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

28:39And I do think entrepreneurs sometimes, they're not aware of such risk. They're just not thinking about it until they're on the side of the road. So part of the book is written for that. Well, there's a difference between methodically kind of putting together a value-based business that can withstand the test of time versus what you see a lot of in technology startups, which is let's just raise as much money as we can, which is celebrated without really acknowledging the fact that you just gave away a gigantic amount of your company. And control. But nonetheless, it's all about, you know, a rush to scale without any regard for, you know, sound economics or profit and loss.

29:28Because once you reach gigantic scale, then you figure that out later and you sell it and exit. You know, it's interesting. I don't always think that's what the entrepreneurs want to do. Unless they, I think that's one of the messages the VCs are putting in there, which is raise as much money as possible. By the way, you'll lose control of the business because you don't have the money and we do. And then it doesn't matter if you have a high burn rate. You just, because the VCs, if they can get, their model is they have a lot of failures, a lot of burnouts, but they have the big hits that the blockbuster that makes so much money that - Yeah, it pays for all the other investments.

30:08Yes, it pays for all the other ones. But then there's a lot of dead bodies on the road of entrepreneurs who had good businesses and tried to scale them too quickly without, and then they failed. And so I have a very different perspective on that. And I understand that tech is one thing, but I mean I'm starting a new business up, Love Life, right? And we're not going to try to scale it super fast because I don't think we can execute it super fast. I actually found at Whole Foods, When we started to grow more than about 24 % a year, our culture began to get seriously diluted. There's an optimum.

30:47If you try to grow too fast, you can't take a culture with it. The culture is just implodes. It can't integrate. It needs, you ever heard of the rule of 72? It's a good little adage. If you divide your growth rate into 72, it shows how fast you'll double your sales. So if you're growing at 24%, you divide a year, divide that into 72, and three years will be twice as big. If you keep growing at that rate, three more years will be twice as big as you were then. So 18%, divide that in and you get, it takes four years to double. If you grow at 12%, it takes six years. So it's a handy rule because when I found whenever Whole Foods was growing too fast, and it happened a few times, our culture began to get diluted.

31:36We were bringing people in before we can enculturate them. So this massive go to scale, you can't take a culture with it. You won't even have a culture. It's people are just trying to get rich and you're not creating a long-term viable organization in my opinion. Make the case for the value of culture. Why is cultivating a great culture so integral to the success of a business? It's integral to the long-term success of the business. The culture is, first of all, it's the purpose of the business, whatever the higher purpose of the business is. Secondly, it's your core values. And then it's your leadership principles, how you're managing the business, how you are executing day-to-day.

32:25And those things together are formed that will call out the backbone or the scaffolding of the culture. And those things have to be real. They have to be sincere. They have to be – but all great enterprises, all great enterprises in the long term, they either have great cultures or they fall apart. Because eventually what you're doing gets copied. And your culture is what – and gives you the competitive long-term advantage. of loyalty, of people that are committed to the organization, people that love what you're doing, people that are giving their heart and soul. They're not just professionals looking to get a notch on the resume and move on to the next best highest paying job.

33:10The culture is what holds it all together and creates the possibility of creating something really great in the long term. I think culture's a very important job for the CEO. And most of the time they don't, particularly in the entrepreneurial CEO, it's something they take for granted and don't pay enough attention to. It's, can you build something to last that doesn't have a great culture? I don't think you can. And the degree of difficulty of maintaining a great culture as growth begins to escalate - Is very difficult. Becomes difficult, but that ultimately becomes one of the core, most important jobs of the CEO.

33:51I think so. Yeah. That's how I see it.

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37:24Last time we did this was 2017 in a conference room in the Whole Foods offices. Seven years ago, wow. Yeah, in Austin. And as memory, if memory serves me, I was actually surprised that you didn't cancel on me because you were in the throes of a very challenging moment in the history of Whole Foods. And I don't know precisely when we did it, but I know that the shareholder activists were chomping at your ankles. I believe that the talks with Amazon were underway, but I'm pretty sure that no deal had been sealed. So the reason I did that was I'd come out with the Whole Foods Diet. And the day that my book launch was, that happened to be coincidentally, but not coincidentally at all, was when Jana Partners announced their activist attack on Whole Foods.

38:20I had to cancel most of the book tour. I don't know, I canceled all the national television. I was supposed to go on to the Today Show in the morning show. I think you had already gone to New York for that purpose and then you had to come home. Well, and the very first place I spoke was at Goldman Sachs. The soon to be CEO, David Solomon comes up and says, I know this is a difficult day for you. I know you must be in shock, but I wanna let you know that Goldman is here for you. And then that could not be coincidence. Those guys invited me. I mean, are investment bankers really that interested in plant-based eating?

38:56I don't think so. It was all orchestrated. It was all planned. That guaranteed that I was not gonna pick Goldman Sachs to be our banker. It's kind of a brilliant move though. A little transparent, but nonetheless smart, knowing that you were going to need a solid investment banker to help you navigate this quagmire. And we got a good one, but it wasn't Goldman Sachs. Have you had any run-ins with Solomon since where you can say, hey man, tell me the truth? After you sell your business, we sold to Amazon, then we have no future business. In fact, what was very bizarre is when we were negotiating with Amazon, after we'd announced the deal, but we're trying to get the legal documents done and move towards the merger.

39:46I had the distinct impression that neither our bankers nor our attorneys were on our side because they had no future business with Whole Foods. all their future business was gonna be with Amazon. So it's like, we had nobody in the room that was really looking out for our interest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a sort of hidden truth in a lot of business relationships. I'm thinking of, we're here in Hollywood and agents who are meant to be representing you, but they're doing deals with the studios. Like who are they really interested in making sure they are in good stead with? I think it's true. let's just say they have conflicts of interest.

40:26And sometimes they're professional enough, they're able to disclose the conflicts and maybe work around them. But a lot of times they're just transparently biased towards who's really gonna be there, who they're gonna have the longest term relationship with. And this bears some relevance and truth in this evolving relationship with Amazon, right? I remember at the outset of this relationship, and I believe we went hiking one time and you were sharing with me your enthusiasm and your excitement about what might be as a result of this acquisition. And you talk about it in the book, but what are your thoughts?

41:13We're now how many years? Seven years? Yeah, seven years. Post acquisition? Well, of course, I was CEO for the first five. I've been out. I resigned almost two years ago. I mean, I left almost two years ago now. The honest answer, Rich, when people ask me, the most common way people ask me that question is, do you regret selling to Amazon? And the honest answer is, I regret the circumstances that made that the best solution for us. And it was the best solution in those circumstances, because we looked at what our other options were, and the other options were, A, we can fight Janet and try to keep them from taking over the company.

41:52But we needed time. We needed to drop our prices. We needed time to turn around the company to get the prices down and get our sales and same store sales growth up. I was going to take some time. It was about a two-year turnaround. I didn't think we were going to have time to do it. We met with those guys and they did not want to work with us at all. They showed this PowerPoint presentation that was, a lot of it was inaccurate. They wouldn't give me a copy of the PowerPoint presentation. I said, I'd like to, can you give me a copy of that? Because I really think a lot of these things you're saying are not accurate.

42:22And they said, no, we're not going to give it to you. And then when I said, well, let's work together to help Whole Foods become more successful. I said, no, we don't want to work with you. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to take over your board of directors, and then we're going to fire you and your management team. And then we're going to put the company up for sale. And there's not an effing thing you can do about it. And they got up and walked out of the conference room. So it's like, okay, we kind of know where they stand. They're not going to be partners at all. They're just in it for the quick buck here.

42:53So fighting them was, of course, I'm a very competitive guy. So that was my first instinct was we're going to fight these guys. We're going to beat these bastards. And then it was like, well, what are their options? We could take the company private, which is something we seriously consider. The problem with taking the company private is that the private equity firm puts in, they put in some money, maybe 10 % of the money. But the other 90 % is borrowed against the company's balance sheet, against Whole Foods' balance sheet. So, we'd have been taking on about$13 billion in debt. And the interest rates on that, just servicing that debt would be enormous.

43:28If we hit like a 2008 downturn in the economy, company wouldn't make it. We'd go bankrupt. I thought that was too big of a risk. And then there was also the option of friendly hands, like we contacted Warren Buffett to see if he'd be He'd be a perfect partner for us. But Warren just joked about it and said, I own Dairy Queen. I don't think Whole Foods is a good brand fit for me. It doesn't quite line up with his practice of, you know, hitting the McDonald's drive-thru. Yes, he's very proud of his junk food diet. So Amazon was the best solution in those circumstances. And all in all, a lot of good things came from that merger.

