Transcript of interview of John Mackey at the Burt Kunik JA Men Forum on December 11

Editor’s note: In this wide-ranging conversation, Whole Foods Market co-founder John Mackey discusses his entrepreneurial journey with me. Our discussion of John’s new book “The Whole Story”, offers candid insights about building a business based on love and conscious capitalism. Starting with $45,000 in 1978 Austin, John traces Whole Foods’ evolution from a small Victorian house to a $22 billion national chain, while sharing pivotal moments that shaped both the company and himself.

Throughout the interview, John’s philosophical depth and entrepreneurial wisdom shine through, particularly in his articulation of conscious capitalism as a practical management philosophy rather than an ideology.

The discussion took place December 11, at the Burt Kunik JAMen Forum, a periodic gathering at Austin’s Dell Jewish Community Center. It was transcribed by Otter.ai and edited for clarity with help from Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant.

John (excerpt from deeper in the podcast, highlighted upfront): When you are on your deathbed, you think you’re going to be having regrets that you didn’t make enough money, didn’t work hard enough, could have built a bigger business, could have been more successful? What will you be thinking about on your deathbed? You’re going to be thinking about people you love and the people that you didn’t say things to that you should have said before they passed on, people that you said things to that you regret, never went through forgiveness, never healed. That’s what we’ll be thinking about on our deathbeds because what we really care about is love — love of family, love of friends, love of our community. The Jewish community is a very tight-knit loving community, because that’s what really matters in life. I tried to build Whole Foods based on that principle of love. To a large extent, we succeeded.

Brett (beginning of interview): I’m very happy to be here with my very good friend John, who I’ve been lucky enough to have as a mentor now for a long time, over over a decade.

John: I don’t think I’ve ever been your mentor, Brett.

Brett: You’ve definitely been a mentor. I’ve learned a ton from John. Anytime I go up for dinner with John, it’s an amazing experience, and I come away with a ton of lessons. Last time we got together, you were like, “You need to listen to this Founders podcast.” That’s David Senra, right? And if you’re an entrepreneur and you haven’t plugged into this podcast called Founders by David Senra, it is addictive. It is absolutely amazing.

But we’re here to talk about John’s book, which is an amazing book, and I know John was really excited about getting to write this because he could tell the whole story now, not being a public company CEO and being on to his next business with Love.Life.

So we’re gonna dive into it. We collaborated on a set of questions here that I wrote and then John looked at. The broad arc of the Whole Foods story is now well known — $45,000 is where it started with startup capital from friends and family. Started here in Austin in 1978 in a Victorian home in central Austin. Upon your leaving, Whole Foods grew to 550 stores, 105,000 team members and $22 billion in annual sales, and it really changed the way America eats. One of the ways I describe John is that I think he’s done more to advance the vegetarian diet than anybody in the United States through capitalism.

But I have to ask you, as a friend, and I’m an Austin native as you know — I’m very proud to have been born here — what do you think the Austin ethos may have had to do with the success of Whole Foods? When I was born, Austin was the size of Anchorage, Alaska. Today we have really become a global incubator of icons like Dell, like Yeti, like Indeed here in town, Tito’s, Kendra Scott, the company I started Bazaarvoice…is it something in the water here? What do you think?

John: I just realized something. Did you get to Austin in 1972?

Brett: I was born in 1972 at St. David’s.

John: Well, that’s when I got to Austin too — 1972 as a student at UT. You know, there was no ethos in Austin back in 1972. When I got here, there were 250,000 people in the metro area, and about 50,000 of those were students. Today, we’ve got 2.6 million people in the metro area and 50,000 students at UT. So it’s really grown.

Back then you had the university, you had the state capital, you had a music scene, and you had a counterculture that was really part of the creativity of Austin. That’s part of the creativity of Austin, was that counterculture that was here and then not much else.

You can’t understand the entrepreneurship boom until you look at when they started doing the tech think tanks and incubators. And I think Michael Dell obviously had the biggest impact, because Dell was — he was such a great entrepreneur, still is such a great entrepreneur. And the tech scene started to happen.

One thing about Austin that is really built into Whole Foods — Austin’s always been a very unpretentious place. People are a lot more authentic, they show up as their real selves compared to most other places I’ve been, where people are always posing and trying to impress people and trying to be somebody else. In Austin, particularly in that day, they didn’t really care who you were or what you’d done, because everybody treated everybody else with dignity and respect. I think that’s part of what makes Austin kind of a special place. Even though it’s grown a lot, I still think that’s a big part of what the culture is.

And really in terms of the entrepreneurship, I think again, Michael Dell and you get to sort of a critical mass. And then people are just flooding in here because, partly because California screwed itself up so badly. We got all the best entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and guys like that who have come to Austin because it’s relatively free. It doesn’t have the same levels of regulation. The tax rates are lower. It’s more hospitable — people actually want you to be successful and work here. And I don’t think that’s true in the Bay Area of California any longer.

