Episode 495: John Mackey: From Living Above a Store to $13.7 Billion Exit - The Whole Foods Story

25:25And then if they got control of the board, we'd have a struggle with them over the shareholders. And so we could fight them all the way. The challenge of that strategy was we needed to lower our prices. Whole Foods, the whole paycheck thing had really stuck. And there's another even more backstory I'm not going to go into that is more complicated. But we had the government harassing us in certain cities and it was hurting our brand. And we were getting a lot of negative publicity. But I'm not going to go into that right now. But that led to Jana taking this position. And then we needed to lower our prices, but we needed time to do that.

25:59Because you're selling something for a dollar and you start to sell it for 90 cents. In the short run, your sales just dropped 10 % if everything went down 10%. Your same store sales dropped with negative 10%. Your profits probably dropped 30 % or 40%. And that's going to freak out Wall Street. And so then you're playing into Janet's hands. And it's going to like, these people are wrecking the business. We need to take it over. So we needed time to do that. We weren't going to have time with Janet as investors. So then we looked. Maybe we could find somebody friendly to buy it. So we'd like to talk to Warren Buffett.

26:34And Warren, he knew all about Whole Foods, but he made a joke, which was pretty funny. He said, you know, we own Dairy Queen. Right. And I'm famous for my junk food eating. John, this is not a good brand fit for me. I think he just maybe thought we were still too expensive for a price. But anyhow, he didn't want to do it. And Albertsons, we had a talk with Albertsons. They really wanted to merge with us. but it was obvious to me that was a very poor cultural fit. And so then I kept asking this question. I really believe that if you put intentionality out into the universe, things happen. So one of my intentions I kept asking was, what's the win-win-win solution here?

27:18What's good for our customers? What's good for our team members? What's good for our suppliers? What's good for our investors? And what's good for the larger community? And one morning I woke up and the answer popped in my brain. It was, what about Amazon? I'd met Jeff Bezos at a conference the year before. He and I had hit it off. We had a lot in common, science fiction, fantasy, scuba diving. We were on a panel together. Jeff says, this has been great. I want to follow up with you. Let's get together and talk. I didn't hear from him. Of course, he's going through that when his marriage was starting to break up and stuff like that.

27:51And then a year later, we contact Amazon, see if they're interested. They were very interested. We flew in, had a special meeting with Jeff and his top senior leaders. And we had, you know, I always like to tell people, you know, when you fall in love with somebody, there's always what I call the conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The conversation where you connect and the hearts connect. And it's like, whoa, I've never met anybody quite like this. And you fell in love. That happened in our first conversation with Amazon. These guys were not like I thought they were going to be. They were incredibly intelligent, which I thought they would be.

28:23Very entrepreneurial, very strategic. We talked about all the things Whole Foods and Amazon could do together. And I remember our team, the three executives I brought with me, we went to a restaurant afterwards to process what had happened. And we're kind of looking around saying, that was incredible. That was an incredible conversation. And then it was looking around. And then we asked the question, like, do you think they liked us too? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And it turned out they did. They contacted us a couple of days later, flew a team down. And then it was a whirlwind romance.

28:53Six weeks after the first meeting, we were engaged to be married. And that ended up being our solution. What I'll never know is if we'd fought, could we have won? But I felt like this was the best thing. Whole Foods dropped prices four times in those first two years with Amazon. Our team members all got raises. All the hourly people got raises. Within a month, the deal happened. Really? Yes. Amazon came in and set the new minimum wage back in 2017 at$15. So everybody that was hourly went 15, and then they staggered it up from there. So literally, I don't know, 80 ,000 people got pay increases.

29:28Cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars to do that, as did it did cutting those prices. Those were two things that were really, really good for morale, good for our customers. Our suppliers got, not only did they not get dropped by Amazon, but they studied our movement, and they picked up a lot of our suppliers and put them into Amazon.com that weren't there before. So it was really good for a lot of our suppliers. Our investors got like 30 % more money from that sale than they had previously to Amazon doing. The price of the stock went up. And our communities also developed because of our philanthropy, our foundations.

30:02Not only did Amazon not change that, they made additional donations to our Whole Planet Foundation or Whole Kids Foundation. So they've been a good partner in a lot of ways. But culturally, that's been the rubbing point. We're different culturally. and to give Amazon credit there, they haven't really tried to change Whole Foods culture in any direct way. They like our culture. But the metaphor I'd come up with, Jen, is like, think of Amazon like this giant sun. And we're like a big planet in their orbit, like Jupiter. Okay, we're big. We were a Fortune 250 company when they bought us. But Amazon was a Fortune 5 company when they bought us.

30:41So even though they haven't tried to change us, the fact of the matter is, their gravitational pull is so powerful that Whole Foods is nevertheless affected by it. So we're still Whole Foods, but we are changing the gravities affecting Whole Foods. Well, they took away the decentralization, which, by the way, I guess after you said that, it makes sense. That does make a major difference in the customer's user experience, right? Because the problem I have with Whole Foods is that one is not the same. I feel like the quality or caliber has gone down to the majority. There are some that you walk into still, like the one near Love Life actually in Manhattan Beach or El Segundo.

31:23I went in there for the first time when I went to Love Life. It was beautiful. It was immaculate. It was clean. It was very nicely shelled. But I can go into five other Whole Foods and it's going to be kind of like the quality is not there. I will tell you what my motto is now that I've retired in just about three years. Yeah. It's not my problem any longer. Right. You don't care. I do care. There's not anything I can do about it. Right. I do care. It's like, if you think of it, it's like my daughter, I make the joke that I married my daughter off to the richest man in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

31:56You actually did. Exactly. He was only the second, he was the richest one, I married her off, and then he on the must-pass. Yeah, right, right. At that point, it doesn't matter. Yes, no, it doesn't really matter too much. But I mean, I can't do anything about it. And the greatest gift I can give my successor is not to try to interfere in any way.

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33:31What do you say besides the fact, like if you were to go back or look, we talked about all the benefits that Amazon added to Whole Foods. What would you say besides my little rant, what would you say the things that you've noticed have been kind of like the negative things or the things that kind of haven't been up to snuff when you were involved? Well, part of it, part of it's not necessarily the fault of the existing management. The people, let's just put it this way. When I retired after 44 years, I was like the last man standing. All the people that we built the company together with, they all retired.

34:07They all retired before me. And I was working with people that were substantially younger than me that had professional backgrounds. And so the thing about professionals, this is why most corporations over time begin to decline. Once the founders leave, that entrepreneurial spirit begins to go out of the company, and it's less creative, less innovative. And it's true of almost all businesses, unless they're family-owned. So what ends up happening is the professionals are very smart people. They get MBAs from Harvard and Wharton and Stanford. They're very bright people. But their first loyalty is to their careers.

