John Mackey: From a Hippie Food Store to $22 Billion — The Whole Foods Story

24:07John Mackey:And it's transformed the world, not perfectly, not for the better, always. But again, the perfect's the enemy of the good. And overall, it's been for the good. And so that's why we like the gritty part of capitalism. But when you do it more consciously, you're doing it for purpose, for stakeholders. And then the third pillar is leadership. What kind of leader are you? The right kind of leader, the conscious leader, is one who is trying to fulfill the purpose of the business, not just line his or her own pockets, and cares about all the stakeholders and is trying to create value for them. And fourth, culture, because you're going to work in a place, culture matters.

24:48John Mackey:Are people going to be nourished by working in your organization or is it toxic environment? So a conscious culture is one that's like, I would say CEOs don't pay enough attention to the culture. They take it for granted or they delegate it to their HR department. I always took culture as like one of my most important jobs as a CEO is to create and maintain and evolve a healthy culture for people to flourish. They can be happy. And you know the two things are most important in a culture? The two things human beings most want is purpose and love. If you create those in your culture, not only is your business going to be most likely hugely successful, but your turnover rates are going to be low.

25:28John Mackey:People are going to give their best energy, their highest level of creativity, their most passion, because we are human beings, and we crave to have meaningful work and to be cared about.

25:40Darin Olien:How would that show up in your day-to-day life? How would you nurture? Because people want to be seen. They want to be heard. That's a great question. I'd like to take a quick break from this episode to thank our sponsor, Fatty15. That's right. I want to talk about something that isn't talked about enough, keeping ourselves healthy. Here's what I'm doing now to prioritize cellular health, supplementing with this new exciting research, and it's called Fatty 15. Fatty 15 has three times more cellular benefit than omega-3s or fish oil. This is dietary odd chain saturated fatty acids, OCFAs. There are present trace levels in dietary fat, some fish, and plants.

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29:31Darin Olien:How would that show up for you?

29:34John Mackey:If you're the CEO or the founder, but any leader, I think this is true for. But I was always very conscious that I was embodying the culture. Because you can talk all you want to. People pay attention to who you really are. How do you show up? Because otherwise they just think you're a bullshitter or you're a hypocrite. So I felt this responsibility to kind of be the representative of the culture and to embody the purpose myself and to live every day by example the importance of the stakeholders and trying to create a culture that allows people to flourish. And, I mean, that's being a good human being.

30:13John Mackey:It's meaning being positive. It means learning the basics of praise publicly, reprimand in private. Don't ever dress down people in public. It means being discerning. and sometimes you have to let people go for the good of the whole, but you can do that in kind ways, and you can do that where it's a win-win-win type of exit. It's about the great thing about business in a way is that it helps you grow as a human being if you're in a leadership role. The business, a question I used to ask, I ask myself all the time in Whole Foods and now I ask it at Love Life, what does the business most need me to do now and be now?

30:55John Mackey:because it changes over time. As your business grows, some of the things that you're good at, you still may be good at them, but maybe that's not what the business needs you to do anymore. In the early days of Whole Foods, when we were starting to grow, one of the most important things I could do was get involved in real estate, because the locations really make a difference. And if you mess one up, it could be the end of the story, because it will lose money and could drag the whole thing down. So we were very careful about real estate, and I put a lot of attention into it. But then eventually we got a good team in the real estate team, and I didn't need to focus there anymore.

31:29John Mackey:Still, there were no stores approved that our executive team did not ultimately approve. And so I stayed not working full time on that, but it was always we got together every couple of months to go over potential locations and approve them. The leadership did. So it's how you show up in the world, who you are. that is the most important thing a leader can do is be the kind of leader that you want to see in the world because that's what we need

32:01Darin Olien:well and it's also powerful because I believe in that ability to ask a question who do I need to be right now and what does this store require and that is a very active in the present kind of open situation that I think people can, whatever walks of their life they can get value from. You know, so this world of systems, I think about a lot. I think about food systems. I think about environmental systems. I think about health. I think about healthcare systems.

32:39John Mackey:Because it's all systems all the way down.

