July 2, 2025 • 57 mins
What does it really take to start over at 69?
In this inspiring episode, Whole Foods founder John Mackey shares how psychedelics, purpose, and love reshaped his path after selling to Amazon.From ego death to building Love Life wellness centers, he opens up about business regrets, spiritual breakthroughs, and midlife transformation. You'll learn how conscious capitalism evolves with age—and why love might be the ultimate business strategy.
Subscribe for more honest conversations about midlife renewal, purpose-driven living, and personal reinvention.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:27 Meet John Mackey
01:27 Psychedelics, Ego Death, and Food as Purpose
07:44 Love, Breakups, and Big Business Shifts
08:37 Austin in the '70s and Building Whole Foods
10:40 Advice to His Younger Self
12:34 From Atheism to Spiritual Adventure
14:36 What Is Conscious Capitalism?
17:15 How Whole Foods Revolutionized Grocery Stores
19:28 Learning to Communicate with Kindness
21:46 Selling Whole Foods to Amazon
28:17 Why He Finally Left Whole Foods
29:25 Healing Journey Through Plant Medicine
31:28 What Is Love Life?
37:56 Psychodelics as Therapeutic Method
40:21 Challenges and Financial Realities
43:21 Longevity Myths and What Actually Works
47:49 Redefining Retirement with Purpose
49:54 What He’d Regret Not Doing
52:09 Wisdom Bumper Sticker
55:33 Final Reflections
Learn more about MEA at https://www.meawisdom.com/
#JohnMackey #WholeFoods #ConsciousCapitalism #MidlifeTransformation #LongevityTips #PlantMedicine #PsychedelicHealing #PurposeDrivenLife #HolisticHealth #LoveLifeWellness #SpiritualGrowth #EntrepreneurMindset #ChipConley #FoundersJourney #ReinventYourself
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Purpose is one of the most important things for longevity.
When you have a purpose, you're communicating to the cells in
your body, hey, it's not time todie yet.
You got to stay with me. I've got to fulfill this
purpose. And guess what?
The body responds to that. The point is, is that a business
is a win, win, win. Life is fundamentally this
(00:20):
adventure of learning and growing and changing and
evolving. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
podcast with Chip Conley. Well, I'm excited about this
episode with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods Markets
and the new founder of Love Life.
The reason is John, in the, in the course of this episode,
(00:40):
talks about the lessons he's hadalong the way.
He's in his mid 70s now, but he's learned some things along
the way and he's built some wisdom.
And so you're going to hear about that.
You'll also hear about the fact that often it's not been a
crisis that's led to a transformation for him.
It's been some kind of sometimesplant medicine, some kind of
(01:01):
whole earth, whole life journey that might include breath work
or a spiritual journey that led him to making a decision that
really transformed his life. I hope you'll enjoy the episode.
You know, he's been a role modeland mentor to me for for many,
many years. So you'll see a lot of love
between the two of us over the course of this episode.
(01:22):
We've always appreciated talkingabout how business can be
different. And I'm just curious if you can
tell us a little bit about your origin story, how Whole Foods
got started, but especially the the ages you have been along the
way when you've had particular landmark occasions, including
ultimately the sale to Amazon. For the record, I've written
(01:47):
this is now a year old. I wrote The Whole Story, which
is a 403 page book that tells the whole journey.
It's called The Whole Story. It's it's my spiritual journey.
But when I started the business,when I started working on it
with Renee, I was 24. Renee, my girlfriend was 20.
(02:08):
And then when I retired from Whole Foods.
Now, I just turned 69 when I retired from Whole Foods.
And that was how long ago, John?That was It'll be three years in
September. Along the way let's you know
from 24 to 69 that's that's quite a you know, for me with
(02:29):
you want to leave my hotel company.
It was just 24 years for you, itwas 45 years.
This the name of the podcast is the midlife chrysalis.
There have been chrysalis is that might have looked like a
crisis at the time, but they ledyou to having more wisdom as a
result. So along the way with Whole
Foods, what might have been a chrysalis that you had in your
(02:53):
40s or your 50s that related to the company that ultimately
turned out to be to to be a transformational experience?
In the whole story, I write of several of those.
There's not just one, There wereseveral transitions that
occurred over time. Even starting out the book I
(03:15):
talk about how I was actually taking a very large dose of LSD
when I was 20, had just turned 22 and and I had experienced ego
death or dissolving into the onethe one being and how that
changed me. I have to soon after that I
moved into a vegetarian. Co-op wasn't a vegetarian, but I
(03:37):
was interested in all things counterculture and I was looking
for the meaning of life. I was looking for my own hero's
journey And that, by the way, that's when Star Wars was just
coming out and I found it. I found it in food.
I, I moved into this housing co-authors vegetarian.
I became a vegetarian. I became the food buyer.
(03:58):
I became the I was passionate. I learned how to cook.
I was passionate about all things food.
I I'd never made the connection before then how important it was
to nourish the body and not justfuel it.
I thought I was a car and I needed to go in the gas station
like, you know, drive through jack-in-the-box or McDonald's,
fuel up and be on your way. So that changed everything for
(04:20):
me. And then we launched the
business and I suppose the next big thing that occurred that had
a big impact on me that is worthmentioning was at age
30/31/1984, I took MDMA for the first time it when it was still
legal. And that was a huge heart
(04:41):
opening experience for me. And I, I, I realized then, which
I've never forgotten, is that love is the most important thing
in life. And then I wanted to make Whole
Foods the happiest place to workin America.