34:47And oftentimes, a company like Whole Foods or Amazon is just kind of a stop along the way. It's an addition to the resume. And then they're going to leverage that to another higher paying job. And so their first loyalty is going to be to their own careers. And then the second loyalty is to their profession itself, because they think of themselves as professional. So as we were building the company, it was very hard. it was very easy to enlist people that were coming up through the ranks into our purpose and our mission and our stakeholder theory. People bought into that. It got harder to do that with the professionals because their, again, their loyalties were not first to the company.

35:26And so I do think that's why over time, despite all that intelligence and market research and all the things they do, that sort of the creative spark oftentimes goes out of companies as they age. But you know, capitalism solves for it. Companies like Erwan come along. Right. So new entrepreneurs come up who aren't. It's like Whole Foods disrupted the supermarket industry. You could argue Erwan's disrupting Whole Foods, at least in LA. Exactly. I would argue that Erwan's business model may not translate. It translates to New York, but I don't know if it translates, maybe the Bay Area, but it wouldn't translate everywhere.

36:06I was going to ask you about that. because one thing about Whole Foods is like you can go anywhere and there's scalability. Most people in Ohio or Wichita, Kansas are not going to be able, they're not going to be going to Aero One. It's just, it's kind of like when you go to a zoo and you see a lion. That's why when you have these tour buses who come to LA and they all come off with their cameras and they take pictures of the Hailey Bieber smoothie at Aero One, right? What are they charging for that now? $25. Yeah, it's crazy. It's insanity. And by the way, this is the irony of this whole thing, right?

36:41I was speaking with somebody who was a big executive at Erewhon for a while. She left. And people have this optical illusion that it's healthy because it looks very pretty and they talk about having an organic bee or pollen or whatever. Most of the food there is not healthy. It's just not. When you put that much oil, like the food bar, like the hot bar, you're now spending a fortune on food that you can get pretty much even at Albertsons, honestly. Maybe it's like one or two levels above, but you're spending – like I went there. I spent$45 on a piece of salmon and some vegetables that I literally could have gotten at Trader Joe's for like$11,$8.

37:21Well, it's not that much different from going to like a high-end restaurant, right? Right, right, right. You're going to pay more, but you're paying more for atmosphere, for service. But you're not getting that there. Well, again, I'm not going to throw down on Irwan. They're doing something right. They're obviously very successful, and I'm very happy for them. I think what they've done well is branding. Sure. And when you walk in, the feeling that you get. You feel like you're doing something healthy for yourself. It's the emotional thing. Companies are doing really well in the emotional piece.

37:52Also, in LA, probably because of the Hollywood culture, people want to be in the coolest, hippest places. True. And Erwan has got that niche now. That's why you say it's kind of like the new Whole Foods. Yes. Because we used to be that niche. And now the cool people go to Erwan. And the people see the cool people going to Erwan. And they want to go there too, because that's where the cool people are going. 100%. Yeah. It's TikTok friendly too. You can go there, get your little smoothie, take your little picture. Well, also, it's a different time, right? Hey, you know that Love Life, we're working with Erewhon.

38:25Are you? Yeah. We have an alliance with them, a marketing alliance. If you're an Erewhon member, join one of their club. You can get a special deal at Love Life. Oh, you can? Yeah. What is the special deal? I'm forgetting it right now, but I think you get a discount on memberships. Oh, you do? A discount on a membership. Because you went from—before even—well, we're going to get into Love Life, but I want to finish with the Amazon situation with Whole Foods. Did you step down because you wanted to from Whole Foods or did they push you out? What was the reason behind it? I signed a five-year contract with Amazon when the merger happened.

39:04So I had a five-year commitment, but I detail this in the book and some detail the whole story, but I was increasingly fighting with Amazon about cultural things. And you might say that the tipping point occurred, This is back in February of 2022. And the fight that I had with Amazon that tipped me was call back to work. I wanted to bring our corporate staff back into the office. And because everybody else at Whole Foods was going to work every day, everybody going into the stores or the distribution centers or everywhere else had to go into work. But Amazon, because of Amazon, our corporate people didn't have to.

39:47They could work at home. And after a year, I thought it was wrecking our culture because we had sort of a privileged elite that didn't have to play by the same rules everybody else had. And that was so not Whole Foods. We had a much more egalitarian culture. Everybody gets the same benefits. Everybody gets the same discounts. No privileged elite. So that bothered me a lot. And I could see it was affecting. People asked me about it when I go down to the stores. Hey, are the people back to work upstairs? Yes. I was there. But Amazon didn't want us to force anybody to come back to work. And I wanted to.

40:22So I'm talking to Dave Clark, who was my superior, who in almost every other way, I really love Dave. I still love Dave. Dave was very smart, and he was a very decisive and a very good decision maker. I watched him make good decisions over the years, and he was a very good decision maker. But he was wrong about this decision. He did not want to let me bring him back. and I started, I was talking to him, I said, Dave, listen, trust me, I'm the general in the field. This is bad for Whole Foods. It doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't want to do this. It's, I just, trust me, I know this is the best thing for Whole Foods.

40:58And he said, he said, it triggered him. And when I started talking about being the general in the field, trust the general in the field, and he says, God damn it, John, why don't you just fucking do what you're told to do once. You want to argue about everything. And I said, Dave, can you give me any other examples of me ever arguing with you about anything? He thinks about it and he says, I don't fucking have to give you an example. I know it and everybody at Amazon knows it. It's like, whoa, everybody at Amazon knows it? Knows what? I mean, it's like, and I said, Dave, I can see you're really triggered.

41:35And I think maybe we should not have this conversation any longer. And so we got off the Zoom call. And Dave and I had this call every month. He canceled the next two months. And then I thought, I thought, but I decided that day, I decided, you know what? I don't have power anymore at Whole Foods. I can't do what I think is best for the company. I can't protect the team members. I can't protect the culture. It's time for me to go. However, that's such a monumental decision that I didn't want to make that hasty. So I wanted to think about it for a few months. And I thought, if Dave will contact me and apologize for being a jerk, you know, maybe I'll stick around a little bit longer.

42:16But he canceled the next two calls we were supposed to have. And then they get back on and it was like nothing had happened. And it's like, okay, so that's how it's going to be. And so then another three months, everything was kind of normal, but I'd kind of made this decision. But I wanted to talk it over with people at Whole Foods that I love and trust. I want to talk it over with my wife. I wanted to make sure it was really the right decision because I knew it was, you know, it's no going back. So then it was pretty clear my heart was guiding me and to say that it was time to go. It's time to do the next thing, which by the way, leads to love life, right?

