate. They are worried about their downside. You know I don't know if you've ready have you ready on musk spoke phy by wallis .

and yet i've read most of bit.

K I love that book um for a lot of different ons, but you know I know on a little bit but um I got to know him Better in that book. And the thing that that just blew me away because I consider myself a guy who's willing to move aggressively and the seize opportunities take chances. But what he did again and again and again, which you know never had always paid off for him.

He was always willing to get up there like a person and one, a bunch of chips and a boker game. He just put the whole poe, he's put IT all in. He could have lost everything multiple times. And he was like that guys easy, that most courageous, bold as entremets every seen as a damn full. And you'd have to conclude now by his tremendous success and wealth that he's just the most bringing.

And entropy r because I mean in the book talk about some of his friends also, I know like his brother cambell, or looked no sick, these guys came held bAiling out when a couple of times when he was near, you know when he might have failed. So he had friends, and he had loyal friends who would help him in those crisis situations. But his boldness, I mean, the way star, I mean, not start link with the way of space ex got created and IT goes and visits the russians in to get mussels from him. And they he thinks you're trying to sell them too expensive so we just aside or want to build my own rockets. It's like he figures out how much the materials are crossing and he says, well, we can do this for a lot cheaper than they can um I again .

and then he does IT and he doesn't just say .

that he he's able and he's able to attract uh, these amazing people to be onest team. That's an that's by the way, that's something I haven't talked about. Our entrepreneurs right now.

Entrepreneurs journal have a lot of Chrism. They they talked about Steve jobs having another at Steve. You're talked about Steve having a reality distortion field. And I think that's true of a lot of entrepreneurs.

They're so passionate about their vision that that creates a kind of tourism, a and IT attracts people to them that want to work with them. I mean, people like, you know, everything i've read, people like like, like elon or Steve, these guys can be really, that can be very great. I can be assembled at times, but they are so passionate about what they are doing.

And they create sense of sense of purpose, that they draw very talented people that want to be on their teams, and they and those people stay for a long time. So I do think the the ability to create a great team as an underage skill that I often times think entrepreneurs, I don't know, they consciously create them. I mean, Steve jobs to say that he would only hire a listers because he says the higher blisters, blisters will hire c listers.

So he had these high standards of performance, and he wouldn't sacrifice those high standards for what he wanted in his team and his people. And by all accounts know Steve has reacted. Just brilliant people to work with him.

Is there a difference between a talent collector and team building? Ter.

great question in in the answers. I never thought about that before, but yeah, absolutely. Course there is. Sometimes those entrepreneurs that are driving forward, not sometimes, almost all the time, they have to have other people on their team who correct for their false because their false generally very, very big. I know for example, i'll take my own situation.

Um I was um I was never very good at herring and that's because I think my people's witnesses come out of the shrinks. One of my drinks was I see people's potential. I see what I see the very best in them.

And by the way, when you do that, people want to perform to a very high level of you because they don't want let you down. And so I could see their potential. And but the downside, the shadow side of that, you might say, is that often times I didn't see their weaknesses that clearly.

So i've often times needed people on the team like I particularly worked truly well with my chief financial officer, gen. Planning, because SHE always saw the downside in people. And, you know, he could see the shadow when I was born blind to him.

Shei, don't think we should hire him. You know, I know he he's impressed you here because he's dazles you, john. He think he's so in brilliant and what not.

But guy, can you just see that kind of the sme bot slam guide? Let me I don't think we can trust sky and think he's going to fit in door or culture. I found out the hard way that he was almost always right when I D overrule her and make pick, pick, hire somebody.

Anyway, i'd always regret IT. So I finally learned to say I trust her judgment in this more than trust my own. So I think a good entrepreneur, a good team builder is going to be able to build a team that uh compliments their strings and compensate for their weaknesses. That's a different thing. They're just being able to collect talent because um it's like a difference between like a good basketball team is one that not just has a lot of talent but is a talent that can play well together where they they are synergistic and the whole is greater than the sum in the part. We just have a lot of that people who don't work well together and are backbiting each other, then they might be brilliant, but your teams probably going to lose.

To what to what extent do you think that the teams and the organization should be built around the founder versus putting in the founder into a more difficile structure?