32:41Darin Olien:Yeah, and our ecosystem. and I'm involved in some clean energy stuff. And certainly with traveling in the early days of Shakeology, all over the world, I would see the world as it was more clearly laid out in the challenges. And it changed my life. And so I really look at our systems feeding us, pun intended, or are they hurting us? and so many, especially around the healthcare system. And when I actually really look at this and just take it on, I really can't still believe that our healthcare system is the way it is, just treating sickness and not taking in this wholism approach, which is why what you're doing with Love Life I think is absolutely 100 % needed, required.

33:49Darin Olien:And so for you, because I scratch my head at this stuff, I want my mom in Minnesota to have better access to other views of health and not poked and prodded and pilled up. But it takes me to kind of build up.

34:09John Mackey:I like that. I've heard that. I'm going to borrow that one.

34:13Darin Olien:Yeah. So so it frustrates me. I'm a small town kid from Minnesota. I like working hard, but I also now knowing what I know, my family in Minnesota doesn't get access to certain things and it frustrates the hell out of me. so for you this next vantage point this next kind of aha what what for you and why is this now your passion to change this system you know uh darren you said so many interesting things there so first of all um trying to understand the systems then you if you study history if you study the

34:57John Mackey:way things change over time things make more sense our medical systems this way because that was the right medical system at one time because remember this is a very interesting fact until we began to get better sanitation until we got antibiotics and vaccinations vaccinations started to come in late in the 19th century The average lifespan of humanity was stuck around 30. So it's only been the last 150 years. This is 150 years we've seen the lifespan rocket up. And part of that is due to our medical system. The sanitation, vaccinations, and antibiotics were sea changes for extending lifespan.

35:47John Mackey:So if you were a Civil War soldier and you got shot, they're probably going to have to cut your arm off because they had no way to stop the gangrene from just killing you. You're going to get infected and you're done. Exactly. And so medical care first was based on science, and that's how they began to get away from just sort of the snake oil salesman was science. But of course, science is continuing to evolve. But for most of the things that were killing people for most of our lifetime, I mean, most of our history was not poor nutrition. It was people, it was, we were dying not from chronic diseases.

36:34John Mackey:We weren't having heart attacks. We weren't getting cancer. We were living long enough. We were living long enough to have those things. We were dying from infectious diseases. So science, initially, medicine had to deal with things like tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, the big killers, the plague, the things that were – they didn't even have – you know, Louis Pasteur came along and said, you know, if you pasteurize this stuff. And we just didn't have the knowledge. And so science began to break us out, and we started to make progress. But what you've identified correctly is, well, that's not good enough any longer.

37:12John Mackey:Science itself is not, the way medicine is captured by the pharmaceutical industry, and so there's a pill for every type of thing, but it's no longer curing those diseases. It's mostly managing symptoms. So now your dissatisfaction, this is how we make progress in the world. You're dissatisfied. I'm dissatisfied. Literally millions of people are dissatisfied. That creates a market opportunity for entrepreneurs to come in and create new things. The government and that stuff always follows later. And so right now I am seeing, now that I've gotten into this field, one of the things that's blown my mind is how fast it's evolving.

37:55John Mackey:Not only is AI going to completely transform health, transform everything, but, I mean, no doctor is going to make a move without checking in with AI. And you have businesses like Function Health now, for example, that are using AI. You're not sending you to doctors necessarily. You're getting comprehensive blood examination, and then the AI is making recommendations for how you should change your habits and what else you might want to do. So I think now – and also the type of technologies that I'm seeing, the biohacking that's occurring. I think Americans are really susceptible to biohacking because we always want a shortcut.

38:35John Mackey:Yeah, we don't really want to change our diets and lifestyles. We just want a magic pill or a quick fix. But nevertheless, that being said, there's still amazing things that are happening that kind of blow my mind. And it seems like every week I hear something about some new cool technology, some new scanning technology. So I think we're on the cusp of literal health transformation. I'm just thrilled myself to be part of it because it was really when I looked down deep into my soul on my own journey in life, my own hero's journey, I see that I thought it was just selling natural and organic foods, but I realized, no, I wanted people to be healthier.