42:49Right. So I call up Dave and I go over it with him and say, you know, I think it's time for me to go. I think it's time for me to leave. And I'll fulfill my commitment I have on the contract. I'll finish out. So I basically gave one year's notice. And that last year at Whole Foods was arguably one of the best years of my whole career there because I had the new successor I already picked, Jason Beagle. Amazon loves Jason. That's who they would have picked anyway. And I'd already been mentoring Jason anyway. He was my chief operating officer. He'd been the chief technology officer. He spoke Amazon speak, so to speak.

43:23So I basically, for the next year, let him run the company anyway. And I just made a grand tour. I visited as many stores as I could, maybe a hundred stores around the country and said goodbye. And it was so wonderful because I got so much love from people and I gave so much love and it was very teary eyed stuff. And so I had a great last year. I wish people could, that's the best way to leave the company. And, you know, I still have so many good relationships with people there. Do you? Sure. People still know me. I go into a store. I go into that El Segundo store to shop here because it's next to Love Life.

43:58And yeah, people know me there. They talk to me, come up and talk to me. They do. So were you really like, so a lot of times when this type of situation happens, people are like figureheads, right? They're not really doing much. When you were there, besides that thing that happened with David Clark, what were you really involved with before you kind of gave it to the helm to Peter? What's his name? Jason, Jason. Well, I mean, you think about what does a leader like me do? Yeah, what do you do? What does a leader like you do? No, one of the things, This is a good tip for entrepreneurs out there.

44:28Yeah. One of the questions as I grew the business that I asked myself and continued to ask me at the very end, what does the company most need me to do now? And that answer will change over time as the business grows. At the early days, what they needed me to do was run a store. And then the next thing they needed me to do was get involved in real estate so we could get really good real estate decisions. And part of, as the business would grow and I'd let go of things, one of the things that's difficult to do is let go of things that you really enjoy doing and you're really good at. But if you keep asking that question, what does the company most need me to do?

45:04It's like, okay, like at one point it needed me to do something I wasn't very good at and didn't want to do, but I knew I needed to do it, which was I needed to be more public facing. I needed to speak publicly more often. I needed to tour around to the stores, connect with the team members, connect with suppliers, connect with Wall Street, just be sort of the face of the company. Hence the media training days. And I flunked the media training days, exactly. But nevertheless, and I wasn't very good at it initially, but I practiced it and I got better at it. Ten times. Now I'm a very good public speaker.

45:42I'm very relaxed in front of crowds and audiences and stuff. So anyway, the point is it's changing and evolving over time. So what was the company most needing me to do? well, the last year it most needed me to do was have a really good farewell and hand the reins of power over to my successor with not dropping a baton, but doing it in a very skillful way. Before that, so you might say after Amazon bought the company, what was my most important job? My most important job there was to A, protect Whole Foods' culture from Amazon, while at the same time integrating as closely to them as we could to make the business more successful and efficient.

46:17Whole Foods bought 23 companies over my time as a CEO. So I knew a lot about what made a good acquisition. And you know what an acquiring company wants? They don't want to hear about how good the good old times were before the acquisition. They want to hear about the good things that are happening now and how much you like Amazon and the good things Amazon's doing for the company. They want you to be a good team player. So I worked hard on that. I spent a lot of times selling Amazon to Whole Foods people and saying and pointing out like I just did to you a little while ago why this was a good thing for the company.

46:53And so that Whole Foods people would not be rebels, but we'd be good team players. Right. I also needed to work with the, you know, I knew any way you slice it, I was getting older. I knew at some point my time was going to end. I always kind of thought it would end after five years. I thought that's long enough. Yeah. And, And, you know, it was clear to me, by the way, that when Amazon didn't say, oh, John, we don't want you to leave. Please stay. We'd like you to have another three-year contract. No contract was offered. They were not. Right. I don't think they were going to force me out because I was too, you know, famous.

47:28Or, you know, that could be really bad if they forced me out. But they were glad I was leaving. That was pretty obvious. Really? They were happy. I was like, sure. Because I was arguing with them about culture. I was fighting back. I was pushing back. I was never a yes man. I'm curious, how are they doing now post-Amazon? How's Whole Foods doing? Whole Foods is doing really well from a financial standpoint. Yeah, from a financial standpoint after Amazon. Sales are very strong. Sales are growing very rapidly. I mean, I don't actually know, but the last year I was there, we'd gotten up to$22 billion in sales my last year.

48:01I'd say they're probably at$26 or$27 billion now. Really? So they're$4 or$5 billion bigger. Yeah. I'm pretty sure if Amazon wanted to sell Whole Foods, we'd pay$13.7 billion for it. It's probably worth, I don't know, probably almost twice that much, I bet. Are you a billionaire now? No, no, no, no, no, no. You're not? Because it was a public company. You had to give all the shares and all the people. So something people don't know about me is just simply that I'm a wealthy guy. I have enough money. But I stopped taking any compensation back in 2006. I gave all of my stock options to our foundations.

48:38I never took a salary after that. I had enough. Yeah, I read something that you capped your salary at a million a year. No, no, that's inaccurate. That wasn't right. That was ChatGPT. We capped, ChatGPT, what did they know? I know. We capped any, the salary, the compensation anyone could make to, by the time I left, it was about 13 times the average pay was the most anyone could make. So I think the very best paid people at Whole Foods were making close to a million dollars a year. I was still making$1 a year. I only took$1 a year from 2006 on. So I made nothing the last, when I leave, 16 years I got paid zero.

49:18Nothing. Nothing? $1. Except they never gave it to me. They never gave me that dollar. They never gave you that dollar? No. I'm thinking about suing them. They owe me like$13. Are you allowed to go to Whole Foods right now and like pick an apple? Would they charge you for it? So you want to hear something funny? Yeah. So at Whole Foods, we have what we call benefit hours. So you can bank those benefit hours if you don't use them. So I was banking. I have 1 ,000-plus paid time off hours. So I guess they probably owe me about$1 an hour. They owe me about$1 ,000. Oh, my God. Hold on a second. So when they sold, and, of course, with venture companies.

49:55No, I had stock in Whole Foods. Right. I mean, that's what I say. So you took a dollar salary. How much stock did you have when you sold it to Amazon, when Amazon acquired it? I'm not going to tell you how much stock I had or how much my net worth was simply because it just gets misunderstood. Everyone wants to. I remember telling one guy, one of my friends asked me my net worth one time, and I told him, and he says, that's it for all you did with Whole Foods? And I said, are you kidding? I'm fabulously wealthy. There's nothing I can't do in life. And so it's always a good question to ask yourself.