Well, I think question sort of answers itself. The founder founded the company so you can't fit the founder. And another structure, IT wouldn't be the founder longer.

Where I was going with this is like the outside people are always like, you need to bring in a professional grocery. You need to bring in an MBA. You need to bring in all these people from the outside. And what do they want to do? I think they tend to be more structured .

or what you need both. You need the that's the paradox. You do need creativity, but you also need structure. You need, need general people, and you need structural people. Eye, for example, very generative. I needed more structural people around me and also needed people to tell me when my ideas are full shit.

And because sometimes they really were, and I needed people that that I had a high enough trusting relationship with me and they trusted me enough, they could come in and just say, john, this is not gonna. And here's the reason, why is not gna work? We can't figure how to make IT work.

Now every once in a while, I would say i'll figure how to make IT work and go forward with and figured out. But often times it's like, you know, you're right, I can't forget how to make this work. Well.

let you go. But but how did you get to a position where you could do that? And most people don't allow the ego.

Oh, that's a good argument that you had. A really good point is I hadn't thought of that. I'm going to change my mind.

One of the chAllenges that I think many entrepreneurs are every successful entrepreneur eventually faces and some don't rise the occasion. And that is, is that success can breed ego, you know, expansion where you start thinking that you are some kind of universal genius. I think in my case, I had so many failures.

I am my, if you get your face land on the ground a few times, you learned humility I i've remember safer away was a failure for me and um and we had to get into the first all foods to make a successful we of flood after nine months we were we were bankrupt and then I started some new stores and my one of my founders quit because he said, you're read in the company here. These new stores are never gonna mount in anything. You're deluding down our gold mine with these these mines don't have any gold in them.

So I had and and there many other examples of times I had the, I bought the ammi on, I pushed to do dot com. I can't let the internet opportunity escape. A hundred million dollars we lost.

So you know what? I ve had my serious successes, but i've had enough failures to recognize I am far from infallible in my judgment, and to learn to trust people's working with and make decisions collectively. Almost only rarely did I go against my team.

If they, if they took a universal stand, I would almost say that that the whole is smarter than me and just let you go. And I think any good entrepreneur will back down at times when that people they love and trust all tell me them. This is a mistake. We got to .

listen to IT.

We all have blinds spots. We all have blinds spots.

What advice would you give to current Younger entrepreneurs or future entrepreneurs?

That's a very open question. Do you want to try to get IT you want to .

try to I like the ambiguity, okay.

because I want to see where your mind good. So first, while just in general, I get asked A A, A similar questions. So little different, I get asked, what would you what advice would you give a Young person, entrepreneur or not? And the advice I always give is follow your heart.

Life is shorter than you think IT is it's too short to not be doing something that you really are passionate about, that you're drawn to don't do something because you're just trying to get safety and security. You probably won't be happy as as you get older or you might have to change and when you get older. So I always tell people, the Young people like what do you really care about? What do you passionate about? Go after that? follow.

I call IT the heroes s journey. Or know, I got that from josef camps, the heroes journey. But the heroes journey is one where you feel an inner calling, an inner drive, and you simply answer IT.

You do IT even though what's scary. And you go off on your adventure, you don't know how it's going to turn out. So whole fit was my heroes journey.

I'm on a new wind with lovely. I don't know I going to turn. I could fail.

I mean, based on probability will fail because most things to fail, most businesses to fail. Uh, but that's the calling. And i'm answering the call, answered the call.

If you hear that into calling, don't hang up the phone. Do IT go for IT lives, a grand adventure. Don't sell yourself short and try to play IT safe, because you won't be safe.

There is no safety. You're gonna die. That's why I said, remember, earlier on I said, I got clear about death.

I'm gona die. I'm gonna ve my life as an adventure. More fun. That way, I can't guarantee you it'll workout. If IT doesn't, i'll learn and grow and do Better next time.

Try to me about the new venture.

What love life is kind of a continuation of the my heroes journey call to try to help people be healthier. First for nation regaining food ds and now with with love life. It's it's a holistic membership club is really what this is.

And it's got elements. It's got a healthy restaurant. It's it's a plant forward.

