hey everyone and welcome to Chef AJ live I'm your host Chef AJ and this is where I introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that I think you should know about well my guest today needs no introduction but in case you're not familiar he was the co-founder of Whole Foods Market and for over 40 years the CEO and he's recently written a brand new book called the whole story and we're going to talk about that today please welcome to the show John Macky every time you have a book you come on the show this is your third time that's the way you promote books these days well I was saying I was saying that like meaning the only time I can get you on is when you write a book but you know you've written two wonderful books so why did you write this book and who is it for oh I I this is technically my fifth book uh why did I write the book yeah so that's actually a simple question but a a complex answer so bear with me um first I I wrote it for all the Whole Foods Market team members and when I was researching team members at our company there's about 120,000 current team members at Whole Foods but in our history over a million people work for the company so that's a lot of people and this is our story and most of the people that go to work for Whole Foods now of course I just see it as this big Corporation and that's not the way it was for most of our history for most of our history we were small we were startup we were one store we struggled we almost failed we went to two stores that was difficult and so this this is kind of the story so I dedicated the book to all Whole Foods Market team members present I mean past present and future and secondly this is kind of like my final gift to Whole Foods I retired just under two years ago and um yeah this kind of helps me complete I've now got the story out there I've done all I can so I can I can bring closure to to that relationship in any kind of meaningful way and third um you know I almost advise everybody to write a memoir because you kind of understand your life better when you look backwards on it retrospectively in a systematic way I I basically kind of got to relive about 50 years of my life and but one thing goes by a lot faster than you realize and looking backwards I can remember those times like they were maybe not last week but just a few years ago not not 30 or 40 years ago and then the final reason is that this is a book that it reads like a novel it's a book that will inspire entrepreneurs it'll Inspire anybody that's creative I think and uh because that is kind of the ethos of the book and and I wanted that book to be something that a young entrepreneur could read and and uh get excited so those are the reasons well I apologize for not knowing you wrote five books because I only read three of them and that's what I interviewed you on but you're right about how it reads like a novel because I was thinking this actually could be a movie and I was trying to wonder who who would play you you know of course I I think Ryan Gosling or Matthew mccon should pay me I love both of them so much you know one of the things I gleaned from the book is it seems like you have always always March to the beat of Your Own Drum and you really don't like being told what to do yeah both of those are true I really do from a very early age or at least you know when I got to be about 19 or 20 I just started to follow my own my own heart my own guidance that and I that's been my life path doing that and it's been pretty good I I I think everybody's called to a hero's journey and I answered the call for myself and and uh and and so and it was going my own way and problems taking direction from others is that was that the second part of that question well yeah it seems like I if I remember correctly you're a Leo and I I you don't seem to like to be told what to do or like I really don't like being told what to do I've always had kind of a Go My Own Way rebellious kind of spirit the joke I make is that I have so much Pro problems with authority I can't even have a personal trainer because I don't want to do what they tell me too that's funny that's funny I also learned you seem to have a lot of nicknames maoan wacky Macky shrider yeah well if you live long enough and you have enough friends you get you'll get don't you have some don't you have some nicknames I don't think so maybe I don't have enough friends do you have Terms of Endearment like my wife calls me you know she just calls me calls me John Mackey she never just says John or she just calls me John Mackey you know hello John Mackey what you today John Macky so and but the Strider is my trail name from hiking from hiking the Appalachian Trail and Hiking ever since and then Terms of Endearment wacky Macky was not a term of endearment one of my co-founders gave me that one because he thought I was Nets but Maan yeah that was a term of endearment yeah you know the book started out with you hitchhiking in Austin do you think today you would attempt hitchhiking oh well I wouldn't need to I know but I mean it's just it just seemed like you know I can't even imagine you as a long-haired hippie do you have pictures from that time oh yeah there's P there's pictures in the book right but but but but for people that yeah I just think they're they're um I don't carry him around with me so I can't show you on the camera okay I'll see if I can get one to show in the book I thought that was interesting that you were thinking of becoming a bartender because I actually thought about that when I was in college you've got some pictures early in the book that uh uh very early in the book very the very beginning what I have long hair and I I definitely look like a hippie you can see those let's show those well the top ones when I was seven years old so yeah yeah but other ones yeah I definitely identified as being kind of a hippie and definitely I was interested in all things counterculture and that's been that's an important theme through the book is um you know I got into New Age spirituality and and a lot a lot I guess in the co-op movement so the counterculture and the late 60s and early 70s I I went into that orbit well you even talk about taking LSD you must be open to experience um I I think yeah I'm open to experience but I also for me I I'm really opening to learning and growing that's that's a common theme in the book I always keep learning I keep reading I keep trying new things I'm always exploring um and trying new things making mistakes I like Adventures so um that's why the book's subtitled adventures in love life and capitalism yeah um but yes I mean I I did LST the first time when I was about 19 or 20 and it kind of knocked me off the path that my parents had programmed into me from a young age they wanted me to be a professional they wanted me to go to school and and become a doctor my mother really wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or you know dentist or something that was you know respectable uh and uh that just knocked me off the path I became after that first time I did LSD I became a Seeker I was seeking deeper meaning in life I I knew there was deeper meaning I experienced it the book starts out and the prologue of the book is on actually took a very I just turned 22 just a week or two before and I took a dose that I didn't know I know how big it was it was huge dose biggest dose I've ever taken to my life and um that one uh I experienced an ego death where ego death the sense of eye or separation from everything else disappeared there was no there was no there was no John there was no body there was no separation there was only there was only the Bliss of being in the one self the one being and that changed my life as well because I let go of a lot of fear after that I realized death was not something I needed to be afraid of that all life was an adventured and we could kind of we could make it the way we wanted it to be we could create our own adventure and that led me to move into this vegetarian food co-op when I was 23 yeah Prana house right Prana house and I was not a vegetarian when I moved in there but I had my food Awakening there because everybody else was vegetarian and I became a vegetarian and I became a food buyer for the co-op I learned how to cook and I was very into natural organic foods I'd never really thought about it before then I had thought of food as something that like well you should eat food that tastes good that you like and it's just fuel anyway it's like a car going to a gas station you fill up and you got to get enough gas to get you down the road the idea that that we were living beings and food was this essential element that nourished the trillions and ions and trillions of cells that make us up and it could either be nurturing and nourishing or it could be poisonous and harmful that never occurred to me until that until I got into that Co-op and then I went to work for a small natural food store and I and I liked retailing and then I came back to the co-op and talked to my girlfriend Renee and told her I wanted to start a natural food store what what did she think something we could do together and she got excited and said yeah let's do it macom man and um so we did and we launched our first store called saferway and a ve it was a vegetarian store in an old Victorian house and we had a store on the first floor we had a veget vegetarian Cafe on the second floor and we had an office that also Renee and I lived on in the third floor we moved out of the co-op and moved into the into the store did Safeway ever bck at you naming your store safer way I mean it was it was kind of a joke and we we kind of hoped they would we thought that'd be great public right they if they were picking on this little tiny store telling us that we had to change our name we thought wow that'll really get our name out there but that we were we were just such a small little Gat Safeway I'm sure Safeway never noticed this you said that you had had a store and a cafe and I remember you saying in the book that it was actually harder to run the cafe than it was the store why was that still true today I think well I think they're um I think Running a Restaurant is very difficult uh for a lot of reasons it's even more difficult today because labor costs are far higher than they used to be places like California you can't use tips to offset it um it's even harder in California um a lot of a lot of benefits they've mandated more and more benefits which really hits a restaurant business hard U and um people turn over a lot so you have to train people but they may not stick around that long and uh it's it's just a labor intensive business and you're working with people that don't generally work for you for very long and that makes it very difficult to do it and execute it at a high level consistently does PR house still exist and are there any places like that today PR house did out it did exist for maybe 10 years after Renee and I moved down and then it they they caught a fire in the kitchen and they couldn't get it to put out in time and it burned down so um then that land was more valuable they didn't build back a house back there it became like uh near the university sector of Tech University of Texas so it became a a multi-level housing unit for students was it hard initially to to change to a vegetarian diet you know until that time the answer was it wasn't I thought it might be but it it didn't prove to be difficult at all I had I was very picky eater when I was younger I didn't really eat any fruits I didn't eat vegetables at all and I only ate you know some fruits I had a very narrow pettey picky diet and so PR house was really good for me because I began to try all these new foods like there were all these interesting people there and I wanted to I wanted to hang with them so I I wanted to eat the same Foods they were eating so my pallet decided these Foods tasted really good so my I now I like every kind of plant-based food you know if it's if it's a healthy whole plant-based food I like it but so I overcame pronal helped me overcome my narrow eating philosophy that when I grew up with I know you eventually became a vegan and you've been one for a long time and really for ethical reasons which I I truly appreciate was making the switch to veganism any harder I think that was easier because I had been a vegetarian for a long time and and U all it meant was was getting rid of dairy and eggs right and well I've been a vegan now for 21 years and back when I made that transition I mean there really wasn't there was a little bit aseptic soy milk was coming on the market but there were there were no cheeses there were no alternative Butters at that time so that was a little bit difficult you know no but today it's it's so much easier because you delicious plant-based cheeses you have all kinds of different alternative milks and uh the eggs aren't were never really w a problem for me so I didn't really eat too many of them anyway so um that wasn't too difficult you mentioned in the book a pediatrician named Don Schaefer who did standup I I you know I don't know if you know this I perform standup and it's one of my first really you still do I do it I don't do it like on Johnny Carson or anything anymore but I you you live in where do you live I live in Roseville now Northern California by by the by the Roseville Whole Foods actually so in the Sacramento area Sacramento area you go you do go to clubs and do perform now and then I or do it on Zoom it's just it's just something that I've always you know dabbl you don't you need a live audience to really flourish oh it's it's much better with a live audience than Zoom but you know during the pandemic what could we do for those first two years everything was on Zoom so what's nice about Zoom is if they Heckle you you can mute him