Whole Foods Market Founder, John Mackey’s Journey of Love, Life, and Capitalism: Hippie to Heavy Hitter

27:51We don't need to do anything else. We've got it made. Don't screw it up. And there I was, screwing it up. That's how he saw it. I was screwing it up. and he just knew I was going to wreck it all. It was a matter of time. And he just wanted to get out before I was able to wreck it. And he just, he didn't understand me basically and he didn't trust me. So I get that. He had his own business. He was in control of it. And now we had this one store. He worked really hard in it. It was very successful and very profitable. And he's right. If we'd stayed in that one store, Or we'd have had a nice long run.

28:31Eventually we would have gone bankrupt because competition came along. But we could have had a nice long run, and Mark would have made a lot of money. And that's really what he wanted to do. And that really wasn't what I – I wanted to make money too, but that wasn't my primary goal. I wanted to grow a business. I wanted to build a business. And he just – I don't know. Again, he called me wacky-macky. He thought I was nuts. I don't know how else to put it. He's not here to defend himself. He would probably tell you all kinds of crazy things John did that John has conveniently forgotten. You never kind of like years later sort of met and said, hey, water under the bridge?

29:10You know, I tried. And when we created a hall of fame for Whole Foods Market, Mark was a first-round inductee because he was one of the founders of the company. And he came to our big celebratory dinner. But I think that was, I think, I don't know this for sure, but I think that was really hard on Mark because he'd made a bad decision. He'd sold all of his stock and he'd created a pizza company, which ultimately failed. And if Mark had stayed in the business, if he'd held onto his stock, he'd have been worth, he wouldn't have just been rich, he'd have been mega wealthy. He'd been super wealthy.

29:48And it was a huge mistake to make in his life and faced with our success there. I never, ever saw Mark in a Whole Foods Market store after he left, ever again. He didn't even shop there. And I think, you know, people want to be right, and there's a tendency to root against the team that, you know, I don't think he was pulling for Whole Foods after he sold it. He wanted us to fail. He said I would, when he left, he said, I know you're going to wreck the company. Instead, the company went on to these great and glorious things, and Mark could have been part of that. But I think going to our celebratory dinner and seeing our success was probably really hard on him just because he wasn't part of it.

30:29And he'd made a mistake, and he couldn't rectify that mistake. I don't know for sure. I'm just guessing. And if he was here, he might say something completely different. Now, one of your other initial founders was your girlfriend Renee. You were 23. She was 19. you were working in the food co-op together and decided to do your own. And, you know, ultimately, like people do from the ages of 29 and on up, she changed and changed her interests and you guys split up and she had other things going on in her life. Did she end up remaining a shareholder? Renee did, and she ultimately made a lot of money on her investment.

31:12um so she kind of has a happy ending there and she has her own business in talus new mexico and she she married raised up a daughter and i think she's you know by all counts had a very happy life and it seems like a lot of your relationships were interwoven with your your your business i think it's hard as an entrepreneur to have relationships outside of a business frankly like like for my own self i've never had a business obviously like whole foods but just the businesses I've started, I would sooner or later realize, hey, all of my friends and social interactions are completely related to my business.

31:50It's hard to move away from that. I mean, I think it's true. At least the first 20 years I did the business until 9-1-1 happened and I began to realize that I needed to do some other things in life before I passed on. I think that's probably true. Almost all my relationships were connected to Whole Foods, one way or another. Except Deborah. Yeah, you met outside of Whole Foods and ended up marrying her. And so then I suppose I had new friends that came from her side. But there's only a certain amount of time in the day, right? And between when you're married, if you're working really hard. If you are trying to exercise, it was just hard to maintain other relationships.

32:46I'm in a better place today because I have a ton of relationships outside of Whole Foods. And in fact, outside of Love Life, I'm just an older, wiser person. I understand the importance of those relationships. And I had other friends that didn't work for Whole Foods, but I just I didn't have the time to keep them up. A relationship needed to be nourished. I didn't always nourish them as well as I think I should have. I didn't have a healthy, a personal culture, using your metaphor. Do you think when you're older, it is possible? Like when you're younger, it's possible to have quote-unquote best friends.