Whole foods restaurant got some animal foods in their bit. It's it's definitely focused on people eating a lot more fit and vegetables. It's um we've got a state of the art fitness center. We have a we have all kinds of classes, spin classes were got a huge health center IT is so i'm just telling you the parts of IT.

So you ve got a gym, we ve got you go, we've got polarities, we've got um we have a small, we have all this equipment from hyper beric oxygen chAmbers to rio therapy to red light therapy, to inference sonus regular sonus to call plunges. There's other other lymphatic mesage suit, chicken wear and microphone that you can. We ve got a lot of different bio hacks there.

Um and then of course, you have a SPA with mass ge and and facials and things you would get at any kind of not a medical school no boat talks but will you get IT IT at a good SPA? Pretty much in the like a resort setting. Then we have um we have pick ball, we have three indoor pick ball courts because we think play is important and pick balls.

A community builder people, since I try to playing pickle ball about three years ago, i've made at least fifty new friends and I hang out with because of cable. And now in the medical center, which is most important part. And our medical our health care system is now really a disease management system.

And it's not preventative. It's not really dealing with lifetime le diseases. It's our medical systems good if you have an infectious disease, it's good in terms of things like vaccinations, antibiotics, surgery, first aid, but the chronic diseases to kill people, obesity, heart disease, type two diabetes um author ian diseases, cancer never get to that.

They might manage that the symptoms of the disease, but they don't really the prevented or reverse IT. So love life aims to change that, to disrupt that paradise. Are we think now with the testing protocols we have that you can get, most people don't know how healthy they are, is charge with a good assessments, you can find out where you where you stand. Um and then once we had that, then with the wearables, the data, you can get orring apple watch garment, there's so many different to continuous good cos monitor, we can begin to track pupils.

And then once you have good assessments and tracking, then it's about the doctor works with you in a health coach to create kind of a precision, individualized plan for you unique to yourself that allows you to become the healthy aversion in yourself to be more vital, more healthy, more alive, strong remind system, uh, a more energy, uh positive attitude and also love lives working on peoples emotional inspirit al health as well. Now we're doing breath work. We're their meditation classes.

When psychodeviant therapy is legal in in california, like IT is in colorado and organ, we will be doing that under therapy sessions. So all idea is to help every person that becomes a member to become the very healthiest, physically emotional inspiratory that they can be. And and hopefully, if people start Young enough and work with as long enough that these onic diseases, i'll never get them they're not they're not inevitable um we're all gona die something but we should live to be a hundred with without these colonic diseases recking our lives and be a sound mind and high vitality and the wisdom that will be good for the planet because we will have healthy old wise people being greater percentage of the population. You know, why is enough to try to keep us out of wars? And you know all the stupid things that we do when we're not as why is that we .

should be talked to me a little bit about at the first of them, every first that I love what you're doing. I wish you up in one in my city. I think that needs to exist in in every sort of center.

We help. Certainly we hop to open up in new york. absolutely.

To what extent do you think the diet is the biggest bang for the buck here versus exercise, versus everything else?

I actually feel like, first of all, I think the most important thing is attitude. I mean, a positive attitude, a sense of purpose and meaning. It's like the body. As long as the body feels like IT has something that needs to do, he wants to stay a life like you can't dial me. Now I got important work to do and that's communicated through all the cells is like we're not done here yet.

So I think I think first of all, the mind and the attitude is most important for for health and longevity um I know people that eat terrible diets that have very positive attitudes that are remarkably healthy even though you know they should be fAllen apart. They just that there were in buffett is well, it's more about the good example because he is a terrible diet. On the other hand, he got a great positive attitude, but he also doesn't take any taxes.

And other than his diet, he's not a smoker, he doesn't drink, he actually he eats, he he does. He's not taking a lot of the things that that record health senior than than necessary but yes, I think morn has an incredibly positive attitude and I think at one of the reasons he's gonna ably load to be a hundred. And so we track in alonga stop chrbs attack other than, of course, he missed out on the whole foods opportunity.

Um but then I think diet that was very important. I mean, I was a grocery. I do think um the diet that people lead in amErica today is, you know I mean the statistics tell you all seventy four percent of americans will wait forty three percent or obese.