44:05I mean, we were able to drop our prices. People don't realize, People don't really say the whole paycheck narrative much anymore. Whole Foods dropped its prices four times in the first two years. It cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. They raised the compensation for all of our hourly team members within 30 days of the merger taking place. They didn't take any of our suppliers away. In fact, they studied our supply chain and then they picked up our best suppliers. So our suppliers gained from it and the shareholders gained from it. all of our stakeholders won in that deal. Now, we did lose control of the business ultimately, but they didn't try to change our culture.

44:44They didn't try to make us into Amazon clones. We became more centralized. Some things are a little different, but all in all, if I had to do it all over again, I'd make the same decision. But I will always wonder what would have happened if we would have fought. I mean, I'll always wonder that. So, for people that don't know, Janna Partners was this private equity firm. They acquired something like 8.8 % of the stock. And it's a classic, you know, Gordon Gekko, Wall Street kind of maneuver. That's what they were like, by the way. Yeah, it was, you know, it's ripped right out of that, you know, sort of narrative on some level.

45:21And it left you with very few options in order to survive. So the decision to go with Amazon was the best opportunity within the constraints of a very unfortunate situation. in which you found yourself. But it wasn't the obvious choice. And I bring this up because I think it's indicative, reflective of the way that you make decisions. It wasn't like people were walking around saying, you should think about Amazon. This was your idea at the time, it was Albertsons look like, you know, it was gonna be maybe your only option to, you know, find an exit out of this. I hinted this in the book, but I'm not gonna make any accusations.

46:02I actually feel like there was a lot of pressure to take the company private. I was being courted by some big players like Mike Milken to take the company private. They really wanted to take the company private. You know, as I said, I just didn't think that was the best option for the company. And I didn't think putting the private equity company in control would have been the best interest of Whole Foods either. But there was a lot of pressure to do that. The Amazon thing happened because I kept asking. The question I kept asking, I'm a great believer that if you have intentionality and you put it out into the world, answers come.

46:38And the question I kept asking is, what's the win-win-win solution? What's the best solution for all of our stakeholders? I kept asking that question. Every day I'd ask that question, what's the best solution? And I had met Jeff Bezos just coincidentally a year before at this conference we both were at. We both were on a panel together, the two of us. And we actually hit it off pretty well. Jeff likes to read. So we talked about books, particularly like science fiction and fantasy. So do I. He also is a scuba diver. And we talked about that. And he's interested in whole foods. So we talked about whole foods some.

47:11And we kind of hit it off. And he actually said, man, this is a really interesting conversation. I want to follow up with you and we'll get back together. I just didn't hear back from him. So then I kept asking that question, what's the best solution? And then I woke up one morning, right when I woke up, you know how, you know, like I just woke up And all of a sudden, this answer popped in my brain. And the answer was, what about Amazon? And it was like, whoa, what about Amazon? Hmm, I wonder if they'd be interested. They have the deep pockets. One thing I love about Amazon, which is I think very long term, they really do make decisions 10, 15, 20 years down the road.

47:47That's the kind of leader Jeff Bezos is. So I knew they'd give us time to be able to drop our prices and reconfigure the company. And they did, in fact, after the merger happened. And after I thought about it, then it was like, let's get together with them. So we contact them and Amazon was very interested. And just a few days later, we flew. I flew with three of my leaders from Whole Foods. We met with Jeff and three of his leaders. And I make this joke that when you fall in love, you have what's called the conversation, where you have this conversation. You might stay up all night and talk and you just have this connection, this sort of soulmate connection.

48:25We had that the very first meeting. We talked for like three hours and all the things we could do together. And they weren't the typical corporate types that I'm used to dealing with. They weren't Wall Street types at all. These were really smart, regular guys. And we talked about all the synergies we could create. So we had an amazing conversation. And then they followed up two days later and said, we want to send a team down. Let's get going on this thing. and six weeks after that very first meeting we'd signed an agreement uh they were very i love the fact that once amazon decides they want to do something they really move all in on it and they made a decision quickly this would be a good merger for them so um the deal happened pretty quickly and uh you know was it perfect no kind of like most marriages aren't perfect either but all in all i mean again i'd rather whole food stayed independent if that was really a viable choice, that would have been the choice I prefer.

49:24But I just didn't think we had that choice any longer. And this was the best solution. In an alternate universe, you would still be happy to be at the helm. You know, I think in an alternate universe, I probably would have retired by now anyway. I'm 70. I loved running Whole Foods, but, you know, there's a time to step aside and let the younger people take charge. All my peers, I was the last guy standing. All the people that I built the company with that were my age, people like Walter Robb and AC Gallo and Glenda Flanagan and Jim Sud, they were all gone. So everybody I was working with was 15, 20, 25, 30 years younger than me.

50:04So I didn't have anybody there that was like, you know, that I could share at the same level. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were eager. I could tell. They just kind of wanted to, and Amazon was running it, and I was bumping heads with Amazon a lot, you know, because I was never intimidated. That had an expiration date, too. Yes. In the book, I described this thing that was kind of the trigger. I'm talking to Dave Clark, who was the CEO of Consumer. He was like the number two guy at Amazon. Dave and I were fighting, and we have an argument via Zoom, Amazon's equivalent, Chime, about I wanted to bring the people back to work at the offices.

50:44And this is February 2021. They had basically not been there for a year. But everybody else is going to work at the stores. Everybody else is working at our commissaries. Everybody else is going to our distribution centers. We just had this privileged class at our corporate offices that weren't working. And I thought, this is ridiculous. vaccinations are available. People need to come back to work. This is bad for morale. Everybody sees that these people don't have to work and go into work and everybody else is. So I was trying to get permission from Amazon to do it and Dave did not want to do it.

51:18And I triggered him because A, I was pushing back and I said, listen, Dave, you got to trust me on this. I'm like, I'm the general in the field here. I know what's good for Whole Foods and what's bad. This is bad. This is bad for our morale. It's bringing people down. I need to bring people back to the office. It's been a whole year for God's sake. And he said, it's too soon. It's too soon. I said, look, trust me, Amazon, you don't have to come back to work. Fine. Stay all as long as you want. But this is what Whole Foods needs to do. Trust me, a general in the field. And that triggered him. He says, can't you just for once stop fucking arguing with me?

51:56You argue about everything. and I said, well, what do I, what do I argue with you about? Can you give me some other examples? I don't argue with, mostly I just go along and he thinks about it and he says, I don't have to give any goddamn examples. I know that you do and everybody else knows it too and so he's really angry and really triggered but then I got some unvarnished truth in that anger too. He said, you know Mackie, if you didn't want to lose control of Whole Foods, you shouldn't have sold it to Amazon. And now you just kind of need to do what you're told. And it's like, whoa. Then when that conversation was over, it was like, I asked myself the question, why am I still here?

52:33Do they want me here? I don't think they do. I think, you know, I don't think they want me here. And I didn't make a pop decision, but I kind of made a decision that day. I think it's time for me to go. I waited a few months. You know, you got to let, when it's such a big decision after 44 years to leave that I had to let that kind of marinate to make sure it was really aligned with my heart and talk with good advice from my people I love and trust, like my wife and some of the, and Glenda and some AC, some of the people I love and trust. And increasingly I just saw this was the right decision.

53:03It was time to go. And it opened up the possibility for love life for me. So sometimes you have to let something go to go on to the next thing, right? You do, right? Well, I think that story, even though it's just kind of one incident, it gets to the heart of what's really important to you, which is like culture and people. And throughout the book, it's a recurring theme that whenever a crisis strikes or whenever you're faced with some kind of decision that you have to make, it's the culture that you have constructed and protecting that always seems to win the day. And that incident made clear that there was a clash with respect to how you were perceiving culture or prioritizing it.

53:47And I couldn't protect any longer. Yeah. You know, it's like, imagine you're a father, you have children and, you know, he's basically saying, yeah, well, if you wanted to stake, if you wanted to keep control, you shouldn't have sold it to us. Now we're gonna kind of do what we wanna do. So when you walk into a Whole Foods market now, I'm sure you do every time you travel, right? You walk in, walk around, you're looking around, like, are you looking at, oh, they did that? Oh, that's good. Oh, that's not so good. I would have done this. Like what is the emotional kind of response that you have?

54:18That's a great question. And I have complex emotions about it. You know, one of the gifts I wanted to give my successor, Jason Beekle, who is, I did pick Jason and Amazon did agree with that pick. So I got the guy I wanted to take my place. And he's super smart, loves Whole Foods culture. He was our chief technology officer, then he became chief operating officer. and he speaks Amazon language because he's a tech guy. One of my gifts to Jason was, I'm letting this thing go. I'm bringing closure. I'm not gonna be looking over your shoulder. I'm not gonna be second guessing what's going on. I don't wanna be in the loop.