33:22It's just the kid who lives in the house next door. You walk over there anytime you want, and you can go play baseball or whatever. Do you think when you're older, it's possible to make good, long-lasting life friendships? Yes, because I have so many of them. Absolutely. It's all about the energy you put into the relationship. And when you're younger, you put a lot of energy into it. And you go through a phase in your life where you're building your career. Maybe you spend less time nourishing those relationships. Or if you have kids, you spend more time trying to nourish those relationships. But I'd say today, I have so many friends that I love and I'm close to.

34:01And most of them are not involved in work in any way. I've nourished those relationships. So yes, it's possible. Now, you mentioned, you know, Mark would call you wacky-macky. I feel like lots of people, either to your face or behind your back, would call you that over the decades. It's like, you know, after your IPO and you're posting on – I remember this. The day was – the news was out there or the article was out there. Somebody said, oh, the CEO of Whole Foods is posting anonymously on the wild oats market at the same time that they're buying the company. And it was just like a funny story, but that's a wacky thing for a CEO to do.

34:47I guess. I don't know. Of course, I didn't go to CEO school, so I'm not sure how CEOs are supposed to act.

34:57I'll tell you a story. You would post on the Wild Oats board, oh, the CEO of the Whole Foods is the most handsome CEO out there. No, no, no. I never did that. That joke was on the Whole Foods, not the Wild Oats Bulls board. I only post it occasionally on Wild Oats. The media blew that completely out of proportion to the reality of the situation. I was just having fun. I mean, I liked defending Whole Foods Market. And this was like before you had social media, those bulletin boards were an opportunity. Everybody had screen names. And it was fun. I enjoyed it. I stopped doing it after I lost a bet with a short.

35:41I was always arguing for pro Whole Foods on the bulletin board, Yahoo bulletin board for Whole Foods. And this guy was always shorting Whole Foods. And we made a bet. I lost the bet because he said the stock would be below this number, this date. And I said, no way it will be. And I'll tell you what, if it's above that number, you get off the board. If it's below that number, I'll get off the board. And it was below the number, barely. And I got off the board. So I never posted again on that bulletin board. but uh and so it was about six months later that it's i go into it in detail in the book you had a you had a ftc was trying to stop our merger with wild oats and they probably are the ones that notified the wall street journal to this because they hey they got 10 million documents from whole foods and including my whole computer so they probably leaked it i don't know that for a fact Somebody leaked it, and not too many people knew.

36:38And then the next thing I know, I'm getting investigated by the SEC for insider trading. The whole thing was a circus. We ultimately triumphed in all those things, but my reputation was deeply damaged. As you say, wacky-macky. But for me, I'm a playful guy. I am playful. Entrepreneurs generally are playful people. And it was a form of play, entertainment. It was a game. And my book starts out with the game of life and ends first chapters about the game of life. And the final chapter is about the infinite game. Game playing is a huge theme throughout my whole entire lifetime. And posting on a bulletin board for me was nothing more than a game.

37:22And I had fun doing it. And sorry I lost the bet to that guy. But I was honorable and I stopped posting. And the idea of an infinite game is interesting because obviously you say your reputation was damaged, but obviously it survived. You grew, you flourished, you transformed in many ways throughout the book, throughout the life cycle of Whole Foods in your career. So I think that's a view people have to take is that whatever happens in the short term, it's not the end of the world. There's very few things that are the end of the world. And you sort of showed that quite a bit. I mean, I think most entrepreneurs, I can't speak for everyone, but every entrepreneur is going to be criticized.

38:12Because if you're a successful entrepreneur, almost by definition, you're thinking outside the box. You're seeing things other people don't see. You're creating something that's generally not just a me-too thing, but you're doing things that are different than the way other people do things. And so entrepreneurs are just frequently criticized, and you have to overcome a wall of skepticism. And I think for me, I was told I was going to fail so many times with Mark telling me that when he was leaving, but he was not the first and he wasn't the last. I've had it. A venture capitalist told me that.