39:13John Mackey:And I wanted to be healthier myself. And food was obvious to me that we were on the wrong track. So food was the path that I took. But it turned out that after Whole Foods, I didn't just want to live on a beach and live the good life. I still had a quest for purpose to make a difference. And so that's shifted now into helping people to become. Love Life's mission is to help people be the healthiest version of themselves. Darren, we're all on a health journey. I could be healthier. You could be healthier. I will give you a trivial example because while I'm here in town, I'm not surprisingly a member of Love Life here.

39:52John Mackey:I live in Austin. But I saw my doctor here, and I'd done a bunch of blood tests. About a year ago, I started taking creatine as a recovery. But then, you know, being a good American, I went from 5 milligrams to 10 milligrams. More is better. Not a fit. More is better. Exactly. And so one of my kidney, one of my blood tests showed a slight, one of my kidney indicators was out of whack. And when we go back and compare it, as a doctor was going over my previous blood test, he said, when did you start taking the creatine? And be honest with me, how much are you taking now? So she said, John, you're taking too much creatine.

40:31John Mackey:What we need to do is we'll dial you back to five milligrams, see and take a blood test in six months and see if this resolves. Five grams. I'm sorry, five grams. Five grams. Five grams and then. You're taking the tablespoon.

40:45Darin Olien:Yes, exactly.

40:46John Mackey:And so let's see if this clears up. But my point is we now have, science is working with me to determine, it's like, okay, this may be the cause of that. and if it is then I'll stay at five grams and but what if I get off I go to five grams and it still doesn't it gets better but doesn't resolve itself maybe I need to go off it completely my point is we now have the science we have the measuring devices like apple watches and or rings that can track our sleep track our exercise when when we have AI integrated into that and we're gonna I fully believe in 10 years or less we're going to be having some kind of wearable AI that's going to be monitoring our overall.

41:26John Mackey:John, your blood pressure just went up 10 points. What's going on? Take some deep breaths here, buddy. Right, right.

41:32Darin Olien:Yeah, talking to you. Exactly. And because that's what's been missing too. It's been this kind of catch-all kind of idea. And really, we're all bio individuals. We're literally millions and millions of synapses and cellular changes trillions trillions trillions happening in every nanosecond right so how can we possibly think that that supplement is going to be at that dose is going to be perfect for me you can't and so i i too that i was talking to some friends who are doing um voice recognition of diagnostics. So beyond the hearable voice, they're getting pretty good at diagnosing what's going on inside the body.

42:25Darin Olien:From just hearing the voice? Just hearing the voice. Wow. You're picking up on subtle changes and they go as deep as you want. Cool. Yeah, so hormones, vitamins and minerals, and then recommendations.

42:41John Mackey:Another thing to add to love life through our protocols. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

42:44Darin Olien:Yeah, so I can put you in touch with those because that, for me, you know, we're not far off. You have a love life, and I'm going a little bit different angle on super life. I want my driving force, even when I formulated Shakeology. I want, and this actually is a little personal. This goes back to I was born 1970, and I was three and a half pounds. I was two months early. Wow. And it was a 50-50.

43:14John Mackey:Now look at you, dude.

43:15Darin Olien:Yeah. Eating plants, still going. But the imprint, the messaging that I got right away was I may not live. This is a fragile thing.

43:29John Mackey:You mean you got that on some subconscious level? It's a deep, deep, yeah.

43:32Darin Olien:And I track it, you know, throughout my life. There was this thing, and there were things happening. My body took a while to catch up.

43:41John Mackey:That's still a psychological block in you, do you think?

43:45Darin Olien:I think, you know, it became a superpower for sure because when I would hit adversity in life, I would go and I'd go around it and figure it. And I think that trauma, because ultimately it's trauma, it's fear. And that is being released as the more I don't pretend it didn't happen. But the point is that the shadow side is I could be paralyzed by that as my life. And then the things happen in life and I don't. I'm a small town kid. There's no reason I should be even sitting here in California doing any of what I've done. I did a docu-series. I did Shakeology. I did all this shit. And I'm not even close to being done.

44:34Darin Olien:so that I want ultimately not people to be afraid of life or be a victim to life but actually have let's reinvent what life could be and so that's where I come from so I love I love being able to see if we can scale this and that's my next question for you how do we how do we make this really cool stuff that you and I and a few people can get access to and hopefully that population how do we scale that in a way that competes against this this massive health care system I mean that that to me would be my brother my sister my my mom getting access to holism as a result of siloed, fractionized health.