Brett: Growing up here, my family in Dallas and Houston actually felt sorry for me because they’re like, “You’re screwing around with the hillbillies and the hippies and all that stuff.” And now they all… But we would not be on the land that we’re on right now (the campus of the Dell Shalom Austin Jewish Community Center) if it wasn’t for the Dells. All this land was donated by the Dell family, and so capitalism really rippled out.

In terms of being from Texas, in the book you talk about when you’re going to Berkeley and Palo Alto and looking to expand, they kind of looked at you as, I’m not sure if they’re kindred spirits or not, and you actually were right, but they kind of judged you because of being Texans. And then in your book “The Whole Story,” you wrote that David Lannon, who turned out to be one of your outstanding executives, said of you acquiring Bread and Circus at the time, “We’ve been acquired by the Allman Brothers.” He later told you he was half-joking in his assessment of the situation.

So what’s it like to grow up as a kind of a hippie vegan who’s devoted to meditation? How did you come into business that way? And how did California actually help you realize your natural national aspirations for Whole Foods?

John: I did self-identify in my early 20s as a hippie. I moved into this vegetarian co-op when I was 22. I wasn’t a vegetarian — I just thought, “I’m going to meet some really cool people in a vegetarian commune.” And I did. I met my girlfriend that I co-founded Whole Foods with. I became a vegetarian. I learned how to cook. I kind of had a food awakening. Became the food buyer for the co-op.

And then I remember coming home — I was working in a small natural food store called The Good Food Company. I remember I came home back to the co-op, and I thought, “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to open my own store?” We could do a natural food store. Renee, who was this amazing hippie chick — I asked her, I said, “Renee, what do you think about opening up our own store? We could do this together, it would be fun.” She looked at me, grabbed my hands, looked me in the eyes and said, “Oh Mac, oh man, that’s really cool. Let’s do that.” And so we did.

You have to understand how people thought about Texas back in the late 70s and early 80s. Remember that really popular TV show — for those who are older — “Dallas”? That’s how people thought of Texans — a bunch of J.R. Ewings, oil guys and cowboys. And they thought Texans were kind of stupid because you talk slow. You talk slow, you’re obviously stupid, because people in New York could talk real fast.

When we opened in Austin and we were successful, then we went to Houston and we were successful. We went to Dallas, we were successful. By this point, Renee and I had split up, and I’m with another woman at this point, Mary Kay. We were traveling on a road trip around the Western United States, and we stopped off in the Bay Area. This was when Silicon Valley was just sort of just really getting going — this was back in 1986.

Whenever I travel, I go to the food stores. I always look at the natural food stores. We’re visiting the natural food stores, and they’re nice stores. And I’m sitting there at lunch and I’m looking at Mary Kay, and I said, “You know what I think we ought to do?” She said, “I think I know what you’re going to say.” I said, “What do you think I’m going to say?” “You’re going to say something like, maybe we should open up a Whole Foods Market here.” And I said, “That’s exactly what I was going to say.”

They had only small stores, no natural food supermarkets. And you have to understand — for us, the Bay Area, that was like… think about the Bay Area. They had the Summer of Love. The hippies were in San Francisco. The radicals were in Berkeley. The tech people are down in Stanford and Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, and the rich hippies are in Marin County. It’s all there. And it’s like, “Wow, could we actually open a store in the Bay Area?”

It was such a cool idea. Of course, my board thought it was a terrible idea. But once we opened up in Palo Alto, we wanted to go to San Francisco. We couldn’t find the location, but Palo Alto was a huge success. And it was like, wow, we could possibly be a national company. That was the first time that idea ever struck me.

Palo Alto led to Berkeley, which is a great story — a whole chapter in the book about Berkeley, picketing us for 18 months, and the mayor of Berkeley telling me she’d never heard such nonsense since the ’50s when I was talking to her. And then after that, we did Mill Valley in Marin, and then we got to San Francisco. So we covered the major four areas, and all the stores were really successful. So then it was like, let’s take venture capital money in and grow this thing. And we did. You have to read the rest of the book to get most of the rest of the story, but the Bay Area or California was important because it was like, if we can succeed here, we can succeed anywhere.

Brett: You talk about — there’s one word that comes up in almost every chapter, and it’s a word that you and I have talked about. It’s a word that I love, because that word is love — and not just for family, your first love Renee, your soulmate and wife Deborah — but love is the animator of life. And you write, “Love wasn’t just an emotion, it was the foundational truth behind my purpose.” Tell us more about love as an entrepreneurial principle.