38:49I had so many people tell me that what you're doing is nuts, crazy, it's going to fail, blah, blah, blah. I even had one team member that left Whole Foods, and she came in and told me she was leaving. And I said, you know, she really wanted to talk to me. So I have an open door, so I talked with her. And she said, you know, you're not like us. You don't act like a CEO is supposed to act. And I said, I don't? How is a CEO supposed to act? Well, you know, look at you. You've got long hair. You dress in shorts. You're not a professional business guy. You don't look like a business guy. And I said, how's the business doing?

39:24and she says, well, it's doing pretty good, but it shouldn't be. I said, why not? She says, because you're not a good CEO. And I said, well, why aren't I a good CEO? And she couldn't really put her finger on it, except that I just didn't look the part. I didn't act the way she thought I was supposed to act because I just, I'm just myself. I just show up as who I am. I wasn't trying to be a CEO. I was trying to be a good leader. Leadership and CEOs are not synonyms for each other. You can be a good leader and maybe don't live up to somebody else's opinion of what a CEO is supposed to look like or do.

39:59But ultimately, the results are what count, right? So I always use all those criticisms I took about how I was going to fail. I didn't know what I was doing. I'm a bad CEO. I don't act the right CEO is supposed to act. I always took it as ways for me to, okay, I'm going to show you. I'll show you what I can do. And I'll show you what Whole Foods can do. And so I always used it to kind of stoke my ambition, my drive, my desire to overcome criticisms, overcome the obstacles. It would always create determination in me, not discouragement. But you were talking about earlier about why didn't you quit when you're after the flood?

40:38I said, well, I would let everybody down. There was a second factor, which is maybe the most important factor, which is I just view setbacks as opportunities to, okay, there's a lesson here. What can I learn from this? And I'm going to do better next time. There's just that resilience. You have to have, if you're an entrepreneur, you're going to have setbacks. You're going to have failures. You're going to have criticism. You have to be very resilient. You have to be willing to get back, pick yourself back up and get back in the game and do it better next time and not be discouraged and not get into that negative self-talk that you're somehow or another a failure, you're not any good, or you don't know what you're doing, you'll definitely sink the boat if you start thinking like that.

41:19So you have to, I just always view everything as a learning opportunity. When you make a mistake or you have a failure or setback, it's like, okay, what can I learn from this? I'm going to do better next time. I think that characteristic I'm describing is true of every time I've read books about entrepreneurs, it's true for all of them. Entrepreneurs, the ones that succeed, they just keep learning and growing and they get better. They have many failures along the way.

42:05you know it seems like throughout the life cycle of whole foods one thing that you're particularly good at was you had this instinct for expansion like rather than say oh we need to have these products rather than these products, it seemed like your natural thoughts about the business would go to where can we expand to next? And okay, now we'll go to other parts of Texas. Now we'll go to California, Northern California. And, and you know, where it seemed like of your initial founders, like Craig maybe had an instinct per store, perhaps what should be in a store. I don't really know, but, uh, you yourself seem to have a good instinct for, for expansion.

42:45And that, That seems to be very important for an entrepreneur that's going to be incredibly successful, particularly of a physical goods store like what Whole Foods was. I think that's true. I mean, as Craig said early on, he said, you know, John, you're really good thinking about the future. And I'm really good thinking about the present. And that's true. And that's why we made a good team. Craig was so good in operations. He was so good at the day-to-day part of running a store in a retail business. And I was good about thinking about what we needed to do to grow. Um, that we, we both were, we had both, those were our superpowers.

43:22And, and, uh, I think there are different kinds of entrepreneurs. I was always a builder kind of entrepreneur. I, I, I didn't want to have just one store as Mark did. I never wanted to have just one store. Once I had one successful store, let's see if we can do a second successful store. It's, it's, that's the, that's the fun of the game. That's the challenge is to keep creating, keep building, keep – and make every store better than the last store because every store is a new opportunity to paint a new painting. And you can – it's not the same painting. It's – you can create a better painting than the one you did previously.

43:59So I think that creativity is a big part of me as well. The three things I emphasize throughout the book and I sum up in the very end of the book, I talk about let us love, let us create, and let us play forever because it's love creating and playing to me that all lead to such a deeply fulfilling life that I've had. And I do that for all eternity. Those are fun things. Those are good things. They're all good. You know, as you were expanding, how did you know when you should build from scratch a new store as opposed to, let's say, buying an existing store or chain? Like, you know, how you bought Wild Oats, but in many other cases, you just simply went someplace and built a new Whole Foods.