50:26How much do you really need? In fact, I'm going to tell you a story. This is one of my favorite stories. You might have heard this one. Did you know that Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, were good friends? No. They were good friends, and they were both writers. So they're at this party on Long Island at a hedge fund party, and they're there. And Vonnegut was needling Heller. He says, so Joe, you know the guy that owns this place, he makes more money in a day than you've made for all the books you sold of Catch-22 and all your other books combined. Every single day he makes more money than you do.

51:07What do you think about that? And Heller thinks about it for a few minutes or a minute or so, and he says, well, Kurt, I've got one thing he'll never have. And he said, what's that? I have enough. That's a good story. It's a good story, right? Mm-hmm. Good story. And that's how I feel. I have enough. That's a real... You know, you don't hear that very often, right? When you have people like someone like you who created like... You know, that's like a massive household brand, right? Like it's Starbucks, Whole Foods. Like everyone knows it. The assumption is you walked away with a lot of money. I did.

51:43You did. No, I was going to say. I know. But the fact that like the way... I guess this plays maybe into the conscious capitalism thing, right? Yeah, sure. Same principle. Same principle. Well, can you talk about that? Can you tell people what that is, what that means? How do you define conscious capitalism? Conscious capitalism, for the record, I've co-authored a book. It came out in 2013 with Raj Sisodia, and we're working on a second edition of it right now. Oh, you are? Yeah, it came out 12 years ago. It needs to be updated. So conscious capitalism means that there are four pillars to it. The first pillar is every business has the potential to have a higher purpose besides just making money.

52:22And that's the biggest misunderstanding people have about business. They think it's just all about the money. It's all about profit. And that's why business and capitalism have bad brands, you might say. But in fact, the best way to understand the purpose is to use an analogy or a metaphor. Let's take my body or your body. My body has to produce red blood cells or I die. No red blood cells, I'm dead. But it doesn't follow because I need to have red blood cells. The purpose of my life is to produce red blood cells. Business, similarly, business has to make a profit or it dies. It doesn't have the money to sustain itself.

52:58It can't meet payroll. It can't pay for repairs. It has to make money or it dies. But that doesn't mean that's why it exists. It does not exist to primarily make money. That's a byproduct. It exists always to create value for its customers. That's why it exists. And the higher purpose is involved in that. So for example, whole foods has higher purpose, which we articulated is to nourish people and the planet. That's our purpose, to sell the highest quality natural and organic foods possible, help nourish people, help them be the healthiest version of themselves. And if we do that well, profits result in that.

53:33So that's the first thing. Purpose is very important. First principle of conscious capital. Second one is all the stakeholders matter. What's a stakeholder? Well, a stakeholder is somebody that has a stake in the business who's voluntarily trading with the business for mutual gain. So like customers are trading with the business. You go to Air One, you pay$25 for a smoothie. They didn't make you buy that smoothie. You did it because you wanted to. And so you made a trade voluntarily for your own mutual gain. Similarly, employees or team members, they work. They trade their labor and their time and their creativity and their energy for paycheck or for other types of compensation, benefits and whatnot.

54:16They don't have to work there. In fact, there's lots of other jobs they potentially could do in a competitive marketplace. So they do it for their mutual gain. Similarly with suppliers, they don't have to supply. They don't, you know, they'll like you. They don't have to trade with you at all. Trading is always voluntary for mutual gain. Same thing with investors. They don't have to invest their capital. Communities that we're part of. So all the stakeholders matter. And so stakeholders, once you realize that, then you can see, wow, they're all interdependent. They're all connected together. Can we create strategies where all the stakeholders are simultaneously winning?

54:49Customers are benefiting. Suppliers are benefiting. Employees are benefiting. Investors are benefiting. A win-win-win. That's the beautiful thing about business and capitalism, which people don't understand. It has the potential to be a win-win-win system that has an upward spiral indefinitely. That's why capitalism has led to so much progress in the world. It's totally misunderstood. It's been branded by its enemies, the Marxists, the socialists, wrongly and inaccurately. Third principle, leadership. We need leaders who are conscious, that have a higher purpose themselves to not just to line their pockets in their own compensation.

55:23They're there to serve that business and make it a better business and serve all the stakeholders. And then the fourth principle is culture. We spend a lot of our lives at work. Culture matters. We have to create cultures that allow human beings to flourish and be happy and where they can find meaning and purpose and love. I always say at Whole Foods, if you give people two things, they want to work for you forever. Give them purpose and give them love. That's what we most crave for. And by the way, that's why knowing when you have enough money is important. Because people chase after money, fame, and power because they think if they have those, they will get love.

56:00No. And those are very addicting. You can get addicted to any of those. You don't have to be addicted to them. But the people I know that chase after those things, they find eventually that it doesn't, no matter how famous they get or how powerful they get or how wealthy they get, it doesn't fill the void in the heart, which only love can fulfill. So that's what you should chase after is love, not money, power, and wealth. So anyway, that's conscious capitalism in a nutshell. The one that you just said, though, I think is so true and so overlooked and underrated because we're living in a world that values those things, money and power.

56:36We value those because if we think if we have those, we'll be happy. Right. But there's been so, you know, no matter how many times people say that doesn't bring happiness, it doesn't seem to penetrate or resonate. People still chase it. Because what you'll get when you have those things is you'll have some admiration. Yeah. You'll have some respect. You'll have a lot of envy too, though. The more successful you are, the more envy that you create. People that want to tear you down. But admiration or respect is not the same thing as love. Nope. Love comes from the intimacy. It comes from friendship, from really being connected and intimate with somebody.

57:11We're trusting someone and loving. As you love, it returns back to you. So we chase after the wrong things. You might say false idols. Yeah. How did you kind of steer away from that? I mean, you seem to be, how long have you been married? 35 years. 35 years. I would imagine after you sold Whole Foods or being the CEO and founder of Whole Foods, you're probably surrounded by a lot of people who admire you, right? How do you kind of create a life of meaning and purpose and of authenticity when you can be surrounded by so much of that other stuff? You know, I always say that you know who your true friends are twice in your life or at two extremes.

57:52Right. You know who your true friends are when you are very successful because your true friends are really happy for you. They don't envy you. They see your success as their own success. Those are true friends. The other friends may not be your friends at all. They may secretly be wanting you to fall and fail. So you have to pay a lot of attention. You have to be conscious. It's like you need to have a little bit of sensitivity to envy. If your friends envy you, they're probably not really true friends. But a lot of times people feign friends. They pretend. Yeah, I know, but you have to be discerning.