John: I do think the purpose of life is love, so I’ll say that. I’ll get my bias out there right in the beginning. But let me ask you a question — when you’re on your deathbed, think you’re going to be having regrets about you didn’t make enough money, didn’t work hard enough, could have built a bigger business, could have been more successful? What will you be thinking about on your deathbed?

You’re going to be thinking about people you love and the people that you didn’t say things to that you should have said before they passed on, people that you said things to that you regret, never went through forgiveness, never healed. That’s what we’ll be thinking about on our deathbeds because what we really care about is love — love of family, love of friends, love of our community. The Jewish community is a very tight-knit loving community, because that’s what really matters in life.

I tried to build Whole Foods based on that principle of love. To a large extent, we succeeded. My new business is called Love.Life, because there’s lots of different meanings for what that means. But for us, it’s about loving life, loving your existence, loving beingness. I mean, isn’t it an amazing, amazing gift to be alive? It’s just incredible. We should be grateful every day for this grand adventure that we’re on called living in life. And there is just nothing more important in life than love, and the sooner you discover that, the richer you can live the rest of your life. So yeah, I’m really passionate about love.

Brett: Yeah, I completely agree with that. And the more you radiate that into a company, I mean, you just become unstoppable. But if you’re manifesting love throughout…

John: You can still lose in business with love. You need other skills too.

Brett: So in chapter two, you talk about circumventing the building inspector by building at night. It’s a really fun part, and you write, “In most cases, regulations should be politely respected and followed. Occasionally they need to be politely resisted, and every once in a blue moon, they need to be strategically subverted.” In this time that we’re in a great debate about government regulation, you want to amplify that?

John: I’ll amplify it first by telling that story. It’s a great story. People like stories. So we’ve got our first location — it’s Safer Way, it’s the summer of 1978, late spring, early summer, and we’re working on building this. It’s now a school called Headwaters School, on Eighth Street and Rio Grande.

I’ve got my friends — we only raised $45,000 in capital, so we don’t have a lot of money. We’ve got friends that are electricians, friends that are carpenters, and we’re there just putting this store together, refurbishing used refrigeration equipment, and doing what we can.

And one day this guy walks in, and he’s kind of in a suit. And he says, “What are you boys doing in here?” It’s like, “We’re going to open up a natural food store. Going to be called Safer Way.” And he says, “Well, actually, building permit.” And I said, “What’s a building permit?”

And he says, “What do you mean, what’s a building permit?” I said, “Well, what do I need a building permit for?” He says, “Well, you can’t build a store without a building permit.” I said, “Well, we are.” And he said, “But you can’t legally do that. You need to get permission from the city, and you need to have architectural drawings, and you need engineering drawings and then the city will approve that, and then you hire people that are certified in those professions, and they’ll come do all this stuff for you.”

And I said, “Oh, how long will that take?” And he said, “Oh, I don’t really know, but it’ll take several months.” It’s like, “Well, we can’t — we’ll go broke. We can’t do that. We only have $45,000. We just can’t do that.” And he said, “I’m sorry, those are the rules. And so in the meantime, you’re shut down.”

The very day that happened, our landlord walks in. He’s a Lebanese immigrant, and he was probably about the age I am right now — to me, looked like he was about 120. And he sees that we’re all bummed out, and he says, “So John, why is everybody so sad?”

I said, “Well, Mr. Joseph, we just… the city just shut us down. They say we can’t… we don’t have a building permit. We can’t open this store. And we can’t… we don’t have enough money to hire all the architects and engineers and wait to get all the stuff approved.”

And he puts his arm around me and he said — I’m gonna try to do his accent but I won’t do a very good job — he just says, “John, you’ll never get your store open if you listen to these bureaucrats. But son, listen, they all go home at five o’clock. Just build your store at night. They’ll never know.”

So that’s what we did. We built our store at night. It was closed up during the day, we opened it up. And guess what? Inspectors came around to make sure we had our weights and measures, that we had our health inspections, and we got all of our certificates, we got everything approved, but kind of after the fact.

Let me just say, in terms of what I think about regulation, I’m a big fan of what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are doing in terms of deregulation. My God, that could be transformative. If we can’t cut back this incredible build-up of the administrative state, America will explode. We will unleash so much entrepreneurial, creative energy that it could be the most transformative moment or stretch of time in my life.

Now, you know, getting it actually done is a whole other problem, but I’m pretty excited about that. It’s not that we don’t need regulations. It’s just that regulations get added on, but they almost never get canceled. They just keep piling on, and you can’t even track them.

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t have any regulations. We need some regulations. We just don’t have a way to get rid of the bad ones, and they just keep multiplying. It’s like you need to weed your garden or it’s going to get taken over by weeds. And that’s what’s kind of happened in a lot of ways to the economy here.