45:32John Mackey:You know how these things happen generally? It's first year. Remember I told you that story about how the guy said, you're just a bunch of hippies and that's never going to amount to much. What ends up happening is when you create something that really is creating value for other people, it may start to grow slowly, but then word gets out and people begin. Almost every brand that you can ever think of starts kind of slow, but then it explodes at some point because it's like it's time has a – so ideas, they go through – good ideas go through certain stages. It goes something like this. That's a shitty idea.

46:15John Mackey:It's never going to work. Entrepreneurs hear this all the time because if it was a good idea, how come somebody's not already doing it? And so first there's skepticism. And well, first, and they just ignore you. It's like, pay attention to that. It's not even worth thinking about. Then they're skeptical. Then the next phase is, is they start to argue against it, all the reasons why that's probably not going to work. And then they're sort of like, I guess, live and let live, you know, different strokes for different folks. They sort of have a sort of there's I that's not for me, but I guess I tolerate it.

46:48John Mackey:And then finally, it takes off. And people look back and say, well, that's obvious. Duh. Everybody knows that. Only everybody didn't know that for a long time. What you're saying, you've just gotten further in your own consciousness. You can already see the duh. Of course that's the way it should be. Well, that's just, you're just ahead of your time. Every good entrepreneur is ahead of their time. Hopefully not so far ahead of your time that you're just seen as like a lunatic. You can't get any traction. But just far enough ahead of your time that you can create something that other people like, they get excited about.

47:27John Mackey:The early adopters take it, and then it grows, and then it reaches takeoff point. I mean, another example in our lifetimes, look how electrical vehicles. I mean, I remember, did you ever watch that movie, Who Killed the Electric Car? Sure, of course. You know, it was kind of a conspiracy theory that the General Motors and those guys were shutting it down. And then Elon Musk comes along, or the pioneers that he worked with, the scientists that he worked with, the company that he ended up buying, if you know the whole story. And, you know, he creates that first Model S. It's super expensive. He had early adopters take it.

48:06John Mackey:He was going to pay$100 ,000 for a car. Some people did. And then my tech friends that bought it were saying, John, this is the most amazing car. You just got to drive it. It's so expensive. And I mean, where are you going to reach? So I was sort of like the skeptic. And he said, well, you just drive the damn thing. So I drove the car, and it's like, wow, you're right. So then, of course, I went out and bought a Tesla. And then, but I bought it early enough where now it's sort of, and if he hasn't completely killed his brand with this politics, the brand started, it just took off, right? Tesla became at one time Tesla was worth more than all the other public traded automobile companies in the world combined.

48:49John Mackey:So my point is it went from zero to a lot. But it started slow and then it took off. So I think the change that you and I want to see in the world, I'm already telling you it's going to happen. It's going to happen in our lifetimes. And I've already given you some clue. AI is going to be transformative in it because that's going to help people. It's going to help empower people to make different changes in their lives. So I'm excited about it. I'm glad to be part of it. And you ask how it's going to happen. We don't have to necessarily know how it's going to happen because it's going to emerge.

49:25John Mackey:New entrepreneurs are going to do things you and I can't even think about. We're going to look at it and say, that's a terrific idea. I'm going to copy that. And then I'll innovate and iterate on that. And you make progress because entrepreneurs are in there copying each other, studying each other. Look how this AI now is making so much progress because, A, there's hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into it. And everybody and their brother is trying to get into it. And it's just accelerating at a rapid rate.

49:53Darin Olien:Yeah, every other person is working in AI.

49:55John Mackey:That's going to happen to holistic health care.

49:57Darin Olien:I mean, the biggest, just a caveat on the AI thing, its biggest challenge is a physical challenge because the power systems.

50:07John Mackey:Oh, electricity.

50:08Darin Olien:The electricity, the land, all of that stuff, the data centers, that's its biggest.

50:15John Mackey:I was reading how much electricity it takes for if you just do a simple query to chat GPT, it's got an electrical trade-off.

50:23Darin Olien:Exactly. Big time.

50:25John Mackey:Same thing with crypto, I might add. Yeah.

