David SenraMy Conversation with John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods Market | David Senra
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
105 min read · 21,469 words- 0:00 – 2:18
Fanatical Entrepreneurs: Why Work Feels Like Play
- JMJohn Mackey
[static] Well, one of your themes that comes out in, in listening to a lot of your... is you admire entrepreneurs, and you find one of the common threads for the successful entrepreneurs to be those who are basically fanatics. They just are into their businesses. I just listened to Michael Dell. I mean, Michael, you know, it's, it's like he, he, he says, and y- even started off the episode by quoting him. He says: "Well, how much time did you work?" And he said, "All the time. All of the time." And, uh, that's a theme for oftentimes for entrepreneurs, that they are so- it's not like they're even thinking about working. Michael doesn't make a distinction, I don't think, between work and play. Neither do I, 'cause when you're really enjoying it, is it work? I mean, it's-- you're doing what you want to do, and it's playful. So it takes a lot of time, but you're not thinking about it because you're loving every minute of it. You're enjoying it. That comes through with the Todd Graves one as well, you know? I mean, he just loved his business so much. And so all these entrepreneurs, they're a hundred percent in, and that's where their time goes. They're not-- You ask Michael if he was kind of like a Renaissance man or if he was doing a lot of different things, and it's like: "No. No, not really." I think that's also true for most entrepreneurs. They're pretty focused on a few things, and mostly they're focused on their business.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, to the, with the conversation we were just having- [chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes, exactly.
- DSDavid Senra
-before we started recording, which, you know, I'm essentially seeking your counsel because I think I'm just like these kind of people. Like, you wouldn't spend ten years making this podcast, reading four hundred of these books. Your book is excellent, by the way, which we'll talk a lot about today. I wasn't expecting to start here. If you didn't think that you were similar or there was something about them that was attractive, and I feel like essentially my, my entire life is my work. Now, I think one thing that we share together, and we, we spent several hours, uh, together, too, it's very obvious in your book, but also with you, you viewed yourself... I don't know if you use this word, but to me, you're definitely a missionary.
- JMJohn Mackey
Mm.
- DSDavid Senra
And one of the things I want to talk to you about, I talk to a lot of founders about this, so it's a lot, a lot of co-founder conflict. And it's very obvious that especially when you're a missionary, you aren't like, "Oh, I just want to, like, start, you know, one grocery store so people eat healthier and better food." You're like: "We're going to change the way that the country eats." And that was a very d- distinct philosophical mismatch from some of your early co-founders.
- 2:18 – 6:16
The Missionary vs. Mercenary Co-Founder Conflict
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Can you talk a little bit about that?
- JMJohn Mackey
I mean, the first one, we started it up, it was kind of like, this ought to be fun. We weren't trying to change the way America eats. We just wanted to open up a small natural food store in a safer way. And actually, the good part of the book is dedi- dedicated to the early days because I think many entrepreneurs, they remember the early start-up part of the business very well, and then they remember the last few years, and then there's the period in between they don't think about. One of the good things about writing a memoir is, like, I got to rethink it all, relive it all. And, um, yeah, my original founders, co-founders, particularly one, Mark, he just wanted to make a lot of money. And the very first store, the very first Whole Foods Market, was very profitable. And even though the flood knocked it back, we got back on our feet, and it was just very profitable. And he said, "We don't really need to do anything else. We've got it made. Let's just not screw it up." It's like: "Well, I don't want to do just one store. I want to open up more stores." And he went along with that, but those new stores started slow, had to grow into it, and so there even came a time where we were losing money again, and he was very angry about it. He says, "You've, you've, you've blown it." And I said: "No, these stores are going to be fine. They're going to grow. You wait and see." But he didn't have the patience to do that. It's like you, you plant a seed, you can't be digging around. You got to let it grow. You got to give it time to ger-- seed to germinate and turn into something. So you have to be patient. It's sort of like investing, and you have to let it compound over many years. Well, you have to let a business compound over many years as well. So the missionary part was, as we began to grow, I began to realize nobody's really doing quite what Whole Foods is doing, and nobody quite has the vision that we have, that I had, to, to be a national company, to, to maybe change our agricultural system, maybe be able to help people to eat healthier. I could see what was happening simultaneously. Uh, with Whole Foods growth, America was getting sicker and sicker. That's the paradox. It almost tracks perfectly, where we see... I, I mean, David, seventy-four percent of Americans are overweight and forty-three percent are obese, and that has not peaked. It is still going up. Um, and it's, it's, uh, this-- and you can see it now with Make America Healthy Again, that people are beginning to respond to the fact that we are literally killing ourselves through what we're eating.
- DSDavid Senra
The co-founder that had the philosophical, philosophical mismatch, one of them, was that the same one that you guys bought out? Was it Mark that you bought out early in-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes, Mark.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- JMJohn Mackey
That's right. Mark. The other co-founder was with me. I mean, I mean, he, he, he was Mark's partner, originally, Craig. But Craig really had a, a larger vision. Craig really wanted to grow the business. He really-- I remember, I, I don't know if I told it in the book or not, but I think, I think I might have mentioned it. But one day early on, c- we were, we were starting to grow, we were starting to went to California, and Craig said, "John, we're going to be everywhere. We're going to be everywhere in America. Can you believe this? We're going to have Whole Foods Markets everywhere." He says, "I'll bet someday, I'll bet someday we have a store in Kansas City." [chuckles] For, for, for Craig, Kansas City was, like, the last place we'd have a store, but he thought: We'll get there someday. And I remember, I think Craig had retired by the time we, we finally got to Kansas City, but I remember, uh, calling him up and saying, "Craig, we've done it. We're in [chuckles] we're in Kansas City, dude, we made it!" [laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
There's a lot of things that hon- I, I, I mentioned this in the Founder's episode I made about you. Uh, I was not expecting, because you're, you're hilarious in the book, by the way, where it starts. You're like, you know, I'm like this shirtless, hitchhiking hippie. [laughing]
- JMJohn Mackey
[laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
Like, I just dropped out of college. I'm looking for, like, my life's mission, like, what I want to do for work. And so you wouldn't think, like, a shirtless, you know, hitchhiking hippie, there'd be a lot of parallels between you and, uh, Johnny Rockefeller, but there definitely is. And it- specifically in the early days of his career, where there was a commitment-... mismatch between him and his original co-founders wind
- 6:16 – 8:12
The Shirtless Hitchhiking Hippie and Johnny Rockefeller
- DSDavid Senra
up-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah, that's true.
- DSDavid Senra
Wind up, he bought them out. He said that day that he got rid of those partners was-- he looks back as one of the smartest and best decisions of his life. You were constantly ex- wanting to expand, expand, expand. I wanted to ask you, that's the next question I'm gonna ask you. From the very first, like, from the very early days of SaferWay, and then which turns into, to Whole Foods, and your partners were kind of like, kind of put-- trying to put the reins and, like, pull you back.
- JMJohn Mackey
Right.
- DSDavid Senra
Can you, like, talk us through that time of your life?
- JMJohn Mackey
I just had a lot of confidence, and I think, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, not that we weren't making mistakes, I just... I think entrepreneurs believe, okay, I, I got this from listening to the Michael Dell one on, on the drive out here, in fact, is that Michael said, "Well, you, you gotta make mistakes. That's how you learn. That's how you, you iterate." Entrepreneurs have confidence that they will solve the problems. Michael likes to figure out puzzles, right? Well, business in some way is a puzzle. It's like-- and I'm doing it again with Love.Life. It's like, okay, what does the market really want here? And okay, this isn't working, we've got to do less of that. This is working, let's do more of that. And then, and then you- you're constantly try- trying to think about how to create more value for your customers in ways that they don't necessarily even know they need it. So the entrepreneur has confidence that he or she will figure it out, crack the code, solve the puzzle, and so they're willing to go ahead even though they don't know for certain, because they're-- what they do believe is they're figuring it out. They're going to figure it out. And, um, people that-- I think my co-founders, they weren't sure we would be able to figure it out, so they... And they didn't want to blow it. They didn't-- they wanted to play it safe. They didn't want to lose what they had, I think. And I was like, we're gonna-- I, w- I didn't-- failure wasn't an option. I mean, I just think entrepreneurs have great confidence in their ability to solve the problems, and they will figure it out and win. And I think I fell into that category, looking backwards.
- DSDavid Senra
Why did
- 8:12 – 10:19
Entrepreneur Confidence: Solving Puzzles and Cracking the Code
- DSDavid Senra
you understand, though, that you had to expand or you weren't going to succeed? Where they thought, "Okay, we can just stay with this, like, nice old store."
- JMJohn Mackey
Just because the world's constantly... That, that Whole Foods had no patents. We were just a grocery store retailer. Anybody could see what we were doing. Anybody could copy what we were doing. I was amazed. I always like to make the joke that Whole Foods flew under the radar. The supermarkets never took us seriously for decades. It wasn't until we opened up in Columbus Circle in New York City. The media never paid any attention to us either. We opened up in Times... You know, not Times Square, we opened up in L- in, in, uh, Columbus Circle, and the, this, the biggest supermarket in New York, and it just-- and it was in a basement. I mean, I think I talk in the book about how difficult a decision that was because of the capital investment, no parking, and in a basement. It's like, we're bound to fail. But we took the risk, and that store was still the highest volume store at Whole Foods, even though it's got some challengers now. It's, it's-- ever since we opened, it just took off, and then the supermarkets discovered us. They started to take us more seriously as a competitor because of all the publicity we received, and they had better go see that store. And then the media started to pay attention to us as well, and as the media gave us more attention, more people began to buy the stock, and so we had this, you know, upward spiral of success. And one of the things is, is that we can't patent anything. We don't have any, uh... Anybody can see what you're doing, and they can-- and they-- it's easy to get your intellectual capital. Just hire away some key employees. And we were-- Whole Foods was fortunate because we never were taken seriously by the supermarkets until we really developed scale on our own. I think I tell the story of a, of a venture capitalist who, who didn't invest, and his basic argument was, "Well, I don't think it's a big market. You're just a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies. But then, if I'm wrong, uh, these other big supermarket chains will put you out of business. You can't compete with Safeway or H-E-B or those guys." And he, he might have been right, except that they didn't pay any attention to us, so we kept doing what... They were, they were hypnotized by Walmart.
- DSDavid Senra
Wow!
- JMJohn Mackey
They were
- 10:19 – 10:52
Flying Under the Radar: How Supermarkets Ignored Whole Foods
- JMJohn Mackey
so scared about Walmart that they ignored us.
- DSDavid Senra
This is one of the most surprising things. I want to go back to the venture capitalist. I'm going to handle the venture capitalist first, and then I want to go to Walmart because we talked about this when we had dinner, but in the book, that was one of the most shocking things, where like, actually, Walmart played a huge role in our success, and I didn't even put it together, uh, before that. You call venture capitalists hitchhikers with credit cards. [chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
Right. [chuckles]
- DSDavid Senra
In the book, you do not hide your disdain for them in general. Can you explain why, like, you call them hitchhikers with credit cards, and, like, recount some of the experiences that you had with them in the early days?
- 10:52 – 14:03
Venture Capitalists Are Hitchhikers With Credit Cards
- JMJohn Mackey
I mean, first of all, I'm glad we got venture capital money. Um, they... I don't know if we could have grown without it. We didn't get very much, but it was enough to get us into Northern California, and then, and then, after that, we, we-- four years after we got the money from them, we were public. So they, they were important for us to get to where we got to. Once we had the public money, we didn't need those hitchhikers any longer, and they got out of the car. And I tell entrepreneurs this all the time: The VCs are playing a different kind of game. The game VCs are playing is, is that it's kind of a blockbuster model. They're looking for exponential growth, and when they hit-- when you get an Apple or you get a NVIDIA or an Intuitive Surgical, or you get one of these companies that just compounds and compounds and compounds, you can get a hundred X your venture capital money, and that's what they're looking for. And so what ends up happening is they oftentimes take good businesses and try to scale them too rapidly because they're trying to get that exponential payoff. Remember, they've usually got these funds where the money is only going to be in the, you know, seven years, they've got to start paying back. So the entrepreneur, they're not evergreen funds, where you can keep the money in, you know, for decades. They're pressuring the entrepreneur to try to scale rapidly, and that works for some businesses.... and those are happy endings. But a lot of times, you take a perfectly good business that, that's not gonna be, you know, a, a multi-billion dollar business that's gonna change the world, but it's still a good business, and they wreck it. But they can afford a lot of failures because of the blockbusters make so much money. And so it's, it's, it's like a batting average. They c-- they don't have to hit a thousand. They just need to hit good enough, and the blockbusters are home runs, and so they make a lot of money on that. So I'm often telling entrepreneurs that, "Be careful with the VCs, because the first thing they're thinking is they wanna scale your business, and they're gonna tell you, 'Don't worry about your burn rate. We'll do another round of financing at a higher level, and a higher level, and a higher level.'" But what often h- happens down that road is that, um, the business doesn't scale as well as they want it to, and then you get the round where it's kind of a cram down round, where it's a down round, and the, the, the, the entrepreneurs' share is diluted way down in those down rounds, or they get rid of the entrepreneur and bring professional management in, and they throw them out on the side of the road. I always tell the young entrepreneurs, "Don't give up control of your business to the VCs. They may talk a good game, but they're not fundamentally aligned with you." I think for most entrepreneurs, you really wanna build a business, and you probably wanna be here a decade now or fifteen or twenty years from now, still growing your business. And if that's the case, you have to be very careful about the VCs because they-- that's not what they want. They have seven years. They want a hundred X return if they can get it, and they're prepared to crash your business prematurely if that's what it, it takes. So, so be careful. That's, that's my main, main thing I tell them.
