Continuing our seventh Authors in August series, in this podcast episode, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner welcomes John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods Market, for a deep dive into his 2024 book, The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism.
Reflecting on the journey from Safer Way to Whole Foods to Amazon.com to Love.Life, John shares how passion, purpose, and unexpected surprises shaped a company that's transformed the way America eats. With a nod to their 2020 conversation on Conscious Leadership, this episode explores the intersection of purpose and profit, and the enduring joy of playing the game of life -- and business.
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.
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This video was recorded on August 14, 2024.
David Gardner: Welcome back to my seventh annual Authors in August series for Rule Breaker Investing. This week, we get to hear from one of the great Living entrepreneurs. A rule breaker, who as a young man, thought, we can, we should eat better. His first store in Austin, Texas was called Safer Way, a punning jab at Safeway, of course. When more than 40 years later, John Mackey sold that company Whole Foods Market to Amazon.com. His empire had grown to 85,000 employees, $16 billion in sales regularly listed as one of America's top companies to work for. Perhaps most importantly, John had ignited and then led a full-blown cultural revolution around better food and healthier habits, since imitated by everyone from Walmart to Trader Joe's. What is it like to start something beautiful but small, long ago, and watch it, help it grow, and leave the entire world off so much better for your efforts? Let's hear the whole story. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
I'm delighted this week to be joined by John Mackey. Full Disclosure. John is a member of the Motley Fool Board of Directors. More full disclosure. I'm on the board of his new company, Love Life, which I'm sure we'll talk about. One more disclosure, John is a friend of mine, somebody I deeply esteem. I've learned so much from for over 15 years and counting. John first joined me on this podcast in September 2020 talking about his new book at the time Conscious Leadership. It's one of the better books I've ever read on the topic. I highly recommended. But this week, we're talking about John's new book just out in 2024, which is entitled, The Whole Story. It pretty much is, John shares his life story. The subtitle Apped is Adventures in Love Life and Capitalism. John Mackey, welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing.
John Mackey: Thanks for having me on again, David.
David Gardner: John, we're going to get to the book, of course, in a second, but you just saw a big launch of your first flagship Love Life in El Segundo, California. Take note, Los Angeles Fools. Since I'm co invested, John, how is the opening?
John Mackey: Yeah, it was fantastic. It was on Saturday, we had a grand opening. We had several hundred people come and show up, and I did a talk on the whole story. We have a community gather room, we can jam about 100 people in and then did a book signing. We did a soft opening back on July 9th, but we didn't have all of our equipment. We didn't do any marketing. We wanted to work out technology bags and other challenges, get the team ready for the grand opening, and it went very smoothly. People seemed really, really excited. They came. There's never been anything quite like Love Life, which is it's this holistic health membership club. It's big, it's an old Best Buy. It's 45,000 square feet, and we have a healthy restaurant. We have a state-of -the-art fitness center, we have yoga, palates, we have a spa and we have great recovery modalities, all kinds of biohacking type techniques from coal plunges, infrared saunas, cryotherapy, lymphatic massage suits, the pulsometer. We've got hyperbaric oxygen chambers. Then, of course, we have three pickleball courts because we want to have play and community there. Then we have a medical center. Our doctors are trained in functional medicine, integrative medicine; East West Integration plus lifestyle medicine, and they're medical doctors, and they're wonderful. The whole idea really is to get people to be members and then do some tests so we can establish a baseline health for our members. Then once that baseline health is established, we can work with the wellness coach and the doctor to sort of set up a plan for you to become healthier, become the healthiest version of yourself. If you have some disease, we hope to detect it, and then work with you to reverse it. Most modern medicine doesn't do this. You generally go see a doctor in America when you are sick. Then unless it's an infectious disease, where something like antibiotics will work or a vaccine, which might prevent a viral infection.
In general, modern medicine just treats the symptoms, and don't reverse things. The leading killer in America, for example, is heart disease. It has been our leading killer for over 120, 130 years, now. The infectious diseases which used to kill us, which from tuberculosis to influenza, small pox, tetanus. These things have been held back by modern medicine. But now they are chronic diseases, such as heart disease, obesity, auto immune diseases, stroke. This kind of diseases we don't really have solutions for through technology and through pharmaceuticals. But they can be in most cases reversed and prevented, by living a eating a healthy diet, living a healthy lifestyle, and by checking in hopefully at the earlier age better to get your baseline established. Then through the wearables, and then through continuous testing once or twice a year, you can establish your progress. We have it all on our platform. You can access all this information vis-à-vis our app. Then we can see people become the healthiest version of themselves; healthiest physically, emotionally, and spiritually. That's kind of the Love Life vision. We're very excited about it. I don't think anybody's quite doing what we're doing anywhere in America.
David Gardner: I really enjoy the LA Times article. There's one anybody can reference, wherever you are. There's only one Love Life right now. It is in Elsa Geno, California. There is the app that you can use, John you pointed to. A lot of the benefits you get are on site, and they're high tech, and that definitely came through that LA Times article. But of course, a lot of this, John is just common sense. Things like the best time to go to the doctor is when you don't need to go to the doctor.
John Mackey: Yes. The doctor's job is to keep you from needing to see the doctor.
David Gardner: Thank you for that opening, John, we'll probably go back to Love life near the end, but let's go to the book. Let's start, in fact, at the end. John, in the final chapter of your book, you reflect back on all that's come before in your book, in your life. Most especially, of course, the life of Hole Foods Market. You initially called the company Safer Way. You write in Chapter 39, reflecting on a conversation you had with your business partner and life partner. At the time, Renee Lawson, I'm going to quote, and then ask you to react. Here I go. "When I first came up with the idea for Safer Way, and Renee said, Let's do it, Mac O' Man, we thought it would be fun. That was the initial impulse. We also needed to make a living, and we wanted to do so in a way that benefited other people in the process. If you told us then that the little venture we'd started in a Victorian House would, by the time I retired, grow to be a company with 540 stores, 105,000 team members, $22 billion in sales, that changed the way America eats, we'd have fallen over laughing.