58:26Discerning. That's the one. You've got to be discerning. The other time you know who your true friends are is when the bad times come. Yeah, that's for sure. Because your true friends really care about you, and they're down there in the gutter with you or in the hard times with you. They're not secretly chortling happy, oh, finally she got hers or he got his. They're there, and you can tell. You can tell they genuinely love you, and they care for you, and they want to help you. Right. So it's kind of interesting that the best of times and the worst of times is when our true friends reveal themselves.

58:56Totally.

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1:00:29You said your dad was your mentor for the first 16 years. What were a couple of the big lessons that he instilled upon you or taught you that helped you? One of the first things my dad taught me was the best capital you'll ever have in your business is the money that you retain from making money. And that's so different than what the venture capitalists do today with these startups. The venture capitalists are not necessarily your friends at all. No. And they may not have your best interest at heart. They have a business model. It's called a blockbuster business model. One runaway successful idea is all they need to make billions of dollars.

1:01:12And so they can have a lot of failures. So they try to scale a lot of these businesses too quickly. And they tell them it's okay to lose money. We'll just keep raising the price round after round. And guess what? if you don't scale well or if you start to lose money, maybe you can't get a higher price. Then the entrepreneurs get diluted and they get a cram down around and they may get forced out and they bring in professional management to take their place. So my dad taught me the best capital you'll ever have is the money that you make and then invest it back in the business. So from very early on, we never tried to scale Whole Foods so much as we just tried to be successful and we kept reinvesting the money store after store after store.

1:01:57That was a very big lesson. And the second lesson he really taught me was, you've got to be able to build a really good team. And the best team, that means you have to be sort of very self-aware, Jim. It's like, you've got to know what you're good at, but more importantly, you've got to know what you're not good at. And one of the things I've noticed about entrepreneurs that become successful is their egos can get really inflated. And it's like, they think they're good at everything. You know, I was so bad at so many things that I needed to build a good team around me to compensate for all my weaknesses.

1:02:30And so don't hire and promote people that are just like yourself. You've already got that covered. You need to hire and promote people who have the qualities and skills that you don't have in the same degree. Because I'm a firm believer, our culture makes heroes out of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and I mean, all those guys, they're all brilliant people, but they also build great teams. And those teams are what make the business successful. Entrepreneur's the driver, but you're no better than your team. Would you say one of your strongest skills was your ability to build really good teams underneath you?

1:03:06Yes. Yeah? I do. What other skills would you say are you, what are your main... Well, so going along with that, well, I have a very strong sense of purpose. Yeah. And I can infuse purpose and help other people to see purpose. I have a certain charisma in that regard. And because I'm so passionate and I'm an intense guy, people are very attracted to passion in general. Anybody that's passionate about something, I find it fascinating. No matter what it is. No matter what it is. Yeah. They could be just a plumber, but he's really in there just working away. And you can see that they're figuring it out.

1:03:44They're solving it. It's like, wow, you're watching a master craftsman at work here. It's fascinating. Right. And great actors, any type of creative person. I just find it very, very interesting. I find the people that are passionate to be the most people I most admire in the world. Yeah. And people follow passion. They do. Yeah. They do because it helps. Passion comes from purpose for the most part. It's kind of connected. So you think that your strongest skill set is building great people and teams underneath you, having a lot of passion and purpose, and being able to instill that and kind of invigorate that in others, basically?

1:04:23I think a lot of entrepreneurs have those skills. I don't think those are... I think Elon Musk has that. I think Jeff Bezos... I mean, Bezos has it. I know Steve Jobs definitely have it. Well, he had it for sure. Yes, for sure. Yeah. So, but that doesn't mean all entrepreneurs are like that, but a lot of them are these intense people that are very mission-driven and people follow them because they, you know, I mean, you know, you ever read the story about how Steve Jobs got John Scully, who ultimately replaced him in Apple, the first guy around to work for him? No, it happened. They really wanted to bring in this, the board was pressuring Steve to bring in a professional manager.

1:04:59So this guy was like president of Pepsi. Oh, okay. So he was a big corporate, and Apple was kind of a pipsqueak company back then. His name was John Scully. So Steve is putting the pressure on him. Scully is going to have to give up a big, to come in as the number two guy under Steve. And it was a big step down, you might say. And so how does Steve convince him? He says, so John, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water to people? or do you want to come in and change the world? Because that's what we're doing. We're going to change the world. Which do you prefer, sugar water salesman or world changer?

1:05:37He had Scully with that argument. I think I did hear that before. That's a really good story though. But I remember hearing that now that you said it. So let me ask you something because then you stepped down from Whole Foods. You're 70 years old, you said. Why didn't you just retire and go enjoy your life? Like, why did you think, okay, now I just, you know, I'm leaving Whole Foods. I'm going to now start like a health and wellness facility chain or whatever. It's a good question. And definitely leaving one I've thought a lot about. Yeah. So imagine for a moment that you knew how to help thousands of people, maybe millions of people in the long run, live a healthier, more vital, longer life.

1:06:24And you did nothing. You just enjoy the rest of your life. When you got to the end of your life, how would you feel? I know I can help thousands of people be healthier. And maybe over time, after I'm long gone, Love Life continues to grow and develop, maybe millions of people. I can't not do it. I have to. Didn't you do that already with Whole Foods? I mean, people probably, you disrupted that market, right? So you kind of did that in a big way. Yeah, well, you know, I could have, in my book, The Whole Story, I talk about one of my co-founders who didn't want us to grow past one store. No, you laugh now.

1:07:00That first store was a gold mine. Yeah, I said that. I wanted to grow. And he said, John, why do we want to grow? We've got this one store. All we have to do is not blow it. We're going to all die really rich. Let's just keep doing it. We don't have to do anything else. Let's just live the good life. And I said, Mark, I don't want to do that. That's going to be boring. I don't want to do that. God, I want to build a company. I want to open Whole Foods markets everywhere. I want to help people eat healthier all around the country. And he says, that's ridiculous. We'll probably fail. He ended up quitting.

1:07:35A few years later, we'd gotten up to four stores, and we were struggling because the new stores didn't start as well. And so we had some growing pains, you might say. And he was so disgusted with me, he quit. Sold all his stock for a couple hundred thousand bucks and opened up a pizza restaurant. That was not a good financial decision on his part. It was not. No, it was not. So how involved are you? It's called Love Life. How involved are you? Are you really involved? Are you tangentially involved? Another good question. So I am CEO. I own about 70 % of the stock from the capital that I put in.