And I wanted to, I wanted to open up love, to build a company
based on love. And so that was a huge
transformational point for me personally and for Whole Foods,
(05:03):
I might add, that also led to one of my Co founders was so
upset he had nicknamed me wacky Macky because I was, you know, I
was going off and I wanted to start a holistic health place
called Lifeworks. Oh, that's when I also started
doing breath work and I also started to meditate.
And I also studied the course ofmiracles, which I've been
(05:26):
studying ever since. So over 41 years now studying
that Course of Miracles. That's been a big part of my
spiritual path. And I think the next big
transition now we're getting into my 30s, right?
So I break up with my my first wife after about six years, and
that's obviously a big transformation.
I didn't have any children with her, but she had three
(05:47):
stepdaughters, of which I'm close to all three of them
still. They're all adults now,
obviously. But then I found my, my true
love. I found my, my soulmate,
Deborah. We've been together now 35
years. She's a very, very loving
person, the most loving person I've ever known.
And, and so I was on this path of love and then then I'm with
(06:08):
her. And so that part of my being is
really continued to develop through that relationship.
I went through this trans transition of breaking up in my
mid 30s, finding my great true love.
And meanwhile Whole Foods is continuing to grow and grow and
grow and grow and Co founders are leaving, new people are
(06:29):
coming on. The business is is is
accelerating. But I was in a really good space
for that to happen. So I do think the mid 30s was a
huge early 30s to mid 30s was a huge period of transformation
for me personally. And then really the next really
pivotal event was when Whole Foods was, we were attacked by
(06:51):
the shareholder activists who were trying to take over our
company. There were a couple of coup
attempts along the way in the journey that had a big impact on
me as well. But I'm skipping over those for
for brevity's sake. But then when this shareholder
activist came in, that ultimately led to the sale of
the company to Amazon. So that's something most people
don't understand. We didn't want to sell to
(07:12):
Amazon. We wanted to stay independent.
I just didn't think we were going to be able to do it and
they were going to take us over.They told us they were.
I thought we needed time to lower prices and and get it, do
a big reset and we weren't goingto have time to do it.
So Amazon was our best solution.And then of course, retiring
from Whole Foods now not quite three years ago, that was a big
(07:34):
transition as well. So there's lots of different
transitions over that or transformations over that period
of time. Yeah, but there's a lot to
unpack there. So let's start with the idea of
it. It feels as if, whether it was
through psychedelics or through breath work or other modalities,
(07:55):
personal growth and Wellness modalities, many of your
transformations were not necessarily a result of
something bad happening, but it was more like a mind opening
experience or a heart opening experience.
When it comes to Deborah. Is that pretty accurate, John?
Absolutely. And along the way, you know, I
think one of the things that's interesting that you you talk
(08:16):
about love. And as a Californian, I grew up
with this point of view, which was, Oh my God, people from
Texas, you know, business peoplefrom Texas are just hardcore and
tough. And then, you know, you've got
Southwest Airlines where the stock ticker symbol is LUV and
you have Whole Foods markets that was built on love.
(08:37):
Talk about what it was like to do business in Texas back in the
day. You know, long ago when you were
getting started and, and Austin,where you where you started was
a relatively small place, most people didn't know the cool, fun
hipster side of Austin. So talk about that if you don't
(08:58):
mind. One way I explain Austin to
people is I got there in 1972 and went to the University of
Texas my freshman year at Trinity University in San
Antonio. When I got to Austin, the metro
area, the MSA was 250,000 people, of which 50,000 were
students at the University of Texas.
Today, it's 2.6 million people. It's literally more than 10
(09:20):
times larger than it was still 50,000 students at UT.
So it was the state capital, butyou might say back in 1972, it
didn't have a tech industry really at all.
Dell, Dell Computer, Michael Dell was still in junior high
school, mid school, mid, you know, he's 10 years younger than
me. It was the state capital and it
had a university and it had a music scene.
(09:43):
Thought music scene goes way back.
So they were cosmic Cowboys because they had a country and
western and then sort of a rock'n'roll country synthesis.
That was kind of Austin. It was very inexpensive place to
live. No traffic, no, no traffic.
You could get anywhere in Austinin 10 minutes back then.
Although I will point out many of the roads people are familiar
(10:06):
with didn't exist. So the north part of Austin was
where where Round Rock is and where Dell Computer is.
It was just, you know, just fields.
So Austin's changed and grown a lot.
I mean, Whole Foods contributed to that growth.
Honestly, we, we were next to Dell and we're probably still
(10:27):
the second most successful large, let's say if Elon Musk
really moves his headquarters toAustin and that that will no
longer be true. But we, for a long time, we were
always #2 to Dell. We've seen it all grow up around
us. Based upon your the wisdom
you've cultivated over the yearsand I and I believe that our
painful life lessons are often the raw material for our future
(10:50):
wisdom, What advice might you give to that young 24 year old
or even a 44 year old John Mackey regarding both life but
also what it means to be aceo ofa company like Whole Foods?
1st, I'm going to say that I, I get asked that question a lot.
Honestly, the media almost always ask me that question
(11:13):
because it's you're, you don't intend it this way, Chip, but
it's kind of a gotcha question. Oh yeah, I definitely don't
intend it that way. No, no, they want you to recount
your failures. And I always answer it three
ways. The first one I say, well it
really doesn't matter because my20 year old self would never
have listened to me, so what's the point?
(11:34):
Or I say, well, don't get involved with Mary Kay.
You're going to be, she's going to make you miserable.
So just don't get involved with her.
He wouldn't have listened to that either, probably.