44:48Well, sometimes there's nothing worth buying. But like Trader Joe's, like, did you ever consider going for Trader Joe's or something like that? But hey, if Trader Joe's had ever been for sale, I certainly would have been bidding for them. But Trader Joe's was – people don't even know anything about Trader Joe's. They never talk to the media. Trader Joe's is a very closely controlled company. And people don't even know. They're just not even American-owned. The guy that started Trader Joe's, he sold that company to a German family, the Albrechts, I don't know, 40 years ago now. and so they've never been for sale or they I'm sure that private equity firm or somebody would have bought them here or taken them public they're they're a great company they're a company that Whole Foods learned a lot from over the years I mean that was always for for my family when my kids were growing up that that was always our choice do we shop at Trader Joe's today or we shop at Whole Foods today a lot of people shop at both of them they come that's what we ended up doing because they're different they're slightly different yeah a lot of people would come to whole foods for our perishable quality get our fresh produce or meat and seafood and they go for trader joe's to get their their very excellent private label products or cheap wine and you know one one way which it's almost sort of dissonant looking at your career you know whole foods it makes you think of well your background like you know you you you you came up with the idea of whole foods originally you were at a commune and you're working at a food co-op and this sort of austin hippie culture and which is of course very very liberal but you're you're really i don't want to use the word conservative because you're not conservative but you're really like you know an arch you know obviously capitalist and very uh you know strong about your views on the economy and capitalism and so on.

46:45Where do you think just economically we're at right now as a country? Like people are doubting the dollar around the world. There's a lot of government spending. There's a lot of government debt. Everyone's nervous. Where does this take us? Well, who knows? I mean, nobody can predict it. You can't really know the future. One of the questions I get asked all the time by media is, one of their favorite questions to ask is, you know, what's the world going to be like in 10 years? And it's like, well, nobody knows because think about the changes that have occurred in the last 10 years or the last 20 years that you would not have predicted.

47:31I mean, if you go back, people 20 plus years ago, nobody had a smartphone. Now everybody's totally addicted to smartphones. Who would have thought Tesla would come along and revolutionize the automobile industry? Now you have the Internet itself is barely, I mean, in any kind of worldwide web usage is barely 30 years old, or maybe 35 or 40 years tops. AI is the new thing, new kid on the block, and who knows how it's going to change our world. But people ask me, and I say, I think in five years, people are going to be wearing wearable AIs with them wherever they go. And it'll be like our little friend that is on our watch or wearing it around our neck or an ear something we've got plugged in there.

48:18And it'll make reservations for us and answer questions we have. And it'll be a disruptive event for Google, probably, because people are talking to the AI instead of doing searches. So it's very hard. You can extrapolate from what you currently have, what you currently know. But what you don't know is evolution. You don't know innovation. You don't know what's going to, what new things are going to come along you hadn't anticipated. I remember the first time I got into an Uber, maybe, I don't know, 15 or 20 years ago, and it was like, gosh, this is so obvious. How come nobody's done this before?

48:56Well, you couldn't do it first until you had a smartphone. The smartphone with the GPS on it made Uber possible. But then once that was created and put in a smartphone, it was like it was almost destined to happen. Some entrepreneur was going to come up with that idea. I just regret I wasn't the one that thought of it first. It was a little obvious later. So the point I'm trying to make is that if you go back 10 years, you couldn't have predicted the future we're in today. And so it's very hard to predict the future that's going to be coming. But what I will say is I'm a very optimistic person.

49:31I'm optimistic because I believe in creativity of humans. We are very, very creative species. And as long as we have a relatively free economy that allows entrepreneurs to innovate and create, we are going to continue to make tremendous progress in this world. by every objective measurement, we are better off today than we were 20 years ago or 50 years ago or 100 years ago, any other time in history. It's astounding how far human beings have come in the last 200 years. I mean, the statistics show that if you go back 200 years ago, 94 % of all the people alive on the planet lived on less than$2 a day, and 85 % lived on less than$1 a day.