- DSDavid Senra
How do the younger entrepreneurs that you're advising usually respond to that advice?
- JMJohn Mackey
Well, for
- 14:03 – 16:31
Builder Entrepreneurs vs. Serial Entrepreneurs
- JMJohn Mackey
one thing, most of them don't care, uh, uh, because I think you're a builder, Michael Dell is... A lot of these entrepreneurs you're talking about, these iconic entrepreneurs, they're builder entrepreneurs. But that's not the most common entrepreneur. Tho- those are the ones you get the biographies about, but the most common entrepreneur is the serial entrepreneur. They just start businesses, and they do them for five years and flip them. They're, they're like somebody remodeling a house and then flipping it. Except these cases, they're really creative. They're good at germinating things. They don't want to operate them. They don't want to really build them over the long run. And so they're okay with that, trying to scale it because they're not gonna be around anyway. They want a rich exit. That's more common than you realize.
- DSDavid Senra
I think I now am realizing that, and I have for several years. Actually, it's funny, I just thought about this story this morning, um, and I think this is actually a really important point, that I remember a few years ago having dinner with a founder, and the weird thing is, I had never met him. He was a fan of the podcast, and... But I'm like: I don't know if this guy's actually listening to the po-- the, the podcast, because he wanted to talk about, like, the watch he has and the car he's driving. And I found out he was selling a ton of, like, secondary before his company was successful at all. And it just came out yesterday or the day before, that this company that had a two billion dollar valuation in, like, two thousand and twenty-two or two thousand and twenty-one, whenever I was having dinner with him, uh, last year, they did seven million in revenue.
- JMJohn Mackey
Wow!
- DSDavid Senra
And they had forty-seven million dollars of expenses. And I'm like: "Oh, you're just this gu- this-- that sign." I was like: "I don't give a shit about the car you have or the watch you have. I care about what you build, not consume. You should be proud of what you have built, not that you bought-- you have money to buy somebody else's product. Like, that doesn't impress me." And I-- obviously, I left the dinner and never saw him again.
- JMJohn Mackey
[laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
And I kind of forgot about him until yesterday. I'm like: Oh, this-- I spent... And I was like: You idiot, David! You have, like-- One of the benefits of reading a book like yours or any of these biographies, like, you get to the end of the story, and you just re-- you're reminded that, you know, our life, you come to the end of the book, our life, we have limited time here-
- JMJohn Mackey
Mm.
- DSDavid Senra
-and you should be ruthless with how you're spending your time. And I just gave two hours to this guy that was not even a B player. He's F. You've done nothing, you fucking joker. Like, this is useless for me to spend any time with you. And this is why, uh, people think I'm a little crazy, where I spend almost all my time with people that have... I said in the episode, people like you, where Michael Dell, Todd Graves. I'm obsessed with people that do things for a long time-
- JMJohn Mackey
Right.
- DSDavid Senra
-because
- 16:31 – 20:52
Time Is the Only Filter I Trust
- DSDavid Senra
time is the only filter that I trust. I have no idea, no predictability, that this entrepreneur that started a company today is going to be successful. We're gonna see, and it's going to be up to them and the decisions that they make. And so I am kinda drawn to these, like, more missionary founders because you just make better, longer-term decisions.
- JMJohn Mackey
So m- I'm not sure he, he was a typical, uh, serial entrepreneur, because a lot of serial entrepreneurs that I know, I know a bunch of them, and they do care about their businesses, and for them, it's more, it's more-- they have a, they have a certain skill set of creating businesses and then getting them to a certain level, and they're, that's not primarily about the money. For them, the fun part is creating the business. And then, as you start to staff it up and you build a bureaucracy, they're-- they feel trapped by their own creations in a way. They're just-- they're not wired to fit within that kind of corporate structure that they're creating, and all businesses eventually evolve to, or almost all businesses eventually evolve to, if they get any scale. They just don't like that, so they start over again. But I think those people are very interesting people. I think many serial entrepreneurs are not simply shallow people do- in it just for the money. I have some good, close friends who made a lot of money creating different businesses that, um, but only... Like, one of my good friends in Austin, a guy named Brett Hurt, he was the-- he, he, he co-founded three public companies. Uh, his most famous one was Bazaarvoice, which does, uh, all-- did all the re-- i- if you do a review on an online business, you're probably using Bazaarvoice technology. And, um, B- Brett is just-- he says: "Well, I just love creating businesses, and, and, uh, but after, after I've done it for, I don't know, five or six years, I just get bored with it, and I want to create something new."
- DSDavid Senra
... Yeah, I don't have any problem with that.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Like, I mean, the whole point of being an entrepreneur is you, you get to decide what you work on, who's around you. Like, that's one of the, the biggest choice.
- JMJohn Mackey
But Brett, Brett would never be bragging about any of his cars he drives or, you know, his wealth. It was just not in him. He just wouldn't do that.
- DSDavid Senra
Before having this conversation with John Mackey, I got to spend seven hours with him over two days, and it was during one of our conversations that John Mackey told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about Founder's Podcast. He had listened to over a hundred episodes before we met, and he told me that if Founder's Podcast existed when he was younger, that Whole Foods would still be an independent company. That since the podcast and all of history's greatest entrepreneurs constantly emphasize the importance of controlling expenses, he would have put a much higher priority on it, especially during good times. During boom times, it is very natural for a company and for human nature to not watch your costs as closely because everything is going so well. Andrew Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again: "Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and in Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in the cost of goods were permanent." This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp and have spent a ton of time with them over the last two years. They all listen to the podcast, and they've picked up on the fact that the main theme is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend, and how doing so can give you a massive competitive advantage. That is a main theme for Ramp. The reason that Ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your costs. Ramp gives you easy-to-use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. In this episode you're currently listening to, there's a shocking idea that John Mackey told me about, and it has to do with the role that Walmart played in Whole Foods' success. And it has to do with how impossible it was for other people to compete with Sam Walton and Walmart. In his autobiography, Sam Walton wrote this: "Our money was made by controlling expenses. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient." Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your spend and optimize all of your financial operations, all on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. Make sure you go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time and money. That is ramp.com. Let's go back to the role that Walmart played in Whole Foods' success, which is a very interesting part of your book.
- 20:52 – 24:01
How Walmart Accidentally Fueled Whole Foods' Success
- JMJohn Mackey
Well, it was, it was sort of, um, uh, if I was using a metaphor, it's kind of like, uh... we were using a football metaphor. It's kind of like Walmart was such a massive force. They, they created everybody, all the supermarkets. Remember, Walmart started out, they didn't sell food. They were, they were... You know, Sam Walton, you read his book, [chuckles] probably ten times.
- DSDavid Senra
[chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
And, and Sam, you know, he started out in kind of in the five-and-dime store, and that was kind of his initial model. I remember he w- had this big idea to do the bigger general merchandise store, and he couldn't sell it to where-- to the-
- DSDavid Senra
To Ben Franklin.
- JMJohn Mackey
To Ben Franklin, so he just went out and did it on his own. And it was only later, after they'd succ-- Walmart was very successful growing, and they were competing with Gibsons and companies like that, uh, Kmart, that they started thinking about food. But when they put groceries in, it so disrupted the conventional supermarket industry that all they wanted to do was, um, figure out how to compete with Walmart.
- DSDavid Senra
So the existing grocery stores saw the competition from Walmart, and they made the drastic mistake of trying to compete on price-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes
- DSDavid Senra
-with the low-cost provider. [chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
Correct. And so they, they tried to cut their costs. They-- and they spent less money in building out their boxes. They looked more like warehouses. They were more sterile. They went with cheap lighting. Everything, you know, everything to, to cut their capital investments down. Then they cut their labor to the bone. They had... A lot of them had unions, so they had to but-- so they cut, like, cut service back, and, uh, they still couldn't compete with Walmart. We were playing Walmart's game. With Whole Foods, we just were going this different direction. We'd like, "Well, we can't compete with Walmart on price. We're not even going to try to. We're, we're going to compete on quality. We're going to compete on service. We're going to have differentiated product mix." And so that's what we did. As that one venture capital said, "You're a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies." That's true. It was true at one point. We were definitely, uh, fooded for a younger generation of more health-conscious people. But what had ended up happening is, is that as those supermarkets made their stores less attractive, we'll say, to, um, middle class, upper middle-class women who do mo- do most of the food shopping, they wanted to come into a store that was pretty, it was beautiful. There was people that gave them good service, that took their groceries to their car, that was nice to them, that answered their questions. And they didn't get the products that Whole Foods sold, but what they got was our produce was beautiful, and it tasted good, and these people were really nice to us, even though they had piercings and tattoos, and [chuckles] they didn't look like-- but they looked like their children, actually, so they were more sympathetic to it than you might think. And so we cracked the- we crack- kind of cracked that upper middle class next, that bought our food for the quality and the service. And then, as that happened, we began to grow faster. Our comps went up. We were not just in our own little sort of hippie, hippie ville any longer. Uh, and the supermarkets didn't pick it up, and again, until we got to... really didn't pick it up.
- DSDavid Senra
So they were ignoring you?
- JMJohn Mackey
They were ignoring
- 24:01 – 27:17
The Jaw-Drop Effect: When Customers First Walked In
- JMJohn Mackey
us. It was like, use another football metaphor coming back, Walmart was like this giant, uh, distraction, and we were running downfield wide open [chuckles] for the touchdown pass. They were so obsessed with stopping Walmart that it allowed Whole Foods to, to compete on a different, different framework, a different, different competitive strategy. The supermarkets only competed-... for the longest time, they only competed on price, really. They just, you know, they d- had nice stores with Muzak in it, and they never-- but they were all trying to compete on price, and then Walmart was the killer app, so to speak, and they were trying to-- That's all they knew how to do, is to compete on that. So Whole Foods created a different business model, and once they figured it out, it became a lot tougher competition for us. They started copying us. They started making nicer stores, putting a bigger emphasis on their perishable foods like produce, um, competing with us on price instead of Walmart.
- DSDavid Senra
How many years did they give you the run of the field?
- JMJohn Mackey
That's the great question. I'd say we got the run of the field. We opened up, uh, the first Whole Foods was nineteen eighty, say, before nineteen seventy-eight, and, uh, we didn't open up... It was two thousand and four, we opened up Columbus Circle. So think about that. We had, you know, twenty, twenty to twenty-five years where nobody paid any attention to us, and that allowed us to scale and compound, and they just dismissed us. They just thought, "Who cares about Whole Foods? They don't hurt us." We never hurt any s- one supermarket that much. In fact, we'd come into a new market, and they'd be all-- They'd compete initially. They'd try to lower prices, get some of our products, but then their sales didn't drop very much because Whole Foods would take a little bit from a lot of different groceries. We wouldn't take much from any particular one. So as a result, they just thought, "They're not-- We don't have any problem competing with Whole Foods." They, they just ignored us.
- DSDavid Senra
What was going on there? I don't understand how you would take a little bit from, you know, let's say, five of the other grocery stores in the areas you were going in.
- JMJohn Mackey
Well, because we weren't-- we were so differentiated, we'd take only a few of their customers, not, not most of their customers didn't switch over, just some of them did. A few did, but a few switched over from a lot of different places.
- DSDavid Senra
Mm.
- JMJohn Mackey
And in the early days, when we were the only natural food supermarket, maybe for fifty miles around, we had a lot of people that would drive in on the weekends and stock up, and they'd buy, you know, three hundred, four hundred dollars worth of groceries.
- DSDavid Senra
How far were they driving to get to you?