But so, but the real answer is, and, and this, this is really
true. I don't think I would have given
my 20 year old self any advice at all.
(11:55):
And the reason why is my life has worked out wonderfully well.
It's been a, it's been a fabulous journey for me.
Sure, I've made a ton of mistakes along the way.
And you can say, well, I could have saved myself from mistakes,
but those mistakes were how I learned and the learning, the
lessons that I learned made me the man that I am today.
(12:16):
And So what I really go back andtry to avoid those mistakes.
I don't think I would because itall worked out so well.
If it had been a disaster then maybe I would, but it's worked
out really well and I like the way I am today.
So and and and it's been a wonderful, wonderful life, so I
wouldn't change anything. What beliefs?
Or what beliefs have you outgrown over the course of
(12:39):
time? Or what new beliefs have have
you tried on and, and said like,yeah, that that's, that's sort
of a new way of looking at the world that is different than
maybe when I was in my 20s or 30s?
First of all, that's a. That's a, it's almost, that's a
really long conversation becauseI'll, I'll, I can say a few
things, but in general, I mean, what did I know when I was in my
(13:04):
early 20s? Very little.
So I would say that some things I can give you some beliefs of
outgrown. I was an atheist before I took
that large dose of LSD that whenmy ego dissolved and I saw, I
saw who I was part of the one being immortal and we as we all
(13:24):
are, not as a separate ego, but as a manifestation of that one
consciousness. So I've outgrown that and I see
that life is fundamentally this adventure.
It's a spiritual adventure of oflearning and growing and
changing and evolving. I've learned Love's the most
important thing in life. I've learned that the world is
(13:47):
an illusion, more or less. My is basically accurate that it
is that the world does mirror back to us our emotions and
thoughts and feelings. As we become more loving, then
that's how we show up. People are more loving towards
us if we're kind, people are kinder to us.
If we're judgmental and angry, people are more angry and
(14:08):
judgmental towards us. So in some sense, the world is
our mirror and it reflects back to us how we're showing up.
So I've learned that the best philosophy in life is what I
call a win, win, win philosophy.Good for you, good for me, and
good for all of us. I've learned that's pretty much
a universal ethical system. I just talked about this at Ted,
(14:28):
by the way, just a couple of months ago about the Win win,
win. That was my Ted talk.
So I've learned that that's a good way to interact with
everybody all the time. Would you say that conscious
capitalism is basically a win win win system and maybe
describe conscious capitalism? For people, yeah.
Well, I actually feel like capitalism itself rightly
understood as a win, win, win philosophy.
(14:50):
Not that everybody sees it that way or engages it that way, but
fundamentally business outrightly understood is
creating value for all these stakeholders at the same time
they're creating value for customers.
No one has to do business with Whole Foods Market if they and
most people don't. We got like a 3% grocery share.
So if people think it's too expensive or they don't like the
(15:13):
products we sell, then they shopelsewhere.
And so, but we have a lot of people because the business is
up to, I don't know, 23 or $24 billion a year.
We got lots of people that do like that business.
So the customers are benefiting and they wouldn't trade the
employees and the team members. They're voluntarily working for
(15:34):
the business. They don't have, they have other
job opportunities, don't have towork for Whole Foods.
And and many of them do move on,right?
They find a better job and move on, but they're working there
because it's a win for them or they wouldn't be doing it.
Similarly, our suppliers are trading with the business.
Well, the suppliers don't have to trade with you.
I mean, and every business is highly dependent on its
suppliers. And so that's, and it's, they're
(15:56):
trading with you for their own benefit, for their own gain.
Similarly, investors don't have to invest.
They invest because they want toget a return on their
investment. And the communities that you're
part of, they're obsolete, essential to the business
because you're not doing it in isolation.
You're creating value in these communities and if you have a
bad relationship with your community, the business is
(16:17):
really, really going to struggle.
The point is, is that a businessis a win win, win entity.
It's it's creating wins with allthese stakeholders, customers,
employees, suppliers, investors in the communities that they're
part of. That is ultimately a win, win,
win system. I contrast that because most
(16:37):
people think of businesses win, lose.
It's like, well, somebody's winning and somebody else is
losing in competition. But rightly understood, even the
even the even your competitors are winning.
This is how you make progress incapitalism because the
competitors push you to get better.
And you learn from your competitors.
They come up with ideas and waysof doing things you hadn't
(16:58):
thought about before. And so if you're smart, you'll
copy that and that'll make your business better.
And guess what? They're studying you.
So your best ideas are spreading.
I mean, Whole Foods changed. The people don't know this
because they're not. Most people are not old enough.
Whole Foods completely changed the grocery business.
It's so radically different thanit was before we got started.
Give us a couple. Give us two or three examples of
(17:19):
that. Well, the main thing was, is
that when Walmart got into, you know, they started out just
selling general merchandise, butwhen they started selling food,
when they went to the Super center model, super center model
that complete and that was back in the, you know, late 70s,
early 80s, that completely scared all the supermarkets.
How are we going to compete withWalmart?
So one thing they did was they just tried to look compete on
(17:41):
price. So they, they had to cut back
their, their stores got look more like warehouses.
They, they cut back on labor. They didn't do as much service.
They, they just cut everything the bone to make it as cheap as
possible. That was fine if all you cared
about was price. But if you wanted anything else,
then you were you were you weren't going to find it in the
supermarket industry if it. Whole Foods went a different
(18:03):
direction. We made our stores beautiful.
We focused on service to customers.
We began to sell natural organicfoods, which nobody else in the
supermarkets weren't selling those products at all.