50:26Darin Olien:Exactly. So we're relying on those systems more and more and more. And yet our power grid in California isn't even close to being. Well, that's on the California government. Exactly. But, you know, without getting into the details, I can show you some videos after this podcast. I do know friends in the clean energy space that have made advancements in a way that I am confident will blow your mind after we're done.

50:55John Mackey:I look forward to seeing that. I could say I'm a believer that nuclear power is – we were scared of it because of the radiation and plutonium and atomic bombs and whatnot. But that is a carbon-free energy source. Human beings are not going to stop using electricity. They're not going to be satisfied with just wind and solar. I just think that I almost have a limitless belief in human creativity. I think it's if we unleash it and let it experiment, and it just keeps going faster and accelerating because of things like AI that can help. Think about people used to have supercomputers. Now, I mean, you have a little iPhone that's got the kind of power that you used to have in a supercomputer.

51:46John Mackey:And so people are able to do things today they couldn't do in the past. So we might say evolution is accelerating.

51:54Darin Olien:Yeah. It is an interesting thing. It's like these things are all in how you use them too, right? So, you know, the Internet has a very dark side of how people use it. AI can have a dark side. But for me, when I play with AI, it's a creative tool. Sure. Because I'll throw in some like, oh, my God. Okay. And then it's how you ask it, where you want to come out of it. And it opens up my field of possibilities. Which is an amazing.

52:27John Mackey:So it's you're into super life. So it's making you super smarter. Yeah, exactly.

52:35Darin Olien:Yeah. So what's the next steps with love life now? You have how many locations? Just the one? We just have the one location.

52:44John Mackey:Maybe I should talk about Love Life a little bit. So Love Life is our first locations here in El Segundo, south of the airport, Beach Cities, near Manhattan Beach. It's a one-stop holistic health center. And it's big. It's an old Best Buy. It's located next to one of Whole Foods Markets, the most successful stores in Southern California. I know all Whole Foods best locations. and it's got great visibility, good parking, good access. So you go into Love Life. The first thing you'll see is that we've got a healthy cafe, healthy food cafe. So food was where I got started, and I know it's still food is really one of the keys to longevity and wellness, and people underestimate its importance.

53:36John Mackey:and then we have a big gather room a community room where we can we have classes we hold events we have lectures we have guest speakers we may have live podcasts can be done there and we'll have retreats they'll be centered around that as well then we you come in and you check in and then so uh like the cafe is open to the public you don't need to be a member but if you are a member you get a 10 discount at the cafe so you come in and then we have a really nice fitness center, a gym, very technologically advanced fitness center like you might see at Equinox or any of the good, really high-quality fitness centers.

54:17John Mackey:We're really trying to, from a healing wellness standpoint, we're trying to have all these different types of modalities. So we have a large room dedicated strictly to physical therapy. So the doctors can send patients over there to work. We have really good physical therapists. So we have physical therapy. We have a yoga studio where we also do breath work. We have a Pilates studio for Pilates. We do acupuncture. We have all kinds of different modalities that we can work with people from traditional Chinese medicine to Reiki to almost anything you can imagine. We have a spa. So we have a very beautiful spa with great therapists there, again, doing a whole bunch of different kinds of treatments.

55:06John Mackey:We have three indoor pickleball courts. And we have a medical center that, let me say we have a big recovery area where we're doing a lot of biohacking recovery type stuff. So we have cryotherapy. We have pimp machines. We have hyperbaric oxygen chambers, red light therapy. We have six cold plunges. We have giant steam room, giant sauna, infrared sauna, lymphatic suits. We're adding new technologies on. We're going to add this Evolve technology on that is a virtual. This will start in 2026. It's going to be a headset that you wear that also measures your brain wave, so it can help you learn how to go deeper in meditation into alpha, theta, and delta states.

55:55John Mackey:It's one that can get coherent, make your heart and brain coherent through training. Then we have the medical center. So we want to be your primary health care solution. This is different. This is where the rubber meets the road. It starts out with people becoming medical members, end up, we do comprehensive testing. In order to get you healthier, we have to know your baseline. We have to know where you're at. And so that's through blood. That's through your gut, through gut tests. That's going to be through your oral health. We're going to do a DEXA scan. In some cases, we'll do MRIs if necessary.