54:56Anybody comes to me to complain about changes that are happening, I'm gonna say, I'm sorry. That's not my problem any longer. You need to go talk to the Whole Foods people. I can't help you. I'm sorry. and so I'm not, I deliberately stay out of the loop. I don't really know what's going on. I don't wanna know what's going on. Occasionally, I'll get together with Jason and he'll give me a little bit about, telling me about what Amazon's doing and it's like, yeah, I'm sorry, I can't help you there. I'm trying not to judge the changes. There are changes occurring. I see it. They're doing things that I wouldn't do but that's the gift, right?

55:31They have to evolve it as they see fit and with Amazon's input. It's gonna change. I can't do anything about that. It's kind of like your children grow up, Rich. You've done the best you can to inculcate good values in them, but you're not in control of them any longer and they're kind of gonna do what they wanna do. And you just still love them anyway. Here in Los Angeles, we have something called Erwan. Yeah. You know Erwan. I do. You know Erwan all the way from the beginning. Have you been into any of the Erwans in town here? Because this seems to be the new, you know, kind of whole paycheck version of what - It's good to be competing with somebody that's considered a lot more expensive.

56:08It sort of ups the ante in terms of luxury experience with food and they don't shy away from their high prices. In fact, that's not a bug, that's a sort of feature. It's really kind of like a lifestyle brand or a beauty brand almost, a prestigious thing to go to this store, which is a very different ethos than Whole Foods, but in some way, you could characterize it as an heir apparent or the next evolution of what like a high-end food market is and could be. So first, let me say, I have a lot of respect for Erwan. I think they do a really good job. If I was still CEO of Whole Foods, we'd be responding to Erwan in a very competitive way.

56:52I would not see that high-end position to them in LA or anywhere else without a fight. But I don't think that's what Whole Foods is gonna do. We developed, we're testing it out first in the Denver area. We opened a high-end store we called Ideal Market, which had a lot of Erwanian elements in it. And that was going to be the brand for our upscale answer to Erwan. It was going to be Ideal Market, where we could do similar things that Erwan's doing. And I wanted to compete. but again after I gave one year notice that's one of the things that got canceled when I when I gave up my leadership CEO mantle they decided they didn't want another brand they were willing to concede that part of the market to Erwan and just be the Whole Foods you know we're very successful in LA just as Whole Foods so I'm a very competitive guy was not I was not going to concede that to Erwan but I want to repeat what I started out by saying they're doing a really good job.

57:54I have a lot of respect for them. And I think your competitors are the ones that can teach you the most. I don't like Whole Foods getting outflanked on the high end. So, I would have fought. Yeah. And if you suddenly found yourself reinstalled as CEO, would you resuscitate ideal markets and go to war with these guys? But I think the beautiful thing about capitalism is you have competition, which makes you better. If there wasn't competition, you tend to rest on your laurels. You know, I have a great metaphor for it. Do you follow tennis at all? A little bit. A little bit. So the three greatest tennis players who ever played the game happen to all be about the same age.

58:33The three highest Grand Slam winners are Djokovic, Nadal, and Federer. They're, you know, Federer's a little bit older and then Nadal and then Djokovic. But those three guys, they won almost all the Grand Slams over the last 15 years. One of the other ones won it. Everybody else has won fewer Grand Slams and each one of those guys has won by themselves in the last 15 years. They made each other better. They had to keep counteracting each other. They had to take their game to the next level. And that's the beautiful thing about competition and capitalism is it helps you to get better. Erwan would have helped Whole Foods to get better if we'd gone to compete with them directly like I wanted to.

59:13And guess what? We'd have made Erwan better and Erwan would have made Whole Foods better. Who benefits from that? Customers do. Customers benefit from that struggle for improvement to serve them better. And that's how you make progress in a free market capitalistic society. And that's why humanity keeps advancing.

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1:01:17Most people who go on these MDMA psilocybin adventures like you have many times are seeking answers to questions or they're looking to address a wound or heal a trauma. And I'm curious if there are pain points that motivated some of those experiences for you and what those might be? You know, I talk about the psychedelics three times in the book. First time is I'm just turned 22 years old and I had a very massive LSD trip that was unscripted. And I experienced dissolving in my ego and a merger into all that is the one. And when I try to explain that to people, it's very hard for people to understand this because we're so identified with our egos.

1:02:12Our egos are our separateness. like you're rich i'm john it's a water bottle um that's robin over there and so we're we're we think that's who we are that's what we identify and and the essence of it is separation we're different we're unique we're separate and when you when when you have an ego death or your ego dissolves that separation disappears there is no separation between me and you between me in this water bottle there's only the one and that is i believe the deepest reality is the oneness only because we're in the ego state of consciousness we don't experience it so that was the most important experience i probably well one of the most important experiences of my life because before then i just didn't really believe there was any deeper reality there was spirituality as believing you know i mean it's just uh I was an atheist and there's no no deeper spiritual reality it's all just bullshit opium of the masses you know opiate of the masses uh that you know it's a hard I was existentialist it's a hard cruel world you just get used to it that's the way things are and uh uh and I was like all of a sudden I'm dissolved into the one it's like oh my god every it's not just that there's a spiritual reality the whole thing is spiritual the whole thing is this deeper oneness And it's like, okay, well, how do I experience this not through a drug but through my normal life?

1:03:41And how can I get into this space all the time? That's the first book. And that led me to move into the co-op, which launched me on my hero's journey in doing Whole Foods. Then in 1984, while it was still legal, I might add, I did MDMA for the first time. And which now, I mean, back then it was called Atom. then it became called ecstasy and we had a rave scene that occurred i was never in that rave scene that occurred after i really didn't use it and then now it's called molly i think among shunk's people and that was a very life-changing because um i'd forgotten that love is the most important thing and i had such an intense loving experience on the mdma i i just saw oh my god love is the most important thing you want to get back and dissolve the ego and you want to be in the oneness it's through love love is the the gentle path to reintegrating into the wholeness of the oneness of the universe and i just never have forgotten that and i've gone back to it and that that led to breath work and a course of miracles and a journey a gentle journey through the course of miracles of awakening deeper to love and then the third time in the book i talk about it as i was transitioning out of Whole Foods.

1:04:56And I knew after 44 years, that was not gonna be easy for me to do. And I wanted a really good separation or a good letting go of that. And so I did a guided journey, inspired by Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind. It's like, as usual, Michael Pollan's, he's at the cutting edge of what's going on. And oftentimes he did it with food and then he did it with psychedelics, I think. And so I thought, I'm gonna do a guided journey. And so I found a person that I had a five-day retreat where I basically, it was all very, very, it was very sacred in terms of I had to do preparation before I went in there.

1:05:38I had to, we did a lot of work around intentionality, what did I want to have come out of this, a lot of prayer around that, a lot of clarity about what I wanted. and then openness to what I needed to see rather than what I wanted. And so five days, five days of breath work. And I actually found the breath work to be more powerful in this context than the psychedelics, although the psychedelics were very powerful. There were combinations of MDMA and psilocybin. Holotropic breathing? Yeah. Well, no, the breath work that my guy did was, I did a lot of holotropic breath work. That was the breath work I was taught in and what I was doing.

1:06:16And that's what I started doing. And my guide, a woman, she said, you know, we're not going to do the holotropical breathwork here. We're going to do a gentler, circular type of breathwork. So she gave me a different breathwork. It was much gentler, and I could relax into it in a way that I couldn't quite do with holotropical breathwork. She had me focus a lot more on the circular breathing of continuous but more gentle breathing. And it was incredibly powerful. And I'm a different person now. That was two years ago. And I've really never come down from it, to be honest. Different in what way?

1:06:56I just went deeper. I went deeper. I saw things. I had three experiences I'd never had before in any other context. The first one was I never really completely loved myself. Not really unconditionally. We all have an internal critic, Rich, that is finding fault. finds fault with everybody around us and finds fault in ourselves because we're not perfect we make mistakes we say things that hurt people or we do dumb things and i have a you know powerful internal critic and so i'd never really completely love myself and if you don't love yourself it's very hard to really let other people love you because you're thinking they don't really know me if they knew me they went they say they love me but that's because they don't really know who i am because I'm this, you know, horrible person that hurts people and says nasty things and, you know, isn't perfect.