- JMJohn Mackey
Oh, I mean, sometimes a hundred miles. When we only had one store in a market area, uh, people might come in. They wouldn't-- I mean, it's not their everyday shop, right? They'd come in. They couldn't get this food anywhere else. They didn't have what Whole Foods was selling at a, at typical supermarkets in the day. In the day, we were so unique. I would say, David, the first twenty years we existed, when people would first walk into a Whole Foods Market, you could see-- I'd see it, I'd see it again and again and again. Their jaw would drop. It was like, "I've never been in a store like this. This, this, this... I've never seen a store like this." Now, people don't have that feeling because it's more common, and supermarkets have upped their game. But for a long time, at least twenty years, people were just b- blown away the first time they came into a Whole Foods Market. They'd never seen a store like that. It was so different than any other supermarket they'd ever been in. So we were very well differentiated. We were in a niche, and people did not compete with us in that niche, and so we sort of owned it. But as I said, retailers don't have patents. We couldn't patent a natural food supermarket. We couldn't patent our product mix. We couldn't patent our marketing. We couldn't patent our service levels.
- DSDavid Senra
And
- 27:17 – 29:19
Growth Through Acquisition: Building Geographic Platforms
- DSDavid Senra
so scale was your solution to that?
- JMJohn Mackey
Well, as we scaled, we could get, we could get better pricing as well. So-
- DSDavid Senra
That was one of the craziest stories in the book that, again, I've been shopping at Whole Foods forever, and never, for some reason, I never thought about, like, the creation. I just figured, "Oh, he started the first Whole Foods and the second, and he's been doing it for forty years, and that's how it happened." I had no idea that how much you grew by acquisition.
- JMJohn Mackey
The acquisitions were key because they created a platf- a geographical platform for us. To go into a new geography and create a team of people is very expensive. We did it a few times. We did it... We started in Texas, we did it in Northern California, we did it in Chicago, we did it in Northern California. But most of the other regions, like Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., Florida, North Carolina, we got our platform by an acquisition. We bought out an existing company. It didn't, it means we didn't get many stores. We might have gotten, you know... I think we got six stores in Boston and seven in LA and two in Florida, but that was still enough to create the platform. And from there, with that platform in place, with already support there and good- and, and, and, and good intellectual capital, people that knew what they were doing, we were able to grow faster. But if you look at Whole F- let's say Whole Foods has five hundred and fifty stores right now. Uh, probably, of those that were stores that were acquired, that still exist and weren't relocated, maybe twenty-five.
- DSDavid Senra
So the acquisitions were happening earlier in the company history?
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes, earlier, and they created a platform, a geographical platform, that allowed us to expand out from that platform, uh, in a sense, open new, new stores in that area.
- DSDavid Senra
This is, again, one of my favorite parts of the book, and I think I want to spend some time here, if you don't mind. Again, Rockefeller did this exact same thing. I mentioned it in the Founder's episode I did on you, where he had this thing called Secret Allies, that I think is one of my favorite ideas I've ever come across in any of these books. He's at the very beginning of the refining industry. You're at the very beginning of the natural foods, you know, industry.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Doesn't
- 29:19 – 33:17
Secret Allies: The Natural Foods Network
- DSDavid Senra
really exist. [chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
Right.
- DSDavid Senra
Uh, you are by far the most ambitious, and you-- I called you in the episode, like, oh, like, I should have known this. Anybody that's going to start in a new industry and come out at- built the category-defining company in that industry, of course, they have this huge ambition. They're essentially a conqueror, is the way I think about you, even though I think a lot of people would, uh, not come acro- come away with that same conclusion because of how, like, you know, the hippie nature that you started with. So you, what you do is very smart. You did exactly what Rockefeller did. You like, you looked around and said, "Well, I'm doing this thing. Who else? Let me look around, not just in my area. Who else is doing the same thing?" And in some cases, you find out about these in, like, trade journals, and then you don't just like: "Oh, that's interesting." No, you get on a plane, and you go there, and you start building a relationship.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
You, you built a network, right? Was it an official network? Was this-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... unofficial?
- JMJohn Mackey
No, we had a name for it. It's called the Natural Foods, Natural Foods Network.
- DSDavid Senra
Talk about this. This is phenomenal.
- JMJohn Mackey
In some ways, the natural foods industry, natural organic foods industry, came out of the health food industry. The health food industry started earlier-... but it's mostly selling-- it's mostly what we call pill shops. They're mostly selling supplements, um, and some packaged, uh, y- whole grains and whole, whole grain flours and things like that. But mostly, most of their sales came from supplements. And, and but that's kind of where the industry grew out of. Pe-- You know, think about Jack LaLanne, and he, and, and he was back in the health food day, and he was a health food champion.
- DSDavid Senra
This, like, '70s? What year-- What time period?
- JMJohn Mackey
Oh, no, no. We're talking-- The early health food industry was probably after World War II, and, and it didn't-- until you-- until the c-- until my generation kind of came of age in the late '60s and early '70s, you begin to see certain natural food stores start to pop up that were primarily food rather than supplements. And there came a point where we realized we're not really health food stores in the old traditional sense. We're different. We're natural food stores. Then the next iteration was, what if we did a store that was a complete one-stop shop for people living this lifestyle so that we were a supermarket, a natural food supermarket? When, when Whole Foods started, there were only, like, three or four other natural food supermarkets in the United States. There was, like, Bread and Circus in Boston. There was Mrs. Gooch's in LA. There was Fraser Farms in San Diego. Um, that's about it. I mean, there were some smaller stores, but they weren't... You got to be at least ten thousand square feet to be a natural food supermarket, in my mind. And, [clears throat] so we opened up. I heard about those in the, the Natural Foods Merchandiser and went and studied them and thought... I remember it was pivotal. It's like I could go and tell the investors: "Hey, I didn't invent this. There are other people doing it. It's working in LA. It's working in Boston. It's working in San Diego. Why wouldn't it work in Austin? It'll work in Austin. Let's try it." Otherwise, I may not have been able to get the money if I didn't have at least a few prototypes that were already working. Went and studied them, became friends with them, and, uh, ultimately acquired all [chuckles] of them, and- [chuckles]
- DSDavid Senra
You jumped to where I was going.
- JMJohn Mackey
But there were, there were others that were opening up about the same time, like, like Alfalfa's in, uh, in, in Boulder, Whole Food Company in New Orleans, um, um, Unicorn Village in Miami. There were, there were others that were forming about the same time. That was an idea whose time had come.
- DSDavid Senra
But what was the initial instinct? The initial instinct is, "These people are doing what I'm doing. Let me go build a relationship with them." And then you realize, "Oh, there, there is a mismatch of ambition here, and I can actually acquire them?"
- JMJohn Mackey
No.
- DSDavid Senra
Because they didn't want to expand. Like-
- JMJohn Mackey
You're giving me too much credit there.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay, but Mrs. Gooch's, I remember that one-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... because that was instrumental. At the time, I think you guys were only selling, like-- you weren't selling, like, there wasn't a butcher. There was some kind of... That you were doing, like, eight to ten thousand dollars a week in sales.
- JMJohn Mackey
That was a SaferWay.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay, it's SaferWay.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Eight to ten thousand dollars a week or something like that.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
They were doing, like,
- 33:17 – 34:52
Mrs. Gooch's and the Revelation of Scale
- DSDavid Senra
a hundred thousand, and you're like, oh-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
... that kind of opened your eyes-
- JMJohn Mackey
That's right
- DSDavid Senra
-that you could add the other product category, correct?
- JMJohn Mackey
Bingo.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- JMJohn Mackey
Mrs. Gooch's was a huge influence early on because it's like, wow, they're doing ten times as much sales as we're doing, and their stores are a little bit bigger, but they're not that much bigger. But they're selling, they're selling fresh meat, and they've got big produce departments and, and so it's like, that's what we need to do, too. Can't do it at SaferWay. It's too small. We need a bigger location. What ended up happening-- I think of it this way: we were all, we were all missionaries in a way. We really believed naturally-- We saw what was happening with the processed food industry, that it was basically poisoning people. People were eating this terrible food, uh, eating junk food diets, and we thought, we need to... So we were sort of like Puritans in a way. We wanted to create a-- this really natural, organic revolution that could change the world. That's what we-- And other people that were our colleagues, they were missionaries, too. They, they were doing it because they really believed in it. And so initially, we created this Natural Foods Network because we were, we were helping each other. We were-- We would get together, and we'd bring our financial statements, and we'd trade them. We, we didn't see ourselves as competitors. We each had our own geographical niche, and by, by exchanging information and financial information, this was making us all better, better retailers. It was sort of like a-- It was a club. And it-- And then we-- I-- we used to do trips together, too. I-- We called it, uh, uh... We did some people that were in the industry, not just retailers, but we'd call it-- We had a wild man's group. We did some adventures together in Alaska, in Yosemite.
- DSDavid Senra
Not
- 34:52 – 38:10
Missionaries Sharing Financial Statements and Building Friendships
- DSDavid Senra
work-related. This is just friendships.
- JMJohn Mackey
Oh, we-- Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
Building friendships.
- JMJohn Mackey
Building relationships-
- DSDavid Senra
Okay
- JMJohn Mackey
... and a- having adventures together.
- DSDavid Senra
You would also-- Wouldn't you guys also travel to other stores together and do store visits as a group?
- JMJohn Mackey
Oh, yes. But what we'd do is we'd come together in a city. There, there'd be a host company hosting, usually around a new store. "We've opened up a new store. You got to see it." And so, like, when we hosted in Houston, we opened up our first natural food store in Houston in nineteen eighty-four. We hosted the Natural Foods Network meeting in Houston. Um, that became one of the highest volume stores in, in the natural foods world and within a couple of years.
- DSDavid Senra
Was this like a collective, or do you-- you felt you were, like, kind of the leader of this organization?
- JMJohn Mackey
The guy that organized the Natural Foods Network in the b-- and I credit him in the book as a man named Peter Roy, who was a natural networker. And Peter, he started a whole food company in New Orleans, which we bought out and acquired that in nineteen eighty-eight, and then Peter came on and helped us start North-- start Northern California. He eventually became president of Whole Foods for five years, and he left us back in nineteen ninety-eight. Um, I, I do some detail on that in the book. And so he was instrumental. He worked for us for ten years, and Peter brought the network together, and he, he helped... One of the first acquisitions we did, uh, after Peter was we-- and it, it was key before we went public, we acquired Wellspring Grocery in North Carolina. Lex Alexander and Peter were like best friends. So Peter said, "John's a good guy. We're gonna take good care of the business. We're gonna grow it. You're gonna get a big paycheck." 'Cause we needed to go public to-- 'cause I didn't want the VCs to get control of the business. I needed to-
- DSDavid Senra
You said they were trying to dra-- grab the steering wheel sometimes.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah, well, we, the founding investors still had a ma- majority of the stock. The VCs owned thirty-four percent, but if we'd done another round, they would have gotten control of the business, and they, they had different agendas. Uh-
- DSDavid Senra
... There's a great story in the book, 'cause your dad, which we'll get to, plays a huge role-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
-in your life and in, in the company.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
And there's like, you guys have this, like, knock-down, drag-out fight, and then he pulls you into a room with, with the VCs after, and he pulls you into a room, and he's like, "We need to get rid of these guys as soon as possible."
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah. Uh, he just said, "They're wanting to take over the company. Let's get them out."
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah.
- JMJohn Mackey
"Let's get them out of the car." [laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
Let's get them out of the car. [laughing]
- JMJohn Mackey
Um, he used more choice language about it than that, that-
- DSDavid Senra
Let's go back to this network, though. So your, your-- you guys are-
- JMJohn Mackey
So we're hand- developing all these relationships-
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah
- JMJohn Mackey
-with these guys. What ended up happening is I did have an ambition to grow the business. Most of them wanted to stay, and when I went to Northern California, that, that was the first rupture in the Natural Foods Network because we'd gone out of our state, and Mrs. Gooch just felt like California was theirs. I think-- I said, "Gosh, LA's yours. You're there, but nobody's in Northern California. That's four hundred years a-- that's four hundred miles away." It's like, you know, "You never said you even want to have any ambition there." And they said, "Well, we don't, but we didn't think... You know, we would get there eventually, and now you've gone there." So that kind of was beginning to break up the Natural Foods Network. We w- stopped sharing financial information. There was-- we-- Whole Foods sort of created some fear in some of these other entrepreneurs that we were maybe going to come into their territories. I kept saying, "No, guys, we're not going to compete with you head-on."
- DSDavid Senra
[chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
No, I mean, I've-
- DSDavid Senra
[laughing]
- 38:10 – 41:22
Never Competing Head-On With Friends
- JMJohn Mackey
No, seriously, I-
- DSDavid Senra
What do you mean you're not going to compete with them head-on?
- JMJohn Mackey
There, there were markets that we stayed out of for years, uh, so-
- DSDavid Senra
And then what happened?
- JMJohn Mackey
Well, well, then we bought them.
