John Mackey, Whole Foods Market

**John Mackey** (0:02)
Well, one of your themes that comes out in listening to a lot of your is, you admire entrepreneurs and you find one of the common threads for the successful entrepreneurs be those who are basically fanatics. They just are into their businesses. I just listened to Michael Dell. I mean, Michael, you know, it's like he says, and even started off the episode by quoting him. He says, well, how much time did you work? And he said, all the time, all of the time.
And that's the theme for oftentimes for entrepreneurs that they are so, it's not like they're even thinking about working. Michael doesn't make a distinction, I don't think, between work and play. Neither do I. Because when you're really enjoying it, is it work? I mean, it's you're doing what you want to do, and it's playful. So it takes a lot of time, but you're not thinking about it because you're loving every minute of it, you're enjoying it. That comes through with the Todd Graves one as well. You know, I mean, he just loved his business so much. And so all these entrepreneurs, they're 100 percent in, and that's where their time goes. They're not, you asked Michael if he was kind of like a Renaissance man, or if he was doing a lot of different things, and it's like, no, no, not really. I think that's also true for most entrepreneurs. They're pretty focused on a few things, and mostly they're focused on their business.

**David Senra** (1:17)
Yeah, to the conversation we're just having before we started recording, which is, you know, I'm essentially seeking your counsel, because I think I'm just like these kind of people. Like you wouldn't spend 10 years making this podcast, reading 400 of these books. Your book is excellent, by the way, which we'll talk a lot about today. I wasn't expecting to start here. If you didn't think that you were similar, or there was something about them that was attractive, and I feel like essentially my entire life is my work. Now, I think one thing that we share together, and we spent several hours together too, is very obvious in your book, but also with you. You viewed yourself, I don't know if you use this word, but to me, you're definitely a missionary. And one of the things I want to talk to you about, I talked to a lot of founders about this. So it's a lot of co-founder conflict. And it's very obvious that, especially when you're a missionary, you weren't like, oh, I just want to start one grocery store so people eat healthier and better food. You're like, we're going to change the way that the country eats. And that was a very distinct philosophical mismatch from some of your early co-founders. Can you talk a little bit about that?

**John Mackey** (2:20)
I mean, the first one, we started it up, it was kind of like, I thought it would be fun. We weren't trying to change the way America eats. We just wanted to open up a small, natural food store in a safer way. And actually, the good part of the book is dedicated to the early days because I think many entrepreneurs, they remember the early startup part of the business very well. And then they remember the last few years. And then there's the period in between. They don't think about one of the good things about writing a memoir is like I got to rethink it all, relive it all.
And my original founders, co-founders, particularly one, Mark, he just wanted to make a lot of money. And the very first store, the very first Whole Foods Market is very profitable. And even though the flood knocked it back, we got back on our feet and it was just very profitable. And he said, we don't really need to do anything else. We've got it made. Let's just not screw it up. And it's like, well, I want to do just one store. I want to open up more stores. And he went along with that, but those new stores started slow, had to grow into it. And so there even came a time where we were losing money again. And he was very angry about it. He says, you've blown it. And I said, no, these stores are going to be fine. They're going to grow. We wait and see. But he didn't have the patience to do that. It's like you plant a seed, you can't be digging or you got to let it grow. You got to give it time to seed to germinate and turn into something. So you have to be patient. It's sort of like investing and you have to let it compound over many years. Well, you have to let a business compound over many years as well. So the missionary part was as we began to grow, I began to realize nobody's really doing quite what Whole Foods is doing. Nobody quite has the vision that we have, that I had to be a national company, to maybe change our agricultural system, to maybe be able to help people to eat healthier. I could see what was happening simultaneously. With Whole Foods growth, America was getting sicker and sicker. That's the paradox. It almost tracks perfectly. Where we see, I mean, David, 74 percent of Americans are overweight and 43 percent are obese. That has not peaked. It's still going up. And it's, you can see it now with Make America Healthy again, that people are beginning to respond to the fact that we are literally killing ourselves through what we're eating.