1:08:16But it is in LA and I'm in Austin. So Michael Robertson is the operator that's there running it. And so he's got chief responsibility for it. So I'm involved in all the major strategic decisions. I'm involved in the, we have regular meetings, executive team meetings. So a lot of the vision is not solely mine, but I was a driver of the vision and what we're trying to do. It was my idea. I'm the ultimate creator, although I have other co-founders. but I was the one that brought everybody together. Entrepreneurs bring people together and create enterprises. So I like to say that I brought money, wisdom, passion, but I'm not going to work as hard at Love Life as I did at Whole Foods Market.

1:09:05I don't have that. I'm going to be 72 years old in a month. So while I'm vital and healthy, I just don't, I'm not young. So I can't do the things that I could do in my 20s and 30s and 40s. That's just reality. So I'm somewhere between deeply involved and tangentially evolved, someplace in between. In between that. Yeah. But I think about love life. I mean, I think about it a lot every single day. So it is the main thing. It's the main focus of my life besides my marriage. How would you describe it, though? Are you trying to build a brand around, It's not a fitness, it's kind of like a wellness facility.

1:09:44It's a one-stop holistic health club, all under one roof. Remember, it's similar to Whole Foods in this regard. When Whole Foods opened up, there weren't any other national food supermarkets. They were small stores, and you had to go shop somewhere else. Our idea was we're going to be one-stop shopper for anybody interested in natural and organic foods. They don't need to go to any other store. People that are making this as lifestyle choice can just shop at Whole Foods. That was an original idea. It may seem trivial now, but nobody believed that would work 50 years ago. They all thought it was going to fail.

1:10:18And that's entrepreneurs always climb over a wall of skepticism and doubt. So we're creating a one-stop holistic health center. Everything you want is at Love Life. We've got the gym. We've got Pilates. We've got yoga. We've got physical therapy. We've got pickleball. We've got a restaurant. We've got a spa. We have primary health care. We have complete testing protocols so we can find out where you are. We are doing everything. It's a club. We want it to ultimately become a social club like a Soho house except all around wellness and health. We've got all the biohacks. We have all the recovery stuff.

1:10:54And the fascinating thing, Jen, is because of the boomers are aging, they're interested in longevity. The Xs are interested in that too. But now you have so much technology that's intervening in so many ways. We have testings getting better. Measurements are getting better. I mean, think about AI. In five years, like you see these metaglasses, five years from now, maybe less, we'll be having a wearable that's plugged into us. Maybe it's an earring. It might even be an earring that's inserted into, it's connected to our blood. And it's an AI there that we're going to talk to. And you don't have to look at your phone anymore because the AI will do anything you want.

1:11:32Right. And it'll also be monitoring you. It's like it'll say, Jen, your pulse rate's just gone up 20 points. What's going on here? Are you okay? Or your blood pressure, it just really, really zoomed up. I want you to take some deep breaths, relax, tell me what's going on. So I just think we're going to have this AI integrated in our wellness and health. We're going to become much more conscious. And I really think we're on the cusp of sort of a wellness health revolution that's going to change the world. And I'd like Love Life to be part of that. Yeah. There's so many different modalities now and things like that.

1:12:06It's such a noisy market. It is. It's incredible. It's very crazy. It's incredible. It's become like, you know, the wellness business is like a trillion dollar business. I mean, you know all this. I think people are very confused because they don't know what to list. Like when there's so much noise, everything becomes just difficult. Well, one of the reasons that you go to a place like Love Life is we're going to be a good editor for you. We'll be doing the research and figuring it out. Just like Whole Foods was an editor for Natural Organic Foods. What's your forecast? Do you want to build out like one a year?

1:12:39What's your plan? Our first plan is to get this one profitable. Right. And we're probably a year away from that. And then, but even before then, we're looking for a second location, which we want to really do in Austin because that's where I live. That's where we're headquartered. We can probably finance that separately if we find, but I'm very picky about locations. Yeah. I'm very proud of the fact the first 250 locations Whole Foods opened up were all successful. Well, I was going to say you picked locations. Great. Like I thought maybe when I went to Love Life, it was right beside that Whole Foods, like I was saying.

1:13:11Was that purposeful? Absolutely purposeful. It was like in the same mall. I happen to know where all Whole Foods Market's best stores are. Right. That must be one of the top stores, huh? It's like number three in Southern California. It is, right? Because it's so nice. You know, Airwana opened up just down the road. Oh, I saw that. I haven't been in there yet, but I need to go check it out. I wonder what that's going to do for business. I don't either. I don't know. And you don't care. Well, I could guess my daughter. I'm always going to care about the well-being of my daughter, but I'm not interfering with her life anymore.

1:13:42Exactly. If she wants to see me, she knows where I am. That is a great, I love that point. You're right. You married off your daughter to the richest man in the world. That's a great one. I'm just trying to think of something else I was going to ask you, which I never did before about whole foods. Because you're a vegetarian, right? Vegan. Vegan. Yeah. So whole food sells, of course, meat and all the things not vegan. Was that also, again, but most people. Do you remember that lesson I told you I learned with SaferWay? Yeah, SaferWay. It was a vegetarian store. Yes. It just didn't do very much business.

1:14:18It didn't sell. No. Yeah. And Love Life opened a vegan restaurant here. They did? Yeah. About almost, is it two years ago? Three years? Two or three years ago. I can't remember. Yes, it was in Culver City. We were going to have the first Love Life in Culver City. Oh, okay. Did you own that? Yes. Okay. It was called Love Life. And so what happened there, it's very interesting. We thought it was going to be a great location. We were doing the restaurant first, and we were going to open the medical and wellness center after that. And we had a corner location. It's where HBO is headquartered. Apple TV is across the street.

1:14:55Sony, Amazon Studios, they're all within a mile of that location. Netflix, within a mile of that location. So this was like streaming headquarters for the whole United States. Guess what happened after COVID? Nobody came back to work. Nobody came back to work. And so it was a ghost town there. There was nobody. HBO's was just empty. Apple was going to build another 575 ,000 square feet onto that. They canceled that project. Wow. So pretty much every retailer in that center has failed now. And the other restaurant that opened up also failed. So we had to walk away from it, canceled out. So that was a big write-off for us.

1:15:35We lost a lot of money there. But it was also a vegan restaurant. And so the little cafe we have in El Segundo is not vegan. No, it's not. No. Yeah. We might call it Plant Ford. It's got a lot of plant, but you can add in grass-fed beef. We get all our meat from Whole Foods, by the way. Oh, you do? Yes, it meets Whole Foods Market's standards, and we purchase it from Whole Foods. Okay, because, yeah, the whole computer system I saw, it was really good because you can take out any ingredient. It tells you how many calories and how much fat. It's a very savvy technology there. Yeah, thank you. So the moral of the story is you have to meet the market where you find it.