56:41John Mackey:We've got so we do all those testing. And then once we get the testing results, we're going to have a doctor, a primary health care doctor. We've got a whole medical team, a wellness team there, that's going to huddle together and work out sort of a plan for you, if you remember, Darren. A lifestyle plan. A lifestyle plan, what supplements you might need, what you should change, dietary recommendations, exercise recommendations. And then we start to track you. We track you via wearables, like Apple Watch or Oura Ring. Garmin continuous glucose monitor, if your blood sugar shows any irregularities, that can be a very useful tool.

57:31And then it's about watching you transform yourself over time.

57:38John Mackey:I was just meeting with the medical team just a few days ago, and we're just about to complete our first year, Darren, and they were telling me some of these stories of people that have transformed their health that came in, and a year later, if they were type 2 diabetics that no longer have to take any meds, they've lost a lot of weight in some cases, or they've just taken their wellness up to a higher level of vitality. And it's all tracked. Yes, it's all tracked. It's not just an idea. That's right, and we're documenting it. In fact, I was talking to the team. I said, you know, we've got to get these stories out there to protect anonymity for the names, but we need to get the stories out there and we need to tell the rest of the the rest of our team here about how much success we're having and we also need to begin to use it in our marketing yeah

58:28Darin Olien:because it's team building to your employees who are doing something good but it's also a story that you need to let others know

58:38John Mackey:let me tell you a story so back in the days of Whole Foods we were self-insured Whole Foods is still self-insured and so that means that we paid all our we paid all the health care bills. And we had an administrator that paid the bills, but it was our money that was paying the bills. And they would come up with a network of doctors to work with, so like UnitedHealthcare or Aetna could be two big providers that we've worked with over time. But what we discovered, Darren, is that 10 % of our team members spent 90 % of our health care dollars. So it's like, what's it about those 10 %? Now, in some cases, it could be unexpected cancer or somebody had a premature baby or had a motorcycle accident.

59:23John Mackey:But in general, most of it was chronic diseases, obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease. I would argue cancer is mostly a lifestyle disease as well. It's one that if you may not absolutely be able to prevent it, you can lessen the risk of it tremendously through dietary and lifestyle changes. And so we began to invite those 10 % to come into what we call a total health immersion, where we worked four times a year with different doctors in different parts of the country. Our team members would apply to come, and we took the ones that were in the 10%. And then we added their spouse to it as well if they wanted to have a spouse come.

1:00:06John Mackey:And what happened in a week, we took control of the food. We taught them the basics of healthy living, healthy lifestyle. even in one week, which doesn't seem very long, people can make tremendous progress. We saw, in many cases, type 2 diabetics get off of their meds in just seven days. We saw people that are obese could routinely lose 7 to 10 pounds in that week. Cholesterol would plummet 30 to 40 points. High blood pressure might plummet 30 to 40 points as well. It's just amazing. My last takeaway from that was a couple. One is the human body is actually incredibly resilient. If you stop poisoning it, it begins to heal.

1:00:47John Mackey:It's incredible. It's made to heal. It wants to do it. It wants to heal. Stop poisoning it. Exactly. The second thing I learned is that even people that were healed, there was a high rate of recidivism once they got out of that healthy environment. Now, some people got the lessons and never looked back. I still would travel around to our stores, and people would hug me and say, you changed my life. thank you so much for making this opportunity available to us. And others would apologize. It's like, I know what to do, but it's hard. It's really hard. Food addictions, they don't say food addictions, but the food addictions are deep.

1:01:22John Mackey:It's hard. And here's the most important thing. If you're not in a healthy community, it's very difficult. Let's say you were an alcoholic and we sent you to rehab for 90 days. You come back, you're sober, you don't crave alcohol. But if you go back to the same set of friends, what they'd like to do is go to the bars on Friday nights, and go clubbing, you're probably not going to stay sober. You need a new set of friends. You need a new community. That's what we couldn't do at Whole Foods that we can do at Love Life. We've created a community of people that want to be the healthiest version of themselves, and they're going to be around other people that are on similar journeys.

1:01:59John Mackey:So there's that support group that's there, and hopefully they bring their whole family in, and they become members of Love Life, and then you can deal with the whole system. Remember how you were talking about systems before? Well, we have healthy lifestyle systems that are rooted in our families and our friends. So you want to change the system? Well, you have to change the system, not just the individual. For sure.