We're dying from diseases like heart disease that are diary. There are dietary I diseases um obesity or all of the autumn une diseases are also related to that more complicated. But diet as a huge factor in terms of houston gamine systems are. So you know it's it's let's not that complicated people make IT. I mean, always tell people if you want to, if you can try to get your information from the internet, you going to be confused.

Well, let's talk about this for a second. But before we do, what percentage of whole food sales at the time you left were actually whole foods?

I don't know the answer to that quite example, but I do know that I knew, I knew what I produce. I I really don't think I should reveal that those statists, because of not public information, I don't want whole foods unnecessarily mad at me. But but they were not as high as they were when we started out OK.

And that's because the the process food industry incorporated our standards and made process needs that metal foods market standards because and we'd sell IT, but they were just meeting them, you might say. And when we first started, they didn't we didn't have very many processed food. We didn't have junk that we could easily sell.

So we mostly sold produce and meat and balk food people cooked. I will take one interesting statistic. A very first store was over twenty percent of our cells in the boat foods to department, and we didn't have any Candy to act them.

That was just whole grains, whole whole great flowers, beans, not seat things like that, whole foods. And today it's under one percent, twenty percent to one percent. So what is whole foods?

I mean, you written a book on this, but what what does that mean for people's thing?

What does when I see whole foods? I mean the food that is close to its natural state as possible. So it's been minimally processed. So and that would be like the things I have listed, fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, sea, those have been manipulated too.

So I think you want to try to get a animal foods that, you know, not been, that have been grassed, for example, of your beef or their, there are not been animals have not been put in feedlots, have not been crowded together, that they have lived up for natural animal lives. So sort of natural um meat, then you've got you've got your your beans, your nuts, your seeds, all your legions. Um you're going to have things that are produced with minimally processing so you can cook food, for example.

But if you say take oil, oil or sugar, those are not whole foods. If you add oil, whether be olive, il or see oil, you're not getting a whole food. You're just the pure fat of that food.

And what is sugar? Sugar is taking a whole harbor hydrate food and stripping away the fiber in the german tell you're just life with pure car behind, right? The biggest chAllenge humans have with our diets is that we evolved our genes, preclude us our our genes um we evolved in scarcity.

We evolved with starvation was our biggest problem, not for just the last few thousand years, before tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. That just wasn't enough food. And so we've evolved to crave calorie dense foods, and it's in our genetic structure.

And we like foods that have a lot of protein, or have a lot of sugar, or have a lot of fat oil. Pure fat, nothing. A fat sugar, nothing.

A carbo. Uh, high concentrations of protein. H, you people always put in protein powers and things I got on their smoothes. We crave calories.

Did we also crave salt? Because I was scared. Ce, as we evolved.

And so as a result, the food, the food system today, IT gives the market what I want. IT wants color density, but it's killing us. It's making a sick.

It's making a obese. We need to people always ask me as a plant based y, where do get your protein is? Like in every food I eat, it's proteins, not scarce.

Where do you get your fiber? Because you're not getting fiber from those process foods you're not getting from the animal foods. I mean, something like ninety plus percent of americans have the less fiber than is optimal for their good health.

We now know the god is the first most important part of our immune system. So that whole fit, whole foods are. It's the definitions.

A little bit fuzzy, so a little bit of process things, not too bad, but the more you do, the worse tends to become. And now we eat highly process ss foods, not just three times a day. Some people just eat and need and need all they want.

That's a really good way to look at IT. I think there's A A scale i'm going to get this wrong, but i'd came out from brazil and IT sort of did the one through four in terms of processing food.

Food was a good idea actually yeah.

And then that would be great to put on labels at grocery store, even on the shelves, the people, three. So it's Better than a .

but you know what happens in is that those kit gamed in the sense that the they've been they're been all kinds of rating systems the'd tried to be applied. But then the the food manufacturing companies and alleged to the lobby. But they are they're constantly trying to change those rules so that their products look good.

Um it's more complicated than you think because we try to do something at whole foods. We did we actually did IT, we call IT was based on gel firm in the work, an aggregate nutritional density index. So we are looking for neutral intensity and fears.

You can do IT. You can get those. You can get how many vitamins and minerals and and then the fatal new transit food have.

And we rerated all our food and we put up the ratings all on the store. Okay, fresh vegetables, particularly ephie Greens, are by far the most nutrient and food you can nutrients per calorie, I mean not even close. And then all the vegetables are way up there.