Brett: Yeah. And I mean, it actually — I know you’re a big fan of Elon Musk and regulation is in part the reason he moved here. It’s also for the workforce, but it was going to take him around six years to build that factory. They built it in two, and now Tesla has 23,000 employees in Austin. It’s the largest employer. It’s larger than Dell as an employer, and it’s only been here since towards the end of 2021, and scaled. And it’s now Austin’s largest employer that’s non-government. And I don’t think he’s stopping.

So throughout the book, beginning in chapter three, you talk about the challenges of reconciling your own values as a vegetarian with your decision after a trip to New Zealand to sell meat, poultry and fish. And ultimately, that becomes an even bigger issue as you wrestle with activists. You become friends later in the book with Lauren, who’s executive director of Viva USA. So how do you draw the lines between your personal values and business decisions and how did those views kind of evolve from Safer Way, which was obviously all vegetarian, and Whole Foods?

John: Since I think stories are the best way to communicate this stuff, I’ll tell you another story. The woman you’re talking about was an animal rights activist. Back in 2003 at Whole Foods, we used to rotate where our annual meetings would be for our shareholders — we’d pick a different city since we were all over the country.

This one was going to be in Santa Monica, California. I’m coming from the hotel to go to where we’re having the event, and there are all these protesters, all these signs. And I’m like, “Man, what’s going on here?” And they said, “John, it’s a bunch of PETA and Viva, and they’re protesting our animal welfare standards.” I said, “Why are they doing that? We’re doing more than anybody else in the United States. We already have the best standards.”

They’re disrupting our shareholders meeting and interrupting, doing the things that activists do. It’s a longer story, but afterwards, I began a conversation with her after the meeting was over. We were disagreeing, and then I said, “You know, we’re going to continue this conversation.” So then we began emailing each other, and she challenged me in a way that I’d never been challenged before.

She said, “You know, John, I can tell after talking to you that you really are a very caring person, very idealistic. But when it comes to animals, quite frankly, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not well informed in this area. You have not done the research. You just trust what your team is telling you and they don’t know what they’re talking about either. You should get better informed, because you’re having a big impact in the world.”

So that summer, I read about a dozen books on livestock practices in the United States, animal welfare practices and whatnot. And by the end of the summer, I said, “God, she was right the whole time. This is horrible. I had no idea we were doing this to animals, livestock animals. It’s just horrible what we’re still doing for the most part in America.”

By the end of that summer, I decided to become a vegan. I’d been a vegetarian, I was going to be a vegan. And then the second thing was I really wanted to see what Whole Foods could do to improve the welfare of animals. So we began this sort of multi-stakeholder process where we brought in the animal activists, the farmers and ranchers, the animal scientists, the experts, and we brought in the Whole Foods team. We brought all the stakeholders in one room and decided we’re going to create practical, workable standards that we can build a business around, but will be a huge upgrade on the way animals are treated.

And that’s exactly what we did and it has made a huge difference for those animals — literally, billions of animals. But the moral of the story is that in business, you have to meet the market where you find it. That’s just a fundamental truth, and you can try to educate that market. You can try to lift it up. You can try to influence it, persuade it. But at the end of the day, they vote. Every time they transact with you, they vote with their pocketbooks, and they can vote you right out of business.

It’s easy to be a saint on a mountaintop. It’s a lot harder to do it in the marketplace, because you have to be pragmatic. So it’s that dance between your ideals and the dance with the market as you find it, and you have to be able to move with it.

The people that are very idealistic see you as selling out, as a traitor. And I constantly get that criticism, and I always have a good retort, which is, “Hey, if you think you have a better way, why don’t you do it? You’re telling me I have to do it in a better way. But why don’t you do it? Because I don’t know — I don’t see how to do it any better than the way we’re doing it.” They never have an answer for that, because they don’t really actually want to do anything. People just want to criticize.

Brett: Your father was clearly a mentor to you, an investor in the company, and ultimately became a member of your board. And you know my father was an important mentor to me, an incredible inventor. I’m just curious about your general thoughts on the role of parents in entrepreneurship. Is it essential, nice to have? I mean, in Judaism, family is such an important aspect of all of our processes.

John: Obviously your parents just have a huge impact on you. When I think back on my own life… By the way, I highly recommend you write a memoir. Everyone in this room should do that. The reason why is, in some ways, you really only understand your life retrospectively. The threads come together. You see the patterns. You begin to understand it as you look back.

It’s also a gift you will give to your children and your grandchildren, because they will understand you in a way that they will not understand you otherwise. One of the best gifts I’ve ever gotten in my life was about five years ago when my sister put together a sort of history of our family. I hardly knew my parents — they didn’t ever talk about themselves, about where they came from, or their struggles they had. I didn’t know my grandparents hardly at all, and the people before then, I didn’t even know their names. This was such a great gift.