1:02:26Darin Olien:Yeah, and that's the key, man. And community, we know, is one of the most powerful tentacles for longevity and happiness. We need to create healthy communities.

1:02:37John Mackey:Yeah, we do.

1:02:38Darin Olien:Yeah, so you've created these proverbial four walls. That's what I know how to do. Yeah, yeah, and powerfully.

1:02:45John Mackey:So hopefully we'll open these all around the country. That's the plan. That's the plan. Yeah.

1:02:48Darin Olien:What's the scaling opportunity?

1:02:51John Mackey:So I think I mentioned previously that it took Whole Foods. Yeah. It took us 14 years to get to 12 locations. So Love Life may be a little bit similar to that in the sense that finding locations is difficult. But first, we're not yet profitable. So we have about half the members we need right now to be profitable. But the big test that's going to happen in the next few months is the first member's anniversary, are they going to renew? Now, I think that we think they are, but we won't know until they do. So if they renew and we continue to compound new members, then a year from now we should be probably profitable and maybe highly profitable.

1:03:32Darin Olien:How is the economics? We're looking for a second location right now.

1:03:37John Mackey:Not in L.A., though. It'll be in Austin, where I live. This is a long way for me to go to see my doctor.

1:03:41Darin Olien:Yeah, you should. And Austin's a receptive community. It's a great community.

1:03:47John Mackey:It's got a lot of people from L.A. living there now.

1:03:50Darin Olien:It does. There's an exodus, for sure.

1:03:56Darin Olien:Is there ever a world to which there can't— Do you see an opportunity for insurance to play a part of this wholism approach?

1:04:07John Mackey:The answer is yes, of course. The answer is not yet is the true answer because it's geared for an entirely different medical system where prevention is not really what it's about. And it's been, we'll say it's been warped or corrupted a little bit as well. You have a system where it's a sick care system. It doesn't make any money if people are well. As one of my holistic doctors once told me, he said, you know, John, you know what the problem with my medical practice is? I said, what is that? He says, my patients all get well. So they're well. They don't need that doctor any longer. Our system is not really geared to getting you well.

1:04:52John Mackey:It's getting you on a lot of pharmaceutical drugs that have – I mean, you see the TV commercials. You know, it's like, you know, ask your doctor, but then the side effects of this are terrible. It's death and psychosis. It's good with you. The psychosis or death. Ask your doctor. We've bribed your doctor. Your doctor will say what we want him to say.

1:05:13Darin Olien:I mean, if we flip the whole thing in terms of subsidizing health and supporting the system and the doctors to be rewarded in some way for the health of their patient. Yeah. How amazing would that be?

1:05:29John Mackey:That would be amazing. I think that's what the new system will look like. But the other system, you're not going to just tear it down. What's going to happen is you're going to have entrepreneurs, you're going to have new innovations that occur, Love Life, but thousands of other innovations as well that will begin to change the old system until it's not even recognizable. insurance is is I call it I'll say it's going to be one of the last dominoes to change it'll follow when because government is slow to react so first you'll have entrepreneurs change things then people will start demanding it but why that's not fair why do these you know rich people have this and why doesn't everybody have this and you'll start having you'll have politicians getting up there and saying I'm promising you that we're going to have you know preventive holistic health care and your community blah blah blah blah and and so that's how it'll change yeah and and but the insurance will not be one of the first things to change it'll be one of the last things to

1:06:30Darin Olien:change for sure they're a very old pillar in this whole system it's true for sure john mackie you're awesome i'm stoked for i'm gonna come visit love life let me know when you're coming i'll make sure you get the vip tour hey oh and i love it because in a building where you have medical facilities, biohacking, health, working out all in the same place to curb, create a culture, a community. And you show it, and then the horses are out of the starting gate.

1:07:07John Mackey:You know, once you create something that people really want, other people take note. I think half the people that visit us are people that are competitors in some way or another. And that's okay because I want the ideas to spread. I want there to be love life knockoffs. That's how we're going to change the world. Yeah.

1:07:28Darin Olien:Yeah. Thanks, brother. Okay. Thanks, John. Appreciate it, man. Awesome. Dude.

1:07:35John Mackey:Good one.