50:15Think about that. The illiteracy rates were 88%. 88 % of the people could not read on this planet 200 years ago, and the average lifespan was only 30. Childbirth deaths were unbelievably, sanitation was terrible, air pollution was terrible, worse then than it is today. It's astounding how far humanity's come, and there's every reason to think the future's going to be better than it is today. I don't know why we would. So I just don't agree with the gloom and doomers because what I see that they don't see, I see human creativity. We have problems. I don't know the answer to all our problems, but I guarantee you there are creative answers for all of them that let humans create and we will solve our problems.

51:04We'll create new problems and there will be new challenges we'll have. But that's the upward spiral of evolution. We're evolving. And there's every reason to believe. I mean, hey, if there's nuclear Armageddon, all bets are off. But avoiding some kind of crazy, stupid war that takes the planet down with it, humans are almost surely going to be better off 100 years from now or even 10 years from now than they are right now. I tend to agree, but what gets me nervous, and maybe this is from just reading the news too much, is, you know, like when Iran sent drones towards Israel a few weeks ago, all the media saying World War III, when it was kind of obviously when you looked into it, wasn't going to be World War III.

51:56Israel was going to shoot it down. Iran had already said, that's it, we're done. And boom, the world moved on within a day. Everybody was marked safe from World War III. But, you know, when you see things like more and more of these weird geopolitical situations popping up and the U.S., you know,$34 trillion in debt and people saying, oh, the only way to survive this is to inflate our way out of it. I don't know how to, I tend to be optimistic too, but I just don't know always the answers to, you know, what do you say to that? I say that you shouldn't focus your attention on things that scare you.

52:40because you'll find the world to be fearful. It's better to focus your attention on the things that you can create, the difference you can make in the world, and the things that are out of your control. You can't do anything. What can you do about those drones? You can't do anything about it. Why direct your life, your special gifts, your own life energy to worrying about things you can't personally do anything about? Instead, take your energy in creative ways to create value for other people. I mean, my new business that we've co-founded, Love Life, I think is going to make a huge difference over the next 20 or 30 years because it's going to help.

53:19I mean, it's a way I can make a contribution to humanity's progress in terms of helping human flourishing to occur. I can't do anything about nuclear war or$34 trillion debt. Those are out of my control. But I do have things that I can control, and I focus my attention on those things. And it leads to happiness and contribution instead of fretting and unhappiness and anger and fear. I guess that's a good point because if you look at it, look at the past 40 or 50 years. every time someone's predicted anything doom and gloom they've been wrong like in the like in the early 1970s the world was gonna have too much population to feed it we were gonna have an ice age by the way back in the 70s just to be clear yeah ice age in the 70s london starving by the 80s because of too many people then the world was going to heat up too much by the 90s so everybody And 9-11 happened, so that was a disaster for everybody.

54:30But still, everybody survived. And like you said, it's turned out better than ever. And so I guess you're right, focusing on— You know, let me recommend three books people consider reading, besides the whole story. Of course, the whole story. Of course. Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism by John Mackey. I think the most important book that's been written so far in the 21st century is Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now. That is, Pinker's research is so unbelievable, and he so documents human progress. It's just, he's, it's such a great gift what Steven Pinker's done for the world with that book.

55:08It's incredible. You have to read that book. Secondly, a book more recently is Marian Tupi's book, Super Abundance, which shows from a labor, human labor hours, how much abundance has been created in this planet. And more recently, Johan Norberg's come out with a book called The Capitalist Manifesto. Think Communist Manifesto, Capitalist Manifesto. And there he documents how just given more free markets than just countries like, it's an international perspective. So China and India moving just a little bit away from socialism and making their economies freer, allowing creativity, allowing entrepreneurship.

55:55I've listed hundreds of millions of people. Just those two countries alone have lifted almost a billion people out of poverty in just the last 30 years. India and China. It's astounding what happens if we let humans create, let the entrepreneurs be free. And yes, we need good law. We need government. We need a whole bunch of things, but we mostly need economic and human liberty and freedom. We have those things. We can solve our problems. We will create our ways out of it. When I sometimes speak at universities and I have younger students doing what you were doing a minute ago, ask me about, what are we going to do about this?