- DSDavid Senra
[chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
But, but, but you see, that's a different thing.
- DSDavid Senra
John, John, you, you have this-- [chuckles] come on, man. You have this, this-- you are unbelievably humble, and I don't think that's an act, uh, but you also are this, like, ruthlessly competitive conqueror. Like, you admit to how competitive you are in the book.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
[chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
However, but the point is, is that-
- DSDavid Senra
[laughing]
- JMJohn Mackey
-these were my friends, and I did not want to hurt my friends.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- JMJohn Mackey
So I never hurt Mrs. Gooch's. It didn't hurt them. I mean, maybe it lessened their upward potential someday if they'd gotten there in ten years or where somebody else would have gotten there before them, though slow as they were going. But I didn't compete directly with anybody else's stores ever. I didn't. I never did it. I didn't go to Portland for that reason, 'cause Nature's was there. I didn't go to, uh, Boulder until Alfalfa's and, and, uh, Wild Oats had sort of partnered up. And, uh, so the people that I developed those relationships with, we could pick where we went and, and, uh... Now, they were scared we were gonna come, but-
- DSDavid Senra
Why would they be scared of you? What were they seeing in you?
- JMJohn Mackey
Well, Whole Foods got out ahead. We raised the VC money, and once we went public in 'ninety-two, that was a big event because now we had this currency, and all-- we could-- the entrepreneurs could cash out and make millions and millions of dollars. Most-
- DSDavid Senra
The, the entrepreneurs? You mean the VCs could cash out?
- JMJohn Mackey
The V-
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- JMJohn Mackey
No, I'm talking about-
- DSDavid Senra
Oh, the, the quiet, the people who are quiet.
- JMJohn Mackey
The network entrepreneurs.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- JMJohn Mackey
And they all did. What, what ended up happening is, is they, they, they had no liqui-- how could they get liquidity? I mean, the reality for most businesses is they're never gonna be big enough. They either have to sell the b-- to get liquidity, they have to sell the business, because most of them can't go public. And, w- how else can you get liquidity? Either you're gonna either have an IPO, or you're gonna have a sale. So most of them saw the writing on the wall. Whole Foods was expanding, and they should, they should, you know, they should cash out. Most of them came to us and said: "Would you be interested in buying us?" They'd-- Like, once we bought Wellspring, and then particularly once we bought Bread & Circus, and that was-- you know, what we paid was public, and they thought, "My God!" We ended up, uh, paying, I think... Anthony ended up-- Well, we paid him twenty-eight million, but he ended up getting thirty million because he had to-- there was a lag period between before we could cash the stock out for him, and it was worth more after we did it, uh, when we did our secondary offering. And so they were like: "Wow, I didn't realize my business was worth this much money." And so they came to us. A guy, Terry, uh, Dalton, in, in Florida, said, "Buy me. Let's-- Why don't you come to Florida? We, we're great." And so we did buy him. Uh, and, and so that's, that's kind of how it happened. W- we were-- They trusted me. They knew we were gonna take care of their business, too. We weren't gonna... You know, we lo- we were gonna love their business and, and make it better, actually. Most of them saw what Whole Foods was doing, and they admired us. They envied us partly, but they also admired us, and they knew if they sold out, that we were gonna take care of their team members and, and that we were gonna maintain our standards of-- We weren't gonna turn it into a sup- a regular supermarket and, and that th- they, they felt good about that. Win, win, win.
- 41:22 – 42:00
Going Public and Creating Liquidity for the Network
- DSDavid Senra
I'm gonna go back to your competitive drive, because I do want to talk about that, because I think it'd surprise a lot of people. My question, though, I want to know from your perspective and, like, your mind, okay? Because I do the exact same thing now, where I go around, and podcasting is not... It's, like, very positive song. There's no, like... There, there's really no com- competition. It's, like, a lot more collaborative. But I am very curious, and I run the same idea that you did and the same idea that Rockefeller does. It's like, I will fly across the country just to have, like, lunch or dinner with another podcaster, to be like: "I want a download of your thoughts on how you think about your business and, like, what you're doing."
- JMJohn Mackey
Mm-hmm.
- DSDavid Senra
What did you-- did you notice, as you're building this network and you're meeting all these other people in all these different regions, did you think you were different
- 42:00 – 44:10
Continuous Learning: The Michael Dell Principle
- DSDavid Senra
from them?
- JMJohn Mackey
Sure. I mean, um, but the-- [exhales] One of the things I liked about your... I just listened to on the drive here with your Michael Dell, which was impressed. I know, I know Michael. Of course, we both live in Austin. We, for a long time, we were the two big entrepreneurs in Austin before it became kind of an entrepreneurial hub in the last decade or so. And so I followed his career closely, and I know him, and he's a really good guy. Um, Michael talked a lot about, um, continuous learning. Remember how he talked about-- You asked him, you said, "Well, you had to reinvent yourself, like, three or four times." He said, "No, more like seven or eight times." [laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
[laughing]
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes, because every time there was a new revolution, he had to adapt his business, right? So I continued to learn.
- DSDavid Senra
And you thought they were-
- JMJohn Mackey
They were-
- DSDavid Senra
-complacent? What was-
- JMJohn Mackey
They, they were, they just, uh-... The world is constantly evolving, it's constantly changing, and if you sit still, Michael said it, he, he said it in his talk with you: "If you stay the same, you get passed up, you're gonna fail." You have to continue to evolve. New things emerge, and you have to change with it. Whole Foods was changing rapidly. We were opening up bigger stores. Most of these guys didn't have the capital to try to match that. They didn't have the ambition to do it.
- DSDavid Senra
Uh, let me back up. I'm not trying to say this to be, uh, for somebody to be, like, an arrogant person, like, "Oh, I'm different from all my competitors." No. It's, like, a really great way to spot opportunity. The fact that-- you say this over and over again, it's one of my favorite lines in Steve Jobs' biography, was that if you actually look at his-- one of his main skill sets was that he was able to identify markets with second-rate products, products that he thought he could just make better or think about in a different way. Like, he didn't invent... And, and you just go through all of them, from personal computing, to the phone, to just everything that he's done. And I was like: Damn, I didn't even realize that until it's probably the tenth time I read that book, too, or the tenth biography of his that I read. I see that a lot in what you were doing, too. So I'm not trying to be like you, to say: "Oh, I was, like, better than these people." It's just like, no, I'm fundamentally looking at this industry different than they are, and I was wondering if that was obvious at the beginning when you started going around and building this network.
- JMJohn Mackey
I think about
- 44:10 – 46:50
Steve Jobs and Spotting Markets With Second-Rate Products
- JMJohn Mackey
Steve. I mean, maybe he took products that were very early. I mean, for ex-- I mean, he didn't maybe invent the personal computer, but they weren't, they weren't very good.
- DSDavid Senra
No, he made it easier to use.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes, and he, he transformed it with a much better... You know, Apple II, in particular, was a huge step. Or he didn't, he didn't do the MP3 player initially, but the iPod was massively better. No, he didn't do the phone. He-- uh, you could say he invented the smartphone, though. Was there a smartphone before?
- DSDavid Senra
No, but everybody was using cell phones, and so-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah.
- JMJohn Mackey
But the smartphone is not just a phone.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah.
- JMJohn Mackey
It is a completely new, new category. You could always-- almost say nobody hardly invents anything because they're always taking some other ideas and putting them together in interesting new combinations.
- DSDavid Senra
But from your perspective-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... obviously, d- you, you felt different at that time, or no?
- JMJohn Mackey
You know, it's hard to say, David, because I don't really know how other people are thinking. I only know how I'm thinking. I just see how they act.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- JMJohn Mackey
And I just know, uh, most of these people were older than me, for one thing, and they had families, they had-- they were more security-oriented. They wanted the financial security. I just was always, always kind of all in. I was-- so was I more ambitious? I, I was having a good-- I really like growing the business. I think that's one thing entrepreneurs have in common: they like to grow their business. It's-- you like to see... It's like-- it's, it's Michael called it a puzzle he's figuring out. But also, growing a business is immensely satisfying because all the stakeholders are benefiting. Your customers are benefiting, your employees are benefiting. They're getting new opportunities, new promotions. You're watching them flourish. One of the greatest, most satisfying things, particularly as Whole Foods was a public company before Am- Amazon bought us, for tw- public for twenty-five years, independent. Um, so many of our team members became millionaires through our stock option program. If you're on a winning team that grows, you can make a lot of money, even if you're not the most senior executives. We gave stock options to everybody that worked there. And so, so m- I remember going to an annual gathering, and we had hundreds and hundreds of people, and I got this-- people got-- they had this standing ovation for me because they were telling me: "We bought a house. I didn't think we'd ever be able to buy a house. My kids, they can go to college now. Um, uh, I can retire. This is so great. I never thought it..." And these are grocery people, right? They're just, you know, people that work, meat cutters and just ordinary team members who never thought they would really have any prosperity in the world. That is so deeply satisfying. Uh, that's one of the things I liked about the Todd Graves talk, by the way, was he was so much into his employees flourishing. It-- that is a tremendously good
- 46:50 – 48:09
The Joy of Watching Team Members Become Millionaires
- JMJohn Mackey
feeling.
- DSDavid Senra
This is one of the reasons, like, I've resisted for years. Very close friends of mine were like: "You should... You know all this history. You have this stuff in your head from, you know, the history of entrepreneurship, maybe better than, maybe better than anybody else in the world. You need to start recording some of the conversations you're already having." And I was very resistant to that idea until I realized the gap in the market was, like, a lot of business and tech press, and I don't consider myself a journalist. I'm sure as hell not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast. I'm obsessed with this stuff. Look what the books look like when I'm done with them. Where's the camera?
- JMJohn Mackey
[chuckles]
- DSDavid Senra
Like, this-- what does that look like? That is-- looks like obsession.
- JMJohn Mackey
Looks like you need a new book. [laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
[chuckles] That's obsession. And what I realized, like, most of the business and tech press hate business and tech. Uh, and, and I think a lot of this has to do with, you know, some-
- JMJohn Mackey
Well, they don't-- they're not actually... They're just journalists. That, that's where they got channeled into.
- DSDavid Senra
And, and so the opening was exactly... I said: "Well, I think, you know, as a son of a Cuban immigrant, like, I think capitalism is awesome." You have this great thing where you said capitalism was the greatest thing that humans have ever invented-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... which me and you have bonded over. And I'm like: "No, I'm gonna-- I wanna start hosting conversations to celebrate these kind of people, where you had this idea as this shirtless, hitchhiking hippie, that I wanna start my own little no, uh, natural food store, and I'm gonna continuously learn, I'm gonna grow it, and as I grow it, I'm creating products that people love," which I'll get to in one second, "and then I'm creating wealth for myself and others." For
- 48:09 – 55:59
Capitalism: The Greatest Thing Humans Ever Invented
- DSDavid Senra
normal people to work at Whole Foods and be able to send their kids to college as a result of the wealth that the comp- the, the company is able to create, to buy a house, these are things that should be celebrated-
- JMJohn Mackey
They should
- DSDavid Senra
... not denigrated.
- JMJohn Mackey
And they're not seen because we live in a w- we live in a zero-sum world. We don't. We live in a, we live in a win-win-win world, but people don't... because we-- people don't realize it. People-- think about the history of humanity, David. For tens of thousands of years, there was really no progress in the world. It's been first the Enlightenment, science, and then the birth of capitalism that's lifted humanity, particularly capitalism, that's lifted humanity out of the dirt. People have no reference points. Two hundred and fifty years ago, ninety-four percent of everyone alive, ninety-four percent lived on less than two dollars a day. Ninety-four percent, and that's in today's dollars.... eighty-eight percent of the people alive were illiterate. Eighty-eight percent! The average lifespan was thirty. So many women died in childbirth. There was, there was, yeah, no modern dentistry, there was no antibiotics, no vaccines. It was horrible. People do not understand where we came from, and, uh, uh, capitalism created the possibility of the win, win, win. It w- it used to be a zero-sum game, where somebody won, somebody else lost. And the biggest mistake people make, intellectuals in particular, they still think we're in a zero-sum, in a zero-sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk somehow stole the money from the people. They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching. They're creating value for their customers. They're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing. Their investors are seeing their capital go up. It can be reinvested and compounded. We're seeing governments, where all, where, where do all the... Where do all philanthropy ultimately comes from business. Where's-- That's where the profits are.
- DSDavid Senra
Where's the money come from?
- JMJohn Mackey
And where does all the taxes come from? It ultimately comes from business as well, whether s- you're taxing your, the employees who are, who are flourishing. This is the engine that's lifting humanity out, and the entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. And somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world. I mean, he's c- he's created... He and people like Rockefeller, they're, they're lambasted as the villains, when they are the greatest heroes that have ever [chuckles] lived in terms of creating value and helping people.