And So what generally happened over time was the supermarket's
eventually saw what Whole Foods was doing and they began to
switch their strategies. They began to pick up more
natural organic foods. So it's spread around the
(18:24):
country. We saw, hey, Trader Joe's for a
long time wasn't selling any produce or, and, and then they
saw how well Whole Foods was doing it.
So they started selling produce and that helped their business a
lot. Walmart, Costco, they began to
imitate Whole Foods. They started picking up natural
and organic foods as well. The way we market, the way our
(18:45):
stores looked, the service that we gave supermarkets began to
decide, you know what, we'd rather compete against Toll
Foods Market than Walmart. And they began, I watched
Kroger, Safeway, HEB, Albertsons, they started making
nicer and nicer stores more and more beautiful with more and
more of the products that Whole Foods sold.
Whole Foods has had this major impact that most people don't
(19:06):
realize because they haven't been on this journey with us all
this time, watching the world adapt to the innovations that
Whole Foods created. So that, you know, we didn't do
that alone. The natural foods industry did
it as well. And we were part of that.
And we were learning from other natural food stores and they
were learning from us. But I'd say our natural organic
foods movement has changed the world and hopefully it was one
(19:26):
of not the main leader of that. And in many ways, you were maybe
the most highly high profile person in the movement and at
times with points of view, libertarian points of view that
that sort of surprised people inthe movement.
But what I would just say is that what I've always loved
about you, John, is you speak your mind.
(19:49):
You do not hold back. You also are open to new points
of view and you are a curious learner.
Would you say that's pretty accurate and and is that always
been the case? Yes and yes, But the thing has
changed for me, particularly over the last 10 to 15 years.
Chip is I still say what I thinkand feel, but I'm much kinder
(20:10):
and gentler now. Again, the world is my mirror
and it's if I would speak hard truths to people because I
thought they needed to hear it and they would just cause
reaction against it, they would cross their arms and get angry.
And that was not a good strategy.
It didn't work very well. So I still try to speak my mind,
but I try to do it in a kinder, gentler, more loving voice.
(20:32):
That is based on life experience.
I just regret it took me so manyyears to figure out.
Most people are not convinced byevidence, rationality, or logic.
Confirmation bias is far more powerful than I had realized, so
I have. I'm better now at communicating
because I'm communicating with love and instead of with sort of
(20:53):
passionate arguments that weren't persuading anybody
anyway. Yeah, you.
You. Certainly would have won the
debate society in high school orcollege.
You were a good debater. Well, AI was a debater and I
still debate publicly from time to time, but what I've learned
is that it doesn't work that well.
What works better is to be a good listener and really
(21:15):
understand the other point person's point of view so well
that you can articulate it back to them.
And then they can begin to trustyou because they feel heard and
understood. And then and only then can you
interject. Maybe an idea that they hadn't
thought of, but they'll be in a more receptive mode because they
don't have their armor on, because they're worried that
you're going to embarrass them or attack them in some way and
(21:37):
and make them look stupid. I'm more effective now in
communicating than I used to be.Thank you for that little dose
of emotional intelligence because that is exactly what you
just described. So I want to understand for you,
knowing that you had to sell Whole Foods three years ago and.
That was back in 2017, so it was8 years ago.
I retired three years ago, but Istayed on after Amazon bought
(22:00):
the I signed A5 year contract with Amazon.
After the sale, they wanted me to stay on, so I fulfilled my
commitment. Thank you for correcting me
because I want to know what it was like psychologically,
emotionally, to have that shift of no longer being in charge,
(22:21):
but certainly having influence. And how did that affect you on a
on a more deeply personal level?That's a great question.
So the first thing is, is that, let me just say, I mean, I
people tell me all the time Whole Foods is a different
company now that Amazon's boughtit.
And that's it's true. But what people don't often
(22:44):
understand is, is that there wasa huge win, win, win that
happened when Amazon bought Whole Foods.
So let me just tell you a littlebit, people don't know.
So our biggest problem the, the thing I talked about with Amazon
before we agreed to sell to them, I said, you know, guys, we
need to drop our prices. And these shareholder activists,
if you're selling something for a dollar and you start selling
(23:06):
it for $0.90, well, in the shortterm, their sales just dropped
10%. The same store sales drop 10%
and your profits probably drop 30 or 40% with that, with those
price reductions. Now, if you do it and you have
enough time, the world will get around.
Well, hopefully it's a lot less expensive than it used to be.
So I'm going to do more shoppingthere.
(23:27):
But there's a lag period where shareholder activist trying to
take over your company, you can't have, you can't, you don't
have the luxury of doing it. But that's what we needed to do.
Our competition, the supermarkets had caught up.
They were matching, they were beating us in price.
They were they were beginning tomatch us and get closer to
matching us in quality. Their stores were nicer looking,
(23:47):
better. We were faced with some really
tough competition. So we needed to drop prices.
We just couldn't do it as an independent company.
So one of my first conversationswith Amazon was, guys, here's
what we need to do strategically.
Are you willing to let us do this?
And they were. We dropped prices 4 times in the
first two years after Amazon bought Whole Foods.
That cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars in lost
(24:10):
profits, but it positioned WholeFoods in the they Amazon was
willing to think long term and let us do it.
And that's paid off because he very seldom healed the whole
whole paycheck joke any longer. It's because Whole Foods is far
more price competitive. We still think we have the
highest quality, but the gap between our prices and our
competitors is greatly lessened,greatly lessened.
(24:32):
Secondly, our team members benefited.