which whereas in a club you know you know you can't does does he still do standup he's still a comedian because he can barely ever getting to talk serious but I don't think he does stand up any longer I thought that was so cool a pediatrician that was a a standup comedian you said you started out with $45,000 10 of them coming from your dad yeah yeah he loaned me to $1,000 at 5% interest nice and he he got paid back didn't he he got paid back every penny of Interest yeah yeah it just seems like your dad was more proud of you than your mom and I what I gleaned from the book and that you know she really like for her the biggest deal was you going to college yeah she was um she really believed in education and so I mean I got a great education I have 120 hours of electives and a very high grade point average but um I didn't really care about getting a degree I just wanted to learn I was a sponge I I just read and read and read whatever I was curious and audited classes I just took control of my own education but I didn't finish I was studying really philosophy at the University of Texas and religion at Trinity I was very interested after I did that first LSD trip I was very interested in trying to figure out the meaning of life and um if there was any purpose to life and so my parents couldn't relate to that they just thought that was Beyond you know was I had to be I had to grow up I was still acting like a kid I need to grow up take responsibility but once I got started up Whole Foods my dad and I got really close again because my dad had been an accounting professor for a long time at Rice University in Houston then he went into business himself and became very successful at it became a CEO of a public publicly traded Hospital management company named lifemart and so he became my mentor because I didn't have the business background so he and I got very very close but my mom was she died too young she was only 64 when she died and that was back in 1987 Whole Foods only had about in 1987 we had about five stores I think and so all in Texas and she couldn't she just for her I was downwardly mobile I was like John you're a grosser you could be a doctor okay why are you wasting your life on being a grocer when you could be a doctor doctor and it's and she never got it so I'm going to build this great business mom and and um for her grer was you know just not very intelligent person that um couldn't hack it in a more serious professional job so she saw me as downwardly mobile and of course my dad he actually fed my entrepreneurial dreams and nurtured them so I was much closer to my father um really throughout my life but and my mother really not she died too young to see whole Foods uh really finally you know hit the big time so to speak yeah I I don't think of you as a grocer I mean you maybe are but I think of you more as like a Serial entrepreneur well but I was a grocer for years I mean I worked in the stores and had my apron on and checked people out at the cash registers and cut cheeses and did everything that was necessary for us to do and that was probably true for about the first you know five seven eight years for sure well you know it's interesting because when people see somebody successful like you they just assume that they've always had money and was always successful but what I read in the book is at one point you took a salary of only $200 a month and then when it was increased to 800 you were like ecstatic yeah well Renee and I were living in the store and so we could we didn't we didn't own a car we had little mopeds and we were young we didn't you know we didn't have any insurance and we didn't have our expenses were low so we didn't need very much money when you're I guess at the start last store got open I just turned 25 Rene was 21 so we didn't need very much and we were living at the co-op Community when we first started out and we moved into the store we didn't pay rent at the store so um we didn't but when I got 800 wow I could I could I bought I could I could I bought a car after I got $800 a mon I was I was riding High that's incredible how did you decide on on the name Whole Foods it was safer way and then when we decided to relocate it and expand it to a much bigger location and we stopped we making that decision we also decided we weren't going to be vegetarian store saferway uh was just barely profitable and we decided to relocate it so we needed to we kind of needed to meet the market where we found it and we also merged with a smaller natural food store called Clarksville and we came up with the name Whole Foods because we didn't want to be named Clarksville and they didn't want to be named saferway so we had to find a neutral name that spoke for both stores and we started out with backwards we first got the word market I thought man a market is such a cool word and that's we're we're what kind of Market are we well we're a we're a health food market that seems kind of generic we're Organic Market but everything we sell is nonorganic and we're Natural Food Market but I don't that that's all these stores are natural food markets and and so a magazine was sitting there that had just been published called The Whole Foods magazine it was a trade magazine and Renee I think picked it up and said why don't we just be Whole Foods Market and so we had our name well it it's a great name and one of the things I learned from your book and I remember after I read that part I actually called a friend and mentor of mine Dr Alan goldhammer because it made me realize what so many people that are vegan abolitionist are doing wrong you had said that you would never be a viable business if you refused to sell animal products and that Mrs gues which is a store you I used to live like right across the street from Mrs gues at cold water and and Riverside it was and then I saw it become Whole Foods and you said the reason to include meat and this made so much sense is it so that everyone can do their shopping in one place because a lot of people are not of all family members are not all vegan and so if the mother has to buy meat then she has to go somewhere else because you said my high ideals inevitably restricted our market and I think that's a mistake that a lot of people make people that are not business people don't understand this because they've got their they've got their they've got their worldview they have their e eth ethics and they're they're transferring those ethics to the rest of the world I mean here's some unfortunately these are the these are the the facts and I I don't say these facts with great joy but only 2% of the American population is is vegetarian and only only half of 1% is vegan and uh that's just a very very very narrow Market vegan restaurants are failing all around the United States because more and more restaurants when you have the discussion where do you want to go eat it has to be someplace ideally where people a vegan can get some vegan plant-based food we always prefer I always go to vegan restaurants whenever I can but sometimes if I'm going out with friends they don't want to go to a vegan restaurant and so we have to compromise and that'll compromise in a place that has both right so that's the ultimate challenge that a business faces if you are strictly trying to cater to vegans only it's a very very very narrow Niche and that's one reason vegan restaurants are struggling L really all across America I think my friend Steve Bellamy and and La told me they've been like 30 or 4 vegan restaurants that have closed in LA in the last year so it's it's it's a sad it's a very sad tale to me anyway um yeah you have to kind of Meet the market where you find it and a business person realizes this because you have customers you have to please if they're telling you well I'd come to your store but you know you don't have the foods that I want to eat so I'm going to go someplace else um if enough people say that then you you bit you fail you go you go bankrupt well you know when you think about it there are regular restaurants that do include vegan options which people that are vegan appreciate but it doesn't go the other way vegan restaurants don't include non-vegan options and I think one restaurant start wouldn't be vegan restaurants if they did right right well exactly but I think one traditionally vegan restaurants started to do that I'm going to see if I can figure out what the name was I forgot but then the the vegan audience was really upset and boycotting them they were doing it to stay in business and so the vegan audience was like okay then we're not going to support you at all at all you know yeah was that Sage I think it was yeah sage in La yeah yeah so so I just thought it was really really interesting and the point you made was was because you yourself are an ethical vegan but you still I knew a guy and I know a guy who actually he is an exterminator you know of of pests I don't like that word of bugs and he's a vegan so um you know everybody has to make these decisions for themselves in terms of of it's very easy to be a saint on a Mountaintop it's a lot harder to be a saint in the day-to-day bustle hustle and bustle of the way the world works and yeah you know I can I can limit what I put in my own stomach but to the degree that I try to force people to be the same way as me to that degree um you're probably not going to persuade that many people I mean I I I can I can make the most powerful arguments to be a vegan that are absolutely unanswerable I've never had anybody answer the my arguments into any with any real skill but they still don't change their minds they don't change their diets they don't they don't follow the logic because people just want to do what they want to do and believe what they want to believe and confirmation bias is just rampant so it's a re it's a it's it took me a long time to realize that most people don't actually change their minds no matter what the facts and evidence are particularly when it comes to diet people just because there's so much emotional attachment to way people eat I wonder if it's a part emotional attachment but I also wonder if it's part food addiction too no doubt no doubt food addiction is and people aren conscious of it but most people have S almost everyone I know has food addictions absolutely well I think you would weren't you able to change Milton Freeman's mind and didn't he become vegan Because of You ostensibly do you want tell that story I love that story you know the younger audience may not know who Milton Friedman is but well he's probably the greatest Economist of the 20th century and he was a Nobel Prize winner in 1976 I think it was either 74 76 I think Milton got that for economics and so um mutual friends introduced us back in 2004 and so uh we were eating we were going to eat at the famous Greens restaurant Milton at that time had retired and he was 92 years old he lived with his wife who was also 92 Rose they were living on Russian Hill in actually in a condo that they were able to buy from Milton fredman's uh Nobel Prize uh winnings so we pick him up and we first go up and they offer us a drink and he shows us his Nobel Prize and then he asked me the question he said so John why why are you a vegan why why did you decide to become a vegan and I thought about I said tell you what Milton I'm going to make an argument to you and if you if you can answer that argument I'll stop being a vegan but if you can't answer it I know you're a man of great intellectual integrity and if you can't answer it I expect you to change the way you eat so he thinks about that before he answers for you know 15 20 seconds he said yeah I'm Not Afraid let's do it okay so I made this four I said Milton there's four parts to this argument the first part is if you eat animals there's no getting around the fact that the animal has to die you're killing the animal or somebody's doing it for you there's no escaping that fact and if that's an animal that was raised in the United States there's a 99% chance or higher that that animal was raised in a factory farm and the most horrible conditions that are just repulsive and people don't even want to know about it because it's so awful um and so he gets that point so second point you know you don't need to eat animals to be healthy in fact increasingly scientific evidence is that a whole food plant-based diet is quite possibly the healthiest diet you can eat it's improving to reverse heart disease prevent heart disease um it tends to keep us trim we don't gain weight um and our immune systems are strong it's a very very healthy diet Point number three um so why do people eat eat eat meat well it evolved over time I mean our our digestive tract and our our teeth structure and our you know our nearest primate relatives the gorillas are they're vegan and the chimpanzees are 95 to 98% vegan and uh that's who we're closest to and that's what we've evolved from so that's a a plant based diet is very common for humans probably we started eating meat because we just didn't have enough calories and we get calories where we could get them from so if Hunters could get a get an animal then that would be a large source of calories and and protein and and and a little more fat than they might get in their ordinary diets as well and and then we acquired a taste for it then we learned to domesticate animals so then we could have a food supply we could have calories year round because what would you do in the winter when there were no crops growing people did not were not able to store food that well so here you you stored the food by just keeping it alive and slaughtering it at your convenience and that could keep you from starving to death for your family so there was a necessity for eating meat at some time and we acquired a taste for it but we now live in a society today where that's not required we don't need to eat animals we have plenty of calories we're not going to starve if we don't eat animals and so it's just a cultural thing our parents initiated us to it and our friends do it and it just seems perfectly natural and normal it's just part of the culture so Milton over a lifetime if you eat animals you're going to be the responsible directly or indirectly for the death of literally thousands upon thousands of animals 99% of them will have lived horrible Lives full of suffering and pain I can't justify doing that so I chose to be an ethical vegan how do you justify it okay so that's how that the argument ends and so he starts thinking about it he thinks about it really hard for about a minute then he looks at his watch and he says look we got to go we're gonna be late for our reservation at the restaurant and so I was driving and was real quiet in the car and he was sort of just giving directions otherwise there was no conversation we get to the restaurant and uh he hasn't really answered the question yet and so we're now at we're now at the green we're at greens we have our menus and every looking through menu and then mil Milton Freedman then stands up and he he he takes his menu and he tosses it on the table and he looks at his wife and he says Rose I cannot answer John's argument it's completely rational and logical from this point forward I'm going to become a vegan and then his wife Rose she stands up his wife of over 70 years at that point stands up and she throws her menu down on the table and she says oh Milton don't be ridiculous we're 92 years old it's too late for us to become vegans that's so I don't know whether his intellectual Integrity went out over his wife of 70 years because I I I don't know I didn't see him again he died just a couple years later from a fall in a bathtub so uh but still makes a great story it is a great story oh wow well you won the argument that's good you know you had mentioned that you are I've made that argument to hundreds of people yeah and one person has ever answered that argument and I've never seen anybody change their diet because of it yeah you were dubbed the Cadillac of natural food stores Whole Foods was and you had mentioned that you're a lover of Beauty in many forms but you're not so good at creating it so the look of the store was very important to you wasn't it right it was and initially Renee uh one of my co-founders was really really artistic and with very little money she made our stores beautiful and that that became a whole food sort of that that got inserted in our DNA from that point going going forward yeah you told I think beauty is very important I think we're very influenced by this our surroundings and Beauty I call it vitamin B vitamin Beauty it's vitamin for our souls our souls rejoice in Beauty it brings joy and it I think it enhances our health and our Vitality so being in beautiful places I hear all the time I for years and even to this day I still hear people say I like going to your stores why I don't know they just feel good okay part of that feeling good is that it's a beautiful environment and the second thing is we have a lot of caring team members and they and they create sort of a a collective field you might say that's uh that's a field that feels good people like me in our stores there's not a lot of anger and you know jangle jangl this no I agree and that's one thing I love about Whole Foods is like if you can't find something they not only it's not only easy to find somebody to answer but they actually walk you to the item yeah which I appreciate and you're right you know I mean I still shop at plate like for instance I I don't buy bird seed at Whole Foods I buy that you don't need to confess your shopping sins no no no it's not a sin it's just I'm saying how beautiful Whole Foods is because I go to wico for bird seed because I don't even know if Whole Food sells bird seed and it's just a different feel the the the environment feels different it looks different than Whole Foods it's like going into a warehouse versus oh I misunderstood I jumped to a conclusion many team many PE times people tell me well I like shopping in Whole Foods but I also go to Trader Joe's oh I I still go to Trader Joe's too because you don't sell cruciferous crunch so yeah but it is it is always a beautiful store and you can always get help there you told about an actress who ate trail mix from a bulk bin are you allowed to say who that is Dean Cannon nice that's something well you get a lot you got and you got a lot of celebrities at your store even even your earlier store you talked about ramas Alan Ginsburg who was smoking in your store Oprah Winfrey shopped at your Chicago stores oh yeah of course Whole Foods became um particularly when we were on our uh on our Ascent we had lots of celebrities that like to be photographed at whole series yeah that you talked about the hundred-year flood that happened in your first year how did you ever bounce back for that and did you have flood insurance yeah the funny thing was that first toll Food Market we opened it when we built it we knew it was actually in a 100-year flood zone and I remember talking to the owner of the building and I you said you know John this is the 100 year flood zone and I said well what does that mean exactly he says well it means about about once every hundred years you're probably going to have 8T of water in your store and I and and he said but you know the last time it happened was about 70 years ago before before I was born so um I thought you're saying uh only about once every hundred years we'll have a flood I guess I'll take that risk and he said yeah I thought you would but just to be on the safe side I'm going to put down a two foot slab we're going to build this a little bit higher so when if the waters come over the banks of sh Creek that they'll have to go really high before they get into the store so he did build the store up on a platform so to speak but that happened in the first year we were open nine months after we' opened Austin had a 100-year flood and then the worst flood they'd ever had in in their recorded history and we had eight feet of water in the store and that happened to be Renee was actually closing the store down that was on um Sunday The Day Before Memorial day Memorial Day flood and and she ended up swimming out of the store and and U we were wrecked we were ruined we were we were bankrupt and and I didn't have the word uh for it back then but the stakeholders saved us and by stakeholders I mean our customers and our employees and our suppliers and our investors and even the bank and the whole Community rallied to save us the the neighbors and customers came and helped us clean up the store and there was a benefit a band did for us and the community came out and donated through that to help us as well our team members worked for free while we were trying to get back on our feed get them back but we didn't get open again we wouldn't have been able to pay them uh our suppliers gave us new inventory um on credit even though we still owed them for inventory that we hadn't paid him for inventory they' already given us they gave us initial additional inventory investors put in a little more capital and the bank this was the most amazing part of the story is this local bank City National Bank Loan us $100,000 on my signature which even at the time I thought was really weird because I was my signature was worthless right and I found out just only about 10 years ago I was at a conference and this guy comes up to me and he says I recognize you you're John Macky you're whole F guy and I said yeah and he says well you don't remember me but remember back sitting National Bank I used to work for that bank back in the day that a terrible thing that flood happened wasn't it and I said yeah but B did your bank really came through they loan us $100,000 and I I said I never really understood why they did that because I was taking a big risk on just my signature he he starts laughing he says oh you don't know what happened and I said no no what happened he said John the bank turned that loan down I said no they didn't we got the loan and he said the bank turned the loan down Mar Monroe our loan officer personally guaranteed the loan and I said well why the hell would he do that that's nuts and and he said he just said he really believed in Whole Foods and he really believed in you and he knew we'd pay him back no matter how long it took and so he did it so I wanna I wanna do you know his contact information I just wanna I want to thank him I just didn't ever know that and he said you're too late he died about five years ago so the stakeholder saved Whole Foods Market I've kind of been feeling like I've been paying them back ever since you seem to be a risk taker though am I right I mean you took psychedelics at 19 because you you knew you were going to a store where they warned you about that I don't know I mean risk a risk taker is in somebody else's opinion right I mean it's I I take more risk than some people are comfortable with and I don't take other some risks at other people I've I'm not going to take a risk of jumping out of an airplane for example and I'm not going to jump off a mountain in a squirrel suit um there's lots of risk I don't take so it's just you know what one person's risk is another person's uh stimulating challenge yeah but didn't you say that the reason one of the reasons you fired your father was because he was less risk adverse than you he was the reason I fired my father that's a complex story so he he was my mentor and I for about the first 16 years of the business my dad had a great background in business and I had zero so I I every major decision I ran by him and got his advice all the time and after company went public my dad he was already wealthy but he became much wealthier after Whole Food went public and he was in a different stage in his life and I just saw get increasingly conservative and we begin to argue about these Acquisitions I wanted to make with these other companies that were like Whole Foods and I wanted to buy them and grow that way and he was fighting me about it and we were having these really irrational arguments and I didn't understand why he was so upset all the time so after in two 1994 I asked him to retire from the board I turned 40 and I asked him to retire from the board and and um um that I'd still use him as a mentor but I couldn't have him on the board and because we were fighting too much and we're public company our words are going to leak out in the media and he said we can change that I said I don't think we can we we you and I argue we've we've grown up debating each other and um we both want to win and and you're you know I just you're getting increasingly conservative and and I just think it's better if you leave and or you're going to wreck our it's going to ruin our our French so my dad did leave and but a year later he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's so if you study the early on the early symptoms of of of Alzheimer before ever gets diagnosed is kind of Outburst a lot of irrationality lots of un a lot of anger for the don't seem to be good causes for it those are kind of early symptoms of it and so my dad had it when our relationship was starting to break down so it was good it's good that he left when he did yeah did did eventually like it was okay though it didn't harm the relationship long term no no no no in fact um a year after that happened he came to me and said we made the right decision de ision and I this all the Acquisitions had worked out wonderfully well the stock price 12 months later had doubled uh so uh he he he was even wealthier and I told him I wanted him to sell off some of his stock so he wouldn't feel this anxiety as I as I put the pedals in the metal and grew the company faster so he did that and then the half that he didn't sell was worth as much as he had in total a year later because we our stock kept going up one of the things I like about the way you ran the company you said you didn't care what people wore or their makeup when I go to Whole Foods one of the things I notice is the people seem happy working there it's not a drudgery like other employees at other stores often feel like you know one of the things that people ask me sometimes what I'm most proud of and I'm proud of a lot of things at whole feeds but one thing I'm particularly proud of is we were named by Fortune Magazine as one of the 100 best companies to work for in America for 20 cons years from the very beginning when they started rating companies to the very end when we sold to Amazon after we sold to Amazon we weren't really eligible we weren't independent any longer so uh I was really proud of that and I'm really proud we developed a culture that cares about team members and and you know we're not hopefully this was not perfect everybody wasn't always happy but it really was something we tried to do is team member happiness was a core value of the company and we took we we measured it and we we did did a lot of things to try to help people really enjoy their work and one of the thing I'll tell you a story so the thing that surprised Amazon the most after they bought us was that the longevity of our team members how long they'd work for the company we had so many people that had worked there 10 20 30 years and almost no one in Amazon worked there that long they were um they were the they were professional people that would work for Amazon and then they they had a that had that on their resume and then they move for the next opportunity they had a very professional culture and therefore the longevity was low Whole Foods had this much more caring culture and as a result people work for us a much much longer period of time and I'm I'm kind of proud of that did you think selling to Amazon was the best decision would you do that today you think so I people often rephrase that question in a different way they ask me um do you regret selling to Amazon the answer is I regret the circumstances that made that the best option for us if you're asking me would I rather have been independent yes but I didn't think we could stay independent we were being we had shareholder activist that um were trying to take over our company I met with a shareholder activist they' taken about a 9% stake in the company and they they wanted the company to be sold to the highest bidder and I met with them and I remember these these were kind of your archetypal greedy uh wealthy people and I met with these guys and they had this PowerPoint presentation that showed how terrible we were doing and and I they I asked to get a copy the presentation because I thought that presentation was wildly inaccurate but they said no no we're not we're gonna hold on to that we don't think you need a copy and I said well let's work together to try to make the company better no we don't want to work with you at all here's what we're going to do on we're going to take over your board and after you take over the board we're going to fire you and all your management team and then we're going to put the company up for sale to the highest bidder and there's not an effing thing you can do about it and then they walked out that was my my encounter with our our our shareholder activist so then we had to look at the alternatives for us these guys was a power struggle at that point we did hire lawyers and bankers to try to defend us and so we the first option would be to try to keep them from taking over our board and keep them from taking over the company so we could fight them we that was the first option second option we could find a friendly buyer that that would keep us intact somebody like Warren Buffett would be a great buyer because he buys companies and holds them long term and we approached him and and he he laughed about it made a joke he just said uh you know I own Dairy Queen my brand that Warren is a notorious for his sort of unhealthy eating habits uh and uh so that didn't work and then it was we could go private take it private mean we'd buy it out ourselves and take it private but to do that you you end up working with private Equity firms and you take on a massive amount of debt on your own balance sheet so we had to take 12 or 13 billion dollars of debt on our balance sheet and that meant we'd have to service the interest on that pay not only pay that back but service the interest on it and uh if if if there was an economic downturn like there was in 2008 or 2007 2008 like there was um we'd go bankrupt I just thought that was too big a risk to take so I kept asking this question what's the win-win-win solution for all of our stakeholders what's the best thing for our customers what's the best thing for our team members what's the best thing for our suppliers what's the best thing for our investors and what's the best thing for our community and um I woke up one morning and I had the answer it was what a about Amazon and uh I had met Jeff Bezos a year before I really liked him we got along well I'd always admired Amazon as a very entrepreneurial company that was changing the world in a lot of positive ways and uh yeah it's a longer story but my book tells the story in detail we made a connection with them we met with them we liked each other it was kind of we had kind of a love at first sight kind of thing and six weeks after that first meeting we had signed merger agreement and but it was the best solution at that time and if I had to go back and the circumstances were the same I'd make the same decision again and it was good for all of our stakeholders people don't know the good things Amazon did for Whole Foods let me just name some of them in the first two years we were able to drop our prices significantly four times we we couldn't easily do that as an independent company because if you selling something for a dollar and you start selling it for 90 cents your sales go down 10% your same store Sal go down your profits go down and if you've got shareholder activists telling you telling everybody how that that you're managing the company poorly that just proves it to them we needed to cut our prices Amazon let us do it they thought long term it cost them hundreds of millions of dollars but you know what I very very seldom hear now today the whole paycheck narrative just don't hear it it's not saying it's disappeared completely but it's not something people say right off their bat we've done a lot on that our so our our customers gained our team members gained uh Amazon within 30 days of the merger raised the wages of every uh every hourly person in the company took our minimum wage to $15 and everybody got bumped up from there that also cost them hundreds of millions of dollars um our suppliers gained we didn't have to drop any of our suppliers Amazon looked at our sales velocity with suppliers and they picked up a ton of our suppliers into Amazon.com or amazonfresh so was a good thing for our suppliers good thing for our investors they got 30% profit gain on that transaction and it was good for our the government they got lots more taxes and it was good for philanthropy because Amazon supported our nonprofits our foundations the whole planet Foundation the whole kids foundation so every one of our stakeholders won thank you for for explaining that you know one of the things that tickled me in the book because I used to be a Restaurant pastry chef in Los Angeles somebody tried to pass off a sarily Lee blueberry muffin is homemade okay how could they think that would fly this was like in like 1981 or 1982 and our first store didn't have a bakery and so we were buying local bakery products you got to see what the bakery world was like back in 1981 there's not now we have all these artiss and bakeries but if you go back to 1981 there was no there was no there were zero Artisan bakeries in Austin Texas they were just the ones that you know baked Wonder Bread and uh you know the white bread you can roll up into a little ball that's about a quarter inch thick that's all that's all that's the only kind of bread there was wasn't it wasn't anything else and I remember our second store we opened up our first Bakery and it was a German sourdough Bakery and it was a huge success because we were the only artisan bakery in Austin Texas in 1982 so Barbara claimed to be an artisan bakery but she was cheating she was uh she was just taking commercial stuff and tating it off as her own like Sarah Lee and so we have a good story in there and that also illustrates the fact that in the early days of the Natural Foods industry having really authentic Supply was a really questionable thing was it really organic produce they said it was was it certified no because there were no certifying agencies um so was it natural meat said it was but how did we know it was very difficult to authenticate things in the early days that is a funny story you said I never dreamed about getting rich but the feeling of financial success was intoxicating do you still feel that way I mean not exactly because it's I've been wealthy for a long time so I'm used to it but um I mean remember Renee and I were working for $200 and I remember when we got a pay increase due to $800 after the merger happened it was like wow I mean I bought a car a used car but I bought my first car and uh I just I could buy anything I could buy records I could buy whatever I wanted it was fantastic and i' I've been so poor up until that point and so um money is a relative thing we get we get used to a lifestyle at a certain level of pay and then what most people do as soon as their pay goes up they ratchet up their lifestyle accordingly so it's kind of this rat race where you are constantly wanting your pay to go up so that you can increase your lifestyle and uh I think it's a virtue there's a great story I like to tell and I'll tell this story here because it's such it's a such a great story because the the the two people in the story are famous so you've got Kurt vut and you got Joseph heler Joseph heler wrote Catch 22 and he and vut were close friends so they're at this party being put on this billionaire hedge fund guy that was making a ton of money it was very luxurious they're at his house and and so B uh Bonet comes up to heler and he needles him and he says Hey Joe you realize this guy host of our party here he makes more money in one day than you've made in all the books he sold in catch22 and all your other all your other novels combined what do you think about that and he says well he thinks about it for many says you know Kurt I got one thing he'll never have and Kurt say yeah what's that he says I have enough that's something knowing when you have enough is important in life because it can be intoxicating if money power and fame the things people crave and can become addicted to they do not satisfy our souls it's not to say these things are inherently inherently bad themselves or not but they can corrupt they can intoxicate they can seduce you and you'll never get enough of things that don't really fulfill you but you think they will so you chase after them so I guarantee you when you get to your deathbed you're not going to be thinking God I wish I'd been more famous I wish I'd made more money I wish I'd had more power you're not you're going to be thinking about your relationships you're be thinking about you wish you told your son that you loved him or you or you wish that your before your father died you'd made up with him You' be thinking about your relationships because Love's what's most important in life and anything that takes us away from that is ultimately harming us a lot more than is helping us is that why you call your new Venture love life yes uh there's a there's a much deeper story behind that but um that's a theme of my entire book um love life and I love is the is the answer love is what it has been my North Star my entire adult life it's the most important thing I've I've worked hard and on my spiritual path to become a more loving person I am more loving today than I was 10 years ago or 20 years ago and hopefully I'll be even more loving five years from now than I am today and yeah and loving life like AJ life is amazing look we have these we're we have these bodies and you know all these these tens of trillions of cells and we're we're in this life process we're part of it it's flowing through us it's amazing and we and to you should love life because for one thing it's it goes by pretty fast right tell me about it I don't know I just it's like I woke up and I'm 64 I don't I don't even remember how this happened it do that's the good thing about writing a me a memoir like this is you get to kind of relive relive it but but but it still it all went by really fast even when you're reliving it yeah yeah young people don't appreciate that when I was young I used to think there were two kinds of people in the world there were young people and there were old people I just happened to be one of the fortunate ones because I was a young person and I had my whole life in front of me seemed like I had forever but in fact when you get older and you look back you realize wow I I you know it went by so fast he reminds me of that play by Thon Wilder our town where Emily says does anybody really appreciate life when they live it every minute that's I want to talk about a couple of things in your book that cracked me up okay I wrote These down okay so you you talked about when you had to to sign a lease uh in Palo Alto and I guess it maybe it was a 20-year lease and you said in 20 years I'll be incredibly Old 54 exactly I remember that that's how I felt at the time we never signed a a lease longer than 10 years and this guy was insisting on a 20-year lease and I thought that's that's like forever man 20 years I mean I can't even imagine I you know will I even be here in 20 years I'll be 54 on that's like so old and um it's weird though right because I'm 70 now about to be 71 so um yeah that 20-year lease expired we they had that guy still owns the property chop Keenan and uh we had 20year lease and two fiveyear options but those have expired so that's 30 years past that would have been signed that lease back in 19888 I think we signed it in 88 so would expired the leases by 2018 we'd have been completely done with it but we're still there so we must have gotten another another lease well it seems like every age that's older than you seems old until you're actually that age I I find people um you know so I will also say like um well I I'll avoid that one just because somebody might object I'll just censor myself but um it's true my my range of uh uh I used to think people what have you notice this one I I I find this all the time people that I think are a lot older than me I find out are actually like you know five or 10 or 15 years younger than me do you have that does that happen to you sometimes but I'm friends with a doctor now that's 101 years old like he lives by me so it's it's fun to hang out with people that are like 40 years older than you is he still in pretty good health he's in amazing health heal he drives himself he flies all over the world he's an Adventist doctor you should you should if you do interviews I think I've probably heard of this guy what's his name Dr John shenberg no actually I haven't heard of him he's he's he's a huge YouTuber now I mean he doesn't do his own interviews but he's got millions of views because he's just out a 100 he's still working all over the world that's fantastic yeah you can email me his uh one of his YouTube videos absolutely okay you know I gotta tell you my favorite part of the book I think is a great strategy for all women that are dating or men that are dating because so many people I know really want to be with somebody that has their values at least where eating is concerned and you said that on your first date you asked Debbie who is now your wife to see the inside of her refrigerator yeah uh I mean the story there is is that this was a I'd broken up from a long-term relationship for about six years and I was ready to start seeing women again and this is you know pre no dating apps no internet no smartphones this is back in 1990 and uh how do you meet how do you meet interesting interesting women and I didn't want to go to bars so it's like how do I meet them so I I Hit Upon a strategy I asked my married friends were there any women they'd be interested in going going out with if they were single because I didn't I couldn't ask my you I couldn't ask other women because they would put me in touch with somebody that needs you know that they thought be really nice but I may not be attracted to them and I if I if I ask my um my single friends they're not going to give me any really good tips right because they but your married friends they'll so one of my friends Tom Robinson um told me about this woman that he thought would was perfect she'd also just split up with a long-term relationship a few months before and she was starting to see other people again and um she just thought we'd hit he thought we'd hit it off well I called her up and we couldn't work out the schedule so she was not couldn't see I couldn't see her for about she was a software consultant she traveled all around the world and uh on projects and I was building Whole Foods and we were just really busy people but I said you know listen I'm going to go to this wedding on Saturday night I know it sounds kind of weird but if you want to go with me you know we we can still talk at the wedding and and maybe afterwards and stuff so um she said yeah but I it was blind date I'd never i' never seen any pictures of her I I didn't have any idea who she was or what she looked like so she meets me at the door and I mean she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my entire life she was just unbelievably beautiful and I sort of like you know I just sort of was stunned and you know that age I'm all also socially awkward uh kind of maybe endearing to some people but definitely uh can be you know I can do and say things that I you know would like to take back so I'm trying to recover myself and then and I'm trying to think of something to say and then I just kind of blurred it out hey would you mind if I looked inside your refrigerator that's just that's classic that's a great idea well I mean and she said I think that's pretty weird but sure go ahead and you know she passed the refrigerator test Deborah was vegan at that time and um and her and everything in her refrigerator was really a lot of it from Whole Foods I could tell and it was healthy stuff so then I looked at her books after that and it's like wow she's got some interest a lot of spiritual books so I uh and philosophy books so I I really liked her you have to find out what happens in the rest of the day you have to buy the book well so I shouldn't talk about your unconventional proposal how that happened that was pretty funny yeah still socially awkward I mean this is about I propose about I don't know year or so year or so after we'd been together started dating and and uh um yeah I was getting I was recovering from the flu and I I haven't had the flu since but I was recovering from the flu and I was watching the movie always with Richard drus which was a a romantic movie kind of a tearjerker and I was watching it I'm very sentimental guy and uh I was watching and I was crying and and uh I just felt such overwhelming love for Deborah that I called her up and proposed to her over the phone oh and she said yes right she started laughing when I did that and and she said she said well that's an unusual proposal however of course we're getting married there's never any doubt Deborah says she knew on the third date after the third date we were getting married so we said yes and you know now of course I wish I'd gotten on one knee and had an engagement ring and did the whole the whole thing but um yeah that's just who I was and socially awkward you might say and prone to blurred out things that uh those both times that worked out for me but other times I've done these things and it didn't work out so well for me well you can always propose now you can you can get a doover but then the Catholic marriage counseling when you're not even Catholic that sounded pretty intense it was funny we actually had we had some fun doing it the the so-called engaged encounter um where you have you have to go through this process a couple of weekends of being with Catholic elders and they were telling us uh basically two messages were conveyed to us one was all marriages go through hard times but God's join you together Stay Together work him out don't divorce and the second one was um the Rhythm method although they kept saying this is not the Rhythm method but it was a rhythm method because there was no contraceptives other than you know um not doing it when you were ovulating it so so we got through that we went through that to get to the uh to get to the wedding but you had ass signed something that said you would raise all the kids Catholic and you didn't like that because one you weren't you don't like when people just spring things on you in the last minute as a business person well that happened at actual the wedding ceremony and there were there were about 500 people Deborah was a big Catholic Family I had about a hundred people on the aisle on my side and she had about 400 on her side and so all all these people are out there and the we're just about to perform the ceremony the priest comes to me and he says John can I talk to you in private for just a second and he pulls out this document it's a couple pages long and he says I need you to sign this document before I'll perform the ceremony and the document and it says this is an agreement between John Macky and the Catholic church that you agree that you will all your children will be raised Catholic it's like are you kidding me why didn't she show this to me before and he said oh I I'm sorry I just forgot about it but you know still got to do it and I said so you're telling me if I don't sign this document you're not going to perform this ceremony even though there's like 500 people out here and he looked at me and he says that's right so I did sign the document but I consider it coercive and non-enforceable yeah I mean how can they enforce something like that they can't yeah I mean he's he basically come back and say hey you you made a promise to God are you gonna break it that's that's what they would argue well you you got out of it by not having kids we showed him didn't we y exactly how was Whole Foods a value driven company what does not you mean the values being the higher values yeah I mean just it seemed like like that that like you had higher values than just your local Piggly Wiggly for example well I think we I think we had we're value company because we did we had a higher purpose we we wanted to nourish people in the planet that's our articulated higher purpose we had core values sell the highest quality natural and organic foods um satisfying Delight our customers team member happiness and growth um our suppli our our suppliers are our partners and we want to increase Prosperity through profits for our investors and so we had these these core values we had these purpose that we're trying to realize in the world and we built our business around that higher purpose and our values and we and you have and we lived it and we walked our talk and that I I'll tell you a story from today I'm in Boulder Colorado right now because we have a home in Boulder I'm at a local Whole Foods Market store I'm checking out the cashier recognizes and he says you're John Mackey this is wonderful I'm so glad to meet you and I'm imy I'm I'm Emy and we shook hands and and she said I'm now an advanced cultural champion of Whole Foods Market this was something I started up just before I left the company last year or so I left was with Amazon's culture being so powerful I call it they're like the sun and we're like a planet orbiting the Sun and Amazon didn't try to change our culture but their culture is just so powerful that it had has this gravitational pull so I start I championed or started really a few years before I left now that I think about it um a new program we call cultural Champions and that would be taking our team members that wanted to as voluntary to go through a program where we would we basically educate them into the deepest element of the culture our purpose our values our leadership principles they'd have to study it they'd have to take a test and then they'd be certified it's a cultural Champion they' get a certificate and they would then be with the group of cultural Champions and they would periodically meet together and talk about ways to make Whole Foods culture better and they would talk with leadership about it and I I I just heard just just a few weeks ago that um Whole Foods now has 20,000 active certified champions in the company their job is to spread the whole fuge culture and make sure that we're living up to our values and she told me they now have a new program that didn't exist while I was there they put it in since I retired which is an advanced cultural Champion so um I'm telling you that story because that's how you create a culture and that's how you nurture it and so the culture is alive and well at Whole Foods is is people like and team members like Emy are are making it better all every day well I remember when I met you in 2010 at Rip's first immersion I mean just the people that worked for the company they were lovely and and that the team they were like a team they were people that really liked each other and seem to really like the culture is we're organized into teams and the the teams are empowered and and self-managing in many ways one thing I appreciated reading in your book John because I never knew the truth of this story it was only speculation because when I lived in LA and Wild Oats closed you know people were saying disparaging things about you and I appreciate you telling that story but I $30 million to defend your case that's a lot of money yeah yeah that's the story about when the the FTC decided whole feeds was a monopoly and that they needed to we were trying to buy Wild Oats and they they sued us to stop it and they argued that we were what were we a monopoly of we were a monopoly of the penos market which is kind of a funny term uh that we had a lot of laughs over but that stood for premium natural organic supermarkets the category we created category we invented and um we argued that we competed against Trader Joe's we competed against all the supermarkets we competed against Walmart Costco because our customers would go buy natural organic foods in those places so we hardly had any Monopoly of anything and we won in federal court it cost us $30 million to win in the federal court but then they said well we're going to now we're going to take you into our own administrative Court people don't know this but the FTC has its own court system so after we lost in the federal court they were saying now you got to go into our court and they'd already decided we were monopolis so how were we going to win in their Court we weren't but our lawyers told us that would take another year or so of our time and another $30 million if we won there then we'd appeal it back to the federal court or they could appeal it back then we'd have to fight them again there and that'd be another $30 million if we won there either either they or us could appeal to the Supreme Court and uh that would again cost us another $30 million so it was going to be very expensive this is how this is how some of these regulatory agent agencies intimidate corporations because they make it so expensive and timec consuming to resist them that mostly just cave in and what we ended up doing was an unconventional unconventional approach we I hired a different Law Firm a guy named Lanny Davis and went Lany did he says look they had their own court system is unfair the Department of Justice which half the antitrust is divided into two the Department of Justice has half of it and the FTC has half of it Department of Justice does not have their own court system so he said we're going to go talk to Senators I'm going to set you up with a bunch of talks to senators and we're going to tell them how the unfair this is and what they're trying to do Bully you and then and then we talked to a number of I talked to a number of Senators and they wrote letters to the FTC saying they were going to open investigations of the ftc's own court system is unfair and and the federal system is all that should exist that so freaked out the FTC that they contacted us and said hey surely there's we can come to some kind of agreement here and so we met with them and it looks and we agreed to sell off a bunch of Wild Oats stores that we were going to close down anyway so we did close down a few Wild Oats stores but um they were losing money and uh we probably relocated other ones so but we had to put up about 30 stores of Wild Oats for sale and um that was SP saving for the FTC the only one we lost that we wanted to keep was one of the ones in Boulder that old alala site that um that was for we were forced to sell that one off yeah because when we were living in La we didn't really know what was we just you know heard about that so that thanks for explaining that you said your personal path was not necessarily the path of Whole Foods Market well that just means that uh a lot of entrepreneurs cannot differentiate a lot of uh well let me put the explain it and then I'll do a little more detail so many entrepreneurs cannot differentiate between themselves and their business they they don't make a distinction it's like a parent in a way that thinks the child is just an extension of it of him him or herself that just not a distinct being that has its own destiny and so I didn't really have that problem I always saw Whole Foods as separate from myself I always saw it as I might have birthed it with some other we might have the co-founders might have birthed it together and we might have nurtured it through its early years but then it had its own destiny had its own life it wasn't me it had its own values and yes I influenced it um a lot of my values were incorporated into Whole Foods but it was different and I have a different Destiny than Whole Foods has a great example of that is you know I'm I'm an ethical vegan and Whole Foods is certainly not although it has a great selection of plant-based Foods there it's never going to become a a vegan store and I I I had a lot of vegans criticize me all the time like why don't you why don't you just turn this into vegan story you could do it and I said no I couldn't do it if even if I it's a public company if I tried to do it I'd be fired they can't fire you and I said yeah hell they can't they absolutely can and they would wouldn't take very long either because they think I was absolutely nuts I'd be ruining the business so that's what I meant by it but a lot of people don't don't even think they don't see the distinction like they don't see the distinction between Amazon and Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs and apple or Elon Musk and Tesla founders of companies are oftentimes associated with their companies and they don't see the difference do you think that an all vegan store could even survive because you mentioned about how many restaurants are closing sure all vegan store could survive it'd be small and it'd have to be in a it could inv it could survive in La could survive in New York you know I mean maybe Miami it could inv you know if there enough population density you'll get enough vegans but remember I'm not sure that store would have a bigger selection than Whole Foods house um it might have other vegan products Whole Foods doesn't sell and um the question is would it would it be able to be could it be inexpensive enough it could be that they couldn't be such a small selection of products they wouldn't have the scale to buy they might not be able to sell as cheaply as Whole Food sells it so um that would be a challenge for it so could it survive I don't know it would require ethical vegans to actually support it even though they were paying more money for it some would be willing to do that some would not yeah that well one of the things I heard you say and I completely agree with this I'll in three months I'll be vegan 47 years you said people who aren't ethical vegans probably won't stay vegan right they Drift Away The Temptations are too great you know it's like ah I I try to be vegan but you know if I go over to somebody's house I don't want to make them uncomfortable and so I have something and and then once you do that a few times it gets easier and easier to do it and a lot of my friends that became vegan for six months a year year and a half or whatever they're not only not vegan anymore they're not even it's kind of like you they slide all the way back down the mountain yeah one of the parts of the book that like because I I I really do feel like it reads more like a novel and it could be a movie when you told Renee that you we should start seeing other people I could just like feel that like I could feel what she felt I swear well it turned that turned out to be not a good decision on my part but um because she she almost immediately got involved with another guy and uh she fell in love with another guy and next thing I know she's left Whole Foods and living in bise so so you talk about Renee and Mark and Craig and other people in the book are you in touch with any of them and how are they all doing these days have they read the book Mark I haven't had been in touch with Mark for a long long time and I I wanted to we tried to interview both Mark and Renee for the book Craig Craig was was uh interviewed and we had we interviewed about 30 people but I couldn't we didn't I didn't know anybody I heard Mark had become a truck driver so I'm not sure where he was or where he was living I hadn't seen him in decades and uh Renee just didn't respond I mean I don't know if she changed her email or contact information but she still own she she lives in tals New Mexico and there's a there's a fabric store that she owned down there called Common Thread and and uh but I I I emailed her I emailed her husband I didn't respond I don't know whether I got ghosted or whether I just didn't have relevant information but I didn't everybody I knew that I thought might know how to get in touch with her none of them knew how to get in touch with her so I just I don't know and Craig Craig was interviewed how do you think that the fact that places like Costco Walmart and even some 99 Cent stores sell Organics did that hurt Whole Foods so did it help make no difference depends on how you think about it um it fulfilled our higher purpose for why we existed to help nourish people in the planet and that and the fact that organic and Natural Foods became more widely available see I had no idea honestly that the thing that surprised me I you have to remember we started out in this really tiny little niche that you know just a bunch of counterculture hippie selling food to other hippies and and eventually we had some middle class Housewives start shopping with us because they didn't get the natural and organic but remember all the other supermarkets sucked and we had beautiful produce and our people might have had piercings and tattoos but they were really nice to them and they had good service and the stores were beautiful so we began to break into the the more mainstream gradually and but I never really thought it would ever catch on in a big way I just always kind of thought people weren't going to do this and I it surprised me I I I'll tell you a story that when Whole Foods went public back in 1992 we had 12 stores and I was constantly asked while we were on the road show trying to talk to the investors I was asked how many stores do you think Whole Foods could eventually have and and I thought you know what I think someday I think I think someday we could have up to a 100 stores and I think that would pretty well saturate the United States well there's 540 stores today or 550 stores today so and there stores are far bigger doing far more volume and I just completely underestimated the potential of the market and we helped grow that market but then it got so much bigger than Whole Foods right Trader Joe's was growing right along with us and um so organic then went over in Walmart you know who the largest distributor or seller of w of organic foods in America is W is Walmart that's I I heard that it would blew me away in Costco is second and then I think Whole Foods is third but Kroger might be third it's hard to say doesn't matter well imitation is the highest form of flattery right part of our mission was to help these food spread and we helped that fulfilled our mission but what we would have been more profitable if we had less competition but so it was good for the society and perhaps less good for Whole Foods yeah I'm curious John what do you think of lab grown meat and if it was available and you were still CEO of Whole Foods would you be selling it well let's say that I have a significant investment in upside Foods personally invest in upside Foods I I I am super excited about that potential because this is you know DNA equivalent uh if you can grow this an you can grow chicken and fish and beef and in a in a factory and it's it's the same exact stuff from a d DNA equivalent um there's no animal suffering no death no factory farms there's no raising the the rainforest chopping down forest to make more to grow more sorb wings and corn to feed cows it would be completely transformational so yes I think it's super exciting and uh I really I believe that if if the if the government doesn't make it illegal because it gets lobbied by the animal indust industry to prevent competition it'll transform the world I'm very excited about it what what I like about it is that for those of us that have pets that need to eat meat like say cats we won't feel so bad about feeding meat to our pets yeah that's also a good point cats are yeah I'm not interested in eating it but I mean that that's my main reason for wanting it to exist yeah it'll probably be really expensive at first right of course it'll be expensive at first but what happen over time is you have a as you get economies of scale you get an experience curve in your manufacturing processes and prices will just continually go down it'll start out in high-end restaurants and work its way until until it's something supermarkets are selling and then probably in the long run it'll be a lot less expensive than it's expensive to grow animals and eventually this will be less expensive and it'll outcompete it that's what I hope happens it would be so great might be very world might be very different 50 years from now and just that way alone I hope it happens in our lifetime for sure hey let me ask you this question would you eat that kind of meat well no not because I have anything against it ethically John I became vegan at 17 I didn't even like meat so I don't want to eat I don't even want to eat like fake meat like Beyond I I just I have no interest in it it's you know it just doesn't it never tasted good to me so so no but I think it'd be wonderful it existed for the people that like that taste and want that I understand yeah I would love to see it I would love to see that happen so when and why did you become interested in breath work the Course in Miracles well I start the book out I mean the Psychedelic theme goes through the book uh really is my whole spiritual growth growes through the book it starts out with a this massive LSD trip when I was 22 I mentioned that already talking in the podcast then psychedelics disappear until 1984 when I'm invited over to to to do as uh MDMA back in 1984 which was back then known as Adam and later become uh known as ecstasy and then Molly I think is more current name for it this was legal back in 1984 and first time I did that was in a group setting I knew about half the people didn't know the other half but I fell in love with everyone on that journey and my heart opened up very very widely and I got a message from deep within my soul in that experience that I never forgot which is there's nothing more important in life than love love is the most important thing love is the purpose of life love is the meaning of life love is why we are here and that's what we're here to do is to learn to love better and more completely and eventually the planet will be transformed through love in my opinion and but it starts with transforming ourselves first first and so that led me to doing breath work after that I started doing holotropic breath work I always tell people that are scared of psychedelics but are interested in having a Transcendent experience start with breath work then no psychedelics no drugs and uh very safe and yet you can have an amazing experience in breath work and so and I still do breath work and uh I've now I don't do the holotropic breath method methodology anyway it's it's more of a gentler circular breath that is continuous and uh it's a really good way to quiet your mind and got your soul and speak to your soul so and then I got into the course of Miracles because the same people that I journeyed with um one guy was studying the course of Miracle he said I think you're going to find this book very interesting and I had about age 18 I become a born again Christian and I was that way for about two years before the problem of evil turned me into an atheist the problem of evil is if God is all all knowing all powerful all loving how can evil possibly exist and I just didn't find any answers in traditional religion so I drifted away from it and and uh and what happened when I studied the course of Miracles is that I had an answer to the to the to that question course of to the to the problem of evil and that answer the course teaches is this it's like when you're dreaming does sometimes evil things happen in the dream oh yeah scary sometimes but when you wake up you realize oh that wasn't real thank God right it didn't really happen right also isn't it an odd thing when you're dreaming you're always the character in the dream right always you're the dreamer but you're a character in the dream who are all those other people that are in the dream where do they come from they seem to be acting independently and yet it's your dream it's weird right so the course teaches and so I remember when I first read this and the course teaches it was it was said my son lifetime after lifetime after life time you have cursed God you have blamed God for all the evil that you see in the world all the problems that you see everything that you're think is wrong you blame on God my son you are asleep in a dream it's not real it doesn't exist we're here to help you wake up and the course is a path to awaken to the only thing that's real which is love and the only reason we don't know it is because we're in this dream and we we have we're creating this dream with a lot of fear in it a lot of judgment a lot of anger a lot of hatred a lot of guilt a lot of selfishness a lot of greed a lot of uncaring exploitation a lot of lack of Consciousness and so the course is a path to remove the blocks to Love's presence and their main strategy is to practice forgiveness stop judging and practice forgiveness again and again and again and again and you'll as you do that you become more and more conscious you begin to let go of your fears you let go of your guilts you let go of your judgments and you do that love becomes brighter in your light in your life it become more of a light and so the course says eventually you'll remove all the blocks to Love's presence and you will be awake and the dream will be over for you nice well why is love that's the path I've been on now for about 40 years that's wonderful I don't claim to be uh uh you know that I never do things that I regret I still do but I get over them quicker and I I catch them faster nice why is love good business love is good for business because um you know what are the two things that people ask me all the time what's the secret to building a great company one that will last one that will um people will want to work for and I said just I'll simplify it for you it's two words purpose love everybody wants purpose everybody wants to feel like their work is contributing to helping other people in some form or fashion and if you give people purpose they will like and enjoy that work and then everybody also wants to feel like somebody cares about them so if you create a workplace where people are cared about and cared for then you're giving and you combine that with purpose you're giving people what their soul most craves which is meaning purpose and love and um it's good business business if you if you treat people kindly they're going to want to continue to do business with you and and if you treat them badly then they won't want to do business with you and and so I always say that in a retail business Management's jobs to hire the best people they can find make sure they're well trained and that and then that then you that they feel cared about and that that you help them be happy because they're the ones that take care of the customers and if they're not happy they won't take care of the customers well happy team members results in happy customers which results in happy shareholders it's good business love is simply good business and you know people misunderstand love they think it's some kind of weakness love is weak it means you know that you're you're always giving in all the time you you can't make hard decisions no that's not what love love Is Just caring about other people being empathetic being able to listen it doesn't mean you can't make hard decisions it doesn't mean you can't fire people you you just you may have to make a hard decision you may have to let somebody go but you can still do that with a loving heart care about him the whole time wanting the very best for them helping them find another job even if their time theirs it has to go because you also have to think about what's good for the whole the whole organization because you love that as well so love is absolutely good business and it's a shame also I'll say one other thing about it I'd say for most corporations love is like locked up in the corporate closet and they don't they they think if love was there they would be weak that love is weakness and they have this outdated sense that you know masculinity is strong and The Feminine energy is loving but it's weak that's such old stereotypes we're both masculine and feminine and love is both nurturing and can be strong and because it's it's got the best qualities of both masculine and femininity nice you know what I wanted to ask you remember a while back there was something at Whole Foods called Health starts here and you could get like there were salad dressings and prepared foods without oil I loved that line it disappeared yeah that was one of my initiatives um that occurred a couple of years after I became vegan and then I once I read The China Study and uh CW elon's book prevent reverse heart disease which Bruce Friedrich gave to me I was like I had my own sort of Awakening to there's a higher level of being plant-based there's a there's a purer version then I read M Ferman I read McDougall and uh I I just devoured this whole you know Gregor and this whole universe of Whole Foods plant-based and I might add that most people put the particularly vegans underscore plant-base and ignore the Whole Foods portion of it meaning we're eating Whole Foods not highly processed foods not foods with sugar and salt refined grain um oil oils particularly and probably you know nuts and seeds in smaller quantities I know where you stand on that one too because you McDougall I know really helped you out and I happen to agree that I'm I'm I'm between McDougall and fman I I do that I do that a little bit of nuts and seeds but I mostly flax and chia what those Omega-3s anyway um the hell starts here was an initiative we started and it it it just didn't catch on we tried a lot of things we got a Ferman Andy system in our stores I created a healthy eating team Chad and Derk Sno worked with us rip Elon worked with this Margaret whittenberg was heading it up and it did not catch on with our customers it was they just didn't care I I don't know how else to put it and they didn't like it it felt like we were judging them or trying to prze them into a particular type of diet and then uh we didn't see we didn't see increases in sales and rest of my Executives you know thought this is another one of John's crazy ideas and this one's not working so convince him to give up on it and eventually it was expensive and I I I just you know we gave we did it three or four years and just didn't see the results I bet if it wasn't labeled healthy it people because it the items tasted delicious I think it was the people thought maybe they taste delicious to you and me because our pallets have evolved other people they didn't have enough salt they didn't have enough fat they didn't have enough sugar and it didn't taste good to them because they're they're they're addicted to different you know to they're addicted to things that maybe aren't good for them well I liked it especially the Sesame ginger salad dressing yeah that was that happened to be my personal favorite as well the one with no oil it was so good my well I don't think it most Whole Foods not all most time you can't find owh addressing anymore yeah it's hard again it's because people aren't using them I mean it's not a plot it's just like hey I'm gonna get rid of this nobody's using it we're we're throwing it away it's spoiling I would have bought it all up had I known so John of all your many life's accomplishments what are you most proud of um you know I don't know if there's one thing thing I mean I'm I'm proud of I'm proud of Whole Foods as a collectivity as a life's work so to speak um I'm proud of how it grew up it's it's my child and I nurtured it and and I I co-founded I co-created it I nurtured it and long after all the other co-founders were gone I was still there helping it you know walk and learn to read and and uh become the successful company that it is today and and and even selling it into Amazon I make the joke that I gave away my bride to the richest man in the world my not my bride my daughter to the richest man in world and and she has to be raised Catholic because you did sign a piece of paper so um I'm proud of that I'm proud of Whole Foods is uh I'm proud of conscious capitalism I'm proud of the whole planet Foundation which my book talks about quite a bit it's made a huge difference we've helped millions of people escape from poverty around the world I'm really proud of that um I'm proud of my the efforts I've made on Animal Welfare I do think Whole Foods has helped literally billions of animals have better lives since we started the uh Global animal partnership do PE we've been attacked by a lot of animal organizations who are abolitionists I get the urge for abolitionism I also see that's not going to happen no matter how much you rant and Rave anytime soon meanwhile billions of animals are suffering much higher degrees than it need to be the case so so I'm proud of that what we did the work we did there um you know I'm proud of what I'm doing now with love life we haven't talked about that you want to talk about that before absolutely that that is that's actually what's going to be my last question we're we're this close I just two more questions and then we're GNA get to love life if that's okay which is what brings you Joy the most Joy the most Joy I mean the honest there are certain activities that bring me joy so I'll talk about those so I I don't want to make just a simplistic answer but I'm very joyful and happy anytime I'm just really in the moment and I'm not in my thoughts lost in my thoughts when I'm present fully in the moment it's it's life is such a gift it's so precious and um just being able to breathe uh be able to move um just to be alive it's I'm very inherently I find that incredibly joyful and um but other I can be very joyful and so like Sam I can be joyful in almost any circumstance I'm chasly joyful every day I'm joyful most of the time every day um I'm joyful if I can just be with this person and I can just settle into the moment and relax with them and I see how what a beautiful being they are and and they shine they shining forth that brings me joy um I'm joyful when I'm with my wife because she's such an amazing enlightened being and brings me joy just looking at her being close to her holding hands with her um I'm joyful when I go hiking I'm I'm joyful when I play pickle ball I'm joyful when I'm reading I'm joyful when I'm working uh I'm afraid I there's so many things that bring me joy it's uh it's hard to it's hard to bring it down to one or two things what do you do for fun I just described a couple of them I play Pickleball I I like to hike I'm a long distance hiker I've hiked the Appalachian Trail twice the Pacific crust Trail I have a chapter on the in the book called Strider and U so that's that's that gives me great joy for sure I love doing that I like hanging out with my friends too you know I mean I just and multi really love you my wife you seem to have a lot of Need for growth and Novelty and now we can get to love life and especially what's happening on July 9th on July 9th we'll be opening our first Flagship location for our new business love life so this is a business that I co-founded with some of my longtime Executives at Whole Foods Like Walter Rob who was co-ceo and longtime president of Whole Foods he's one of the co-founders along with Betsy Foster who worked for Whole Foods for 26 years and variety of executive roles but I also brought Glenda Flanigan back as my Chief Financial Officer Jim sud heading up real estate they did these things for Whole Foods for a long time they just work part time at this point um AC Gallow who was the prince of perishables he's put made Whole Foods perishable so great he's he's with us as well Michael Bashaw who who ran our our Midwest region as president for a number of years is heading up um store development and so I got a lot of my team back together with me that had retired and they're back working with me on this dream and then of course we' got lots of young people as well but we've we've got um there's a there's a strong plant-based uh ethos and in the company we acquired plant-based tella health and rebranded it to love life tella Health Anthony Mello is doing that he's president of that so we're licensed in all 50 states so love life's doing business in healthc care we have about 10 plant-based doctors that are on that team that are that are helping people around the around the country and some places around the world um we have a we acquired mastering diabetes couple of longtime vegan friends uh Robbie and Cyrus that wrote the book mastering diabetes which is a fantastic book we're doing on they're doing online coaching for people with diabetes or weight loss we have a weight loss program now as well and then but the real big dream is to open a a chain of holistic health Health membership clubs and to understand it I'll divide it into five parts so the first part is a is a healthy restaurant now we opened up a restaurant in La already that failed called love life it lasted only four months it also half the menu was a Whole Foods plant-based diet meaning super healthy no salt no oil Whole Foods only and uh the market did not accept it it it it it it just crash and burn we never never really got esape velocity or close to it um and so the restaurant we're going to open up in uh in El Segundo or our location is going to be what we call a plant forward restaurant so we're sort of inspired a little bit by sweet greens we're going to try to minimize our labor and so you'll be ordering via the app or via kiosk could go to the counter but we're going to encourage people to try to just order uh via the kiosk via the app and it so we'll have bowls I'm going to detail on this because you are you know Chef AJ we'll have you want to know we'll have bowls we'll have salads we'll have um uh handhelds and then we'll have Mains entree type stuff and and we'll have Beverages and everything we'll start out with is going to be plant-based so you can get it's all starts out 100% plant-based 100% whole foods and then the customer has to decide what they want to do next what do they want they can add an animal protein to it if they wish they could top off their salad or their bowl or their handheld or or whatever or they could have a plate of it if they wish so um we are trying to acquire the mo you know welfare um higher degrees of welfare there and when we can I want to do the the upside Foods is starting with chicken but they're still not licensed to be able to sell it