- DSDavid Senra
All of the founders and extreme winners that I have studied have this one trait in common: They have excessively high energy levels. If you're going to be the best at what you do, you need to maximize your energy and output, and that's why I've partnered with Function. I signed up for Function long before they were a sponsor of this podcast, and when you sign up, they ask you what your health goals are, and my response in all capital letters was maximum energy. Function provides access to comprehensive blood tests and other lab testing to help you improve your health so you can perform at your highest level. Function has made it easy for me to monitor and improve my internal health markers so that I feel at my absolute strongest. As a member of Function, you get access to test over a hundred plus biomarkers, from hormones to toxins to markers for heart health, inflammation, and stress. Function gives you a straightforward analysis of all your results, along with advice from expert doctors on how to improve things like your testosterone, your stress hormones, how to reduce toxins in your body, and much more. The platform is absolutely beautiful and provides an easy-to-understand picture of your overall health. Once you try Function, you will immediately understand why it's the fastest-growing health platform in the country. You can now join Function for just three hundred and sixty-five dollars a year. That's a dollar a day. Learn more and join by visiting functionhealth.com/senra, and use code SENRA25 for a twenty-five dollar credit towards your membership. That is functionhealth.com/senra. You just mentioned Bezos, and he's got a phenomenal idea. Actually-
- JMJohn Mackey
One of my heroes.
- DSDavid Senra
One of my heroes. I just got to spend time with him one-on-one. Incr- It was incredible. He's amazing. Uh, one of my favorite ideas that he has is the fact that he's like, "The idea that we have, like, a Forbes four hundred, and we have, like, a list of, like, these are the richest people," he's like, "This is..." He's like: "There's a better idea. Why don't we have a list for how much wealth that these people have created for others?" And I think he used the example of, like, you know, I, I don't remember what the market cap of Amazon is. It might be two trillion dollars today, whatever it is. He's like, "Out of that two trillion, you know, I might own a hundred and fifty billion of that."
- JMJohn Mackey
If you see Jeff again, when you see Jeff again, you should say, "Hey, Jeff, I thought about your idea. Why don't we create a Bezos one thousand?" And you... There's a, an organization-- Y- With AI, in particular, that can be calculated.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, that's a good point. Why, [chuckles] why we shouldn't we around-
- JMJohn Mackey
Why don't we do that?
- DSDavid Senra
Why don't we-
- JMJohn Mackey
That would be so great for people... If people could begin to see how much the multiplicity of value that comes out of those entrepreneurs and, and, and how it compounds over time, it's so enormous, and p- and the intellectuals do not see it. The average person doesn't see it. They're still stuck in... They think it's a zero-sum game, that somebody's rich, somebody else is poor. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. That is not true. In fact, new book for you to read, one it just, just came out. One of my, uh, good friends, uh, Alex- Alexander Green, has written a book called The American Dream, and he shows in that book how the American dream is alive and well, and it's never been better. It's, it, in fact, the dream is not only not dead, it's much better than it's ever been before. Only the intellectuals in the media cannot see it. They refuse to see it. Instead, they focus on all the things that aren't perfect yet in the society, and they're doom and gloomers. They think it's all going downhill. So that's a book you might want to take a look at.
- DSDavid Senra
I'll definitely check it out. I have a recommendation for you. After this, listen to the episode I just did with James Dyson, 'cause I kept thinking about-
- JMJohn Mackey
You know, I'm gonna listen, uh, 'cause in the, in the episode I was just listening to on the drive, you said that's your favorite all-time autobiography.
- DSDavid Senra
Number one.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah. So I thought, "Okay, that's the next one I'm gonna listen to."
- DSDavid Senra
It's-- I, I told him when I saw him, too, because it's out of print, and they own the rights, and so I go, "Please, just, like, not even for money. You don't need more money [chuckles] just this book is so important to get in entrepreneurs' hands because of the struggle," which is, I think, what most people identify with. But the reason I brought him up is because one of the things I love h- about him and what I'm trying to apply, you know, to every single thing that I work on is, like, he demands differentiation. He will not-- If somebody else has already made the product, he won't just be like: "Oh, I can do that s- you know, a little better." He's like: "I have to have-- I have to invent a completely different spin on it." And the reason I think differentiation is really important, because there's two things where you kind of knew at the very beginning that you were onto something very powerful. You just told an example. If somebody's driving an hour or two hours to shop at your store-... That should tell you something. The other thing, you have [chuckles] you mentioned how, uh, you know, you reinvested, uh, in as, in growth, and as you were investing in growth, obviously, sometimes, you know, so you- you're gonna lose some money for a little bit. But the first store was, like, profitable from, uh, like, two PM of the first day.
- JMJohn Mackey
[chuckles]
- DSDavid Senra
And then, like, a year later, there's, like, a hundred-year flood in Austin.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah, nine months later.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, nine months later, a hundred-year floo- flood in Austin. Okay, eight feet of water. When there's a flood, it's not just water, it's the stuff from the sewers comes up, so it goes-- it floods your store, and you have shit water [chuckles] -
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
- everywhere! And then y- the next day or the days after, whatever, you guys are mopping up and taking, uh, and trying to clean up the store.
- JMJohn Mackey
And getting tetanus shots. [laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
[chuckles] And getting tetanus shots. And then you go into this aisle, and you're like: "I thought I knew everybody that worked here. Who's this person?" You go over, "Hey, I'm John. I'm sorry, I, I guess I didn't know who you were." He's like: "Oh, I don't work here, but I'm such a huge fan of what you're doing. I shop here several times a week. I had a day off. It's very important to me that you guys get through this, so I wanted to help in any possible way." No one does that
- 55:59 – 58:01
Cult Brands Are Built by Evangelists
- DSDavid Senra
if your product is not, one, valuable to them and differentiated.
- JMJohn Mackey
Right. That was... I didn't have the language, but that's when I began to discover stakeholders, the people that care about your business. In that case, he was a customer and a neighbor, and he loved Whole Foods. It made a big difference in his life. I think you will find that most brands that are really popular, particularly in their early days, they were kind of cults. They were cult, cults, meaning they had a following, 'cause I think most brands are ultimately built by the evangelist, enthusiast of their users, their customers. Um, Apple's a great example of that, right? I mean, people would line up to get that next iPhone, you know, camp out to get the next i-- next iteration of iPhone in the, in the day. Um, [clears throat] Tesla, I mean, I, before I, I, I own a Tesla, and, um, I remember my friend talking, "You got to drive this car. You just... If you drive this car, you want to buy this car." And I said, "I don't want a Tesla," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. "It's pretentious," blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, as soon as one of them finally talked me to driving it, [chuckles] I went out and bought it the next day, right? So because... And I became a t- a Tesla, uh, fan, super fan, right? So I do think that happened with Whole Foods. People loved our stores, particularly in the early days when we were so unique, so differentiated. Um, and, uh, I remember those people would drive in. A lot of times, they would tell me, "Why..." I said, "Why are you coming in?" He says: "Oh, I want to make sure my little boy never doesn't eat this poisonous food. I-- They're just going to eat healthy food. They're going to... My child's going to be nourished. I'm going to make sure my children grow up really healthy." And it was oftentimes those parents that were doing it for the next generation, so to speak. So I do think, um, Whole Foods was benefited by that type of cult-like following.
- DSDavid Senra
But the evangelism that you see present in customers, I would say that is a by-product of the fact that those cult brands, which I completely agree with you, are started by an evangelist. You use that word multiple times-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
-in the book. Steve Jobs,
- 58:01 – 1:00:08
Passion Is Infectious: The Reality Distortion Field
- DSDavid Senra
obviously an evangelist for Apple. Elon, one of the greatest evangelists that we've ever seen. You knew that you had that very special skill of evangelizing. The way I say-- think about this is, like, passion is infectious.
- JMJohn Mackey
I didn't know I had it until it, it worked. [chuckles] I mean-
- DSDavid Senra
Well, okay, so-
- JMJohn Mackey
-I discovered it.
- DSDavid Senra
At what age did you discover it? It's right at the beginning when you were starting this, in your twenties?
- JMJohn Mackey
When I started... Yeah, I mean, I mean, even raising money the first time... I mean, think ab- think about this for a second. I'm out raising money, even with my friends and family. I'm raising money. I have six months of experience working in a natural food store. I have absolutely no business background. I'd worked jobs and stuff, but I'd never really been in management. I'd, I didn't take any business classes when I was at the university. I didn't know much about business. And these people were willing to trust their money to this young kid and his girlfriend, um, simply on my enthusiasm. Really, at the end of the day, I was so excited, and I more or less said: "I know this is going to work. Trust me." And they did, and it did work. I think Jobs called it the reality, or somebody said about Steve, he had a reality distortion field.
- DSDavid Senra
Yes.
- JMJohn Mackey
I think I, I identified with that. I think most persuasive entrepreneurs, charismatic entrepreneurs, have a reality distortion field. They're able to get people to suspend their normal skepticism, and for a moment, they let them into their vision, and they, they, they catch a little bit. Maybe they don't get the vision, but they see the, the passion. I think you've talked about, uh, how passion is infectious. I think entrepreneurs are generally passionate, and they sell others on their dream. I would say that, I think I said in the book that, um, entrepreneurs are a little bit like panhandlers out there begging for money, but what they're doing is they're selling dreams. They're selling dreams to people, and they make the dreams come alive. And people in the reality distortion field, they catch a glimpse of what's possible, and then they want to get into it.
- DSDavid Senra
Was there anything you were working on before Whole Foods? What other jobs did you have?
- 1:00:08 – 1:02:57
From Busboy to CEO: The Resume of an Entrepreneur
- JMJohn Mackey
I make this joke: If you look at-- if I did a resume, it would say, uh, busboy, Cargo Restaurant, uh, dishwasher at some other restaurant, um, boys' camp counselor, um, assistant manager at the Good Food Store, CEO of Whole Foods Market.
- DSDavid Senra
Were you passionate in the assistant manager of the Good Foods? Well, the, what, Good-
- JMJohn Mackey
Good Food.
- DSDavid Senra
Good Food Store?
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's when... I remember I loved working at that store. I only worked there six months, and I loved it, though. It was like I'd never worked in a retail store before. I liked that because, A, I liked the customers. I just talked, I talked to the customers, and they were similar lifestyle that I had. They were, they were like me, uh, counterculture types. The people I was working with, I liked them as well. We shared it. We were taking care of the customers. It was fun! I liked it. And I remember coming home back to the co-op, back to Prana House, and I, I had thought that day I could-- I remember bef- the d- the day while I was working, I was looking around, loving it, and I said-... I could do this. I could do this the rest of my life. I could open up my own store. It'd be fun. And I went back to the co-op full of this enthusiasm. I guess Renee is the first person I sold on it because I was so excited about it. And I said, "Renee, what if we do our own store?" And she looked me in the eyes and grabbed my hands and said, "Oh, Mackle man, I think that'd be really cool. Let's do it." And I always say that if Renee had poo-poed, poo-poed the idea, maybe that would've been it, but she got excited. So I- my spark lit her spark, and together we created SaferWay, and that led to Whole Foods Market. So that entrepreneurial enthusiasm, um, is very important. And also, entre- entrepreneurs have to be very resilient. This is a quality that's underestimated because they do fail a lot. They do make a lot of mistakes. I mean, SaferWay, I could have quit if I wasn't resilient. I remember going back and doubling down and saying, "We need to do this." We're, we're-- As I read all these books, I realized, my God, we opened this safe, small store in this residential neighborhood, and it's an old house, it's cute, but it's a terrible place to have a store. It's, it's... No, no cars go by here. This is terrible. We got to relocate it. And that was a terrible mistake, and fortunately, I still had enough enthusiasm that I was able to sell people on, "This big store is going to work." So we raised more capital, and that did work. So I think you have to be able to overcome your setbacks, and the flood could have knocked us out as well. There's so many times that failure is always accompanying you, or the... And, and entrepreneurs, in some ways, are constantly learning from their near-death experiences and, and then determined to learn and get better.
- DSDavid Senra
You're
- 1:02:57 – 1:04:05
Learning From Near-Death Experiences
- DSDavid Senra
going to like the Dyson episode because that's his whole point. He's like: "Success isn't that interesting, like, failure is, like, where all the learning actually happens, and-
- JMJohn Mackey
Success is interesting. [chuckles] I think he's exaggerating there, but you learn more. You do learn from success as well-
- DSDavid Senra
That's his point
- JMJohn Mackey
... but you learn more from failure.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, for sure. For sure.