It was a win for them because 30days within 30 days of making
that deal, Amazon raised the hourly pay of everyone was on
not on salary, but everybody that was working for the company
hourly got a pay increase and the minimum went to $15.00 an
hour back in 2017, which is verygood pay in 2017 for the lowest
(24:57):
pay. And of course everybody else got
ratcheted up. That cost him hundreds of
millions of dollars to do as well.
But again, in positioned Whole Foods as a good employer slowed
down our turnover rates and people stuck around a lot
longer. And that was really good for the
morality organization. Our suppliers, our suppliers won
in that deal because Amazon studied all of our all of our
(25:19):
sales that, you know, they put it into their machine learning
and they studied our sales and, and they picked up a lot of our
suppliers that they had, they weren't using before, but they
had no idea how how good our sales were with them and, and
then they didn't make us drop any suppliers.
So Whole Foods was it was a win for our suppliers.
In fact, Amazon brought that same thing.
(25:41):
We could see what their sales volume was as well.
And in some cases we picked up some of the products that they
were doing really well for Amazon that we didn't really
know about. It was good for our investors
because there was a 30% increasein the stock price when Amazon
bought the company. So they they all got, they got
paid off and made a nice gain onit.
It was good for our, our foundations because not only did
(26:03):
Amazon not cut back Whole Foods Markets, Whole Planet Foundation
or Whole Kids Foundation or Whole City Foundation, they gave
money to them. They helped us improve the
mission of those organizations. And I suppose finally the
government gained because there were lots more taxes paid by the
shareholders by the higher wagesthe team members were getting.
(26:24):
It's a, it was a win, win, win all around.
Now, that being said, of course there were some problems.
There were some cultural challenges that Whole Foods had.
In general, Amazon was respectful of Whole Foods's
culture. They weren't.
But you know, there's a certain arrogance when you buy a company
that your culture must be better.
You wouldn't have bought them inthe first place.
I ultimately did leave the company because of disagreements
(26:44):
I was having with Amazon's leadership.
That was the catalyst for me to to leave.
It's your, your original question was how did that, you
know, feel not having control any longer?
You know, I still had a big influence on Whole Foods, but I
was losing most of those arguments, not not because it
was rational, but because of power.
You know what the final straw was, was back in 2017 when they
(27:08):
bought us and then you COVID hitin 2020.
And then a year after COVID had hit, all of our team members
were going to work every day except the ones in our corporate
offices. They were working remotely.
And I just thought that was terrible for the morality
organization that we had this sort of privileged elite.
Everybody else had to go work, but our privileged elite could
(27:30):
work at home. So I talked to Jose, talking to
Amazon about, I said, look, I this is terrible for our
culture. It's terrible for morality.
I got to bring these people back.
It's been a year. The vaccinations are out now.
I'm, I'm going to do a call backto office and they, they
wouldn't let me do it. And I, I remember talking to the
guy I was reporting to Dave Clark, who at that point was one
of the three CE OS at Amazon. And I said, Dave, look, this is
(27:53):
terrible for morale. You can see that we really need
to bring people back. It's the cultures fraying as a
result of this. And he wouldn't let me do it.
And I said, trust me, I'm the general in the field.
Trust me, I know what's best forWhole Foods and he just lost it.
Then he said, you know, he just,and I describe it in detail in
the book, he used a lot of F words and that I was, you know,
(28:15):
why can't I just shut up and take orders?
I, I, I've seen the, I've seen the quote that must have been
that must, I mean again on a personal level, how did you
metabolize that? I realized when I left that day,
I think, I think it's time for me to go.
But that's such a big decision because after, after that, at
that point, after 43 years, 44 years, and I love Whole Foods.
(28:37):
It's my daughter, it's my child.I love it so much.
But I, I didn't come to a hasty decision.
I sat on it for several months, talk to people I love and care
about, examine my own heart. Is this, what's the right thing
for me? What's it, what's the win, win,
win? What's good for me, what's good
for Whole Foods, what's going tobe good for the world at large?
And there was something else I wanted to do, which is, you
(28:59):
know, love life and my, my shirt.
I want to create this holistic Health Center.
I wanted to do it. And I really felt like that it
was time for me to move on. I'd done what I could do.
I couldn't protect Whole Foods anymore from Amazon.
I was losing all the fights, allthe arguments.
And I had a passion. I wanted to go try this.
And I knew I'd regret it if I didn't try it.
(29:20):
So I did another. I did a guided spiritual
journey. I'd read Michael Pollan's book.
It's so funny, I was just about to ask you, did you use fat
medicine or psycho dogs or any, or any kind of, you know, a
spiritual journey to help you with this?
Because that seems to be a themefrom the past.
I did a five day not to make thedecision, but before I retired
(29:41):
from Whole Foods I knew I was this transition was going to be
very difficult for me. So I did a five day guided
spiritual journey that had plantmedicines, breath work.
I did 5 days of breath work as well and I journaled and it was
all done in a one-on-one with the therapist in a retreat like
setting. I had a huge breakthrough and I
(30:01):
tried describing the book on thelast day.
It breath work not in ceremony, not on plant medicines.
It all came together and I and Ijust felt.
I felt for the first time in my life I felt unconditional love
for myself. I saw my innocent child that had
made a lot of mistakes but wanted to do good, had a
beautiful heart. I saw that child.
(30:23):
I love that child. For the first time, I really
felt unconditional love for myself.
Then I felt unconditional love for the the miracle of
existence. It is a miracle to be alive.
My God, it seems so incredible to be a living being with
trillions of cells. We get to see and move and touch
and feel and love and have friends and create things.
(30:43):
It's a blast. It's a miracle.
And I had unconditional love forall of existence and then
finally had unconditional love for the Creator, for all that is
God that we're part of, right? It's not separate, but part of
that. And it and it was just, it's
just and I just cried and cried and cried.
I cried on how long it was just cry, crying of joy.
(31:04):
That really helped me make the transition.
And Michael Pollan's book, you know, I read how how to change
your mind and that that influenced me.
You know what? I'm going to do my own guided
spiritual journey here. I made a lot of inquiries and
found a really great, great woman I worked with and.
And yeah, highly recommended. Michael was just here in Santa
Fe and, and so he's a, he's a big fan of MEA.
(31:26):
And so this is a perfect bridge to talk about what you're doing
now, because in many ways, for alot of people at 69 years old,
they would get to a place and say, OK, I'm going to retire or
I'm going to just, I don't know,be on a bunch of boards or, you
know, whatever, whatever is being boring.
(31:48):
I totally agree. You know, John and I have a lot
in common. So, but instead for you, John,
you chose to take a path that isvery simpatico to the path I've
I've chosen as well. There's a lot of comparability
between what you're doing with love life, which amazing name
and what we're doing here at MEA.
(32:10):
So tell tell our listeners and and our big community about what
love life is about. And your first location I know
has opened in LA and you probably have other locations
opening soon. What is love life?
How's it going and what are yourbiggest lessons so far?
That's I'll unpack that. There's a lot to that actually.
(32:30):
The first thing what love life is it's it's a it's a one stop
holistic health membership club.So our first locations in LA
down in El Segundo Beach cities,Manhattan Beach, and it's
located literally like next doorto one of Whole Foods Market's
(32:50):
most successful stores in the Southern California.
So I, I had the advantage. I know all of the best stores
Whole Foods Market has. I know what their sales are, at
least I did, you know, my date is a little stale, but I, I know
the directions. And I'd like to say if this idea
wouldn't, if it doesn't work in LA, it won't work because LA is,
(33:11):
is really a very special place and in the forefront of a lot of
Wellness and eating and health trends in America.
So, but I would have opened the first one in Austin if we could
have found a location. So I'm very picky about real
estate. If you, if you don't get that
right, then that might be the end of the, the, the journey
(33:32):
right there. So we found a great location in,
in El Segundo in LA area. It's an old Best Buy.
So it's, it's big, it's 45,000 square feet.
That's a big, big box. And then we, we have a healthy
plant forward restaurant. It's not a vegan restaurant, but
it's plant forward, it's healthy, it's Whole Foods,
(33:52):
primarily plant based. We have a state-of-the-art
fitness center and gym. We have a yoga studio, we have
Pilates studio, won't surprise you.
We do breath work there. We've got a great spa, so
massage facials of the differentthings you might get in a high
end resort spa or really good high quality day spa.
(34:14):
We have all this recovery modalities and biohacking stuff,
so from cryotherapy to pimp machines to hyperbaric oxygen
chambers, red light therapy, infrared saunas, regular saunas,
coal plunges, big steam room, a lymphatic compression suit that
(34:38):
people can wear. So we have all of these recovery
modalities and healing accelerants.
We also have 3 pickleball courts, indoor pickleball
courts. That's a community builder for
us. But really the most important
thing we're doing is that we have a, we have primary medical
care for people. Our healthcare system, as we
know, is broken in many ways. And one of the ways it's broken
(35:01):
is we're operating on a system that I call a plumber's model.
When do you hire a plumber Chip?When something's not going well.
That's generally when people seea doctor when something's going
wrong, and that's probably OK through much of history, but
it's what killing people today are.
Chronic diseases, heart disease,cancer, obesity, type 2
(35:26):
diabetes, stroke, autoimmune diseases.
These develop in most cases overdecades, and they are very
impacted by our diet and lifestyles.
People are still seeing a doctorfor the plumbers model.
And by the time you're going to have a heart attack or a stroke
or you get diagnosed with cancer, wow, it's all they're
(35:48):
going to do is mostly deal with your symptoms.
They can't really reverse those diseases through most cases.
You know, one, maybe one or two cancers that can be, can really
be contained with drugs. But for the most part, they're
just dealing with the symptoms. So our, our vision with love
life is we now have very sophisticated testing protocols
(36:11):
that we can use. So we're going to do
comprehensive testing with people and find out the
baseline, where are they? How healthy are they?
What are their opportunities? We're, we're all on a health
journey, right? So how far along are we on our,
where are we on our health journey?
And then if people start workingwith us, we can create a plan
for them to become healthier. Then we begin to track them.
(36:35):
So things like Apple Watches andaura rings and continuous
glucose monitors, I know AI is going to be a big thing.
We're going to be we're going tobe wearing like one of my
friends was showing these meta glasses.
I think they are that that take pictures.
He's got AAI that he talks to where these things are going to
(36:57):
be integrated into our life. So we're going to have up to
date tracking of our biometrics and there, so we're going to be
able to monitor ourselves. We're going to be able to then
we retest you create a plan. So the doctor and we have a,
what we call a, we have a WellCare team that works with
our members to help them make certain changes in exercise and
(37:19):
sleep and stress management and diet that and then we track the
progress over time. So first you test, then you
treat, then you track and then you transform.
That's that's the four TS. And so that's what we're trying
to do. We're trying to help people
become the healthiest version ofthemselves, not just physically,
(37:39):
but also emotionally and spiritually.