1:16:14If you're an entrepreneur, you can't force your own values on other people. And the reality is, much as I don't like it, only half of 1 % of the population of the United States is vegan. That's so tiny. Yeah. Vegan restaurants are failing everywhere in Los Angeles right now. I don't know if you know. Restaurants in general are failing, but the vegan restaurants are just going out of business. Ones I love, like Real Food Daily, which I always came here to eat. Yeah. Is it going out of business? They don't have anything open anymore. I thought they have one on La Cienega. No, that's closed. Really?

1:16:46I know because I wanted to go there. Yeah. It's closed. But you know what's interesting? That was really popular for a hot minute. LA was, along with New York, was kind of the vegan restaurant capital of the United States. But New York's losing them, too. I think the younger generation, they're back to the protein kit. Protein, protein, yeah, of course. I mean, it's all about protein. Like, I mean, if you go on Instagram, TikTok, everything is about eating more protein, protein, protein, protein. You know, if I can just take one minute to critique the protein obsession. Please, go ahead. So, you know, it's three macronutrients that our bodies need, right?

1:17:19There are calories. You get protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And Americans are obsessed. We eat more protein than any other country in the world. More protein than any other country in the world. We spend more money on healthcare than any country in the world, and we rank 48th in longevity. Have you ever heard of anybody having a protein deficiency? No. In fact, actually, you also, I'm going to give you another factoid to add to that. People's liver now, more than ever, is more toxic. There's more strain. All these liver cleanses and liver companies are coming out with things because people are eating so much protein, your body, I think, can't even digest the amount of protein.

1:17:59So here's what else people don't know what happens to these three macronutrients when you eat them. So extra fat that you eat that your body doesn't need, it just becomes fat on your body. Okay? The extra carbohydrates that you consume, they're the choice of energy that your body uses first. So first it burns carbohydrates from energy. Any excess carbs gets translated into glycogen and stored in glycogen. and then excess carbs beyond that will raise your temperature at night when you're sleeping so it burns off. And if it gets past then, then it'll be added to fat. Protein, on the other hand, cannot be saved by the body.

1:18:37You cannot save protein. So the protein that you don't use in the day doesn't go into some protein repository so you can use it the next day. If you don't need it to grow your hair, your fingernails, or repair bones, or whatever you would need to do with protein, new cells, It just goes through a very complicated process to basically turn it into something else so it can be eliminated from the body. This obsession with protein comes from partly the meat industry and partly health influencers like Peter Atiyah, for example, and Max Huberman. You mean Andrew Huberman? Andrew Huberman. Sorry. They were pushing.

1:19:15And I like both those guys. I listened to Huberman's podcast, and I like Peter Atiyah. lives in Austin, but I think they're misguiding people on the protein. They're not nutritionists themselves, and I don't think they're really following the science very carefully. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole thing right now. You've got two camps, right? You have the animal protein, and you have the vegan people, and they all go, they butt heads a lot. Well, there's not much of a vegan. It's become politicized. There's not a vegan camp because there's too few people. There's too few of them. Yeah. Too few of them.

1:19:48And I'm certainly not, I'm an ethical vegan, but I'm not pushing that on anybody else. And I think, you know, I'm kind of believing the Blue Zones diet, that you mostly eat plants. Yeah. That's how we evolved. But we also didn't evolve as vegans. We evolved as maybe if you go back far enough to the gorillas, they're vegan. Chimpanzees are 98 % vegan. Right. In general, humans grew up eating, hunting, and gathering. Mostly gathering, but they ate some animal foods. So I think that's part of our genetic structure. It's hard to get B12. We don't know of a single historical culture or tribe that was strictly vegan.

1:20:27So what do you eat? What's your day-to-day? What's your diet like? I follow, we'll call it a whole foods plant-based diet, meaning I try to eat as few processed foods as possible. And I start out the day with a huge smoothie. I make a whole Vitamix, a smoothie. It's half vegetables and half fruits. I really believe when people are obsessed about protein, did you know only about 1 % of Americans eat enough fiber? Yeah. By the way, I was just going to tell you, you know, fiber, 90 % of Americans don't eat enough fiber. I think it's more than that. Oh, really? I just saw, I just did a whole thing on fiber yesterday because I thought it's, I did a whole thing.

1:21:04Let's say it's 90%, fine. That means only 10 % get enough fiber. That's still very low. And who doesn't get enough protein? I know. So it's fiber is what, when people say, where do you get your protein? My, answer now is I get it from pretty much every food I eat. Where do you get your fiber from? Because you will not get any fiber from animal foods. You can get your fiber from your vegetables and your fruit. And whole grains and beans. And whole grains and beans, yeah. And some in nuts and seeds too. So that's like a total other area that people are like, their gut health is a wreck because they're not eating enough fiber.

1:21:34And antibiotics also. Yeah, and antibiotics, exactly. But I think protein though, especially at like middle age, you're talking about to keep on lean muscle mass and satiate your hunger and all these things, there's like a huge push for protein. But things in life, as you know, ebb and flow, right? Now it's all about protein. In a year from now, it's going to be all about something else. And that's what happens. You know what I call the low-carb diet? I call it the zombie diet. Right. Because no matter how many times it gets killed, it comes back in a new form. Oh my God. Think about the Atkins diet.

1:22:10South Beach diet. South Beach diet, keto. Paleo. Paleo. I mean, it's all the same. Now, carnivore diet. Carnivore diet. It's all the same. Yes. And you know, from your Whole Foods days, I bet one of your biggest money makers was protein. Anything protein. It is, exactly. If you look at sports nutrition, it still leads the category in our nutrition departments for sports nutrition, which is focused around protein and collagen. Protein and collagen. Yeah. Do you, what else do you eat then? What do you eat for lunch and dinner? So I, my favorite food, I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. I probably get 15 to 20 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

1:22:53Me too. So I eat a lot. Number two, look at you, look how thin and glowing you are. Oh gosh, thank you. I'm not that, I'm like normal thin, but yeah, I eat a lot of it. I don't know why people, this whole nonsense about don't eat fruit is such a load of crap. No, it's fruits. Oh. Probably the single thing people could do to improve their health the most would be to increase their fruit consumption. Do you know there was a study done where people ate nothing but fruit for 90 days in a controlled – they were locked up for 90 days. Do you think their blood sugar went up? No, their blood sugar went down.

1:23:28Did they gain weight? No, they lost weight. They eat as much fruit as they want. It can only be fruit. And their health got better and almost every one of their biometrics improved. Really? Every one of them did improve. And so, but the funny thing is I tell the story is because they set a world record. There's never been those large bowel movements in any controlled study before. Are you serious? I'm sure. Well, think of, I mean, listen, I totally, I would agree. And number one, I just think that fruit is such a, it's become like this villain. It's been villainized. It's so stupid. Number one.