- JMJohn Mackey
Because you have to. Learn or die. I was always working, like most entrepreneurs, but I, I was always taking odd jobs and stuff. I worked for AstroWorld for a while. Even before I legally worked, my parents did something that was pretty smart. I wasn't going to tell people they should do this with their kids. They didn't give us an allowance. They assigned prices for things they wanted to get done, for dishes washed, lawns mowed, leaves raked. They assigned a price for all those things, and if you wanted any money, you go did the jobs. So I, at a very early age, you know, we're talking ten years old, I, I thought, well, I'd like to have money so I could go buy comic books, and then later, as I got older, so I could buy records, or I can save up and buy a car. And so I eagerly worked, and then as soon as I could legally work, I went and took jobs because I wanted to earn money, because to me, money meant freedom. I could do what I wanted to do with that money.
- DSDavid Senra
I feel
- 1:04:05 – 1:05:25
Money Means Freedom: Early Work Ethic
- DSDavid Senra
the exact same way.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
It's exactly what... It's like I so deeply desired control over my life, and I was actually just talking to a really close friend about this yesterday, that I saw just relentless work ethic and started working when I was fifteen. I remember my dad coming into my room and telling me... Because at the time, uh, I really wanted a car, and when, when I turned sixteen, and he's just like, "Uh, you don't have to pay rent, but I don't have any money for a car, so whatever-- Like, you have to find a job," and essentially, like, "You're on your own."
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
And so since I was fifteen, like, I never got a dollar from my family, and then they kicked me out at eighteen, which is a whole [chuckles] other thing. But I felt there- I think there's a lot of people like this.
- JMJohn Mackey
Most entrepreneurs are like this.
- DSDavid Senra
The, the connection is just, like, some kind of, you know, default unhappiness with your life, that realize that you're in charge of it, and I'm going to channel this intense work ethic into, uh, having achieve success, and mainly the success is not because it's monetary, it gives me control over what I'm doing. Now, the next stage of that, and I think w- the, the ideal stage, is like you're actually working on something you're passionate about, you believe in. The reason I asked you what other jobs you had, because there's multiple times when I'm reading this book, I thought of Phil Knight's book, Shoe Dog, which is, to me, one of the greatest-
- JMJohn Mackey
This, this, this
- 1:05:25 – 1:09:16
Shoe Dog as the Benchmark: Belief Is Irresistible
- JMJohn Mackey
book, that was my benchmark, Shoe Dog.
- DSDavid Senra
It's one of the greatest-
- JMJohn Mackey
Absolutely
- DSDavid Senra
... entrepreneur autobiographies ever. I love that it's in chronological order.
- JMJohn Mackey
Right.
- DSDavid Senra
I, I love the fact that every, um, chapter is the year that's taking place. It's just remarkable. I'm about to reread it again and make another episode of Founders. But the reason I-- There's two things that you say in this book that I think are important for the d- next generation of entrepreneurs to understand. One, he realized that he's, he's another evangelist, right? But he didn't have the evangelist until he found something he was passionate about. He, like, sold mutual funds, he sold, like, encyclopedias-
- JMJohn Mackey
Right
- DSDavid Senra
... and he failed left and right. And then he's like: "But I'm obsessed with running," when running, just like you, running was, like, something weirdos did. You don't just go out for a run at the time he's doing that.
- JMJohn Mackey
Right. That's right.
- DSDavid Senra
Just like it's... The, the funny part in one of your books, it's, uh, you're, you're trying to get the store. It's the fir- I think it's the first store out of Austin, so maybe it's, like, in Houston or something.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
And you meet with the landlord, and the landlord's like: "Listen here, hippie guy," he's like, [chuckles] "There's not enough store-- There's not enough other hippies that are going to eat your hippie food." And you're like: "We're not opening... This is not hippie food." And you explain to him what it is. He goes: "This is hippie food." But he, he bought into your enthusiasm.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
And he said that you reminded him of, like, a younger you.
- JMJohn Mackey
Slight correction on the narrative. You got the essence of it right, but that was actually our very first Whole Foods Market.
- DSDavid Senra
Oh, there you go.
- JMJohn Mackey
When we were jumping up from SaferWay, because Ben Pal, he was a, he would've been in... He was a lawyer from Houston. He'd been in LBJ's ad- administration, and, uh, he owned the property, so I, I, I would had to sell him. I mean, entrepreneurs have to sell people on things, and, and he just thought this was a crazy idea, to, to... "You're doing a hippie food store. How can that possibly work, son?" I said, [chuckles] I said: "It's going to work. I just... It's going to work." And he said: "There are not enough hippies in the whole world to fill up the store." [laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
[laughing]
- JMJohn Mackey
And I said something like: "There's more than you think."
- DSDavid Senra
[laughing]
- JMJohn Mackey
And, and then I kept going on, and he started laughing. He started laughing at me, and he said, "Son,... You so much remind me when I was young. You're so full of your enthusiasm, and you're so sure you're gonna be successful. And he, and he says, "Let's do your damn hippie store," [chuckles] you know? "But one thing I can tell you, son, is life's gonna teach you a thing or two before it's through with you." [laughing] He was great, and he was very helpful.
- DSDavid Senra
And, uh, I love these people, the people that are older, further down the path, and they reach back, and they give you words of encouragement, or they help you. The guy that helped you at the bank, they didn't even tell you after the flood, loaned you money, and didn't- he didn't even tell you till years later, he went to bat for you, which that's a funny story because it happens in these books over and over again. I wanna tie- go back and close the loop on Phil Knight, though, and I think it's important-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... is what he realized is belief is irresistible. And he's like: I couldn't sell the stuff because I didn't believe in the product. Now I'm selling sh- Japanese running shoes out of the trunk of my car long before Nike's even a thing, and I can't stay in stock. And he's living at his parents' house, you know, not in the situation that he wants to be in. He's like, "What the hell is going on here?" And that's when he realized, oh, belief, I believe in my product. Belief is irres- it's, it's irresistible, and it was like this fuel. The second thing that, um, you said in the book, and I think you mentioned it, I don't remember if this was before we were talking or, or when we started recording, was entrepreneurs tend to remember the beginning, like, the early years, and then maybe the later years.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
But there's huge, maybe like, two decades in here.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
And Phil Knight advised, 'cause he's writing that book for the benefit of future generation entrepreneurs, he's like, "Man, there's so many times in the early days we were talking about what we wanted Nike to be. We were having incredible conversations. We were such a close-knit group, and those conversations have been lost to history. I wish I either had a tape recorder or I wrote it down in a journal." So when I meet younger entrepreneurs, I'm like, "You need to write down what, what you're experiencing. You're- You think it's such an intense feeling, you think you're gonna remember. You're gonna forget all of this, and you're doing an active service to the, you know, for the future you for two, three, four genera- uh, four decades down the line."
- JMJohn Mackey
You know, since
- 1:09:16 – 1:11:14
Documenting Time: Why Chronology Matters in Memoirs
- JMJohn Mackey
I used Shoe Dog as a benchmark, it's... One thing I did differently than Phil did in his book, I did document. I kept track of time, and, and, uh, what... You don't really know the ti- Do, do you know ma- almost all of Shoe Dog takes place in, like, a five-year period?
- DSDavid Senra
It's, it's- I think it's a little bit more than that. It ends at the I- with the IPO.
- JMJohn Mackey
The IPO.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah.
- JMJohn Mackey
He got his early years, but he didn't, you know, the, uh... Nike became this phenomenon that changed sh- the sports apparel business, changed marketing. It, it was huge benefit for athletes. There's a, a lot of things about Nike in the story that, that he doesn't go into that book. He should've written... In my opinion, he should've written a, a follow-up book because I think a- so much of the Nike story takes place after that occurred. One of the things I did in this book is I talked about how old I was at this time, and I- the book is, is written chronologically in a way, and it goes- it spans a, it spans a forty, forty-four-year period, actually.
- DSDavid Senra
I do that all the time, even if it's not stated. Uh, where, where I am in a book, I will go and be like, "Okay, well, we're in 1969, and this guy was- when was he born?" And I'd write down on the page, "Okay, he's twenty-four, and this is happening." Or I'll go and be like, "Hey, what was he doing when he was my age?"
- JMJohn Mackey
I do the same thing.
- DSDavid Senra
"How was he thinking?" Do you?
- JMJohn Mackey
I do the same. Absolutely. Uh, and I'm thinking because I'm trying to understand the entrepreneur, and, and so by saying, well, how was I thinking and feeling at that age, I can understand them a little bit better. I, I, I, I really like the idea of, you know... By the way, you said I was, you know, like Rockefeller. Uh, you, you did draw some analogies there, but there are so many major differences there. Um, I mean, Rockefeller is the, in my still- and maybe Elon Musk and Steve Jobs can challenge him, but, but he's probably the greatest entrepreneur that ever lived, and, and I would argue he's probably done more, even though he's hated as this robber baron, he's probably done more good in the world than maybe
- 1:11:14 – 1:14:39
Rockefeller, Bezos, and Musk: The Master Strategists
- JMJohn Mackey
anybody but some religious leader [chuckles] or Christ or something. But, um, he- it's, it's unfortunate that he goes down in history as one of the great villains, but the intellectuals have put him there, and-
- DSDavid Senra
Not in the episodes I make about him. [chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
No, but, uh, the, the reality is Rockefeller was, uh, invented the modern corporation. Oil has, has fueled the entire rise of, uh, prosperity in the world, um, and he's totally misunderstood. Was he perfect? No, but he's still the greatest philanthropist that ever lived.
- DSDavid Senra
So you- did you take issue with me comparing you to Rockefeller?
- JMJohn Mackey
I was deeply flattered. [laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
Okay. [laughing] The way you started, I was like, "Wait a minute." Okay, I didn't know if you were, uh, took offense. I was like, no, I... And when I say when I compare people to other historical people, it's always like, this one thing they did is very similar to this act that you did-
- JMJohn Mackey
One thing Rock-
- DSDavid Senra
-because people are, you know, dynamic.
- JMJohn Mackey
One thing Rockefeller did that I never, uh, did, and [clears throat] it was a different era, he, he, he continued to vertically integrate all, you know, uh, uh... And, and he was trying to bring order to his industry because of the, the boom and bust of oil discoveries, and, and, uh, um, he was, he was a much more disciplined thinker than I am in terms of thinking through the whole structure and the whole system and, uh, trying to control it, and I never tried to control, you know, my suppliers or, uh, uh, I never... And he, he was, he was a totally ruthless competitor in the sense that he would, he would do things that today would be illegal, um, but they were legal at that time. People don't understand what he was doing was not- was considered sharp business practices, but they weren't considered to be illegal in what he would do. You know, he, he'd threaten a lot of his competitors, "You should sell out, and you should take the stock because you're gonna get a lot wealthier." But if they didn't sell out, then he'd basically undercut them in price, uh, and lose money until they, until they were out.
- DSDavid Senra
One of the-
- JMJohn Mackey
You can't do that today.
- DSDavid Senra
One of the best quotes I ever heard from him, he was trying to buy a competitor, and the competitor says, "I'm not afraid of you." And he's like, "Well, if you c- if I cut off your hand, your body will suffer." [laughing]
- JMJohn Mackey
[laughing]
- DSDavid Senra
That's a very crazy thing to say. Um, but you... I think you nailed the fact that, uh, he, h- his- he was probably one of the greatest strategists-... I had the thought, you know, I reread things over and over again. I know you have that same habit, that you'll read a book, and then you'll reread it, either read the entire book again a few years later, but you also read your highlights from them.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
We talked about this at dinner-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
-when we had dinner.
- JMJohn Mackey
Read Wise, too.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, they're excellent. The-- when I write-- I think I was rereading Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters for the third time, which I think are very... I think I should read them almost every year because they're just-- first of all, you can read them in a weekend, and they're just so many insights per minute. And i- in my opinion, I think the two best strategists that I've ever come across in all the reading I've done has been Rockefeller and Bezos. They kind of describe what they want to do, and then they go out and do it, and it's very, very similar.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah, I think you got to put Musk in that category as well. People don't understand what a master strategy- strategist Elon is, and think about the way SpaceX has evolved in a way. It's-- he's, he's, he's so many steps ahead of where people realize he is in terms of thinking it through.
- DSDavid Senra
No, that's a good point. I mean, he, he has that document, I think, called Master Strategy, that he wrote, you know, fifteen, twenty years ago, whenever it was, at the beginning of Tesla. He's like: "We're gonna do this, then we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna do this." And you, you go back, and it looks very similar to what actually occurred. Uh, I want to go back to your competitive drive, though, because we touched on it, but I, I think there's, like, a little bit more there.