1:07:48So I first experienced this unconditional love for myself. I got back in touch kind of with this inner child that had this beautiful heart of good intentions, really wanted to do good, really wanted to be loving and help people. And then I could see the ego, which was this like, kind of like this, think about the crabbiest little old mean man you can imagine that was my ego just mean mean as a junkyard dog and it's like i could see that wasn't me that wasn't really who i was that my in my heart i was this very loving innocent child who just wanted to do good and love people and so i felt this overwhelming love for that that little child and i also felt love for the internal critic it's like the internal critic is the ego the separation and it's like i named it it's old bob old bob needs he needs a little love too and you know just bob cool down dude i got this one we're okay okay nothing to be scared of nothing to judge here be okay so you constantly i'm always reassuring bob that things are going to be okay and then i had on then i had this uh unconditional love for existence because i i have this cap i like to wear that says, holy shit, we're alive.

1:09:05Because the miracle of life to be a living being with trillions of cells that are cooperating together and going through this whole adventure of being in human being and in the flesh, if you just think about it and get into it, it's such an amazing thing. It's extraordinary. Holy shit, we're alive. What greater gift is there than to be alive. It's just amazing. So I felt this unconditional love for existence, for just life itself and just this particular reality that we're experiencing, this dream state that we're in. It's amazing. And then I felt unconditional love for all that is, for God, for the creator.

1:09:49And it was like, I'd never experienced any of those things. And they all came wave after wave wave after wave of this unconditional love. And I just was crying. I don't know how long it went on. I cried for, could have been an hour just crying because I was crying from being able to release this. And quite frankly, I'm not the same person as I was before I did that journey. Incredible stuff. So what was it about this time that made it different than the other times and so profound and, you know, something that you can carry in your daily conscious awareness? Was it the breathwork piece? I think it was a combination of everything.

1:10:29Also, my guide was so loving, created such a safe place. You know, and no, she kept telling me, you know, I just trust the process. Your soul is wise. Just trust your process, trust the process. And I felt so safe with her there that I could let go a lot more than I ever could in the past. I also think, Rich, that in this case, you know, I've been on this hero's journey a long time. I was ready for it in a way I wasn't 20 years ago. I've moved into a different cycle of life, which the spirituality part is the predominant part, the thing that's most interesting to me, where I am today in my life.

1:11:12And also, my wife is the most loving being I've ever known. And frankly, she's been working on me for 34 years. I've been her main project. I've been a difficult project for her. But, you know, she stayed in there, hung in there with me, and she sculpted me to a certain extent. When I think of that inner child or the young John who's brimming with love and I reflect upon the many ways in which life erodes our inner child and hardens our edges and turns us into our own worst critics. I mean, this is a primary malfunction of mine. So I'm very interested in this. I can't help but think about your mom in some regards.

1:12:02Like she was a tough customer. And as much as you just wanted that approval from her, she was not giving it up all the way to the end. It's true. And that had to be hard. I mean, you tell the story, but I wanna hear more about that because that's painful. My mother grew up, you gotta always put things in context. One of the things when you get older is you can see your parents, not as your parents, but you see them as human beings and you see them in their own journeys in life. So like my parents, my mother was a small town, grew up in Bastrop, Texas, a small town Baptist community in the Bible Belt.

1:12:47No drinking, no dancing, no card playing, no smoking, all of that. And she rebelled against that. My mother actually rebelled against that. She smoked and drank and danced and gambled. And so she was a rebel. That might be where part of my rebellion came a little bit from my mother to a certain extent. But she also wanted to be respectable. She wanted, she wanted, remember women, the patriarchy was alive and well. My mother was a very intelligent woman. And the patriarchy was very powerful. and there were really no opportunities for women. I mean, they didn't become doctors back when they were there.

1:13:29They were allowed to teach. So my mother was a teacher and she got a college degree and she taught until then she's supposed to be a homemaker, right? So when she had children, she wasn't supposed to work. No wife of mine's going to work was kind of the saying, I'm going to be the breadwinner. And so my father was the breadwinner and my mother took care of the children. We lived in the suburbs. This was leave it to beaver time. and that was the romanticized worldview that my parents grew up in and they remember they grew up in the depression so they didn't have anything so and then my dad was 20 when pearl harbor and world war ii broke out in america immediately of course signed up everybody did and he had to grow up really fast he was in a war and now he gets married to his college sweetheart and my sister's born pretty early on, seven years older than me.

1:14:21And he couldn't follow his dreams. And my mother, she just, they just wanted to live in suburbia and raise a family and not be poor because that's what they knew. And so that was their reality. That was their own hero's journey at that time. I was more fortunate. I grew up in an affluent time. The money was not really, my parents, my dad was a college professor when I was young. And then he went into business and became very successful there. My mother though, really, she named me after her father who was a doctor. She wanted me to be a doctor. At the very least, she wanted me to be respectable.

1:15:00And here I was dropping out of college. That was just unforgivable. Why would you drop out of college? What are you going to do with yourself? And then I was downwardly mobile, Rich. I became a grocer. She never got her head around. You're a grocer. You could have been a doctor and you're a grocer. For her, grocers were the people wearing the aprons, you know, just working at these little stores. And she just couldn't imagine why I would. I think she told me, she says, you know, John, I've seen all your IQ tests. I've seen your aptitude test. You've got a great mind. You could be whatever you want to be.

1:15:35And you've chosen to be a grocer. So she was always guilt tripping me about that. And she didn't like Whole Foods. It was hippie grocery. Worse, it was a hippie grocery store, which she just, you know, just thought was ridiculous. you know you look at your hair you got this big afro and you know it's just embarrassing a long beard and she was really embarrassed about me and she all she'd get together and play bridge with the other um her peers and their children were going on to law school and medical school how's that fine son of yours john doing well he's he's a grocer it's like you know So on her deathbed, the last time I saw my mother was 1987.

1:16:16She died very young. All those rebellions did not work out well for her health because she smoked, was a heavy drinker, never exercised, worried constantly. Almost all the things that we know lead to bad health and shortened lives, she did them all. Last time I saw her, she'd already had a stroke. She was already partially paralyzed on her bed. I knew she only had probably a few months to live. And she said, John, I want you to do a favor for your mother. You know, I'm dying. I said, yes, but hopefully not for a while. She says, yeah, I know, but I don't know when we'll see each other again. And I just want one, just promise me you'll go back to school and just finish college.

1:16:54Do it for your mother. And, you know, I was pretty young. I was like 33 then or 34, full of my own integrity, very proud of what I was doing with Whole Foods. We only had about four stores then. And she said, yeah, do it for me. And I said, Mom, I'm not going to go back to school. I said, I'm going to build Whole Foods into this great company, and you'll see. It's going to be amazing. And we're going to – I'm going to get an honorary degree someday. Someday I'm going to endow some university, and they're going to give me an honorary degree. And she said, oh, don't be ridiculous. Go back and make something of your life.

1:17:32And I just said I'm not going to do it, which is kind of a little bit of a minor regret because my more older mature self, gosh, I mean, I could have just lied and made a promise that would have given her comfort in her, you know, so she didn't die with her being disappointed in her son. She really was disappointed in me. So part of her rebellion is in me. And, but she never, she did not live, she died really a few days, a week or so later after the last time I saw her. So she definitely was disappointed. I had to break away from my mother. I remember the first time I dropped out of school and I dropped out and I wanted to hitchhike around America for starting out in New York.

1:18:15I said, I'm going on an adventure. So she says, you're going to go hitchhiking. You could get killed. And I said, nah, it's going to be fun. I was going with a buddy. We're going to be okay. Be safe. And she was really scared. And she said, if you walk out of that door, you can never come back. This is it. We're done. I got to tell you, Rich, I hesitated at that door. It's like, wow, my mother is like telling me I'm not ever going to be walking back in the house. And I thought about it. I said, that is so manipulative. If that's the way she really feels, fine. So I said, I'm sorry, mom. I hope you let me come back in the house someday, but I'm going hitchhiking.

1:18:54And so I did. And needless to say, like a few weeks later I was talking to her and she said of course she can come back home please come home now so um yeah I I struggle with the mother thing we got off on this topic because we're talking about the internal critic that part of that is in internal cooks partly for my mother I think judging me as you know um a failure not you know downwardly mobile that was struggling with my own desire to be my own guy. Yeah, this sense of being less than and having something to prove and, you know, being someone who desperately wanted that approval and the way to get it was to just put the pedal to the metal on the business until it was so big, it would be undeniable to her.

1:19:43You know, that's an interesting question. I've never quite thought about it that way. I wonder if part of my motivation there was, I'll show my mother. i probably but i don't i don't i don't feel that it wasn't something i was conscious of the thing that's left out of the story is is that my father i always felt i had his tacit approval for what i was doing he not only did he become my mentor but in some ways i feel like he was living through me vicariously because he might have been an entrepreneur but he didn't he couldn't do that and so i always felt his support even if i felt my mother's judgment i always felt my dad had my back and was supporting me.