So we do have breath work. We do have meditation classes,
we do do yoga classes. We will do psychedelic therapy
when it's legal in like it is now legal in Colorado and Oregon
and will someday. And New Mexico and New Mexico
now, yeah, it just, it just passed in April and it won't be
(38:05):
publicly available for two or three more years, but in two or
three years is the first time anybody's hearing it.
We will be offering psychedelic actually it's psilocybin,
specifically medically assisted psilocybin cohorts here at our
2600 acre ranch in in Santa Fe. That's really great to hear.
And and in my own journey, when I did the guided spiritual
(38:31):
journey, the medicine plant medicines were were psilocybin
and MDMA and different combinations of it.
I and that's very powerful healing combination because the
MDMA is in a pathogen. It opens our heart.
The the, the psilocybin's like spirit.
It takes us deeper and that combination, I mean, you know,
(38:53):
we know that science is showing us that people that have this
PTSD that, you know, veterans, Navy Seals, that they can, you
know, talk therapy isn't going to solve their problems.
They need to do deeper, deeper dives.
And I so I'm very hopeful that that plant medicines, you know,
started out as a therapeutic model and, you know, we'll see
(39:18):
where that leads to. That's how they did marijuana,
right? Started out as medical marijuana
and then they legalized it as people's.
The world didn't come to an end.This first of all, I love this.
I love love. I love, love life.
If you go visit love Life, if you ever come, if you get to LA,
let me know. I'll get you AVIP tour.
It is an amazing place. I am literally hanging out with
(39:39):
Rich Roll 2 days from now, so inLA.
Tell Rich. I've contacted him a couple
times. I mean, I did the podcast with
him. I just can't, I can't have been
able to get him to visit it. Oh gosh.
Why don't you guys come visit? We'll get your day passes and
you can you'll like. I, you know what, I've, I've
been actually write him. I've after this guy after we're
done here, I'm going to, I'm going to text him and just say,
(40:01):
you know what, we're hanging outon Thursday.
Maybe we you come a few minutes early because we're actually
we're at the LAX. Oh well, we're 4 miles.
We're 4 miles South of LAX. All right, we got it.
We got this is going to happen, I think and.
When you get it confirmed up, let me know.
So I want to notify them that you're coming so you get.
Yeah. Oh, my gosh.
OK, so this is really the culmination of a journey from
(40:24):
conscious eating to conscious living to conscious medicine or,
you know, healthy natural medicine.
It sounds too good to be true, which I love.
I like the idealism. What's been the.
What has been the biggest surprises to you or challenges?
(40:45):
Because when you start somethinglike this and you're dealing
with, you know, the wallet of your consumer and they're used
to spending this kind of thing by having the health insurance,
you know, paying for it. How do?
How is? How are you making it work
financially without getting intothe details?
That's a great question. And we're not profitable yet.
(41:08):
So let's just state that out front and we made some
acquisitions that didn't work out for us that I mean the
company started kind of during COVID times and like we had a
vegan cafe in Florida that was profitable when we bought it.
And then we moved into a bigger location.
I'm really just a block away andthey didn't do well in that new
(41:30):
location. So then we, we bought a online
coaching business called Mastering Diabetes and then that
actually also did not work out for us.
So we made some, so we made someacquisitions and we bought a
telehealth business, which is also struggled.
So the acquisitions have not worked out well for us.
(41:50):
The holistic Health Center is growing very nicely and it's
just growing, growing every day.It's got a nice pace to it, but
it's still probably, I estimate that our current sales growth
rate, we're probably will be profitable about a little, maybe
a little less than a year from now.
Well, that's good. I think so too, a year and a
half to profitability is pretty good and with a particularly
(42:12):
with a major capital investment that we made.
So, but one of the things that we've learned is that you know,
we have you don't have to be a medical member.
So we also have just a fitness and recovery member that's less
expensive. So we aren't getting as many.
So you can have a fitness and recovery membership, or you can
(42:33):
have an A medical only membership, or you can have an
optimized membership and medicalonly doesn't give you access to
the the facilities, but you may want our doctors.
And so that's actually growing pretty nicely.
But together we're only doing, Ithink about 30% of our members
are actual and medical members that have the medical part.
(42:54):
So that there are people are using US for fit for pickleball,
fitness workouts classes. And that's fine.
Only the vision, of course, was we really want people to be
doing the. Whole the whole holistic, yeah.
Hoping is is that as people get more comfortable there that
we'll be able to convert, trade up a lot of the people in the
(43:15):
second year to get medical. We haven't gotten to the second
year yet, so we don't know yet. No, that's great.
What would you say you've been along term, long term advocate of
health. What do you think people get
wrong about longevity? You know, what is, what is,
what's the common belief people have around longevity or health
(43:36):
that you think is maybe over hyped or it could be even
something that you're currently offering that you think is like,
OK, people want it, but I'm not sure it's all that valuable.
I'm going to answer that question, but I first I'm going
to show you that what I think one of the most confusing things
is so how many one out of how many people do you think lives,
(43:58):
Americans live to be 100? Oh, it's .001% or something like
that. If you were to transfer that
into a, how many out of 100 is that one in 101 in 1000?
I mean it'd be 1. I didn't be one out of every
10,000. You know, Chip, you're the,
that's not correct. You're the first person I've
ever asked that question to thatit was on the low side of that.
(44:19):
I mean, it's one out of about one out of 3 to 4000.
Americans make us to 100. Most people guess.
Believe it or not, most people guess one out of 100, or even
two or three out of 100. In the future, yes.
But most people, most people think a lot of people live to be
100. And it's very, very rare you
know that, But most people don't.