1:24:00Because it's sugar. They think it's sugar. Because of the sugar. I haven't seen any obese person because they ate too many grapes. Oh, I have friends that are strictly fruitarians. Yeah, I'm sure. And they're very thin. And they're very thin. Because no matter what, like... Well, here's one way to think about it. So a pound of vegetables, if you eat a pound of vegetables, you're getting between 90 and 100 calories on average. If you eat a pound of fruit, you're getting about 300 calories. So to get 2 ,000 calories of fruit, you'd have to eat seven or eight pounds of fruit a day. That's a lot. That's a lot.

1:24:34I can do it, actually. If all you ate was vegetables, you'd literally starve to death because you couldn't get enough calories. I know. Although I will say, I'm a massive eater. I can eat four pounds of grapes in a heartbeat. Like, literally. But how many calories are in a tablespoon of oil? Probably. Isn't it like 120? A teaspoon of oil. 120 calories. Yeah. That's the most calorie-dense food that we have. If you show a plot for the obesity rate in America, it totally correlates with oil consumption. Really? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I believe it. Believe it or not, because of all the negative propaganda, sugar consumption has leveled off and began to decline.

1:25:11Really? But oil consumption continues to go up, and so does weight. That's interesting. I mean, are we talking seed oils? Sugar is a scapegoat. All oils. All oils. Sugar is always a scapegoat, though. But having a sugar from a Mars bar is very different than having an apple or an orange. Oh. I mean - Studies show, again, because of the fiber that comes along with the fruit. Yeah. And also, particularly berries. Did you know berries are like super food fruits because the pectin in the berries slows down tremendously absorption of the sugar into the body. Oh, yeah. So I've eaten strictly like fruits all day with a continuous glucose monitor on, and my blood sugar never spiked above a healthy normal.

1:25:52See, I know. You're preaching to the choir. I'm a massive fruit consumer. In fact, like I can eat like again. I was at Whole Foods, sorry to say, yesterday. Sorry to say. I spent like$25 on cherries. I'm telling you. God, the cherries this year are so great. They're delicious. I've been eating them like crazy. But that's my thing. And I'm not worried about getting fat from eating the fruit. I'm worried about getting fat from other things, like not moving enough and having, like you said, too much oil. You know, when I have this, people think that, oh, I'm going to have a salad. It's very healthy.

1:26:27And they're using salad dressing. It can be 2 ,000 calories in salad dressing because of what we're talking about. 120 calories per... I make my own salad dressings and they're delicious. How do you make yours? Vitamix. I can even tell you the principles of how to make a delicious salad dress. Okay, tell me. So the first thing is you need some kind of fat. That's why they generally have oil. But a better, healthier fat will be either nuts and seeds or avocados. So first you have a fat. Then you have to add some kind of acid to it, which could be vinegar, like a good balsamic vinegar, or it could be lime or lemon, even mustard.

1:26:59because it has vinegar in it. So then you have an acid. Then you want to have something that adds a little bit of salt to it. I don't, you know, you don't want it to be too salty, but you want it to be a little bit of salty, which you could get from soy sauce, tamari. Again, mustard would do for acid and salt. Add a little bit of salt. And then you go either, then you either go savory or sweet. You go sweet if you add fruit to it, like blueberries or mangoes. And you go savory if you add herbs to it. I love that and so you and then I almost never make the same dressing twice that's so good because it takes five minutes to make the most delicious salad dressing as you can possibly imagine nuts and seeds taste so much better than oil yeah so if you make it with almonds or walnuts or pecans or cashews or pistachios and then you get the acid right and then you can fine you can taste it and you can fine tune it and then you add some kind of liquid to it water most likely but you want to get the right consistency on it yeah it's all about the consistency.

1:28:00I always try to make salad dressings. And I'm always off by a little bit. You know what I mean? I'm not good at it. Here's the thing. If it's too thin, you just throw a little bit of more nuts and seeds in it, and that will thicken it up. If it's too thick, you just add a little more liquid. I'm going to try one tonight. Yes. I love that. Send me an email or something, how it goes. 100 % I'm going to. This has been very fun. Thank you for being on the show. It's been fun. Wow, it's been fun, Jen. You're a very interesting person. I really enjoyed talking with you. You're very interesting. And I'm so happy we finally got this on the books because I said I was very, I really wanted to interview you for so long.

1:28:35And I wish you so much luck with Love Life. Thanks. It's beautiful. It's, by the way, guys, I went to see it, like I said, just before. It's a beautiful facility. You have everything in there. And I think it's going to do really well. So. You know, even people that don't live close to Love Life, we have, we do have a medical only membership. So you can just join. Oh. Oh yeah. You can just join and we'll still give you occasional pass if you just want to come down to see the doc or whatever. But once you get the, you go in and you do the test and you do the DEXA scan and we get your blood run and we do the gut test and we get a lot back, then you can always just talk to your doctor on Zoom if you want to.

1:29:15And they can still create the optimum plan for you. And if you're ever in the area, you can still come in and use the facilities. And the real big selling feature is the pickleball court because that's, of course, the most popular. Do you like to play pickleball? I prefer other sports, but I know that people love pickleball. I love pickleball. Yeah, everybody loves pickleball. The reason why I don't love it yet is because I'm not good at it yet. I got to keep on playing. Were you a tennis player? I'm actually going to take – I'm taking tennis now. Okay. Because the tennis players are the ones that make the easiest transition to pickleball.

1:29:49But, you know, here's the thing. You can have fun playing Pokeball the first time you play it. It's much easier to play. It's kind of more like ping pong. It is like ping pong. And then you just find people that are at your level. That's the thing. It's no fun playing against somebody that's a lot better than you. Exactly. That's what it is with any sport, right? You want to find somebody who's just as good or bad as you. Or just a little bit better than you. A little bit better. That's how you get better. That's right. I was going to say, I misspoke. It's not getting someone who's worse. It's someone getting a little bit better.

1:30:18And I think it's a great social thing, right? Like to get together and do something interactive versus just staring at each other and having a meal. Like playing something together is a shared experience. I love it. Yeah. And one of the reasons we put it in a love life is pickleball is intensely social. When you play doubles, it's like you're bonding with the person on your team. Exactly. And then you maybe switch teams and you're still bonded with that person on the other side. I love it. But now you're bonding with the new person. I totally agree. And so we're trying to build this community at Love Life, and Pickleball really helps that.

1:30:53Yeah, I totally agree. Okay, guys, if you live in L.A., check out Love Life. And otherwise, again, thank you for being on this show. It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed talking with you. Thanks so much, Jen. Thank you.