- 1:14:39 – 1:20:04
Using Doubt as Fuel: The Slow Burn of Proving People Wrong
- JMJohn Mackey
Well, I'm-- you know, I'm a very competitive person. Um, I always have been, I mean, from an early age. Um, competition, I think... helps me focus. Um, one of the things I got, uh, that I think in the Todd Graves that I just listened to recently is he talked a lot about pe- uh, people are always telling an entrepreneur it's not gonna work, and he-- Todd would use that as fuel. He'd say: "I'm gonna prove you wrong. I'm gonna show you." I still feel that way from time to time. People tell me s- the idea is not gonna work, and it's like: "No, it is gonna work, and I'll show you." And when... And, and you climb this wall of skepticism. A lot of people, they get discouraged when people criticize them. It's like, you know, maybe they're right. Maybe it's not gonna work. The entrepreneur, I think, says, "No, you're wrong. It's going to work," and it causes him to focus even deeper. And, and, and, and, and to, to-- part of it's an ego thing to prove the other person is mistaken. And I re- I remember when that guy told me that, um, "You know, you're never gonna be able to compete with those guys. You're just a bunch of hippies, and it's never gonna work." And, you know, I, I, I make the joke in the book, it's like, the guy had just turned us down. Why is he telling us why he's not gonna invest? And I say, "It's like getting turned down on a date, and then the girl tells you, 'Well, here's why I'm not going out with you.'" It's like, hell, who wants to be told, "Well, you're not going out with me?" Um, in this case, though, I, I remember having a slow burn in me, which said, "You're wrong. You're wrong. I'm gonna prove you wrong." So a good entrepreneur uses that criticism, uses that skepticism, uses that wall of doubt that people are throwing at his or her, uh, as a, as a fuel. It's like: "No, we're-- it's gonna work. I'm gonna prove it." And they're, they're-- it-- they double down on their vision, you might say, and they're not... And they-- and instead of many people would quit, it's-- for the, the entrepreneur, "No, no, it just makes me more determined to succeed."
- DSDavid Senra
I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high-quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night, and as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high-quality decisions, and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is Eight Sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of Eight Sleep, Matteo, and we live in the same city. A few months after I started using Eight Sleep, I randomly ran into Matteo at a restaurant, and I was with some friends, so I go over and say hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, who was I talking to? And I said: "That's Matteo, the founder of Eight Sleep." And my friend replied, [chuckles] "He looks like he gets good sleep." Matteo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an Eight Sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my Eight Sleep ice-cold. It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth ten times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe Eight Sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use Eight Sleep. I would recommend getting the Pod 5, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress, and it is next-level sleep tech. It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night, independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to eightsleep.com/senra, and use the code Senra to get three hundred and fifty dollars off. You can try it for thirty days at home and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my Eight Sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at eightsleep.com/senra. That, that exact same story is in Michael Dell's autobiography. I went and picked it up off the shelf the other day, and I, I wanted to... 'Cause he said something that I think is very fascinating, that I reference in conversations and other episodes that I make, where, you know, he's like: "I'm nineteen years old. I have a thousand dollars. I'm in a dorm room at University of Texas, and I'm going to compete with the largest company in the world, and I'll be honest." [chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
You expressed some skepticism in your a-
- DSDavid Senra
Well-
- JMJohn Mackey
... in your interview with him about it. [chuckles]
- DSDavid Senra
I, I never doubt Mi- I never doubt Michael Dell. Um, he's one of my heroes, and I get to spend a lot of time with him, which I'm very, very thankful for. But o- on that page, he's like, you know, "Was I a little full of myself at nineteen?" He's like: "Sure, I was." And he's like: "I think you have to be to, you know, do anything great." And you talk to him now, it's like the guy's so impressive, but he's so low ego-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... and he's just very calm.
- JMJohn Mackey
I agree.
- DSDavid Senra
He really is like-- just looks at things like a puzzle, and I think a lot of the work he does comes from a very positive and, like, healthy place, and that's why, like, he, he is one of my heroes and somebody I'm trying to emulate, but-
- JMJohn Mackey
Fire still burns in Michael, even though if you don't see it-
- DSDavid Senra
Oh
- JMJohn Mackey
... it's still there.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, but it's a positive-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... I think, the positive source. But later down, I, I reread that entire page, and he's talking about this other guy at the time-... that was older than him, that was living in his city, that was doing the exact same business. And it sounds very similar to y- when you viewed some of your friends and then eventually competitors and some of the people you actually acquired, where Michael's like: "Yeah, but I have ideas about where I could take this that this guy can't even contemplate."
- JMJohn Mackey
Right.
- 1:20:04 – 1:23:09
Daniel Ek and Having No Ceilings
- DSDavid Senra
And he was not saying that in an arrogant way. He was just saying, like: "You don't have any limits." Did you listen to the Daniel Ek episode?
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay, so Daniel, this is one of the most important things about that episode and about spending any time with him. You get around him, and you realize he has no ceilings. He do- there's no self... And I think a lot of people, it sounds like I wanna, I wanna go back to the, the people you acquired, 'cause one of my favor-- I'm doing this for selfish reasons. This is why I'm having these conversations, 'cause I w- I have the opportunity to learn from you.
- JMJohn Mackey
Mm-hmm.
- DSDavid Senra
One of the things that's so incredible is I think a lot of people, and I've done this myself, they put these, like, fake ceilings.
- JMJohn Mackey
They put self-limiting beliefs in.
- DSDavid Senra
But it literally, like, I can't go any further-
- JMJohn Mackey
Right
- DSDavid Senra
... than here.
- JMJohn Mackey
Right.
- DSDavid Senra
And when you spend time with Daniel, he's just like: "Oh, l- like, get that shit out of here. Like, that doesn't exist." And he does that not in a direct way, he does that in a way of an example.
- JMJohn Mackey
Mm-hmm.
- DSDavid Senra
That it's like, well... I remember, um, one of the first times I talked to him, Spotify is obviously incredible, and I was like, "But he's doing incredible, like, investing in business incubation," and I know that team very well. I spent a lot of time with them. And I was like: "How the hell did you build this, like, incredible business that was so difficult, and then now you're-- you have this other thing where, like..." He's more like a co-founder than investor, but it would-
- JMJohn Mackey
You're talking about Neko?
- DSDavid Senra
Neko, Helsing, everything he's doing with pre, uh, Premateria. Uh, and I was like: "Did you-- were you always interested in investing?" And he goes, "No, I didn't even think about it until two thousand and eighteen." And I go: "How did you learn how to invest?" He goes: "I listened to Patrick's podcast, Invest Like the Best [laughing] ." And then he's like: "I would listen to what the guy says. I'm like, 'Oh, let me try that idea. Oh, I don't like that idea.' I would read the book he recommended," and he just essentially consumed all this information and then said, "I like that. That fits me. That's not-- that doesn't apply to me. I don't like this," and then created his cohesive philosophy, and then he actually applied it to a grand scale. And I'm like, "Oh, he's got no limits." This is one of the most valuable things that you could possibly-- if you can instill something in yourself, it's just, like, stop believing that you have a limit. You're at a plateau, but you don't... Just like Bruce Lee, uh, Bruce Lee said, "You don't stay at plateaus."
- JMJohn Mackey
I totally agree with that. Cre-- human creativity is fundamentally limitless. There is no limit to the mind except what we self-impose on it, and once you realize that... See, most people self-censor themselves. They don't let these ideas come through because it's like, "Well, that's not possible. That's crazy. That's nuts." I think entrepreneur lets a little bit more through in terms of that flow from, from- that emerges up through, through their minds-
- DSDavid Senra
But not all entrepreneurs-
- JMJohn Mackey
Possibilities
- DSDavid Senra
... because we're seeing this-
- JMJohn Mackey
For sure
- DSDavid Senra
... i- in the story where, in the book, where you have that, you have that slow burn, which I want to ask you a question about the slow burn in a minute, and then you're meeting other people in your industry and realizing that they're not like you.
- JMJohn Mackey
They just had different, uh, just had different ambitions, that's all. They, they, th- I just had a, a, um, I just wanted to grow a bigger company. They wanted-- They just didn't have that vision.
- DSDavid Senra
Do you think your father played the role in your expansive ideas and your ambition, or do you think that was completely, like, an inner drive?
- 1:23:09 – 1:25:52
How His Father Shaped His Ambition
- JMJohn Mackey
I credit many, many good things to my father. I actually think he played a counter, uh, uh, enforce on, uh, force on that. My dad, for example, he was a Depression, uh, kid in World War II.
- DSDavid Senra
He was twenty when Pearl Harbor happened.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah. So one of the things that, and one of the mistakes that I made, was after Whole Foods went public, my dad was-- He got me to sell stock in the IPO. Uh, this, Todd Graves would hate this, uh, s- stock in the IP- IPO, and he c- he urged me to continue to sell it off. He said: "John, I mean, uh, we don't know when the next Depre--" My dad said, uh, he'd have made a lot more money. He was always thinking there was gonna be another Great Depression, so he was always trying to protect himself from that because it was such a q- it was such a traumatic experience for him as a child, watch- growing up in that Depression with his, with his family. Um, they lived through it, and it never... It, it was the biggest thing that impacted him in his life. And so in some sense, that spread to me, so it's-- you might say that's more limited. I sold it because he advised me to do it, and I trusted my dad, but in retrospect, that was a mistake, and I really believed, and I should have compounded it and compounded it and compounded it. Um, still made it. I still made it. I'm still weal- really a wealthy guy, but I could have been a lot wealthier if I had just probably followed my own instincts instead of his advice in that regard.
- DSDavid Senra
You're, you're right about that, 'cause I forgot, in the book, you ask him to step down from the board-
- JMJohn Mackey
Mm, yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... because you have this expansive, conquering nature, which you're gonna use the word expansive, I'll use conquering nature. [laughing] And he was kind of, like, pulling you back constantly, and you guys were having a series of fights. Am I remembering that correctly?
- JMJohn Mackey
That's correct, but I think in that case, my dad, he, he was in-- he was already being impacted by the Alzheimer's that was diagnosed a couple of years later.
- DSDavid Senra
But you didn't know that?
- JMJohn Mackey
No.
- DSDavid Senra
It was unknown.
- JMJohn Mackey
Did not know that.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- JMJohn Mackey
I just didn't understand why he'd gotten so conservative, because he'd been very supportive of my expansive m- mode, and at, at the time, I just thought, "You know what? Now we're worth so much money," and a lot of my father's wealth was created by Whole Foods. He had his own, he had his own business, but I think he made more money from Whole Foods than he did in his other business. I thought, "He just doesn't want to lose what he has. He's in a different era in his... He can't rebuild, so for him, he wants to be more conservative." And I just said, "He's getting super conservative." That's why I said, "Dad, sell half your stock, cash it out, keep the other half. Let me compound it, but let me go. I, I, we're gonna grow this thing. It's gonna be an incredible company. Just let me do it."
- DSDavid Senra
Do you remember how old you were when you-
- JMJohn Mackey
Forty.
- DSDavid Senra
You were forty, and he was, what, seventy?
- JMJohn Mackey
My dad was thir- seventy-two.
- DSDavid Senra
Seventy-two.
- JMJohn Mackey
Same age as I am right now.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay, and so y- he had been ar- around for the ride-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes
- DSDavid Senra
... for fifteen years up until that point?
- JMJohn Mackey
Oh, no. F- uh, f- yeah, fifteen years, that's right.
- DSDavid Senra
Fifteen years.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
So that had to be one of the most difficult conversations you had in your life.
- JMJohn Mackey
That
- 1:25:52 – 1:28:01
Firing His Father From the Board: The Hardest Decision
- JMJohn Mackey
was the most difficult conversat- the most difficult thing I ever did was firing my dad from that board.... took all the courage I had. I love my dad so much, and it hurt him so badly, so hard to do. But it was, it was also a pivotal event in my own evolution, [clears throat] um, because that was, that was when my mentorship was over. He still advised me, but from that point onward, I really, you know, s- I, I, I was on my own. I was not gonna follow him any longer. And before then, I pretty much did whatever my dad suggested. I didn't buck him. I f- argued with him, but I often caved in because I had so much love and respect for him and I-- and, and his own... And that was a good thing. My dad made so many good decisions that helped Whole Foods. But at that point, I was just basically... I'd grown up. I remember saying, "Dad, I'm forty years old. I'm gonna make these decisions now. I'm not gonna just do what you wanna do, and that's why I want you to get off the board, because I don't want u- us to be fighting. It's turning our relationship apart." I remember he said, "Son, you think forty is pretty old, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, forty is old." He said: "It's nothing. You think you, you think you know some things? You know a little bit more than you did when you were twenty-five and started the business. But frankly, son, you still don't..." He said, he said: "You've barely got your nose under the tent. There's so much you don't know." And I said, "Well, that may be true, but I'm gonna find out on my own. I'm not going to do what you tell me to do any longer, particularly when it comes to growth. We're gonna grow this business, and you should sell half your stock. You've got all the financial security you need, and watch what happens to the other half." And I, I always tell the-- I tell this story in the book, that a year later, he-- the, the half that he'd sold was worth as much-- 'cause we doubled the stock price in a year. Ha- the half the stock that he owned was, was, um, more valuable than it was prior to selling a ha- half of it. [chuckles] So he, he'd already, he'd already made it all back. Uh, so he di- he... And a, and a few years later, even as the Alzheimer's started to grip him, my dad told me that, um, I had made the right decision and that he was proud of me, and we, you know, we, we were back on really good terms.