My father had a huge impact. But both my parents did, and I think back on it — one of the biggest and best impacts they had on me was they never gave us an allowance. One thing I discovered about entrepreneurs: almost every entrepreneur starts working at a very young age because they want money so they can buy the things they want to buy.

So even when I was a kid, before I could legally work, my parents didn’t give allowance, but they put a price on every chore — mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, whatever they wanted us to do. And they had put a price tag on it. We could negotiate on that. It’s like, “I really think you’re not paying enough for that particular chore. I don’t want to do it.” They didn’t make us do it, but they’d raise prices. So I was in a market economy in my own household.

That gave me a taste. And so as soon as I could work legally, I took jobs. I worked all through high school, because money, to me, was freedom. And by the way, it’s still freedom. Money gives us the freedom to do what we want to do.

At that age, you want to listen to the music you want to listen to, or eventually buy a car, or whatever is important. I earned that myself, and that gave me a healthy respect for work. That’s the biggest impact my father had.

But then also, my dad was a business guy. I didn’t study any business in college. My college experience — I tell the story — I have 120 hours of electives. I only took courses I was interested in, and if I wasn’t interested in the course, I dropped it. I actually audited another 40 or 50 hours. But I got a tremendous education because everything I was interested in, I studied wherever my curiosity took me. That was very helpful, because I had this mind that absorbs information and knowledge. I’m a voracious reader — that was all influenced by my parents as well.

My mother was horrified. I tell the story in the book — on her deathbed, my mother was begging me to go back to college and finish my degree. “You’ve got all these hours. You just got to do a few required courses.” And I told her, “Mom, I’m not going to go back to school. Whole Foods is going to be hugely successful.”

As far as my mother’s mind was concerned, I was stepping back in class. I was a grocer. And she said, on her deathbed — her deathbed, not mine — she said, “John, we gave you a fine mind. You could be a doctor, you could be a lawyer, you could do anything you wanted to be, and you’ve chosen to be a grocer.”

I said, “Mom, someday I’m going to get a degree because some university is going to give me one, because I’m going to do a commencement speech, or I’m going to make a big donation or whatever.” And she said, “Oh, yeah, sure.” So when I got my honorary PhD at a commencement speech, I started out by telling that story about my mom.

So anyway, our parents have a huge impact on us, and I really do believe that commandment to honor your parents is very, very important. I actually do regret that I didn’t — I was full of my own integrity. On my mother’s deathbed, I wish I’d just lied. That’s a minor regret, because my mother died disappointed in her son. If I’d said, “You’re right, Mom, I am going to go back and finish college…” She died just a few weeks later with a stroke, and so I can’t go back and repair that one, but I tell stories about it that makes me feel better.

My father became my business mentor because he was an accounting professor at Rice University, and then he went on, left the university and ended up being the CEO of a hospital management company. So when I was starting out the business — all those electives, I took zero business classes. I was studying philosophy, religion, anthropology, world literature, everything but business. But once I got interested in business, I read everything about business. I liked to read accounting books. I liked to read marketing books, so I just absorbed the information.

My dad mentored me. I always say, for the first 16 years of Whole Foods, I never made a major decision that I didn’t get my dad’s sign off on. It’s too long to go into the story, but my dad did get Alzheimer’s, and I ended up, before we had it diagnosed, I ended up kicking him off the board when I was 40, because we were starting to fight all the time. He’d gotten super irrational, and it was later, when he was diagnosed about a year later, that I realized that’s why he wasn’t himself any longer.

Brett: That part of the book was the most painful part for me to read. I know that it was incredibly, incredibly painful when you had to let your dad go from the board.

John: I’ll tell you something — that was a huge milestone in my own personal growth. Because, you know, I’ve always felt like… I think entrepreneurs, a lot of them, if you think about it, I think we’re all on a hero’s journey. Honestly, if you answer the call of your heart, of your soul, you’re on a hero’s journey. And it was a huge part of my own journey to put my mentor aside and go on it myself. I think that’s part of the hero’s journey — you eventually leave the mentors behind, and you go into the wilderness on your own, and you make your spiritual discoveries.

Brett: I think we should tell the story about one of your heroes in the book, Mark Monroe, who gave you that $100,000 loan that he really wanted. Are you going to tell the story?

John: This was back in the early days, you know, Austin had this Memorial Day flood in 1981 and Whole Foods was completely wiped out. Before then, we had opened up that first Whole Foods, when we started selling meat and seafood, beer and wine, sugar, and then Whole Foods just took off. We became the highest volume natural food store in the entire United States within six months of opening. And then the flood happened.

Of course, only the government is stupid enough to insure floods. You can’t get it from private insurance companies. So we didn’t have flood insurance. I thought we were out of business. And then an amazing thing happened. The next day, we show up, and all these people are helping us clean up the store that didn’t work for us. And they were — I vaguely recognized them — they were neighbors, and they were our customers.

And I remember talking to one of them. I said, “Why are you here?” And they said, “Oh, we love Whole Foods. You can’t die. We’re going to help you get back on your feet.” And so we had people work with us to clean up the store that were just our neighbors and customers. Team members worked for free until we could get back open again. And there was no guarantee we’d get back open.

We had our suppliers give us new inventory based on credit we already owed them for the last inventory. Hadn’t paid them, but they were willing to finance this additional inventory. Our investors kicked in some more capital.

But the best story of all was — this is back before banking was really a local business, and the bank we were dealing with was called City National Bank on Congress. Mark Monroe was our loan officer, so we got a $100,000 loan from the bank. And that’s really — I’m not sure we could have gotten open without that $100,000. I was always confused at the time, but very happy. It’s like, why did they give us this loan? My signature was worth nothing. I had no collateral. I was totally nothing.

And I never thought about it after that, because we paid them back, and it was a good story. And so I’m in a conference now, about 10 years ago, and this guy comes up to me and he said, “You’re John Mackey.” I can’t remember this guy’s name — we’ll just say he’s David Smith — and he said, “I remember that Memorial Day flood.”

And I said, “Yeah, City National Bank really came through for us making that loan.” And he said, “Yeah, it was a great thing.” And I said, “Yeah, it really was a fantastic thing.” And he said, “But you know, John, I don’t think you know the full story.” And I said, “Well, I think I do — they loaned the money.”

He says, “No, no, the bank turned the loan down.” And I said, “No, David, you’re mistaken. They didn’t turn the bank loan down because we got the loan.” He said, “No, John, the bank turned the loan down. Mark Monroe personally guaranteed that loan.”

I said, “Why the hell would he do that?” And he said, “Well, he really liked you, and he really liked Whole Foods. And he said, ‘I know Mackey will pay us back if it takes him the rest of his life — he just has integrity. I know that he will do that.’”

So I said, “You gotta be kidding. This is incredible. He never told me this. I want to thank him. Do you know how to get in touch with him?” And he said, “You’re too late. He died. He passed on about five years ago.”

That’s when I began to realize — not that story, but this recovery — was when I began to learn about stakeholders, that a business is a community of stakeholders, and they all matter, and they all care, and they all have a stake in the business. I didn’t have the language back then — I don’t think the word stakeholder had been invented — but these were people that cared about us. And then, since then, I always felt like I was paying back to stakeholders the rest of the time I was at Whole Foods.

Brett: And we’re definitely gonna dive into conscious capitalism, because you created it. You’ve got the namesake book for that. But before we go there, I love this piece about… like I’m primarily a product of venture capital. I started six companies. I bootstrapped my first three, and the last three have been venture capital backed. And you also went down that path with Whole Foods. And in the book, you write, quote, “I began to think of our VC partners as hitchhikers with credit cards. They were along for the ride and benefiting from our progress, and as long as they felt that they were going where they wanted to go, they would help pay for gas, but they did not want to have the same level of commitment to stay in the car for the entire journey.” So the question for you is, how do we nurture and develop entrepreneurs, with or without venture capitalists?

John: Oh, I mean, venture capital is very important. My main objection to venture capital is that it’s just important that entrepreneurs understand that they have different objectives. They are trying to get to an exit one way or another, either sell the company, a public offering, or some other round and get cashed out. But they have… they want to get out of the car. They don’t want to stay along for the whole ride.

And the problem oftentimes is just that the windows aren’t long enough. You know, it’s a five to seven year window generally, and sometimes that works, but a lot of companies are prematurely forced to try to scale before they’re ready to scale. They’re encouraged not to retain earnings, but to just spend it on marketing to grow faster. And so the VCs manipulate it, not for the best interest of the business, but for their own best interest to be able to make an exit.

And they know that they blow up a lot of companies, but the blockbusters that come through and really scale, they make so much money, it pays for a lot of dry holes. So it’s just important entrepreneurs understand where the VCs are coming from.

I would love to see a lot more what we call “evergreen funds” that are willing to invest for a much longer period of time. Don’t have to… they don’t have investors that have gone into the fund and need to get paid off in that five to seven year time period.

So I’m not anti-VC. I’ll take them for Love.Life when it’s appropriate, but I just know who I’m getting in the car with me, and I know I don’t want to keep them in longer than five or seven years. They almost took over Whole Foods. That’s why I had to go public prematurely to get them out of the car.

Brett: Do you want to talk about that, like how they almost took over and why you had to go public? That’s a…

John: Longer story. I mean, it’s definitely a good story in the book. Let me just give you a snippet of it. They were forcing us to hire somebody, a real grocer from the supermarket industry, and we were hiring him, and he was going to be the president. He’d been the CEO of a company based in Phoenix called Smitty’s. They sold out to Smith’s, and I really liked him. He was a nice guy.

Wynn Smith — the very day he was supposed to begin to work at Whole Foods as president, he died. That very day. He died of a heart attack. I get a call from his son. He says, “Mr. Mackey, I don’t know how to tell you this, but my dad… he died. He dropped dead today of a heart attack.”

So I don’t know whether that was divine intervention or a coincidence, but by that time, we had spent so much time doing the search to find him in the first place, and we’d gone through so many different candidates that of course, the VCs wanted to do another search. But by that time, the company was really… Whole Foods was kicking butt, and we were back on track to get them exited. And you know, I talked to my dad about it, and we just said, “Now, let’s just tell them to f-off,” because they’re not in a position any longer to try to force us down. And so we didn’t continue the search after that.

Brett: So one of the things — I mean, you referenced it earlier, but it’s one of the things I love about you the most — is you have this encyclopedia-like knowledge of business. Also, our mutual friend Gary Hoover really, really has that. And you know, you cite so many books in “The Whole Story” from Peter Drucker’s management principles to “Be Here Now” by spiritual guru, and we learned later, Whole Foods customer Ram Dass. And you could fill a library with all the books. I mean, you’re a voracious reader. How do you view the role of reading and the journey of an entrepreneur, and what’s the one book outside of “The Whole Story” that you would recommend to the aspiring would-be entrepreneur?

John: You know, I do think many entrepreneurs are voracious readers, because it’s how you take in… it’s how you form your… we all create a model of the world, the way we think it works in relationships. And Charlie Munger says, the more mental models that you can use — metaphors, mental models that you can put into your kit — the more equipped you are to face different circumstances, because you have a mental model of solutions. And so it basically empowers us, and reading helps provide that.

And as you know, we talked about the Founders podcast — that’s actually good, because those are biographies. And one of the things I recommend people that want to create businesses is, yeah, you should read some business books, but you should read a lot more biographies about entrepreneurs, because then you’ll understand they actually go through so many of the same experiences.

You know, I once heard this and I laughed, because it’s so true: There’s two emotions that entrepreneurs always experience as they build their business. One is complete ecstasy — it’s going to work, oh my god, this is incredible, we’re succeeding, this is fantastic. The other emotion is complete and utter terror — oh my god, it’s gonna fail, it’s failing. Because this is your… it’s just your creation.

And so those emotions are very common, and mostly when I talk to people who build businesses and ask them that question, they always tell you, “Yeah, I felt a lot of total terror, and I had some of the highest highs of my life” as you were building the business. Which, by the way, is what I love about being an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur, you’re creating something. You’re creating something that is bigger than yourself, something that you hope will live longer than you live, will continue to exist. It’s your child. It’s your baby. You nurture it, you wipe its butt, you help it walk, you feed it, and it grows up, and it may go into something really beautiful that you can be really proud of.

But the one… there isn’t one book. So I recommend all those biographies, but the single book that had the biggest influence on me was actually written by one of my philosophy professors at the University of Texas, Robert C. Solomon — Bob Solomon — and he wrote a book on business ethics called “Ethics and Excellence.” I’ve read that book at least a dozen times. It’s incredible. I highly recommend that book.

Brett: I’ll throw one out there that you may have not heard of, that I’m really, really enjoying right now. It’s “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.”

John: That’s a lot of commitments.

Brett: Man, it is. It’s a lot of… I can’t remember all 15 commitments, yeah, but it’s really, really well done. So we talked about conscious capitalism a little bit. And I was real honored when I worked with you on the board of Conscious Capitalism. You know, in thinking about Conscious Capitalism and taking care of all the various stakeholders, how does that square with you being, you know, a really well-known libertarian and your admiration of free market figures like Milton Friedman? How do you look at it?

John: What’s the problem? I don’t see any tension. I don’t see any contradiction. You’re thinking… you’re saying people that believe in free markets aren’t conscious or don’t care about people or don’t want to do the right thing? I beg to differ. I really think that’s a polarity that I don’t think needs to exist.

Brett: I’ll give you an example — like, my sixth company here, data.world, is a B Corp, public benefit corporation. And when I was going out there… Actually, this happened almost every time I’ve raised money for it. People always like, “Why are you that? Like, why not just be a C Corp?” And that’s actually what I tell entrepreneurs, is that that’s allowed me to kick open the door and talk about how we care about all the stakeholders and manifesting love, and that leads to a better business. But a lot of people fear differences. You know, they fear like, “Well, why not? You just stamp it out, and it’s Delaware C, and everybody does Delaware C that gets VC capital.” But I like being different, and I think that it’s been really beneficial for the company.