But then we would have gotten right back up to work building the company we loved. It was because we loved and enjoyed it so much, that it became all those things we could never have imagined. That's why I love playing the game of life." You write, John Mackey, end of business. I love that it keeps surprising all of us. John, looking back, how much do you think the love and enjoyment that you had in building the company contributed to its successes and how is that love evolved?
John Mackey: That's one of the themes. It's one of the threads that goes through the whole book. A couple of threads you've identified there, David. First, that from the very beginning, Renee and I, we were trying to earn a living, but we thought it'd be fun. It was an adventure. I love that word adventure. It's it's part of the subtitle, Adventures in Love life and capitalism. Building a business is really the most fun I've ever had in life. It is a game. I know, David, you love games and so do I. Business is a type of game. Building a business, it's complex. The more complex the game is, in a lot of ways, the more challenging it is, but also the more fun it is. It takes longer to master it. Once you master something completely, it's not as fun anymore. It's kind of boring, actually. It starts to get boring.
But a really good complex game like business is an infinite game, it doesn't get boring, it gets more and more fun. One of the themes going through the book is, the first chapter is called the Game of Life, and the final chapter is called the Infinite Game. Most games are finite games with winners and losers and a clear set of rules and a termination point to the game. In Infinite game, you just continue to play it, hopefully at higher and higher skill level and never really has an end to it. Life is that way, capitalism is that way, I would argue that a business as potentially that way. Although we know most don't last, even 100 years is really long for business, but it's hard to make succession in business once the founders move on, but that's another topic. Anyway, fun and games is one theme that goes through the whole book another one is love. Because the book is chronicle, kind of my own spiritual awakening and my own spiritual evolution. That spiritual evolution was always going deeper into love. Experiencing more and more love, sharing more love, trying to build a company based on love, to the point where probably my last business, Love Life has actually got love in the name. Love Life. Love your life, Love all of life. Those two themes are very common and threads that go throughout the entire book.
David Gardner: Love does, and of course, love visits us early as kids when we think, of course, of our parents, who, as you say at a few different points of the book, John, they love us in a way that no one else ever will. It's something we should never take for granted. The story of your dad, one of the threads that kind of runs through the book. He was on your board for many years. He added a lot of value. He was also a hard person to have on your board. He eventually, unfortunately, as many of us do, ended up with a form of dementia. In his last years, you didn't get to have the dad that you grew up with, but I want to go back to early chapters, early days, because you would hitchhike from Austin, back to your family's home in Houston and your dad, Bill Mackey, was an astute businessman. You mentioned he taught accounting at Rice University. He became very successful as a healthcare company, CEO. At one point in the book, you relay this conversation. You said you'd started the business, but you were looking to this older figure, this elder in your life, to give you advice. You said, "Dad," and I quote, "I'm here because I need to learn more about business. You've hitchhiked down from Austin. I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. I appreciate all the advice you've given me, but I need to learn how to think better for myself. Where should I start? What should I read?" He answers, "Son." pointing toward the shelves. "Here's where you start." He pulls out a management book by Peter Drucker, and then a memoir by Alfred Sloan of his years at General Motors. What was your reaction, John, and did you read them?
John Mackey: Yeah, of course, I read them. Particularly, the Drucker book, I read that multiple times. My copy is falling completely apart after all these years. Unfortunately, I'm a Kendall reader, so I I've got it on Kendall now. But that was the first big impact. Drucker is such a systematic thinker about all aspects of business that he gave me a really good grounding. The Alfred Sloan, and since then, I've read many, many memoirs of entrepreneurs, and I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot from memoirs. In fact, I've gotten into this podcast recently over the last couple of years called Founders Podcast. I don't know if you're familiar with that or not?
David Gardner: I am very popular.
John Mackey: The guy, David Sindra, he reads biographies and autobiographies of entrepreneurs, and then does a 60 minute description of the book. As a result of that, listening to his podcast, I probably bought 20 books or so that he's recommended and read. Yes, I am a bibliophile. I am a reader. I love to read, and I absorb information very quickly when I read. I didn't take any business classes when I was at the university. I was studying philosophy, religion, world literature, the humanities in general, psychology. I disdained business when I was younger, in fact. I never thought I'd go down that path. I got interested in natural and organic foods, and that led to starting a business. Then I found out how much fun business could be. My dad being an accountant, I just thought it was all about numbers and that seemed dry and boring to me. There's this adventure as an entrepreneur creating and building something and watching it grow and feeding in and you're learning as you go along. I also found that to be challenging, but also very rewarding and fun.
David Gardner: John, I have gotten to know the reader in you over the years, you've given me some great recommendations I've benefited from. You are among the most widely read people that I know. I'm curious, this is briefly departing from your book, but how about five books everyone should read by John Mackey? How about a little bonus for our listeners this week? What should we all all have read?
John Mackey: It's a difficult question because I've read thousands of books. Can you narrow it down? Are you talking about business books? Are you talking about books that I most enjoyed, the books that had the biggest impact on me?
David Gardner: I love it. Thank you for making me specify. I would say that could help me flourish as a human being?
John Mackey: Could help you flourish as a human being. The first big influence that the thinker that had the biggest influence on me in my 20s and early 30s was Abraham Maslow. I read every one of his books. He helped me see that humans move up this hierarchy of needs, and you can go into self-actualization, and then toward the end of his life. He started talking a lot about self transcendence. Those books are so positive about human potential. Maslow is one of the founders of the human potential movement. So pretty much you can't go wrong. His books also still hold up really well. A lot of it's been integrated into mainstream psychological thinking, but his books were so inspiring to me. I certainly recommend them. From a business ethics standpoint, I've read this book at least a dozen times. I've read my highlights even more times than that and that's by one of my old philosopher professors Robert C Solomon, Bob Solomon, and it's called Ethics and Excellence. That book came out in 1989 or 1990, but it's when I first discovered stakeholder thinking.
Solomon was good friends with Ed Freeman, and we both know Ed. Then after discovering, I'd already been thinking about stakeholders, but I didn't have the language for it. Then Solomon gave me the language which he got from Ed, and then I went back and started reading Ed's books. Stakeholder Management is another book I can highly recommend. Books that have that super big impact on you are also world literature. All the Russians, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and then in the 20th century Souls and Nitzan, those three authors had a huge impact on me. The books are so incredible. There's so much Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were such great observers of human nature. You learned. Good world literature makes your world bigger and better. Let's see. Ken Wilbur's books had a big impact on me.