1:20:23And so that was very helpful. Must have made for some interesting conversations between your dad and your mom when you were not around though. Probably so. He was probably defending me and she was saying, Billy, you know, he really looks up to you. If you would tell him to come back home, he would. And my dad was probably saying, let him be, he's okay. I'm pretty sure that's what he did. What is it about this book, The Course in Miracles, that snapped you out of your atheism and gave you some kind of spirituality to hang on to. I mean, this book comes up a lot on this podcast. I had Marianne Williamson here.

1:21:02She talks about it all the time. Yeah, I know Marianne. And her book, Return to Love, was a really, really great book. So the story there for The Course in Miracles goes something like this for me. So I did the MDMA. I've had this heart opening experience. And then I'm doing, now I'm doing this holotropic breath work, which is taking me to new places. And one of the friends that I did that initial journey with MDMA was a guy named Curtis. And Curtis comes and he gives me this book called The Course in Miracles. And it's like, what is this? And he says, well, it's going to sound kind of far out, but it claims to be.

1:21:37It's a channeling from Jesus. It's really incredible. I said, channeling from Jesus? That's got to be, that's bullshit. And because I had been, when I was 18, I had very briefly for about two years, I was a born again Christian coming out of high school. I kind of got a crush on a girl and she was into it and she got me into it and I did it. And then I kind of ran into the problem of evil. You know what the problem of evil is? The problem of evil is if God is all powerful and all knowing and all loving, why is there so much suffering and pain? How can that even exist? And that's the problem of evil.

1:22:17And the religions don't really come up with very good answers to that. And I didn't, the answers I got from Christianity, well, you know, we have free will and then we're making, you know, making these choices and it's not God's fault. And it's like, that just didn't seem to be true to me. It just makes sense. So that was really why I stopped So I started reading The Course in Miracles with a kind of a bad attitude, like, yeah, I'm going to prove this wrong. And around 50, page 50, 60, 70, somewhere around there, reading the text. And then I come across this statement that basically answered the problem of evil, or at least had a unique twist on it that really spoke to my heart.

1:23:02And it said that, you know, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, you've looked around and you've seen pain and you've seen suffering and you've seen great wrongs occur. And every time you blame God for it. What's never occurred to you is that you are asleep and you are dreaming this. You are dreaming all of this pain and all of this suffering. and God just wants to help you wake up. Once you wake up, you will see that it's your dream. You're dreaming it. And the reason it's a powerful metaphor is, think about this. When we dream at night, we are in the dreams. Have you ever had a dream you weren't in?

1:23:47Of course not. Well, who are all those other characters that are in the dream? They seem to be acting independently of you. Well, how can they be independent of you if you're dreaming them, right? I've thought about this. Yes. So we wake up and have you ever had a lucid dream? Lucid dream is when you become conscious that you're dreaming and then you can take control of the dream. Whatever you imagine begins to take place. I can't say that I've quite gotten there. I've had the first part, but not the second part. So if you get back in that state, the way to go into the lucid dream, it's not easy.

1:24:26you have to really focus on something i mean and it's interesting in the don juan castanedo books don juan said look at your hands focus on your hands and what what happens if you have an intensity of focus you will become you'll stay in the dream but you become conscious that you're dreaming i've actually i haven't done this for a while but i've actually had uh dreams where i actually think Like I stayed days in that, I went about my business and woke up. Whoa. One of the challenges sometimes is that the two things that are difficult for me are one is it could be a sexual fantasy that takes you out of it.

1:25:05Or I really like flying. So I get, you know, the best dreams are flying dreams. So sometimes the flying does away, it gets me going on it. And so anyway, the point is, just getting back to The Course in Miracles, is that the Course argues that you think when you wake up at night that you've woken from the dream, but you've only woken to a different dream. You're still dreaming. You're still creating experiences all around you. And so the Course says, we're going to help you wake up fully. And you wake up through opening deeper to love. And you do that through forgiveness. Instead of that internal critic that judges you all the time and judges everyone else, we begin to let that critic go.

1:25:54We begin to practice forgiveness. We begin to practice kindness and compassion and gentleness. And as we're starting to take control of our dream, we're starting to become more conscious in the dream. We're trying to make this dream a lucid dream. And when we do that, then everything begins to shift around us. As we are kinder and more loving, we begin to experience more kindness and loving back to us. As we forgive people, we begin to feel that we're also forgiven. As we are kinder and gentler, we begin to experience a kinder and gentler world. So the whole point of it is you're sleeping still.

1:26:30You begin to wake up by understanding that you're dreaming, that you're sleeping, and then begin to practice forgiveness and opening your heart to more and more love. And then you, of course teaches that you transform this dream into a dream of love. And then once it's completely a dream of love, there's no separation and you're fully awake. That's my working hypothesis. And it seems to be happening for me. So I'm gonna keep going with it. In the game of life, in the infinite game, right? Like approaching life with, okay, here's the game board and here's the rules. practicing these rules will allow you to transcend the constraints of conscious perception and allow you to see things more broadly and as they truly are, which is that we are not separated, that everything is one.

1:27:25and this, you know, transmission of energy outward translates into energy that gets aimed in your direction favorably. Exactly. Did I get that right? Yes, beautiful. I like that. That's really powerful. And so the hero's journey now goes into how can I just love everyone I'm around all the time? Just love everyone. Do I sometimes, and I don't always do that by the way. I have an eternal critic that judges me and judges other people. But what I've learned, and I also learned this in The Course in Miracles, is that the past doesn't exist. All that exists is the present moment. So when we forget and we do something unkind, we make a judgment or we attack someone, that's in the past.

1:28:13In the next moment, we can choose love again. If we forget, it's okay. That's in the past. Now we can choose love. So we get a new chance every next instant. And then as we practice, we get more skillful at extending love until that's what we're doing all the time. Where do you get tripped up most with this? What's the handicap? Such a great question. You know, I think where I get tripped up is a little tiny judgments. Like just driving over here, you know, somebody cuts you off and you're driving and it's like, you know, you judge that person for cutting you off. Or someone says an unkind word to you and your ego takes offense at it.

1:28:57So you have to practice being conscious and you have to be aware, you have to be present. And when you're fully present, you don't get tripped up. But we get lost in our thoughts, you're right. We get into our mind games. and in the mind games, we start to practice judgments and we get defensive and we can criticize and attack others. We begin to have these little things. He shouldn't have said that to me. That was really an asshole thing to do. So we start having the judgments in our minds. And so we have to go back into the present moment and there's the power in the now, power in the present moment.

1:29:29There is no judgment in the present moment. In the present moment, there's love. Stay in the present moment. So over the course of your career, when you've had to kind of face and navigate, some pretty heavy situations. Early on, there's the 100-year flood you have to figure out. And then later, all these coup attempts, there's the Wild Oats indictment story, the Howard Schultz letter. Like there's a lot of shit gets thrown at you, right? And you're like at the helm of this increasingly, you know, larger and more powerful company. That's a lot of responsibility and that's a lot of heat to shoulder.

1:30:10So how do you, like, what did you like return to, or what were the practices that helped keep you grounded so that you could, you know, walk through these with some level of equanimity, you know, practice these principles that you just shared and, you know, ensure that you are, you know, visiting your intuition and making the best decision and kind of detaching yourself a little bit from what's happening. So, great question. And first of all, I don't always deal with it well. I mean, right? I mean, I forget. I mean, you're a crusty bastard sometimes. Yeah, I can be, exactly. So, I don't always deal with it well.

1:30:49I haven't always dealt with it in the past well. So, but the really question is how can I remember? And I always do ultimately remember. But it helps because I have a good daily practice, right? And, you know, I start my days off with first I do spiritual reading, usually in the Course of Miracles. Then I do gratitudes because gratitudes are a total heart opener. Then I do sort of intentionality, could call it prayer and another way for what I really like to see happen in the world or in my relationships. And then I meditate. And then I'm going to do exercise after that and do my smoothie and get on with my day.

1:31:31so that's the grounding if i if it's very important that i have my get up early it's very important that i have that 30 to 45 minutes of centering if i get the day off right then i usually can go well in the day i had to do it today so today is a good day um sometimes when i'm under a lot of stress it's like oh god i just can't deal with i just you know it's like i can't do my meditation i can't get my consciousness it's so all out there and then you know i'm i'm i'm all shook up. But the practices are even more important when we're under intense stress. If all else fails, a breath work can be very, very powerful.

1:32:09They do a breath work and you can do it yourself, but it's easier to do it if you just have a breath working friend come over and guide you or be with you while you're doing the breathing. That just sort of like cleans you out and gets you really well centered. So what is the form of meditation that you practice and what is the breath work practice specifically? The meditation practice, I studied TM. So I did transcendental meditation and I had a mantra for, I don't know, 40 years. And then it was interesting when I was doing the guided journey, my soul gave me a new mantra. It said, I want you to practice this from now on.