John: The biggest misunderstanding about Conscious Capitalism — it’s not an economic system, it’s not a governance system, it’s simply a management philosophy, and it’s a management philosophy that works. It creates more value for all of the stakeholders, including the investors, because they’re all interdependent.

And once you see that they’re this interdependent system, and you manage the system, you will end up creating more wealth than any other strategy. If you try to cheat one of the stakeholders, or you try to trade off against it, then you set up negative feedback loops that come back to bite you.

If you try to screw your customers, well, they’ll find somebody else to do business with. If you’re not a good employer, they’ll take jobs somewhere else. You’ll get a labor union. Or if you try to cheat your suppliers, they’ll stop doing business with you. Or they’re going to raise prices, or get back at you in some other way. If you don’t do a good job with your investors, they’re going to sell their interest and invest somewhere else.

So all these stakeholders are voluntarily exchanging with you for mutual gain, and so once you understand you have somewhat of an ethical responsibility to try to do right by each one of them, then the synergies of that cooperation will take the business to a higher level. So it’s good business. It’s the best way to manage.

If it created poor economic results, then it would be a bad way to manage. The best way to maximize profits is… I’ll give you an analogy: The people that make being happy their primary goal in life, in my experience, aren’t very happy because they’re very narcissistic. They’re mostly just seeking their own pleasure. And they think that’s how they’re going to be happy. Happiness is something that comes from love, family, doing the right thing, following your purpose, being kind and forgiving. Happiness comes from those things — they ensue.

And the same thing for profits — they ensue from creating value for all of these different stakeholders, particularly your customers, who are your most important stakeholder. So there really is no contradiction. It’s really a management philosophy, and it works. And quite frankly, it’s just going to grow because it does work.

People always ask me, “So are you worried about what’s going to happen?” I said no, because conscious capitalism works, so I’m not worried about it. Anything that works in business will spread, and it is spreading because we’re getting them… I think generally, you know, they oftentimes say you only make progress in life a funeral at a time. So you always have generational evolutions that occur. And so I think conscious capitalism is going to continue to spread.

Brett: Just to push on that just a little bit more — so, you know, being Jewish, we’ve all been really struck by the horror of October 7. And it’s made us kind of wake up in a different type of way, where we realize now what was happening in academia, like we realize now this kind of oppressor/oppressed mindset, etc. And do you think conscious capitalism is going to get caught up in, you know, kind of like this backlash on DEI and stuff like that, or do you think it’ll rise above it?

John: I would say that the radical left has tried to weaponize conscious capitalism. And again, it’s not — it’s a management philosophy. It’s been misunderstood, and it’s been weaponized. So I’m arguing with people about conscious capitalism who are either the extreme left or the extreme right for different reasons. It’s like, “What do you need? Capitalism is good. You don’t need a modifier of conscious capitalism.” It’s like, no, I’m not trying to replace capitalism. I’m trying to talk about how you should operate your business.

So I’m always having to defend it from attackers on both sides. And yes, conscious capitalism was definitely weaponized by the radical left as a weapon to try to, you know, put stakeholders on all the boards. And you know, it’s to take power away from the owners and the investors, is what the goal was. And of course, conscious capitalism has nothing to do with that at all.

Brett: So I want to close on your new business. I’m super excited about it — Love.Life. It’s really the ultimate health and wellness club, and it’s… you know I’ve known you for a long time. It’s truly your life’s work in action, and huge congrats on opening up in El Segundo, California. Tell us about that. And how can we help you here? This is a community. It’s very plugged in. We’d love to help you.

John: I don’t have enough time to talk to tell the Love.Life story, because Jay’s ready to get up here, but it’s sort of a one-stop, holistic health center, holistic health club. So we have a healthy restaurant, state-of-the-art fitness center, yoga, pilates, we have a spa, we have pickleball courts, we have a medical center. And that makes it a little bit different.

The whole idea is that we’re trying to help people prevent and reverse chronic diseases, but that’s where we spend all our money on in America — chronic diseases, obesity, heart attacks, strokes, type two diabetes, autoimmune diseases, cancer. These are mostly lifestyle and dietary diseases, and we have more of a plumber’s metaphor: When do we go see the plumber? When your pipes break, right? When do we see a doctor? When something’s broken.

And we need to change that paradigm, and Love.Life’s about changing that paradigm.

Brett: How do you get one in Austin?

John: If you can, we need to find a 40 to 50,000 square foot location, about a 10-mile radius from the Capitol. If you have a location, you could contact me, because Austin’s overbuilt in office, it’s overbuilt in housing in some ways right now, but it’s still radically underbuilt in retail.

Brett: Well, everybody, I cannot recommend “The Whole Story” enough. It’s John Mackey unplugged, and it’s just a phenomenal, phenomenal read. And your career is amazing, and I know that Love.Life is going to be just as successful and just an honor to know you. And thank you so much!