56:36What are we going to do about that? I say, well, look, I'm 70 years old now. My generation solved a lot of problems. We didn't solve them all. We left you guys a bunch to solve. This is your problems now. You guys have to figure out. You have to create new solutions that we were unable to think of. Every generation has their own contributions to make. And you guys have got to work on these problems because if you don't, who the heck is? But you have to do it in a creative way, not put yourself in a straitjacket of fear, say it's hopeless. I mean, I read about the younger generation, for example, they're not want to have children because they don't want to, they think it's going to be a horrible world, that climate change disasters are ahead and just all the AI apocalypse is coming.

57:28And it's just complete, total fear, which when you're really scared, you're no longer creative. You're paralyzed by your fear. And so I'm saying don't go into that consciousness. Stay in a healthy, creative consciousness and put your own creative energies into creating value for other people one way or another. Be a contributor. And some – I mean I just think of somebody like Elon Musk. Look at the – whatever you think about Elon Musk, politics or whatever else, I don't care. Elon Musk, with his creativity and his entrepreneurial initiatives, is doing amazing things for this planet. He's a very important person because of what he's doing and what he stands for, but mostly by what he's creating through Tesla, through SpaceX, through Starlink, through all these businesses, the boring company.

58:26Those type of individuals really help humanity advance, and we just need more people like him doing creative things. Yeah, and by the way, to your book list, I would add The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. Oh, love it. One of my all-time favorite books. It's just that one's a little more dated, but it's still a tremendous great read. Anything by Matt Ridley is a great read. I also, if you like Ridley, did you read The Evolution of Everything? Yes, he's come on this podcast for The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and his COVID book. Oh, well, Matt is one of my heroes. Yeah, he's such a smart guy.

59:06He is, he's brilliant. And I agree with you. Always better to be on the side of optimism. Sometimes I do find myself getting a bit overwhelmed by what I see out there, particularly like lately for some reason. I think all these college protests has gotten me down a little bit. Well, colleges are always going to be protesting something. is partly what young people do. That's true. Yeah. And it's funny about how you say people don't want to have kids anymore. I remember in 1974 or 75, Archie Bunker, when Rob Reingold, I forgot the mic, I think his name was, the character on the show. That's right.

59:51He didn't want to have kids because of what they would grow up in. And it's the same thing. And even, you know, so my generation, which is considered Generation X, it was initially called the slacker generation. And yet we ended up probably being the most productive generation. I'm a huge fan of Generation X. The Xers are the hardest working people I've ever known. They work really hard. They're no, as a generation, they're kind of no bullshit people. You can't put one over on the Xers. They've seen it all, heard it all. and they just keep on going like the Energizer Bunny. I love the Xers. I like the Xers better than my own generation.

1:00:33Because the Xers are not too old for the internet and they're not so young that they only know the internet. So they've had like both worlds. But you remember, of course, Austin, I think it was 1992, the movie Slacker was about, Richard Linklater is about Generation X and kind of being just a generation of do-nothing slackers. Well, they turned out to be just the opposite. Yeah. And it just goes to show you that, you know, you were talking about the student protest. I mean, people, we go through certain stages in our lives. And think about it. You're young. You wake up and you look around and you see inequality.

1:01:16You still see racism. But you don't have any historical perspective. You don't see that, oh, yeah, there's still racism in America, but a lot less racism than when I was growing up because I grew up. There were still Jim Crow laws. They were actually legal segregation in the South, in Texas, where I grew up. If you go back further than that, you've got widespread lynchings going on. I mean, is there racism in America today? Yes, just a lot less than we used to have. and we'll probably have a lot even less 50 years from now than we have today because humanity is evolving. And if you look into inequality, there's always going to be inequality, but there are far fewer poor people today than there used to be.

1:02:02So it is a rising tide that's lifting maybe not every boat, but most boats. And we're certainly better off. The world is better off. I always put the challenge to young people. I'll give you the entire history of humanity. Tell me a time you'd rather live than right now. When has humanity ever had it better than right now? And the answer is, there has never been a better time to be alive than right now. Humanity's at its peak right now. Right now, but we can still continue to evolve and grow. And we will if we allow human liberty and freedom and creativity to flourish. If we don't become so scared, we go into some kind of totalitarian nightmare.