- DSDavid Senra
That's incredible. There is a ne- very negative, um, and it has to be heartbreaking story in the book,
- 1:28:01 – 1:34:47
His Mother's Deathbed Wish and Lasting Regret
- DSDavid Senra
your mother's view of-
- JMJohn Mackey
Mm-hmm
- DSDavid Senra
... Whole Foods.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
- DSDavid Senra
I don't know if you want to talk about this or not.
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah. You know, my mom, um, [clears throat] again, another depression child, and I was named after her father, who was a doctor. And what m- my mother, growing up in Bastrop, Texas, kind of in a poor, you know, I guess, almost white trash type of thing back in a rural, you know, little tiny town, very small-town ways, Baptist community. Um, my mother, the most important thing for her was she really wanted to be respectable. She wanted, she wanted her children to rise in society and be seen as respectable citizens. And my sister, the eldest sister, you know, she went on and got a master's in French literature- went to Wellesley, got a master's in French literature and a PhD in psychology and, you know, went on to teach. Um, [clears throat] here I am, scoring well, really high on IQ tests, g- you know, great aptitude, A's when I was interested in something, maybe not so good when I wasn't, and, you know, kept-- I kept dropping out of college, and then I start this grocery store business. My mother could never get over the idea, really, that I was not respectable. That she'd go to her bridge parties and talk to the other mothers, and their sons were going on, and their daughters were going on and becoming, uh, uh, doctors and lawyers, and they were, they were engineers, [clears throat] uh, college teachers, professors. They were, they were-- she saw them as respectable people in society. She thought a grocer was, you know, really a second-class citizen. And so her son, in her mind, I wasn't an entrepreneur. She didn't even know what an entrepreneur meant, I don't think. I wasn't a successful businessman. I was a grocer, and I had squandered... I didn't finish college. I'd squandered all the money they'd and love they'd invested in me, [clears throat] and she thought I was a failure. And I remember, and I tell the story in the book, the very last time I, I ever saw my mother in my life was back in 1987. She'd had a stroke a couple of years later, and she was basically partly paralyzed and bedridden. And I went to see her, and, uh, it turned out the last time I'd ever see her, 'cause she died a couple of weeks after I saw her. And she-- so I say on her deathbed, she begged me, and she said, "John, will you do this for me? Will you make this promise to me? I'm your mother. I've nurtured you, I've born you, I've given you so much. Please, please, please, please promise me you will go back to school and get your degree and make something of your life. You have so much potential. You know, you scored so well on all these IQ tests and aptitude tests, and you're just nothing but a grocer." I said, "Mom, I'm not a grocer. I'm, I'm a businessman. I'm building this business. I'm-- Whole Foods is gonna be this great company." She says, "John, it's just l- little grocery hippie stores. You know? Nobody's... You know, you, you're not doing-- you're wasting your life." And, and I-- and she said: "Please promise me. Please promise me. It's the only request I have. Please promise me." Now I look back and I, you know, I, I kind of wish I'd, I'd lied and just did a white lie to make my dying mother happy. But I was, you know, it's 1987, I guess, now what? I'm, um, thirty-four years old, and I just... "Mom, I'm never going back to school. I'm [chuckles] not gonna go back. I'm building Whole Foods, and it's gonna be this amazing company. It already is an amazing company. It's gonna be even amazing." I, I said, "Maybe I will get a, an honorary degree someday because I'm gonna make a lot of money, and I'm a- university's gonna, uh, give me a honorary PhD," which actually did happen, uh, and, uh, and she died a very disappointed person, uh, and, you know, that, that her son, who she had so much hope in, had, had, had wasted his life. So she died. We were alienated when she died.
- DSDavid Senra
That was your last conversation you ever had with her?
- JMJohn Mackey
Our last conversation. She died a couple weeks later. Y- you know, the funny thing is, my mom has been de- I, I think about my parents. My dad died in 2004, my mom died in 1987, and-... I still have conversations with them. I mean, I mean, in my mind, and, uh, uh, you know, I, I, I ask for forgiveness with them, and I give them forgiveness, and I-- what I wouldn't do to have, you know, I'd probably pay all my entire fortune to have one more night with my parents. That'd be so great to be able to tell them how much I appreciate all the things they did to me and how much I love them. And also, "Hey, Mom, I turned out okay." And, uh, so we'll call that a, a minor regret in my life, that I couldn't make my mother happy on her deathbed.
- DSDavid Senra
Give me one minute. That's fucking... That's heavy.
- JMJohn Mackey
Sorry to take the energy down a little bit there. [chuckles]
- DSDavid Senra
No, don't apologize. That was, that was absolutely incredible. I think it's very important.
- JMJohn Mackey
You know, I'll, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, um, somebody helped me see this. I was doing a podcast, and they'd read the book, and they had an interpretation of my mother that I'd never heard before, which was, you know... And I, and I, I realized they were right. I'd always thought that, you know, I was much closer to my, uh, father than I was to my mother. But my mother had grown up in this, again, this small Bastrop town. Here's the ironical thing: my mother was a total rebel. She rebelled against that. You know, she left that town. She went to Houston, went to Rice University, got a gra-- uh, went to school and got a degree. She was in a Baptist town. My l- my mother, she s- started to smoke in rebellion against their, their, you know... She started to gamble. She started to, uh, drink. She started to dance. She was total rebel against the small town of Bastrop, Texas. And the guy that, you know, I was talking to about it said, "You know, John, you probably got your rebel side not from your father, but from your mother." I never thought about it before, and I thought, "You know what? I think, I think he's right." I'd never-- I'd always credited my own rebellious nature to my father, but I realized my mother had it secretly inculcated in me and di- didn't like it there. You know how we oftentimes project out onto other people the things that, about ourselves that we don't like? My mother wanted to be respectable, partly because she had rebelled against all of her things that, that her parents had taught her and went her own path, and she'd inculcated that in me unconsciously. The other children were more obedient. I was this rebel, and, uh, I never credited her for it, but, uh, then I, then I had a, my own little ceremony. I thanked her, "Mom, you know, [chuckles] thanks for helping me become a rebel because it's really helped me be successful in life. Thank you. I owe you so much for that."
- 1:34:47 – 1:36:17
The Ceremony of Forgiveness
- DSDavid Senra
The reason that just impacted me and the reason I want to talk to you about, 'cause, like, when my mom died, I was around that same age, and we were estranged. Like, the saddest thing is she died, like, a, a just horrific death, metastatic breast cancer spread everywhere.
- JMJohn Mackey
Ah, yes. Ugh.
- DSDavid Senra
And the last two years of her life, like, that's not life. That was not living. That was suffering. And what I'm like-
- JMJohn Mackey
That's my advice for you. I would recommend that you do, in your own way, if you haven't already done it, do some type of ceremony of forgiveness with your mother, just where you actually ask for her forgiveness, and you forgive her. And it's like, and tell her, just: "I love you so much, Mom. Thank you for everything you did for me. I wouldn't be the person I am today without you. You, you w- nurtured me in the womb. You went through labor and pain for me to be born. You wiped my butt. You breastfed me. You took care of me. You kept me alive. You nurtured me. You helped me get educated. I owe so much to you. I'm so grateful for you. Thank you so much. And I didn't tell you that the way I needed to tell you that while you were alive, so I'm telling you now. Please forgive me." And, um, and then forgive her. I've done that, and I feel like I'm, I'm at peace about it.
- DSDavid Senra
That actually is a, a, a good, like,
- 1:36:17 – 1:38:54
MDMA Therapy and Breathwork: Accessing Deeper Consciousness
- DSDavid Senra
lead into, I think, one of the most important things that are in the book, and you also talked about this when, uh, we had dinner. You recommended MDMA therapy for me. [chuckles]
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah. You said, "No way, I'm ever gonna do that." [chuckles]
- DSDavid Senra
Which I still haven't. Um, talk about the inner work that you did.
- JMJohn Mackey
But you know what you, what I can recommend that you could do, and it'd be just as powerful. You don't have to take a drug, but do some serious breathwork. Because I always tell my friends that particularly ar- don't want to do any type of, um, like MDMA or psilocybin, don't want to do a psychedelic, you can have a transcendent experience just through breathwork. You can, you can access deeper parts of your unconscious mind that you've repressed, and you can relive those experiences in a safer environment because what's safer than just doing deep breath? Do it with a guide. And, you know, you need to do at least an hour, an hour and a half, or two hours, and you have to do the deep breathing. But what happens, the breath activates parts of your more deeper self. It's mostly hidden from you, and it, it lets it come into your consciousness in a way that, um, you can see it and not be overwhelmed by it. It's a way to practice, um, uh, letting go of some of the stuff that we feel guilty about, that we've suppressed, that actually drives a lot of our behavior, and we're not even conscious of it. You can have a transcendent spiritual experience through breathwork, and it's completely safe, and, hey, if it gets too scary, you just stop breathing. [chuckles] So you're always in control.
- DSDavid Senra
When did you start realizing you needed to fix something that was inside your mind as you're building the company? Was it early when you were starting the company?
- JMJohn Mackey
Remember, I started-- I did psychedelics before I even started the company, so I-
- DSDavid Senra
You tell this crazy story about doing LSD, and I-
- JMJohn Mackey
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... think you were-
- JMJohn Mackey
That's how the book starts out-
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah
- JMJohn Mackey
... in the prologue. So I'd already done... I mean, wasn't doing it therapeutically. I was doing it, I, I was doing it spiritually. I was trying to access deeper parts of the spiritual being that we don't n- normally do, that-- Think of psychedelics as opening a doorway to going into parts of our mind and our greater... There's, there's an interior self that's-... every bit as the excellent, bigger as the excellent universe may be bigger, that we don't, because we're so focused on living in the material world, we're not conscious of this deeper part of our being. Psychedelics open a door to it, but there are other ways. Meditation does, if pursued. Breathwork does. There's different types of modalities that help us access deeper parts of our consciousness, and I think to grow as a human being, we need to go deeper so we can begin to release fears, guilts, judgments, that kind of holds us back, and I think every one of us can access that.
- DSDavid Senra
Were
- 1:38:54 – 1:40:45
The Entrepreneurial Journey as a Spiritual Journey
- DSDavid Senra
you doing this the entire time you were building Whole Foods?
- JMJohn Mackey
Yes. I mean, sometimes more seriously than other times, but yes, it was a-- it-- that's why, as you read the book, you know, I'm telling the narrative, but I'm also telling my own narrative, my own spiritual evolution, all the way to the very end of the book, and it's still happening now. I'm still evolving. So, um, I, I think rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is also a spiritual journey. It's also a hero's journey. I, I talk about the hero's journey in the book. Um, most people do not go on their own hero's journey. We have a voice. Deeper part of our being is whispering to us, telling us, urging us on to follow this... You know, entrepreneurs are following this inner voice. They're following this passion that they're, that, that they unleash, and they create in the world. Um, you have that voice whispering to you, too, and that's why you're doing what you're doing, because you're so passionate about it. Um, that is the hero's journey. In my experience, most people do not answer that call because they're too scared. They're too scared to do it. They want to-- they... A fear of failure, a fear of people ridiculing them, feel of, fear of rejection. Remember how we talked a, a little earlier about how the entrepreneurs are, um, like Todd Graves, people telling you you're gonna fail, or I was saying that would just make me more determined to succeed? When you're on the hero's journey, you are determined to succeed, and you, you're, you're gonna have a lot of setbacks and failures, but that's all part of the path. That's how you're learning. That's how you're growing. Rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is a hero's journey, and a hero's journey is a spiritual journey. It's a journey of discovery. It's the journey of going deeper into yourself, knowing who you are and what really matters in life.
- DSDavid Senra
John, that's a beautiful place to close. Thank you very much for writing the book. Thank you very much for taking the time to have a conversation.
- JMJohn Mackey
Thanks
- 1:40:45 – 1:41:06
Conclusion
- JMJohn Mackey
for talking to me again, David.
- DSDavid Senra
Of course.
- JMJohn Mackey
I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
- DSDavid Senra
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over four hundred biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.
Episode duration: 1:41:07
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode U8zqsiePKsg
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome