You Might Also Like: On Purpose with Jay Shetty

**Jay Shetty** (0:00)
Was there ever a time when you believed that Whole Foods was going to fail?

**John Mackey** (0:05)
There were times when it almost did fail, but there was never a time I actually believed it would fail.

**Jay Shetty** (0:09)
You said something beautiful about what it takes to keep people.

**John Mackey** (0:12)
That Whole Foods was like, wow, you've had so many people work in 20, 30, even 40 years here. How do you do that? You give people two things. Give them purpose. And secondly, they want to feel they're loved. So if you give people purpose and love, why would they ever want to leave?

**Jay Shetty** (0:28)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become healthier, happier, and more healed. I'm so grateful to have your ears and eyes for the next hour or so and I'm really looking forward to diving in with today's guest. Today's guest is John Mackey, an entrepreneur and co-founder and visionary of Whole Foods Market. In his 44 years of service as CEO, the natural and organic grocer grew from a single store in Austin, Texas to 540 stores in the US, UK, and Canada with annual sales exceeding $22 billion.
John co-founded the Conscious Capitalism Movement and co-authored New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling book entitled Conscious Capitalism, Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, and then the follow-up Conscious Leadership, Elevating Humanity Through Business.
John is also the co-author of The Whole Foods Diet, The Lifesaving Plan for Health and Longevity, and The Whole Foods Cookbook. And today we're talking about his latest book, which is called The Whole Story, Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. It's available right now. We're going to put the link in the comments. I'd love for you to order this while you're listening along. I promise you it won't disappoint. Please welcome to On Purpose, John Mackey. John, it's great to have you here. Thank you so much.

**John Mackey** (1:52)
Thanks for having me, Anjay.

**Jay Shetty** (1:53)
Yeah, really grateful to have you here. And I was saying to you just now before we started that I actually received conscious capitalism as such a pivotal moment in my life. I just finished three years of living as a monk.
And I would honestly say that I'd up until that point thought that consciousness or capitalism were two separate things and that they were two separate pursuits. My monk life definitely helped me learn how they were integrated. Then when I was integrating back into the real world, so to speak, for me to wrap my head around rewiring my relationship with consciousness and capitalism, your book and your movement really helped craft some of the initial thoughts. I want to thank you for coming into my life at a very pivotal and important moment for me.

**John Mackey** (2:42)
Thank you. I mean, you're an author, so you put your books out into the world, and you don't always know if it's helping anybody or if it's having an impact, unless you hear back from people. So, of course, that makes me feel really good. Thanks for sharing that.

**Jay Shetty** (2:56)
Of course. John, there's so much to talk about today, especially about your new book, The Whole Story, and I wanted to start off actually just by asking you, was there ever a time when you believed that Whole Foods was going to fail?

**John Mackey** (3:11)
I don't think there's ever a time I believed it was going to fail. There were times when it almost did fail, but there was never a time I actually believed it would fail. I'm a follower of Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, and I feel like every one of us is called a hero's journey, but for a variety of reasons, most people don't answer that call, usually fear. I just answered that call.
When I was studying existentialism and philosophy and university in my very late teens and early 20s, I got really clear about death. We're going to die. Nobody gets out of here alive. And it's a lot shorter than people realize the time that we have. So what do you want to do with it? I felt like this is what my heart and my soul called me to do. I talk about it in the book quite a bit. And so when you're on the hero's journey, you have a lot of near failures, you have setbacks, you do get knocked down. But also amazing things happen. All these synchronicities occur. You seem to meet the right person at the right time, the right mentor shows up.
Miracles seem to occur when you're on your path. And it's just sort of this grand adventure. And yes, I mean, we did have, we had a flood in our, in our first year at Whole Foods Market where we had eight feet of water. And I didn't know it was a, we'll call it a near death experience. But actually, it was turned out in retrospect to have been a great thing. It taught us a lot. It taught me about stakeholders and how we're all interconnected and how there are people that love you.