1:02:48Okay, there's that qualifier. Do you think there's a chance that can happen? Of course there's a chance. It happened in the last hundred years, for God's sake. We saw it happen, and we saw communism, and we saw Nazism, we saw fascism. I mean, yes, it could happen. And you don't always go straight. Evolution is not a straight line up. it it it it's more of a spiral with you have some downtime so yeah could happen i wonder if like innovation now has reached some sort of tipping point though where innovation and the pace of innovation is going to greatly outpace any possible change that artificial change induced by government it's a great question um it can it it depends on how totalitarian the government becomes if you if If you look back, if you study the Soviet Union or you study China, you'll understand that they basically executed the creative class, was basically killed.

1:03:49They just killed them. Just put them in gulags and shot them. And so, yeah, you can stop it or really slow it down by just – if you're prepared to be ruthless enough. If you're that much of a socio-psychopath that you're willing to just destroy millions of people, you can do it. Because we saw it happen in the 20th century. Yeah, but again, I wonder if that's even possible now because of, A, there's the decentralized nature of the internet. And you have people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and others like them who have so much money, you can't catch them really. It's not like someone's going to slow down Elon Musk.

1:04:32he could just, he can moves all over the world. You don't, you don't know where he is. Somebody could shoot him. That's true. So, I mean, hey, I'm an optimist. I mean, you're just at, you ask it as in the realm of possibility. It's in the realm of possibility. I don't think that's what's going to happen. I don't think it's a probable thing. I do think that particularly now in a more globalized world where you have many alternatives and you have this, the internet has, lets information flow in from so many different sources. It's, that's what scares many people because nobody is controlling it.

1:05:08It is, humanity is collectively connected, but there's nobody in charge. And that terrifies people because who you're holding accountable for it. And people want somebody, oftentimes to be responsible, somebody to be in charge. And the fact that we're just, that nobody is, to me, that's a very liberating thought, but to others, it's very scary. Yeah, it's interesting. I was at a dinner of a bunch of physicists and journalists about science and each person there, you bring up anything like AI, oh no, it's going to take over the world and terminator uh uh just every you know genomics oh we're gonna create a bunch of uh you know clone a clone army uh just like every science and these were scientists like no you know oh why is why is spacex or blue origin happening oh we're gonna put weapons in space and it's just or it's a joyride for billionaires to go into space like nothing was positive they everything had a negative look and i even said like you guys are a bunch of scientists how come you're not positive about science but they didn't really have an they said look how don't you aren't you worried if the internet turns off we lose all the world's knowledge and i'm like well the library of alexandria we did lose all the world's knowledge when it burned down it actually happened and it's not happening now but people maybe have a maybe there's kind of an evolutionary instinct to be more cautious than hopeful so you don't die.

1:06:47Well, there's no question that from an evolutionary standpoint, fear has been selected out, right? If you were the ones that were cautious or a little scared that if you went outside the cave that maybe a saber-toothed tiger was going to get you. Well, if you went out and a saber-toothed tiger killed you, then your genes did not spread. and those that were fearful and were more careful tended to survive more frequently. So there is an evolutionary reason that fear has sustained itself. But now we live in this era where with mass communication, anything that happens anywhere on the planet that's scary, we hear about it.

1:07:30And we're constantly, every single day, we're bombarded with terrible, fearful things. That's why I'm telling you, you have to take control of your mind, your own mind, and the information you feed into it. Because if you let yourself, the overall consciousness is so fearful, and it's being magnified by the media. And then that's, you know what they say, if it bleeds, it leads. People, when they're in an anxious, fearful state, it's kind of an addiction. and they feed that fear and anxiety with more scary stuff. And so they get more frightened. And I'm basically saying, no, you've got to take control of the information that you direct your mind to because is there scary stuff out there?