1:32:48And the new mantra is on the inhale is I am, I am or om, and the exhale is love. and I am love and I am love and over and over and over again. And I've done that with several other people and they all find it very powerful. So I'd urge you to try that sometime. Just a very powerful meditation to just, I am love. And in terms of the breath work, there's lots of different kinds. I do some other kind of breath work stuff now that other people have shown me. I will show I'll show you one when this is over with, you might wanna just try, because it's very simple and very powerful and only takes a few seconds to do.

1:33:33I'm not sure, I think we should do that off camera. Yeah, we could do that. Of course, everyone's gonna be like, you didn't tell me what the breathwork practice is? You will be an initiate, so you can share that afterwards. I will share that. But in terms of the breathwork that I do is this continuous circular breathing. The key to breath work is to lie down, generally lie down. And you can do this on your own. You don't need a guide at all. But you're basically just doing continuous deep breathing.

1:34:09For a circular breath where you bring it in and then into your belly and then out to your chest. But if you do that, you'll begin to have transcendent experience. Stuff comes up. from deeper part of your being. Most people get scared and they stop breathing. The trick of it is to not let fear stop you from doing it. Keep breathing. Keep breathing. And that's why a guide helps you to remember to keep breathing. And you can do that on your own. And I almost promise you if you will do it, but I'm saying you need to do it for an hour if you're going to really have the most effects or even two hours.

1:34:47So that's why I'm having a guide to get you to keep breathing because your ego doesn't want to keep breathing. The ego is not in control. The ego, old Bob gets shown it aside and the soul is beginning to speak to you. So the breathwork, we're going to have breathwork at Love Life. And I just think that's such a, for people that are scared of psychedelics and have no sense of transcendence, breathwork is a very easy way to have a transcendent experience, to get in touch with a deeper spiritual reality within your own being. And it's just simple breath. When you do it on the daily, I assume you're not doing it for an hour.

1:35:26Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, it's a shorter one, but I guess I'm asking because I'm curious. That's the one I'm gonna show you when we finish up here. With experience, are you able to then drop into that state in a more facile way because you've done it so many times. So you don't have to go for an hour. You can kind of connect with it more quickly. The truth is, is that all you have to do to connect with it is just, this is a mindful type meditation, but so you just have to be fully present right now. And when you're fully present in the moment, you're no longer in your thoughts in your head, But you are in, you're in it.

1:36:03We're always there. We're just off dreaming our thoughts. But when we can be fully present in that present moment is the deepest part of our being, our soul, and it's love. That's what's there. When we remove the blocks, the love's presence, that's what we experience. And that is in the moment. It's just hard for people to stay in the moment. What is your relationship between that

1:36:30and your kind of creative voice or your ability to craft a vision and then pursue it? That all comes, all the creativity comes from the source. It all comes from within us. So when you are less blocked, your creativity is flowing fully. And I say your creativity, the deeper creativity of the universe is flowing through you. A good way to think about it is you're like a channel for it. It's flowing through you. I get in my way way too much. So do I. Yeah. Yeah. It's practice. I do wanna talk about love life, but before we do that, there's one other thing that I wanna dig into a little bit. There is the spiritual John and there is the entrepreneur slash capitalist John.

1:37:28These things are not necessarily in conflict, but I'm sure at times perhaps there's some tension between the two. And I would imagine there is also some tension that you're always trying to find balance with between the idealist John and the realist John. And if your story is anything, it's one of idealism in the context of how you create something meaningful in the real world. Yeah, that's really actually a really great question. And it's one I've personally, it's a challenging question, one I've struggled with my entire business career, is I'm very idealistic. One of the things that I figured out pretty early on, remember my very first store, Safer Away, was a vegetarian store.

1:38:19I like to tell the, it's true, but it's also kind of a joke, that Safer Away, we were very pure. We were vegetarian. We didn't sell any coffee. We didn't sell beer and wine. We didn't sell sugar. and we did almost no business. And then when we went to Whole Foods and we started selling meat and seafood and alcohol and coffee and some sugar, the sales exploded. So there's this constant dialogue between the idealist of what you want to create versus the reality of the marketplace. And I always like to say, you have to meet the marketplace where you find it. You can work to evolve it over time, but it's in dialogue with it.

1:39:08Another good example in the book is when we were dealing with the animal welfare issues. We wanted to lessen animal suffering. And so we developed our five-step animal welfare rating system at Whole Foods. And we brought in the activists who are all vegans. We brought in the scientists, the veterinarians and the scientists. We brought in the suppliers who were, you know, skeptical, and we brought in Whole Foods people. And we looked for win-win-win solutions. How do we create better welfare here that the market will be willing to pay for, right? So that's how we developed sort of this five-step standard.

1:39:50And it's not a perfect system, but it's helped billions of animals have a better life before they're slaughtered. And so it's made a difference. But it has to, the idealism always, it's kind of like, I always talk about looking for win-win-win solutions. A win-win-win solution is good for you, good for me, and good for all of us. And I generally believe there is a win-win-win solution to almost every problem. When I was talking earlier about when we found Amazon as the solution, that was a win-win-win solution. It was the best thing for every one of our stakeholders. Every one of our stakeholders was better off because of that merger.

1:40:33That's why they were the best solution. However, sometimes trade-offs, I can't come up with their – I'm unable to find a non-trade-off solution where there's nobody losing. And so then that's when it gets tough. That's when the idealism and the realism clash. I like to say that's a failure of imagination. There was a creative solution. We just couldn't manifest it. And I, but sometimes you have, you run out of time. So you just don't, you run out of time and you may end up making trade-offs. Those things are sort of the reality. And I don't have as much trouble as other people do about it because I always feel like I'm doing the best that I can.

1:41:19And we're making progress. But it's not perfect. It's not all the idealism can't be realized. But because I think, well, this is progress. We'll do better next time. And so I have a saying that's not my saying. It's a common saying, but it's one I really believe in. The perfect is often the enemy of the good. It's better to make the good, to make the incremental step that's an improvement, realizing it's not necessarily perfect, not where you want to be. But it's an improvement and we take these steps of improvement and the world advances. That's frustrating to most idealistic people who want to transform the world into utopia overnight.

1:42:05But in reality, people change their minds, change their habits. They do it slowly and incrementally. incrementally and so um i reconcile myself to the facts that i still have my ideals i mean a great example is um my first store was vegetarian i'm vegan now 21 years i'm never going to eat animal foods consciously again in my lifetime i'm an ethical vegan but does that mean that all my stores have to or my businesses have to reflect that idealism well you can try to do that but The facts of this are that only 2 % of Americans are vegetarian and only half of 1 % are vegan. That is a very, very small market.

1:42:54When you try to force people to eat a certain diet against their will, they're just going to reject your business. And so then your business is going to fail and then you haven't done any good at all. You've failed. So you have to look at what's possible. and you're in this dialogue with the marketplace. You're trying to persuade people, but ultimately you have to satisfy the market where you find it, which is one of the reasons a lot of people don't like business because business is messy, because it has contradictions in it, because it can be chaotic. I have a high tolerance for chaos. Anybody that would go into my man cave at home and say, how the hell does he find anything around here?

1:43:35and including my wife who's constantly trying to reform my man cave. It's my one part of my house I completely control. There's never going to be anything but chaotic in there. It reflects me. So chaos is part of it. But for me, it's like, that's okay. It's okay. We're doing the best we can do. How far you can push idealism without, you know, breaking the viability of the enterprise Yes, correct. Right. And it is an, to sort of further explore the animal welfare subject specifically, you're an ethical vegan, have been for a long time. You are making a personal choice to not, you know, not barter and trade on an individual level in these products, you don't consume them, but you're lording over this enterprise that is buying and selling untold millions of pounds of this every single year.

1:44:35And there are the idealistic vegans among us who would like to take you to task for that, right? Like how can you live with such dissonance? You're not actually living your values. You're not a real vegan, ergo. You know, I'm thinking of somebody like, there's some uncompromising voices in this community like Gary Francione. Like you're perpetrating harm because you are greenwashing this thing and making people feel better about this choice. You have to ask yourself, would the world be better off without Whole Foods Market and us having to go to Albertsons instead, right? But I would imagine there is also a toll, like a psychic toll that you're kind of dancing around when the compromises you make require the business to be somewhat at odds with your own kind of ethical, moral compass?