David Gardner: I've never read him, but you mentioned him a number of times in your book.
John Mackey: The good starter book on Ken is his book. It's only a couple of hundred pages. It's called A Theory of Everything. It really truly is a theory of everything. But the integral thinking believes that they believe everything's evolving including human beings, including our cultures, including our minds.
The integral thinking believes we go through stages of development personally, from more conventional to more modernistic to more post modernistic, and then potentially to integral and in places beyond. I'm a great believer, and I've read hundreds of self-help books. I'm a great believer in continuing to grow as a human being. Of course, the book that has probably had the biggest impact on me in my entire life is a course of miracles. Which I started studying back in 1984. At full disclosure, I had discovered that book soon after I did MDMA for the first time when it was still legal, also known as Ecstasy or today Molly. That really awakened me to the power of love. Then the course of miracles is a spiritual path to waking deeper into love. The course posits that we're basically the matrix that we're dreaming. We think we wake up in the morning, and we just wake up to another dream, that we think that dream is real, but the dream when we're sleeping. Feels real when we're in it. The interesting thing about dreams are, we're the dreamer. Yet who are all the other characters in the dream that seem to be acting independently of us?
We don't seem to have control of them. But in fact, we are the dreamer, we are dreaming it. The course says, you think it's different here, but it's really not, you are still asleep. The course is a path to awaken deeper into love. It basically argues that or posits that love is at the core of who we are, but we have blocks to it. Judgments, anger, fear, guilt, resentment. All those attack thoughts that we have block our awareness of love's presence. The course teaches us how to do forgiveness and how to let go of those blocks because we become more conscious. As we do that, our heart opens more and more, and we experience more and more love until, according to the course, we fully wake up and more dreams.
David Gardner: I was going to say, we must wake up at the end. John, thank you for that, that's really helpful.
John Mackey: Those are some books, there's plenty more.
David Gardner: Certainly, I have a book recommendation for you, by the way, if you haven't come across this one. Have you read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders?
John Mackey: No.
David Gardner: Totally recommended to you.
John Mackey: Can you text it?
David Gardner: Yes, I will. Please remember I shared that with you because I think you'll look back and appreciate having read it. But you have a modern day teacher of creative writing at Syracuse University going back through the Russian grates, the short story grates. Half the book, he's just reprinting their short stories that you may or may not have read, but the other half are his commentaries, how he teaches them. It is a phenomenal book, I think you'll love it, I certainly have.
John Mackey: The Russian short stories like Checkhov and [inaudible]?
David Gardner: Exactly. Checkhov and [inaudible], I think you'll love it. I get to give you, I don't know, a book recommendation once for every 50, you give me thank you for that. Let's go back speaking of books to your book, John. There's a great chapter. I've heard the story from you as a friend of yours, but you tell it. I'm going to call it the Flood and the Loan. Every founder of every business has a near death story, sometimes more than one of them. John, would you tell the story of the flood and then of the loan?
John Mackey: Little background. We did safer way for a couple of years. Safer way was a very pure store, it was a vegetarian store. We didn't sell alcohol or coffee, no sugar, it was very pure. It was also in this old Victorian house, Renee and I ended up moving into the house. Wasn't on a commercial street. We did everything wrong in that first location, we didn't know anything. But we were able to escape from it. That's a longer story in the book, and we relocated, and merged with another small natural food store that we were friends with and changed the name to Whole Foods Market. We stopped being vegetarian, we started selling meat, seafood, we started selling alcohol, coffee, and sugar. But still having high standards for natural and organic foods, and no artificial ingredients flags cooling as preservatives.
That first whole foods market store, within six months of opening. Had become the highest volume natural food store in the United States, based on everything I could find out historically about that era. From my friends that had other stores, we were out distanced them all. Then nine months after the opening of the store, we had built the first whole foods market knowingly in what's called 100 year flood zone. I remember talking to the owner of the building about it. He told me, he says, this is in 100-year flood zone. I said, what does that mean exactly? He said, well, it means about once every hundred years, the Shoal Creek, it's going to flood its banks, it's going to come right down to Lamar and it's going to fill up your store about eight feet of water. I said, you got to be kidding. He said, no. I said, well, when was the last time that happened? He said, before I was born, over 70 years ago. I was like, once in 100 years, I guess I can live with those odds. [laughs] A hundred-year flood occurred in the first year we were open. [laughs] We were wiped out. Even then, I should probably say that we actually, at the landlord's insistence, we built the store two feet higher, we put a two foot slab, so we actually had two feet higher, the water had to get to. But it still got there and went into the store. Renee actually swam out of the store that night she was closing the store up.
David Gardner: Wow.
John Mackey: This store was completely ruined, we have some pictures of a flood in the book, and we were completely ruined. That's when I learned about stakeholders, although, again, I didn't have the language for it back in 1981. Because the stakeholders were people that loved us, they didn't let us die. The very next day we're cleaning up the store, and all these strangers, they weren't strange, I recognized them, but they didn't work for us. They were helping us clean up the store, and I remember talking to them. I was like, why are you helping us up the store? He says, man, I love you guys. You guys have got to survive this. Well, I'm do everything I can to help you guys get through this. Then our team members were working for free because we couldn't make a payroll. But nobody quit, they all stayed, they all had faith, we could get back open again, and of course, did pay them once we were able to get open again. Our suppliers fronted us hundreds of thousands of dollars in new inventory on our credit. Our investors put in more money.
But the biggest thing was we got this $100,000 loan from our bank, which surprised me at the time, because it was just on my signature, and my signature was worthless. I couldn't believe it, the bank usually wants all this collateral, and we're just going to screw it. I remember being really grateful for that. About, I don't know, maybe ten years ago, I'm at this conference, and this guy comes up to me. He look familiar, but I didn't really recognize him, and he said, hey, John, you may not remember me. But I used to work at City National Bank. I said, I love City National Bank, they really came through for us in that flood. They loaned us $100,000, he said. That was a great thing Mark Monroe did for you, wasn't it? He was our banker. I said, it sure was, I mean, if we hadn't gotten that money, I don't know what would have happened. I said, but it always surprised me that they gave us the loan, because I didn't have any net worth and it was just a signature. He starts laughing and says, you don't know what happened, do you? I said, well, they gave us the money. He said, John, the bank turned the loan down. You guys were not worth the credit risk. I said, Well, no, they didn't turn the bank because we got the money. He said, no, Mark Monroe personally guaranteed the loan. I said, well, why the hell would he do that? He said, he really likes you guys. He said, I know they'll pay me back, John Mackey will pay me back for taking the rest of his life.
He took a risk on us. I didn't even know, he never told me. I immediately, of course, asked, God, I'd really like to get hold of Mark and thank me. I asked, do you have his contact information? He says, that's too late. He passed a few years ago. An unsung hero. But that's what that's really what stakeholders mean, they're people that care about your business and have a stake in it. That's people don't understand this about business, really, business is this win game. Where you're creating value for all of these different stakeholders. You're creating value for your customers. They don't like you, they don't have to shop with you, they can go somewhere else. But they do shop with you, then they're getting value out of the exchange. People don't have to work for you, they're working for you voluntarily, they can get other jobs, in other words. Many of them do. But they are winning because they're getting paid, they're getting opportunities to be promoted to gain new experiences and get promoted. Suppliers don't have to trade with you, but they do, and to win with them. Investors don't have to invest. Whole Foods was public company for 25 years. If you didn't like us, you could sell the stock, if you didn't like what we were doing. Then you're part of the communities, and the community, you're trading with the community in all ways, from taxes to helping out philanthropically in the communities you're in. The point I'm making is, these are all the stakeholders, and I didn't know about them back then. But when I read Bob Solomon's book Ethics and Excellence, and I discovered the language, I connected the dots, that's who saved Whole Foods Market. We were saved by our stakeholders. I've been trying to pay them back ever since.
David Gardner: That is just a beautiful story. I'm so glad you told it on this podcast. The Flood and the Loan. I knew the flood story. I don't think I heard thee story in the Mark Monroe story from you. But reading it in your book, it's really one for the ages, and thank you for sharing that. Also, how it opens up into an understanding of what business conscious capitalism anyway, really is, which is an interdependent ecosystem highly sensitive. Where everybody participating is winning, otherwise, they probably are opting out. If we can just understand it and do it that way and buy and hold those companies, by the way, whole food is a pretty good one to buy and hold over the years. Well, very well put, John Mackey. Let me go a few chapters later because this was an interesting part of history I was not familiar with a three do ago. I was not familiar with part of it is I'm younger. But John in Chapter 10, you were speaking to the early days of the Natural Foods movement. It's the early 80s. Natural and organic foods going more mainstream. It's still early enough that each big city might just have one or two really good stores. There are no national brands, there's no national competition. In particular, John, the Natural Foods network, or as you call it in Chapter 10, The Network. Could you explain a little bit more about who was in the network and its history and its importance?
John Mackey: Back in the day when the natural foods, organic industries were really getting going. The precursor to that was the health food stores, what we referred to as pill shops because they were mostly selling supplements, a little bit of packaged food. But natural food stores were focused primarily on food. They might have sold supplements, but they were really in the food business, trying to sell organic produce, whole grains, beans, nut seeds, natural meats, things like that. What ended up happening is that as we began to know through, actually through a trade journal called the Natural Foods merchandiser. We began to see that we were not by ourselves, that there were other entrepreneurs out there doing similar things to what we were doing in Austin. We began to connect up together, and honestly, we saw ourselves as part of a movement. We were a movement.
We were all mostly counterculture, hippies, trying to change the way people ate, just eating natural, healthy, organic foods, just not all this processed junk food that we were starting to eat back then and now even eat more of it today. We saw ourselves as part of a revolution, you might say, and trying to change the way America ate. We were all separated into distinct geographical areas. We shared with each other, we'd get together three times a year about every four months, somebody would host. Then we'd compare a lot of cases, we'd compare financial information, we'd compare marketing strategies, merchandising strategies, we talk about our businesses we're doing. We were all learning together, and they helped make Whole Foods a lot better company as a result of what we learned from them. But also, most importantly, we established relationships with all of them. They became friends. We took venture capital money in before anybody else did. We did an IPO, initial public offering before anyone else did. That gave us a currency. One by one, most of these entrepreneurs decided to cash out. We paid them a lot of money, and they became wealthy and then did what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. Well, we continued to play the game of Whole Foods. Then Whole Foods would gain what we call territory and talent. We gained new territories. When we bought bread and circus in Boston, now we had a platform in New England, Mrs. Gooch's in Los Angeles. We got Unicorn village and Bread of Life down in Miami, we had a platform down there. Fresh fields when we acquired them, we got Washington DC area, and so forth and so on.
We had a certain what we call platform acquisitions. But we also got talent. You always have to think about when you're trying to grow, there's always going to be limiting factors. That's true in biology and ecosystems and ecology. Food is oftentimes a limiting factor for most species. In business, there could be a lot of limiting factors. One might be capital. Once we went public, capital was not really a constraint any longer for us. Then the limiting factor became talent. Because you cannot grow without a lot more talented people coming in. The acquisitions that we made brought in talent. Some of the very best people that ever worked for, the company, like Walter Robb, for example or Will Paradise, AC Gallo, David Lannon. These were heroes of mine that worked for these other companies that had this massive improved Whole Foods in so many ways when they joined the team. I think I got that question answered.
David Gardner: I just found it so interesting. The network is there, it exists because of passion that's being felt in Miami or Los Angeles, and you start to discover each other and you start to meet. You never quite put it this way, and it's not meant in any way to be predatory. But you ended up buying them all out pretty much, which is funny reflection.
John Mackey: It wasn't predatory at all, though sometimes when I tell the story, journalists start printing it that way, like we ruthlessly took over everybody. [laughs] No, we didn't.
David Gardner: They sold to us.
John Mackey: They voluntarily sold their businesses not because we were threatening them. We were offering them so much money, they decided to cash out or they came to us on their own. Many times they approached us, would you please buy us out?
David Gardner: Many cases, they then came to work for you and became some of your lieutenants and some of your superstars over the years?
John Mackey: Yes. It was more difficult for the entrepreneurs that built a business to go into a subordinate position to me. As I like to say today, I learned this a hard way. Once you're a CEO, that's really all you're good for. [laughs] It's very difficult. That was one of the challenges I had after Amazon bought Whole Foods was, as they told me toward the end of the book, it's like if you didn't want to lose control of your business, you shouldn't have sold it to Amazon. Of course, that's true, but they did let me manage the business fairly autonomously until they didn't.
David Gardner: Yeah. Well, in fact, speaking of peer companies, John, it's of course, pure coincidence that on the day I get to talk to the founder of Whole Foods's market, two similar world beaters in the food space are changing CEOs. Specifically, Starbucks has rocked the markets, gaining about 20% of its stock today by announcing its hiring of a new CEO, Brian Niccol, the present CEO of Chipotle.
John Mackey: Really? Wow.
David Gardner: Did you not know that?
John Mackey: No, I hadn't seen that today.
David Gardner: Oh, my gosh. That is today.
John Mackey: I've been preparing for this podcast all day long. [laughs] You don't kept up with the news.
David Gardner: None of us was expecting this, but John, since we're here together, your book, the whole story is often telling the backstories behind executives that you've worked with, your E-team as you would say. How important leadership and these personalities were for Whole Foods. John, today's Starbucks switcheroo has Starbucks gaining 20% of its market cap from about 80 billion to about 100 billion. As it hires away Chipotle's standing CEO and Chipotle loses about 10 billion off its market cap from about 70-60. How can I not just throw this one on the table and say, Mackey, any thoughts?
John Mackey: Well, was Howard Schultz still running the company for Starbucks?
David Gardner: Howard was not. He had come back for a third time as CEO. Howard, by the way, makes a very interesting appearance in your book, which we can talk about or not. He had since given it away to a CEO who was flailing and was replaced.
John Mackey: That CEO got replaced by Brian Niccol?
David Gardner: Today.
John Mackey: Yeah, obviously, under Brian, Chipotle has done very well. The CEO can make a big difference. Another good example in the grocery space is, I've watched how well Sprouts has done under their CEO. That company's market caps gone up considerably. It's probably quadrupled under his leadership. A good leader makes a huge difference. Now, Mexican food is not the same thing as coffee. [laughs] We'll have to see, but probably I don't know what agreement he had with Chipotle in terms of non-competitor, but I'm sure they're not loving him right now and now there's some question about whether he's going to try to hire and he was taking any of his people away with him.
David Gardner: Well, that would be something to watch for as well. It is a shocker. It's rare that we would see, especially in this industry that you know pretty well to have somebody, I mean, we're used to it in sports. Oh, you just traded us your star center fielder. But we don't see this very often at this scale in corporate America.
John Mackey: Now that I'm starting to rattle it around in my brain, I just realize one of the big implications besides management skills. Well, where has Starbucks been the weakest? Food. They've never figured out food. There coffees, they've really got that one down and the consistency is straight up there with McDonald's in terms of the consistency of the products. But everything about food has been a challenge for him. Even I didn't talk about this in my book, but at one time, Howard called me up and wanted to, could Whole Foods help us with your food? I said, well, maybe, how many Starbucks are they? This was many years ago now, seven or eight years ago. He said, how many Starbucks are there? He says, well, they're over over 10,000 in the United States. I said, no, we can't. [laughs] It's too big. You're too big for us. Maybe I don't know. Maybe he was thinking about making an offer for Whole Foods. I don't know. But nothing he never did and nothing ever came of it. But I know he was concerned about food. In other words, Starbucks is at very top of excellence and coffee, but there food, you might say, harms the brand a little bit, maybe. Is not up the same quality. If Brian Niccol can bring food magic to Starbucks. He's going to be a bargain for whatever they're paying him.
David Gardner: One of our cottage wits around the Motley Fool Sina Hassona said, maybe it's Niccol went over because he could finally be able to serve breakfast at this new company [laughs] because a lot of people have asked about breakfast burritos and breakfast from Chipotle for a while.
John Mackey: Chipotle is not open for breakfast.
David Gardner: That's it. Now it will be for Brian Niccol. John, let's go back to your book. The happiest day of your life. It was getting married to Debra. Your wife now of 32 years and counting Deborah is from a large Catholic family. As I myself was raised Catholic, the story you tell. In the book about your wedding day is not completely shocking to me, but it was shocking, nonetheless. Would you share again your wedding day showdownshowdown moment and reflect on it? [laughs]
John Mackey: Well.
David Gardner: What happened?
John Mackey: Well, you have to go back. My wife comes from a Catholic family, and although she wasn't a practicing Catholic, her spiritual interest went in other directions. It was very important to her family, so we had a big Catholic wedding, and she comes from a large family, so I make the joke that we had about 500 people at the wedding of which about 75 were on my side and about 425 were on her side. [laughs]
David Gardner: I'm sure that was a joke.
John Mackey: No. I come from a small family. Anyway, we had to go through an engaged encounter, which we was a little bit older than most of the other kids who were getting married. The joke there was, we had to do two weekends. It was basically two things that you had you had Catholic elders telling you no matter what happens, you're going to hit hard times. All marriages do, stay together. Doesn't matter how bad it is, what God has joined together, do not tear apart. Then also birth control. They kept saying, this is not the rhythm method, but if you look up what the rhythm method says in the dictionary, it's the rhythm method. That was the only acceptable form of birth control at that time, we're talking about, got married in 1991, so 33 years ago. I'm sure the Catholic Church has changed that. But now at the wedding, I tell the story about how I got lost and I was going to be late to my own wedding.
But in this case, I do get there before the wedding launches and the priest who's going to marry us, immediately pulls me aside and says, look, before I can perform this ceremony, you need to sign this paper. I read the paper and it says, I agree that any children the marriage produces will be raised as Catholic, and I said, you got to be kidding me. You're just putting this to me today at the wedding date? Couldn't you have gotten this to me before? He says, well, there's no problem, is there? I said, well, this is coercion. Now you telling me that if I don't sign this paper, you're not going to perform the service. He said, regretfully, I will not be able to perform the service.
David Gardner: Wow.
John Mackey: I actually, thought about calling it bluff, but then I realized no, this would break Deborah's heart. It would be terrible. It was truly coercive. Then I just decided, this is coercion. I'm going to sign this agreement, but I don't consider it binding in any way. I guess Deborah had the last laugh on this one because we never had any children. [laughs]
David Gardner: What a moment and that was the happiest day of your life, and you explain why understandably so in your book, despite a little bit of pressure. John, what was the second happiest day of your life and why?
John Mackey: It's a joke is because the IPO was definitely one of the day Whole Foods went public. In January, I believe January 23rd, in 1992. We did our initial public offering, which it's like losing in Virginity. You can only really do that one time, and it was an amazing experience for our team. We were feeding on Wall Street, driving around limos and everybody was interested in what our business was about. We only had 12 stores when we did our initial public offer. I explained that I needed to get the venture capital hitchhikers out of our car so they didn't hijack it and take it over and hire a new driver and toss me on the side of the road. But it was it was, think about it. We started safer way in 1978. This is literally 14 years after we opened up safer way. Everybody that had faith and confidence that invested their money for the long term, now could sell out for a huge gain or they could keep the money inners. Sell part of it and keep the rest in.
But the point is, I had gotten the car to where I promised I could get it to and they now could, the venture capitalist could exit as could anybody else. Any of our initial investors could exit as well or just partially exit. The Warren Buffett story when he had his limited partnership and decided to wind that down and then he bought Berkshire and gave everybody an option of folding their money into Berkshire and anybody that didn't, he took it personally a little bit. I felt like I had fulfilled my promises I'd made to our early investors and that was a happy day for me. Also, I was on paper rich myself. [inaudible] I was worth about $7 million after the IPO. But I couldn't believe it because before then I was super poor guy. [laughs] Yeah, so very happy day and it's like people wanted us.
David Gardner: Changing gears from an IPO. I would say few CEOs have so distinguished themselves as authors and thinkers, not to say that they're not all smart and deservedly successful, and some of them actually are, but not many are such avid readers as we heard John is earlier or have debated economist Milton Friedman or have written books or led a new business movement. Here I wanted to talk John some about conscious capitalism. I want you to talk some about that, but first, I want to share this excerpt from your book, Page 329. I love this. Here we go, "For a while now, I've been aware that it was hard for people to fit me into their narrow political and ideological boxes. I sold natural foods, practiced meditation, espoused veganism, and wore hiking shorts to work. I believe business should be informed by love, serve a higher purpose and benefit all stakeholders. Yet, I pushed back against compulsive unionization. I defended capitalism and free markets. I argued for freedom of thought and personal responsibility and I resisted anything that resulted in more government controls and subsidies and move us away from the natural discipline and innovation of free markets toward the stultifying inefficiencies of socialism." John, you started out as maybe the proverbial hippie, who let us say a lot of questions about business or capitalism. You've ended up here now championing capitalism, done right, conscious capitalism. It's a philosophy. People have a hard time putting in a simply labeled box. Why is that?
John Mackey: I think there's a lot of reasons. One problem is, is that Marxism has had such a huge impact on the intellectuals and still does and it continues to morph into cultural Marxism and I think part of it is it's complicated, but part of it is people do not understand that business is they see it as a winner take all type of system, that it's a win-lose game. There's winners, and they're losers. The winners are people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These guys are particularly greedy because they're getting these big pieces of the pie, and they're no more deserving of anyone else. They don't understand how markets work. They don't understand that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have become wealthy, not because they are greedy and stole a big piece of the pie when nobody was looking, it's because they've created more value for other people. All their wealth has been created because think about how Amazon has changed our life for the better.
If you're an Amazon customer and you're a prime member, and you're getting one click, and now you get a lot of things the same day or within 24 hours. It's astounding and at good prices. Amazon, that's why Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world. Elon Musk with Tesla and Space X and the other companies he's done, PayPal, these are massive value creations for customers and people trade voluntarily. People don't understand that about business. By the way, capitalism itself is inherently good. It's not that you have to be a conscious capitalist to be doing good. Capitalism inherently is creating value for stakeholders. It's just when you become a conscious capitalist, you understand the interdependencies and you do it in a more conscious way instead of unconsciously. But most business people, I mean, are there greedy business people? Yeah, of course, there are. Are there greedy doctors? Lawyers?
David Gardner: Yes.
John Mackey: Politicians?
David Gardner: Yeah and politicians.
John Mackey: Human nature is not any different because you work for the government than because you're working in a business. I mean, there are bad actors and good actors in every realm of our lives. The beautiful thing about business and capitalism is if you don't serve your customers well, they have other choices. They can go somewhere else. That acts as a discipline. It's very difficult to discipline government. You get to vote, but that proves not to be very effective in disciplining say the bureaucratic state that we now live under. But businesses, if they don't create value, then they lose customers, or competitors come along and do a better job, and they begin to get out distanced and that creates continuous progress. That's why I love capitalism so much. It's not a win-lose game. It's a win-win game. Win six game. Good for customers, good for employees, good for suppliers, good for investors, good for the communities that they're part of and good for the global community.
Most people are also ignorant of how much progress humanity's made in the last couple of hundred years. They're not taught that in school. They're just taught about all the mistakes and crimes and the bad things that happened, but they don't talk about progress, the good things that have happened. I always like to say that and I'll do it here is that if you go back to right around 1800-1820, so a little over 200 years ago, 94% of everybody alive on the planet Earth lived on less than $2 a day, 94% and that's adjusted for today's dollars, 85% lived on less than $1 a day. How many people today live on less than $2 a day? Down to about 6% of the population, 6% too many, but that's been capitalism that's been lifting people out of poverty. If you go back to 200 years ago, 88% of everyone alive on the planet, couldn't read. They were illiterates,88% of the population. Today, that's down to 12% and continuing to decline. The lifespan, average lifespan, 200 years ago, was 30. Today, it's getting close to 80 across the planet. I could go on and on. Childbirth, we talk about inspiring books. Let's put this one in as a late edition here. I consider the most important book I've read in the 21st century. That is Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now. It's an incredible book. It has had a huge impact on me, and I think it should be mandatory reading because he documents so greatly how much progress humanity's made in almost every single area. He takes on the problems like climate change and as you make progress, there's always going to be some trade-offs that occur, unintended negative consequences. But the challenge, I often give young people who despair about where we are today. I tell you what? I'll give you the entire history of the human race. You tell me a time it was better to be alive than right now.
David Gardner: When would you like to be born into? Where would you like to be born?
John Mackey: I would submit, it's never been better to be alive than right now. If you go back 200 years ago, you didn't even have modern dentistry. You didn't have any antibiotics. In the Civil War, if you got wounded, they had to cut off your arm or leg because they couldn't stop an infection with antibiotics. They didn't have general anaesthesia. You got to guess you'd take opium, and a lot of people became opium addicts as a result of that, but we just made so much progress in so many different ways. That story is just not told, and so I'm trying to tell it as best I can.
David Gardner: Well, I appreciate you have told it very well. I've listened over the years, and I've tried to tell it to some too, and I think many hearing us, John, this week, are people who are investors, and they've been coached by me, if not other people too, to make their portfolio reflect their best vision for our future. It is an incredible time that we can be alive and save money and put that toward organizations that add value to our world and that grow for good reasons over time, and that we can all become rich together. It doesn't happen all at once. One year in every three, the market drops. It's not always straight up, and it's not always easy, but my golly, pinch yourself that you live. At least, I'm pinching myself that I live today.
John Mackey: Another great book I'd recommend that I try to get anybody that's interested in being more optimistic, besides Matt Ridley's, The Rational Optimist which is also great. But Jeremy Siegel's book, Stocks for the Long Run. I don't know what edition we're on. I've read all the editions because the stock market reflects human progress, and the new corporations that come along and disrupt things, the rule breakers.
David Gardner: Thank you.
John Mackey: The rule breakers, they change the world, and they change the world for the better. We make progress through the rule breakers. By the way, I do believe rule breakers is better term than disruptors.[laughs]
David Gardner: Thank you. Well, it's something that I've made a part of my life's work, and you're much better branding than I am, but I do appreciate it. I think it's an important phrase.
John Mackey: No. Rule breakers, rule makers, that's pretty good branding.
David Gardner: Not bad. Speaking of rule breakers, John, let's move just a couple more things I wanted to kick around with you. Talk about rule breakers Amazon. You've ended up selling your company to a company that is maybe the biggest, most raging rule breaker of this generation. You do a good job speaking to the decision to sell to Amazon in your book, the whole story. On the one hand, it was at a time of real pressure that you were getting from so called shareholder activists, basically, predatory forces looking to take over the company from the outside, destroy its culture, dress up its short term financials in order to make some short term money. We would call that unconscious capitalism. You were right in the nick of that, but then along comes Amazon as a potentially amazing suitor. On the other hand, a few pages later in your book, after staying with Amazon for five years as you eventually did, you departed and said goodbye to that thing, whole foods market that you'd created that you still loved. Do you want to share anything more here now about Amazon, your reflections on Amazon, the sale or the reflections afterward?
John Mackey: Yeah. The question I get asked the most from people before the book was written, but certainly since the book was written, was do you regret selling to Amazon? The answer is, I regret the circumstances that made that the best alternative for our company. But it was the best alternative. If I had to do it all over again, I would make the same decision because our options were limited. We tried to get Warren Buffet to buy the company, and he made a joke about it. I had that at my brand, I owned Dairy Queen. We talked to Albertson's on an informal basis. We knew we didn't want to be acquired by them. They were interested as a vehicle for them to go public, actually. Then it was really about fighting. That's what we really thought we were going to have to do, fight for our independence. I'll always wonder about the path not taken, but I decided that I actually though we might hold them off for a year or so, but I thought we'd lose. We needed more time to turn the company around. One of the things that I love about Amazon and that I will always be happy we sold to Amazon is Whole Foods, we had the whole paycheck narrative was going really strong, and people had began to copy our products and we didn't have so much differentiation in our products, they were undercutting us in price and we needed to lower our prices. But to do that when you have activists, it's very difficult to do because if you're selling something for a dollar and you start selling it for 90 cents, in the short run, your sales are going to go down, your comps are going to get terrible, and your profits are going to go down, and you won't have time to execute. There's a lag period, maybe up to a year. Amazon let Whole Foods drop prices four times significantly in the first two years.
It cost them hundreds of millions of dollars to do that, but one thing I love about Jeff Bezos and Amazon is those guys think really long term. They're thinking 10, 15 years out. That really helped us. I very seldom hear about the whole paycheck narrative anymore. That's really peaked and gone the other direction. Also, Amazon, they increased the pay of virtually everyone in the company within 30 days of the merger. Back in 2017, they went to a $15 minimum wage, and that meant pretty much everybody else there got bumped up. Every hourly worker at Whole Foods got a pay increase, and so that cost them hundreds of millions of dollars too over time.
David Gardner: Wow.
John Mackey: Our suppliers not only didn't lose business with Whole Foods, but Amazon studied our sales and who we were selling to, and they picked up a bunch of our suppliers that for the first time we're doing business with Amazon. Our investors got about a 30% pop on the price Amazon paid versus what happened before the activist went in, and so I think every one of the stakeholders won. It was a win win win solution. Everything wasn't perfect. I did have some fights with some of the leadership at Amazon over years, and I always saw myself as trying to protect Whole Foods, and I was really wanting to protect our culture. Amazon wasn't trying to change Whole Foods, but I always said they're such a powerful culture themselves, and they're such a giant company. They're like the sun. Whole Foods was a Fortune 250 company when they bought us, but Amazon was a Fortune 5 company. We were like Jupiter orbiting the sun. We were pretty big, but we're still caught in the orbit of the sun. I did worry about our culture being impacted, and most of my fights were about that. I'll go into some detail in the book about that one big cultural fight led me to decide to hang it up and go on and devote myself to love life. But in general, I'm a great admirer of Amazon, and overall, I think that that was the right decision at the time to stand by it.
David Gardner: You've now transitioned because business is a game, it's an infinite game, and you love that game. John, is there anything else you'd like to add about love life before we close with our game of buy seller hold?
John Mackey: Only one thing is why am I doing it? I'm going to be 71 years old in just three days. Why am I doing it? Besides it's fun to build a business. That's the main reason. But I know from Whole Foods, we had a program called Total Health Immersions, where we could take people in a retreat like setting, do intensive education, get control of their food and their diets for one week. I was amazed how much progress people made in losing weight, lowering their blood pressure, improving their cholesterol in just a week. The people would stay in the program, and they could lose over 100 pounds in a year. It's completely transformational. I really feel like we figured out how to radically improve people's health, and Love Life has dedicated to that proposition. I just don't think I'd feel good. It's the call of the hero's journey. I'm still being called by it, and I would not have been happy if I had just taken my money and sat on it and traveled around and had a good time, and I wouldn't have fulfill my purpose. I would have gotten to the end of my life with a regret. Why didn't she try that? You don't know if something's going to work. There are no guarantees that love life's going to work, but if I hadn't tried it, I would have regretted it. I'd have wondered the rest of my life, what would have happened if I had tried it. That's the hero's journey call. I'm still answering it, and that's the main thing to say about Love Life, except that I'm super excited about it, and I encourage people to go see our new location in Los Angeles and El Segundo, south of the airport.
David Gardner: As I mentioned at the top, I'm a shareholder. I'm on the board. I also encourage those same people to do that. [laughs] John, let's close out with our game of buy, sell, or hold. These are not stocks, but if they were stocks, John Mackey, a sentence or two. Are you buying, selling, or holding, and why? Let's get it started. You're ready?
John Mackey: Hit it.
David Gardner: The New York Yankees. If they're a stock, buy, sell, or hold.
John Mackey: You buy. They're having a great season, and they've got two of the greatest players in the game in Judge and Soto, and it's the greatest franchise in the history of baseball. How can you not buy the Yankees?
David Gardner: Well, a lot of people hate them, and I suspect as a lifelong Astros fan, you don't like them very much, but I absolutely agree with your answer.
John Mackey: Well, I'm not pulling for him. I'm an Astros fan. [laughs] If you're asking me what the long term prognosis of the Yankees, then buy.
David Gardner: Buy. Next one up. Private land ownership, if it were a stock, buy, sell, or hold.
John Mackey: For me, it's hold because I own a lot of land already and it doesn't appreciate as much as stocks do over the long term. People think real estate does, but it doesn't. I think that's been well demonstrated. Again, read Jeremy Siegel's book, Stocks for the Long Run, but on the other hand, I'm very happy with my real estate holdings, which are, I own a ranch, I own a house in Boulder, I own a house in Austin. That's part of my lifestyle with my wife. I'm holding on to what I have. I'm not selling. But as investments, I'd hold and I might even sell if you were just investing in real estate to make big profits. Unless you're an expert in the field, and I can't say you can make profits in real estate, but I couldn't. I would sell anything that wasn't personally important to me.
David Gardner: Buy, sell, or hold, kids these days.
John Mackey: If you rephrase that to grandkids, I'd say buy.[laughs] I'm about to be 71, so I guess I'll hold, but I'm not looking to buy anymore.
David Gardner: Well, how about just Gen Z, millennials, whatever you want to call kids these days. What are your thoughts?
John Mackey: My thoughts are this is still the best time to be alive in the history of the planet. The kids today, people always ask me, the trick answer to my question is, I'll give you any other time in the history of humanity. When would you choose to be born? My answer is 100 years from now.[laughs] Because I think it's going to be even better. If you look back where the world was 100 years ago, it's just amazingly better in so many ways. There's every reason to think it's going to be even 10 times better than it is today 100 years from now. Kids, buy.
David Gardner: I agree. Well said. I think I know where you're going with this one, but maybe just a few sentences as to why John, if they were a stock, buy, sell, or hold, labor unions.
John Mackey: I guess I would hold. Labor unions have been in decline for a while. They're actually getting a little bit of a pickup. I see labor unions as a competitor of corporations. If you don't treat your workers well, then they can always unionize. That's an option. You're competing with them in a way. Competition is good. If you have a competitor trying to steal the hearts and minds of your workers, well, then you're going to work harder to make sure they don't. They've served a very useful purpose historically, because there was, if you go back and look at the labor conditions in the 19th century, labor unions are necessary. I don't think there's necessary today, but in some cases, they are. Yeah, I'm going say hold.
David Gardner: It's Rule Breaker Investing. How could I not close with this one, John Mackey, if it were a stock, kind of is, but it's not, individual stock picking, buy, sell, or hold.
John Mackey: Buy, baby, buy.
David Gardner: You betcha. Why?
John Mackey: I'm going to say because it's fun, but if you're a member of the Motley Fool, and you've done what I've done, I've taken so many of their recommendations and bought them and held them for years and years and years. They don't all work out, but the ones that do work out, I sell the losers, basically, and I do tax harvesting every year, and then I take that money and reinvest it and then I just continue to see them. I actually have a little game going on between my Vanguard index funds and my Motley Fool portfolio, and the Motley Fool portfolio is ahead. They're winning the game. [laughs] They're beating the index funds. There you have it.
David Gardner: Well, thank you. You had a very special father, and so did Tom and I. Those dads got us on the path to understanding business and investing, and have given us, as was the case for you, advice throughout our lives. Well, John Mackey, thank you so much. The whole story is the book. What a delight to feature you in this year's authors in August. John, I don't know if you have another book in you. You probably do, but maybe not another life story, but I look forward to whatever you're writing or reading next. I always love that.
John Mackey: If I'll have any other book, it'll be on Love Life. Hopefully, they'll be a good enough story to write someday.
David Gardner: Well, John, thank you so much. Have a great week. Fool on.
John Mackey: Thanks, David. You too. I'll talk to you soon.
John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. David Gardner has positions in Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, PayPal, Starbucks, Tesla, and Walmart. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Best Buy, Chipotle Mexican Grill, PayPal, Starbucks, Tesla, and Walmart. The Motley Fool recommends General Motors and recommends the following options: long January 2025 $25 calls on General Motors, short September 2024 $52 puts on Chipotle Mexican Grill, and short September 2024 $62.50 calls on PayPal. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