1:08:17There are. There are scary movies. I don't watch the scary movies because I don't really like to be scared. I like – I want to – the information I want to focus on is the information that allows me to be happy and loving and caring and able to help other people. So I'm focused on the ways that I can be of greater service, greater contribution to other people. And that's just what I choose. You can choose to be afraid if you want. That's your choice. I just don't think you'll be as happy. You won't be, your life will be a scary, a fearful one. Well, John, we have all benefited from your choice to be optimistic.

1:08:59We've all shopped at Whole Foods. My wife and kids shopped at Whole Foods yesterday. And I said, while you're there, think of questions for me to ask John Mackey. They didn't think of any questions, but they bought my favorite foods there, which is the bread there. I really love bread. Well, you know, I'll tell you, James, I have a, because since I've gotten more, people ask me for more favors from Whole Foods than I ever did when I was a CEO, because I guess I don't have the guards to prevent those people from getting to me. And I just have a mantra that I just tell everybody. It's like, that's not my problem any longer.

1:09:43Well, I think Whole Foods is great, so I don't have any problem there. No, but people usually, they just come to me with, they want favors or they have things to complain about, and I just say, I'm sorry, it's not my problem any longer. That's funny. Well, John Mackey, author of The Whole Story, Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism, such a different kind of story for an entrepreneur than I've ever read. And there's so much great stories and insights and advice also just about the world in there. I also love your first date with your wife, Debra. That was an inspiring first date. So everybody should have such a first date.

1:10:22Well, one of the things I tried to do in the book, James, just to be – I just wanted to be as candid as possible. I wanted to be honest, particularly about all my mistakes and failings. But also because I wanted to say that I made progress over time and I grew. And I read too many books that are just celebratory books. And, you know, look at what I did, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Those are kind of boring. It's more interesting. It's more interesting if somebody will reveal their vulnerabilities and their mistakes and the foolishness. And I did so many foolish things, including like on that as a first date with my wife.

1:11:01And the first thing I asked if I could look in her refrigerator. And I almost never got a second date because I'm snooping around in her refrigerator. And, you know, who does that? I mean, well, I thought I'd learn a lot about her if I could see what food she ate. But those inappropriate things were what I did all the time. Did you know asking that that that was kind of inappropriate or no? I was kind of nervous. I said I hadn't – it was a blind date, so I'd never met her before. And she opened the door, and she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. And I just sort of like went into – I just kind of paralyzed a little bit.

1:11:37What do I say? It's like, hey, can I look in your refrigerator? First thing that popped in my brain. And almost the last – I almost didn't get a second date as a result of that. I also like how, you know, then she asks you later on to jump around while she takes photos. And she said, you can always tell about someone's personality by how they jump. And I've never thought about that before, but that's really true. Yeah. So I think my wife's a little bit wacky too. So I think Wacky Mackie had found his soulmate when he met Debra Maureen because she liked to do wacky things too. Yeah, that's great.

1:12:19So that's why I say this is definitely a different story for people to read. And it's a lot of fun and it's very interesting. And it's a page turner because of things like floods or coup attempts or weird Yahoo Finance message board scandals. And then Amazon buying you like all the way to the end. You have an interesting roller coaster ride that's very unique. and it's in a brand and a store that we all use and love. So it's a great story and I love the book. And you're right. It's not just like, hey, this is the road to success. It's like just this is a road and it's an interesting road. It's an adventure.

1:13:02That's why I subtitled the book Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism because it's an adventure story and it's written in a narrative form. It's meant to be – it's a first-person novel. That's how I view it. Yeah. That just happens to be true. It happens to be true, at least from my perspective. Well, thanks very much, John. And hopefully you write a next book about your next business or come back on when your next business launches and we'll talk all about it. Hey, our first store launches in LA area, El Segundo, California on July 9th. So maybe I'll be on sooner than you think. All right, well, I'm going to head out there.

1:13:38I will try out your first store. It's not. Of course, I tried to correct my language. It's not really a store. It is now this kind of holistic health center. So my vocabulary is having to evolve. A holistic health center with pickleball. I love it. A little bit wacky, right? Yeah, it's perfect. All right, thanks so much, Sean. James, great talking with you. I really appreciate you. You take care. Have a wonderful day.

1:14:12Thank you.