1:45:35Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, that was part of the, remember when I talked about on that guided spiritual journey, when I had that unconditional love is, I saw my intentions were really good. And that I am doing the best that I can do. And the people that judge, the challenge I always put back is, hey, if you think you can do a vegan grocery store, do it. Don't just talk about it, do it. You think you have a better way, show it, do it. And if you do, I'll copy you and try to do it better. It's so easy to be the critic. You know what's hard in the world is to actually go in and do things that make the world better.

1:46:28It's easy to say you're not doing it the right way. Well, what are you doing? Are you doing anything at all besides criticizing me? So that is always a challenge I put back on people now that say you should be doing this. It's like why should I be doing it? You're the one that feels this way. Why aren't you doing it? and no one today has ever taken that challenge up. And yet I would imagine the idealist in you appreciates idealism and values those voices because they are quick to let us know where we are on the map of our own moral landscape. I listen to the criticisms obviously and appreciate it.

1:47:15And I'm always looking for new ways to break through, right? The food thing is really difficult. I have found that people are very reluctant to change the way they eat, not just for ethical reasons but for health reasons. I mean, people – I mean, Americans are very much addicted to very unhealthy foods, calorie-dense foods that are processed foods, fast foods that are destroying their health. And it's, I mean, in some ways, Whole Foods failed there too because we had a better way. When we started out, bulk foods were 20 % of our sales. Now they're under 1 % of our sales. People don't want to buy bulk beans.

1:47:58Most people don't really cook anymore. They just, they want, it's a complicated thing because our evolution of calorie density was so scarce for most of human evolution that we crave calorie density. Anything that has a lot of protein, a lot of fat, or a lot of carbohydrates in it are foods we like to eat. And I might add salt. The food has a lot of salt in it. When we were not getting enough calories, that was survival. That helped us survive. Today it's killing us because today we can get, we can eat all these calorie-dense foods all the time and the market gives it to us. You want to eat ice cream?

1:48:35You can eat it every meal, absolutely. You want to eat candy bars? They're there. You want really salty stuff? Have a go. It's destroying our health. So in a sense, you're meeting the market where you find it. You're giving it what it wants. But the market wants stuff that's really not good for them. And so my idealism is compromised in the sense that I look what people put in their baskets. I see what sells. And it's oftentimes the least healthy things that we're selling that would sell best at Whole Foods, which is unfortunate. so again I can't make those choices for people I wrote a book about it called the whole foods diet I put out there what I think is the ideal diet eat a whole foods plant-based diet if you do you're probably going to live to be 100 and you're going to have excellent health you're not going to die from heart disease cancer blah blah blah blah but I can't make people eat that way I can only lead by example and and I still lead by example in all my own idealism it's I saw I show up in the world.

1:49:37And I guess I don't feel guilty about it. I really do feel like I'm doing the best I can do. And Love Life will be the same way. There'll be little compromises we have to make because the market demands it. It won't be perfect, but it's going to be good and it's going to help a lot of people. Well, let's talk about Love Life. Many years ago, I met Diego to Sony and his incredible wife, Veronica Menon. We became fast friends. They opened a restaurant in Miami in Wynwood called Love Life. When our mutual friend, Dan Buettner moved to Miami, I was like, Dan, you gotta meet this couple. They're amazing.

1:50:18Dan, in turn, introduced them to you. And now you guys have formed this partnership and you're on the cusp of this sort of flagship opening for this new venture called Love Life. So what is this and why, John, after 40 some odd years running Whole Foods, are you so enthusiastic about another entrepreneurial venture? That's a lot of, to unpack there. Yeah, sorry. First is going back to Love Life. We did acquire Veronica Diego's business, Love Life Cafe in Wynwood. We talked about that a little bit earlier. and I do like their food and I do like them personally quite a bit. There are some challenges there.

1:51:04They relocated the restaurant, but the food is really excellent and that's where we got our name. So I love that name, Love Life, because I don't mean how's your love life. I mean love life, love your life, love life itself. The miracle of life is incredible. and so we made that the name of the company after we bought them i said us this is a brand i think we should name our company love life and i've had this dream this dream goes all the way back to 1985 soon after i in 1984 i'd done mdma for the first time i'd done the breath work i studied the course of miracles and i was on this in my own consciousness development and i wanted to open something with some friends that was called LifeWorks.

1:51:55It was going to be where we put our, in 1985, we opened up a Whole Foods Market and we had a consciousness bookstore called Book People and we wanted to do LifeWorks, which was going to be a meditation yoga breathwork center. And it was like, wow, we could have a, it was going to be small, 3 ,000 square feet and we put I saw we could put this where we put Whole Foods and had a whole dream about it. It was a good dream, but the woman that was doing the breath work that had introduced me to MDMA, she ultimately, right at the last minute, decided she wouldn't want to invest. And so that kind of tanked the deal.

1:52:37It's like, well, she's the inspiration for this and she doesn't want to take the risk. I get that, but do I want to take the risk? And does my friends want to take the risk? So we decided maybe the time is not right for this yet. That's 40, almost 40 years ago. That dream never went away. I've always wanted to open some consciousness centers to help people to become the healthiest versions of themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And that's what Love Life is going to be doing. And today is Monday. Tomorrow we open a soft opening, but we're opening up our very first flagship location in the Los Angeles area here.

1:53:15It's going to be in El Segundo, kind of down in the Beach City south of the airport. It happens to be located one – there's a home goods and then there's a Whole Foods Market. This is one of Whole Foods Market's highest volume stores in Southern California is in this particular center. And so we're going in there because I think there's almost 100 % overlap with Whole Foods customers and potential Love Life customers. So they're already coming into this area. And we took over an old Best Buy. And so there's really five components to the Love Life location. The first one is we're going to have a healthy restaurant.

1:54:01and it's going to be primarily vegan. It's going to be primarily plant-based, but it's what I call a plant-forward restaurant, meaning everything starts out vegan, but we're going to let people add on, if they want to add on some fish or chicken or beef, which we're buying all from Whole Foods. So it's all Whole Foods Market. It's gone through their certification processes. And again, that's the perfect scene. I mean, they're good. We'd opened up a Love Life Cafe back in Culver City back a year ago. It lasted only four months and failed. We lost millions of dollars on it. And what did you learn from that failure?

1:54:45I learned that - The location was not great. That vegan restaurants are failing all over the United States is what I've learned. And there's a lot of reasons for that. I think the young generation is not into it as much for one thing. secondly i think that um when you have that discussion the internal politics of where you're going to go eat and it's like the vegans all i'd eat only at vegan restaurants right but if you're with a friend and it's like well let's go to true food kitchen because they have vegan stuff there you can eat that but then i can get fish and i want to eat fish i want some animal protein so that's the compromise and so the pure vegans losing out in those in those conversations because unless people are willing to eat vegan that one night the internal politics of where you're going to go eat oftentimes uh it used to be that you couldn't get vegan stuff uh now most restaurants have vegan options so um that's my explanation for why vegan restaurants are beginning to fail but again this is a great example of perfect being the enemy of the good we're going to have a plant-forward restaurant.

1:55:52It's going to be primarily vegan. If you want to eat a whole foods, plant-based meal, you've got it here. And you've got a lot of different choices. And you can get it without any oil, without any salt. You can get 100 % whole foods. You can add on to it if you want oil, if you want more fat, if you want salt, you can get that too. We're trying to meet the market where we find it while keeping the ideal of a whole foods, plant-based diet there and clear for people that want to eat that like I do. So cafe, first thing. Then we've got a fitness center, a gym, a really nice gym. Think of Equinox in that regard.

1:56:34And then we've got, so we're going to have yoga and Pilates there as well. We've got a separate yoga studio, separate Pilates studio. And we have a really nice spa. So things that you you would get in any spa from massage to facials, to wraps, to scrubs, all the different kinds of things you can do in a spa. Not a medicinal spa, you can't get Botox, but you could get, it's not a medical spa, but stuff you get in a traditional spa. We have all kinds of recovery modalities from cryotherapy to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, to cold plunges, to regular saunas, to infrared saunas and other esoteric sort of biohacking type equipment that we're bringing in for people to make recovery.

1:57:21We have three state-of-the-art indoor pickleball courts for fun and for community. And these are really, I just, I'm into pickleball myself. Yeah, you're big time into that. And these are really good courts. People are going to join Love Life to play pickleball. I know they will. They'll take the other stuff they're not even interested in, just to be able to have a great indoor facility to play with. And then the most important part is the medical center. We are going to have, this is going to be, we're going to have all kinds of alternative health, including the medical doctor. So we'll have acupuncturists.