Then the fruit under that, then you've got um then you've got beans under that, then you've got whole grains, then you got nett and seeds. All the whole foods are much higher neutral intensity. Then you get into the animal foods.

This is what became controversial is that the animal foods on a per salary basis have fewer nutrients. This was very upsetting to people, and they ve got angry. People of team members got angry about IT.

People that want to eat A A alo diet were angry. The people that eat a condiment word, I were angry because they really want, they like their animal foods or color dense. There's a lot of calories and animal fits. They taste good.

And but you're not telling people what to eat. Why is more information and getting people kill the messenger?

Man, not a new thing. I didn't like the message we were delivering. And because people knew that I was a plant, this guy, they thought mak is trying to make everybody eat his diet.

And all we are going to do to give out the information of neutral density per caller is important information. But the end of the day, you know, I talked about how I had caved in. My team was not. They they didn't want to keep doing IT.

What do you think what happened if a girl reported that they sort of had like a color coating system, for example, which is like Green, yellow, red, that's all they did just on the shelf. Beside, they d have a lot .

of red products on their shells, and people would asked them why they healed. You sound on all these red food and so, but they took away the red food d than the people wouldn't go know what. What they would do is they dumb down.

So there are a lot of stuff that you think is red now would always sudden be Green. And it's like because most of the food that we're selling, a supermarket is not good for people. If you start telling the truth, two, one or two things are going to happen.

People are gonna either stop shopping at your store because all their store sell in is red through. I'm going to go to the other store that doesn't put all this red. It's the same food.

But I I don't want to know not I am not confront IT with IT or they will be forced to change the ratio mix so that this some of the red food now is perceived to be healthy. Um so it's it's very difficult. You have to meet the market where you find that you have to give the market what he wants.

And when you when the market, if you feel judge by people, you don't want to do business there anymore. So as one of the reasons the the people in half with me departments were very unhappy that we they were not getting any scores. So they they didn't think that was a good this was this is bulls shit. This is not a good system.

If you could wave a magic one, I guess, and change a policy, or may be more than one policies, what would you do? What would you do for the entire country?

Policies were like in terms of health.

like what if you get you can probably die IT might be the best place to start public. What would you say? What would you do? How would you do this?

It's very, it's very that's a very chAllenging question because. In general, I don't I think people need these are adult people need to make their own decisions. And I don't think you should be telling people they can eat things.

but you will not.

Uh yes but then I think you can ledge IT. Um but then when you start using power to try to change people's behavior, how do you know that the people that take over the power will do IT in a actually good way? We get it's like the good intentions of socialism. The bad elements take IT over the next thing you know, the healthy foods are being eliminated because the people in power it's been copied with that education wouldn't even work right?

Because if we educate people, then we're going to call off the education at some point.

And then you go on to the internet and your google, is coffee good for me? You will get a massive amount data to .

get whatever you want.

IT, that's right. Exactly, exactly. And confirmation bias is so powerful. People just confirm what they want to believe. So if you know what, I, if I could do anything that would help the health of amErica the most, i'd probably wanted chain, I, anna, make nutrition education more, something that would be emphasized in the schools and emphasized in particularly medical schools, because they're not given doctors giving almost no nutritional. They don't.

They come to believe that IT doesn't to do with health, that their positions and there are lickers, their drugs, are the thing that will store health. That's not right. It's not true.

I I think I heard a couple weeks ago that the average school student gets thirty minutes on nutrition or something.

Yes, it's pretty. Not much .

do I wanted. Thank you for taking the time today. We always end the podcast on the same question, which is what is success for you?

You know, I think success for me has been just been following my heart and being true to myself, because doing following my bliss, each of campus that I ve tried to follow my bulls. And i've been very successful by my own internal measurements because I have been true to myself. I have followed my heart and let to me this my life in this grand adventure.

I'm a very happy person. I, I, I have a lot of love in my life. I have a lot of friends. I can do what I want to do. I meet cool people like you uh and yeah to meet a successful life as a life well lived when is true to yourself, true to your own value, is true to your belief and has a lot of love in IT. I won't imagine a successful life that without didn't have a lot of love in IT.

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