yet but I hope to be able to sell that in our in our restaurant their love life restaurant so and then you can you can add salad dressings that have oil or not have oil you can add um um you can you can have no salt or you can add salt so we're going to give people all these different options and but in the ideal sense I'll be able to go there and get a 100% Whole Foods plant-based foods with no oil no sugar no salt no refined grains no artificial ingredients flavoring colorings or preservatives that's the restaurant so then move on we have a we'll have a state-of-the-art fitness center so it'll be a gym like you might find at equinox we'll also have a yoga studio we'll do Pilates there we will then we'll also have a spa a really nice spa and we'll have usual things you get in the spa from um massage to facials to wraps to to exfoliants all the different kind of skin care that you can do we'll have all these recovery modalities that the spa and the fitness center will share from um uh cold plunges infrared saas cryotherapy regular saas hyperbaric oxygen Chambers we'll be doing we'll be doing acupuncture Artic medicine we'll have physical therapist Chiropractic there um we will also have a medical center the medical center will be doctors that are functional doctors integrative doctors and lifestyle doctors they may not all be vegan um but they will have a plant forward bias to their medical care and um but our vision on that is for our members it's like when do people mostly go see a doctor when they're sick exactly well our vision is is to is to start people at whatever Age and and then put them through a battery of tests and assessments to get a an accurate reading about where they are on their own health journey and then once we have a baseline established we want them to work with our team which will be primarily they'll have a primary physician and they'll have a uh a wellness coach and then we'll set an a Very individualized Precision plan plan for them in order to try to get take their health to the next level we'll want them to have some kind of wearable data so we can download that data we have a very sophisticated technology that will have there a platform where all their tests will be located all of their the that they'll have be able to access it via the web or via their own app they can all the test all the doctor reports everything will be there for them to see uh and also the progress they make the with the wearable data that they're getting and so we'll monitor that and then but it's not just the physical health we're also going to be doing yoga there we'll do meditation classes we're going to have breath work there when psychedelic therapy becomes legal in California we will be doing that as well we really want to help people to become the highest and best version of themselves healthiest as they can physically the healthiest they can do a mentally and emotionally and the healthiest they can be spiritually we want it to be a Healthy Growth Wellness Community and um that's the big vision and then I I Envision having this chain all around the country and maybe eventually around the world and of course we'll have people copy us if we're successful so um it I think the world might be very different 20 or 25 years from now technolog is advancing rapidly our ability to measure things is going way up and as PE people I I I'll just tell a story I stopped drinking alcohol now two and a half years ago and it was due to my Apple watch not that I was I never drank very much I was a moderate Drinker at best but um what I started to notice because I have an app on my uh my watch and my phone called Auto sleep and it measures more than Apple health does it to it measures my sleep and I noticed that anytime I had any alcohol at all my deep sleep would drop to zero and my total sleep would also drop about an hour I get one hour less of sleep and my my deep sleep would basically go to zero I did this I tested this for well over a year lots of different experiments I had one drink two drinks three drinks zero drinks and what I discovered was that I felt a lot better when I didn't drink any alcohol I I stopped having what I call throwaway days a throwaway Day is when I would drink and the next day I'd be tired I could get through the day I could do what I would you know I could meet my appointments I just didn't feel my best when I didn't drink I felt better the whole day and then so I I started I just gave it up so I'm going to stop drinking see how I feel I started feeling fantastic pretty much every day and it's like will I ever drink alcohol again I don't know maybe there might become a time when I decide I will give up a good night's sleep I'll give up feeling good I'll be willing to pay the price of a throwaway day for whatever reason to have this fun this night I just haven't had that night yet in the last two and and a half years so um that's what I'm meaning as you get conscious as you become more conscious of things you make changes in your life and as I got conscious of what alcohol was doing to my sleep and how I felt I decided to get rid of it and I think if people were more conscious about the food they would make food changes as well they don't understand how food is harming them because they're not yet conscious of enough about it I think the technology is going to help people see this anyway the final thing is besides the medical center we also have three pickle ball courts because we want people that love not to have a lot of fun and pickle ball is fun everybody if you play pickle ball before you know I played it when I lived in the desert those three years and I tore my rotator cuff it is addictive it is the funnest game in the whole world everybody can play pickle ball from ages you know eight to 100 and uh you they have fun the first time they play so it's it's it's going to be a community builder for us where're going to have pickle ball people playing pickle ball pick I half the new friends I've made in the last two and a half years have been from pickle ball friends so it's very social G that's kind of what a a love life will look like it's this won't surprise you our first center is extraordinarily beautiful people will go in and they're going to say oh my God this place is incredible you know about the first 20 years Whole Foods existed people go into Whole Foods and they said wow I've never been into a place like this this is unlike any other Supermarket I've ever been in then of course supermarkets changed and we weren't quite at the novelty that we started out being I think that's G to happen to love life people GNA go in it and they're going to say wow this place is cool this place is amazing how come nobody's done this before I'm gonna join up this is fun I like it well I bet you like pickle ball you seem like you like competition and it's a it's a competitive game yes but you know by the I'm a pretty good pickle ball player but I'm s about to be 71 and I'm playing with guys in their 20s often times so I'm as good as I am there's I lose a lot more than I win in pickle ball of course I like to play against players that I know are better than me I like the challenge yeah that's the secret to anything always do it I'm when I do comedy or improvisation you always want to do it with people that are better than you that's how you get better yourself in the ins gundo location for the doctor component in person are these any doctors we might have heard of that we could go see in person I don't know um uh I don't think you've heard of them um but they're they're both young uh Jacqueline worked for partially health for a while and uh Anna's actually kind of new to the United States she was in Canada for a while her F her family immigrated from Poland and she's she's a young doctor but I mean they're both very very very intelligent very dedicated very energetic I think they're going to be doing that g be a wonderful job you know sorry you probably know one of our tella Health doctors uh Chris Miller well I know a lot of your tella Health doctors I don't know if you know this but I've done this show every day at least once since March 20th 2020 and two of your doctors have regular monthly shows Dr Colin zoo and Dr Nikki Davis and Dr Jeff Pierce wants a monthly slot and I do know Chris Miller she's been on the show so absolutely all of those teleah Health doctors fantastic Dr Dr Miller is my personal doctor nice my wife's as well we love her a lot and um she's gonna come Anna is getting married and going on her honeymoon in in August so we're gonna Dr Miller's going to come down and and help us out there at uh the elauna love life for a few weeks while Anna has her her marriage and her honeymoon so that's so John one more question and it's a fun question um the viewers always want to know even when the guest isn't vegan what do you eat in a day fair question it's actually not that difficult um so I start out every day with the most amazing smoothie you can imagine I I was very influenced by um Brooke goldner and she has a Regular Show on my show as well we love Dr goldner yeah well I love I love the when I watched some of the videos about her smoothies I started doing those those kind of smoothies that my smoothies are half they're half vegetable and half fruit and uh and then I get my I have a lot of flax and chia seeds in there that I freshly grind that are in that as a base I usually put a little bit of raw caca in it to make it a little chocolatey and uh so my fruits now Dr Gregor has got that research out there that you can't combine the berries with the the bananas so I alternate I have what I call a tropical fruit smoothie one day and a u a berry smoothie the next day and so I get the right U Sweetness quoti by how many dates I put in if it's a tropical fruit day they don't need very many dates if it's a berry day they need a a little bit more dates and I I drink an entire BL blender of Vitamix so I drink 64 ounces of smoothie a day usually I start out with two glasses in the morning and then I have a glass at one another glass of dinner and so uh the fruits are seasonal like right now I'm digging my smoothies because I'm getting apricots and peaches in there uh every day and those are so delicious um how how much greens you said half of it Greens in any particular half of it half of it vegetables I have my greens are four large handfuls of greens I get four handfuls a day so generally um generally it can it can I can do different greens but the ones that are kind of the standby are two handfuls of kale and two handfuls of power greens that whole foodself power greens are combination of spinach and chard and um one other one other uh kind of um bitter green and then I'll have radishes broccoli um brussels sprouts carrots beets what the great thing about my Vitamix is any vegetable can go in that Vitamix can get drunk so it's uh that that's that's the big breakthrough I got with Dr goldner was this idea that I should be doing a lot more vegetables and my smoothies and uh and so I am and then of course water so um they're delicious I always look forward to it it's a good I look forward to my smoothies every day and and uh so then now then let's so so today for lunch um we Deborah and I had a we had tacos I had a a whole organic corn tortilla and then we had a little avocado first we started out with what we're going in Taco so we had the the a a little bit of avocado not too much she takes more than me um and then some cilantro some green onions and some tomatoes and then we had this particular mix that we put in it had a a little bit of tofu and um uh a mixture of of um a few ve vegetables and we heated that up and that went into make the filling of that then put some salsa on that and some nutritional yeast and that was my that was my taco I had two of those tacos for lunch today and dinner tonight I'm going over to a friend's house and then we're going to have a h Tempe vegetable stir fry and quinoa and I have a glass of smoothie on I had a glass of smoothie for lunch too so that's you know we vary our meals a great deal but they're always going to be Whole Foods the great thing is none of that food by the way today except for the salsa had any salt in it no oil uh it's you know it's truly Whole Foods plant-based diet that's the diet that I flourish on well John thank you so much for being vegan for caring about the animals for all you have done to make Whole Foods meaning Whole Foods not just the store available and accessible all these years any final thoughts people can find more about your book and you just by looking below the video in the show notes they can order the book I like it on Amazon I wish you had recorded the whole thing instead of just part of it because I like you know I'd say that's we'll call that a minor regret because I after I listened to my recording I thought wow that's a lot better than I thought it would be I should have done the whole book because I could relive the emotions but my professional reader did a terrific job and he can do the accents of the other characters a lot better than I could he has different voices I wouldn't have been able to pull that off so it worked it worked out pretty well you say final thoughts I'll pass on to your audience the Mantra that my wife asked me to try to live every single day she says John don't over complicate this it's so much simpler than you think just love everyone all the time we should have her on the show well here she comes Deborah I was just sharing uh Your Love mantra thank you so much John thank you thank you Chef AJ it's always a pleasure to talk with you best wishes and always thank you and thanks all of you for watching another episode of Chef AJ live please come back tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. Pacific for ditch the diet with dietitian Deepa take care everyone