1:58:00We'll have Ayurvedic medicine. We'll have traditional Chinese medicine. We will have physical therapy. We will have chiropractic. We'll have all kinds of different practitioners there, but we'll also have, starting out with two medical doctors that are trained in functional medicine, integrative medicine, and lifestyle medicine. So if you ask the question to most people, when do you go see a doctor? The answer you get is, well, when you need to, when you're sick. We kind of want to change that paradigm, Rich. We want people to, the doctor's job becomes a different job. The doctor's job is to help you optimize your immune system and your health at the highest level possible so that you don't need to see a doctor.

1:58:46Because in general, when you get a chronic disease like diabetes, type 2 diabetes or obesity, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, they don't actually, the medical system doesn't cure you. They just prescribe pharmaceutical drugs for you to manage your symptoms. And we, A, want to prevent you from getting those diseases in the first place. We now have such amazing technology that can test and get your baseline established. And then wearables like my Apple Watch here or an Oura Ring or a Garmin that can – and we're going to download all this information. We have an amazing technology app that people will get when they become members.

1:59:26And we can begin to create a customized, precision, individualized plan for you. Say you came in. We put you through a battery of tests. We got your baseline. And it's like, then we work with you to say, okay, how do we get the healthiest version of rich role here? And then you're going to have a coach and we'll have the doctor working with you and we'll track your progress over time. And so that's the physical portion of it. But we're also going to be doing meditation. We're also going to be doing breath work. We're also going to be doing Pilates and yoga classes. We're also helping you. And so I'll jump to the, yes, and when psychedelic therapy is legal in California, MDMA, and psilocybin, like they are legal now in Oregon and Colorado, when those are legal here, we will also be practicing that.

2:00:18I really do believe the combination of those two psychedelic drugs is amazing scientifically for PTSD. It's been proven again and again and again to really help and help people break through that are depressed or have difficult PTSD. So the whole idea is to help each individual that's a member become the healthiest, best version of themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If I was to design a mall that I basically wanted to spend all my time in, it would pretty much look exactly like that. Like I could live at a place like this. Like that's unbelievable. I wish it was closer to my home than El Segundo, but this is an incredible vision, but it's also lofty.

2:01:09It's very ambitious. And obviously it's very cost intensive. I would imagine you had to raise a decent amount of money to execute on this. It's got a lot of my personal Whole Foods wealth into it. That's exciting. I mean, that's basically the solution, the antidote for what ails our modern Western society. And the great thing about this is, is that once we prove this idea works, not only are we going to open up more units, but capitalism goes to work. Other people will copy what we're doing and the ideas will spread. And so the world will be a different place 20 years from now. And people will be thinking about this stuff differently 20 years from now.

2:02:00I will tell you, about the first 20 years Whole Foods existed, before our brand got well-known, people come into our stores. And if you knew what supermarkets were like, you probably do know what they were like 40 years ago. They were terrible. They were really terrible places. and Whole Foods changed the industry. They started copying us. Over time, they copied our, they started to up their quality. They started to do natural organic. They made their stores look nicer. We had this major impact over time. But about the first 20 years, people come into Whole Foods for the first time and they say, oh my God, I've never been in a place like this.

2:02:42This is incredible. I love this place. This place is great. I still hear people saying, I'd love coming into your stores. Why? I don't know. It feels good when I'm in the stores. It's like, that, by the way, is culture. I feel the culture of Whole Foods when they're in the stores. So I believe the same thing is going to happen in the love life. When people go into this love life that we're opening up tomorrow, they're going to say, this place is incredible. Oh, my God. How come nobody's done this before? This is a good idea. I wish this was closer to where I live. when are you gonna open one close to us?

2:03:16That's exactly the, that's what we want people to experience because I do think this is an idea whose time has come. What is the near and distant ambition for this? Like how many of these locations, obviously this is your proving concept. This is the infinite game. I talk about the infinite game, which a couple of great books have been written on the infinite game. I did not make this up myself, But an infinite game, a finite game is like if I go play pickleball, there's rules and it's a finite game. You play, there's a winner, there's a loser. End of game. Start a new game. An infinite game never ends.

2:03:57An infinite game is one that intends to go on forever. So like life is an infinite game. DNA is replicating, going on, evolving, changing, mutating. But it's meant to continue to go on indefinitely. eventually trying to figure out how to get off the planet before supernova hits and get into some other galaxy. So DNA is replicating.

2:04:21Similarly, business or capitalism is an infinite game. The players change. It evolves over time. But the game goes on. People are always creating and trading with each other. That's going to continue. Well, I see Whole Foods is an infinite game. I hope it outlives its founder and founders. It will go on. maybe not forever but for intends to be an infinite game love life is something that i want to be going on long after i've passed on the scene but i intend for love life to outlive me and to go on and to hopefully do much good in the world long after i've left it to be an infinite game so that's what i get people why you're too old why are you doing this it's like you don't understand i'm doing this partly because my soul is guiding me to do this but people don't really understand that but it doesn't matter i don't have to be around to see it fully flower uh it it's uh it's it's if i didn't do this i would regret it the rest of my life i would always wonder oh my god you chicken shit you knew you had the call and you didn't answer it because you were scared didn't want to sit on your money and it's like no i would internal critic would have a field day roasting me.

2:05:33This is like, I feel called to do this. My soul is saying, do this. It's an adventure. It's part of the continuous of my hero's journey. So we're going to do it. If it doesn't work out, well, sometimes reality knocks you back. Do you think about legacy? No. I mean, that's the honest truth. I don't. People ask me that question all the time. And the best metaphor I can give to explain it, people ask Picasso, it's like, you know, what's your favorite painting that you've ever done? He said, the one I'm working on right now, right? Those other paintings are in the past. What he's creating right now is what he's most interested in.

2:06:10I think it's the same way with entrepreneurs. What I'm interested in is what I'm creating now, not what I've created in the past. And legacy is thinking about looking back and what you've accomplished in looking at it and saying, well, you know, it's your legacy or looking forward, trying to anticipate what your legacy will be. It's like, yeah, I'm just trying to be in the moment, creating now, not worried about the legacy. It'll take care of itself one way or another. Yeah, well, it's a beautiful vision and it's a gift. You know, I would absolutely love to go to a place like that every single day.

2:06:47Well, stop by. Yeah, I mean, I'm your perfect customer or something like that. Yeah, you probably are. But I think the moment is right. You know, the culture is receptive to this and people are frustrated with the healthcare system, which is something you have a lot of opinions about and have written about. And the problem is that there's no other like solution other than, you know, going to, you know, trying to root out or find some obscure, you know, clinician who sees things the way that you do and that comes at a cost and is, you know, But the fact that you consolidate all of these things under one roof and create a system in which everything can kind of be tracked and there's purpose and direction and intentionality behind how all these things are interacting with each other, I think is really a fantastic one-stop solution to all of this.

2:07:45I know it's an adventure. I'm very excited about it. It's gonna be, we're gonna have all kinds of challenges and setbacks and problems. I mean, doctors, for example, they have totally different views. Doctors, they're not really employees. Doctors are independent. You can't really tell a doctor how to practice. So every doctor is going to have their own philosophy, their own way of healing. And you've got to get doctors that match up well with your members, that have good synergies with the members. And you have all these alternative healings. And so here's one of the challenges. when does biohacking become snake oil salesman?

2:08:24Right. How do you discern what's really effective versus what's scientific, what's cutting edge and what's just, you know. Right, because you could fill an entire Best Buy with just a bunch of crazy equipment. We have some crazy equipment. We do. Right, but it's what's efficacious, what is still we're not sure about and what is just a waste of money. Yes, exactly. That's one of our challenges is to discern because we are cutting edge. We're on, you know, we're crossed over to what controlled scientific studies have said, you know, and so, but ultimately the doctors are gonna say we wanna do this or we don't wanna do this.

2:09:08And so you gotta pick doctors that you sync up pretty well with. Right. I'm pretty excited about it. It's a new adventure, Rich. It's good to, in life, we need new adventures. We do. Well, you certainly have a lot of energy. So it's working for you. That's part of adventures give you energy. Yeah. I love it. And I wish you luck at the opening, the soft open tonight? No, tomorrow morning, nine o 'clock. We're missing about half of our gym equipment. That's why it's a soft opening, stuck in custom someplace. I'll drop in in August for the real one. August 10th is the official grand opening with media coverage.

2:09:49And we'll have everything, everything will be working then for sure. Beautiful, man. Well, I think we did it. How do you feel? I feel good. Yeah. Come back and share with me once you've, you know, have some stories to tell about Love Life. I'd love to hear more about it. And I'm at your service, my friend. I think what you're doing is laudatory and beautiful. So thank you for coming and sharing with me today. The new adventures of Love Life. That's it. The infinite game. The infinite game. All right. Thanks, brother. Yeah, thank you.

2:10:29That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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2:12:26Thank you.