So that that's something people get wrong in terms of longevity.
(44:42):
The other things are that peopleare looking for a technology,
their hack, they, they really dobelieve that we're going to be
able to live to be much longer because the singularity is
coming. And the major advances we've had
in longevity have primarily beensimple fixes like sanitation,
(45:04):
getting cleaner water was a huge.
And then if you, if you know, you're, I mean, here's here's
something people don't know is that for almost the entire
history of the human race, the average lifespan was about 30.
And it only went up first in, inWestern Europe and United
States. And then it spread to the rest
of the world. It started to go up in the late
19th century and it started to go up because a people started
(45:30):
to have better, cleaner water. That's, that was the single
biggest problem was tainted water.
You got, you got, you died from dysentery or cholera or you got
some kind of waterborne disease.So sanitation.
And then it was vaccinations andthen antibiotics.
You know, we didn't have antibiotics until, you know,
penicillin was invented in like 1943 for that.
(45:53):
If you had a, if you like a got shot or you, you cut yourself,
you might have to amputate your arm or your finger or whatever
to because of blood poisoning. So sanitation, vaccines,
antibiotics or the primary reasons we started to see
lifespan go up. Also more food I mean just
(46:15):
enough calories was a real problem.
Of course now we have too many calories to process foods and
and one thing people don't know is America spent United States
spends far more money per personper capita on healthcare than
any other nation in the world. But we only rank like I forget
it's either 40th or 50th 48th yeah 48th and longevity there
(46:35):
you have it despite the factory spend more money than anybody
else. So clearly that's not, it's not
a, it's not a good sustainable system.
So I think people are looking for longevity in all the wrong
places. It's going to start, it's going
to start with basically being a healthier diet.
Stop eating all the processed foods, the sugars, the calorie
(47:00):
dense foods. They're they, they really, they
really hurt us in the long run. I mean, I think Michael Pollan
said it really well. Eat real food, mostly plants and
not too much. That's a good formula.
And that means don't we eat a lot of potato chips and
Coca-Cola and foods that are just, you know, or Michael also
(47:21):
said, if it comes from a plant, eat it.
If it's made in a plant, don't. I think lifestyle and diet are
something people really radically underestimate.
That's the thing people have gotto get right first and then the
bio hacks and things like that are going to be additive.
But we are making progress. I, I make the joke that I'll
probably live, I'll, I'll probably live to 1000 at 8:00.
(47:43):
But I'll it'll, I'll be, I'll be100 years old for the for 900 of
those years. Well, let's talk about that.
So, so I think the chances you live to 100 are pretty good.
Do you think you would ever retire and what what is the word
retirement mean to you in in thepresent day as opposed to 50
years ago? Retirement was a different
(48:04):
thing. Well, people didn't, you know,
people didn't live that long. So and they were, they were a
lot more blue collar workers andfarmers.
And by the time they got to be 65, they were worn down and they
didn't have hip replacements andthey didn't have, they didn't
have thing for their backs. And they were just really, I
mean, I remember most of the menwhen they got to be in their 50s
(48:25):
when I was a boy, they all use canes women too.
I mean, they're, but mostly men,you don't see very many people
using canes these days and it might be temporary because
they've had a hip replacement or, or they had a knee
replacement, so they have to useit temporarily.
The answer is no. I mean, I think what I've done
is I've downshifted. I'm still very purpose driven.
(48:46):
I'm not working as hard as I didwhen I was building Whole Foods.
You know, I mean, I worked really hard for many decades and
now I'm not prepared to do that again.
I want to, I want to travel more.
I want to spend more time with my friends and people I love.
I want to read more books. I might write some more books.
I want to have a more human paced lifestyle than I had when
(49:07):
I was, you know, in my 20s and 30s and 40s.
But still, purpose matters. I think purpose is, oh, this is
very important for longevity. I think purpose is one of the
most important things for longevity.
When you have a purpose, you're communicating to the cells in
your body, hey, it's not time todie yet.
(49:28):
You got to stay with me. I've got to fulfill this
purpose. And guess what?
The body responds to that. I think that that so purpose
really helps people to live longer.
A lot of people when they retire, they don't have a
purpose any longer and they just, they're dead in a few
years. They just kind of rot like die
on the vine, so to speak. So retirement has been proven to
(49:49):
accelerate your mortality by twoyears.
Oh, there you go. I'm not, I'm, I'm not going to
retire everything. Two last questions 1 is a
question I love asking at MEA because you know, as we get
older, the what gets most valuable in our life is time.
Time is what's scarce. And so the question I would ask
you and then let me, let me preface the question by how I
(50:10):
might answer it 10 years from now.
What would you regret if you didn't learn it or do it now?
So anticipated regret about something that you know you may
regret 10 years from now is a form of wisdom.
It is a catalyst for taking action.
And for me, when I moved to, youknow, to Baja, to Mexico part
(50:33):
time, learning Spanish and learning to surf was something I
learned in my late mid to late 50s at a time where, frankly, I
had a mindset that said I was too old.
But that anticipated regret helped me to see that.
Yeah, I don't, I don't want to have that regret in the future.
We don't have anticipated regretat 20, but we certainly do have
it at 50607080. So what might you regret if you
(50:57):
didn't learn it or do it now? Well, the, the, the most obvious
answer is love life falls into that category.
It's like, OK, Chip, I feel likeI know how to help thousands of
people now, but eventually millions of people to live
longer, have a healthier, more vital life because part of what
you have, we're creating with love life, which I didn't
(51:18):
mention is a, is a community of people.
It's very difficult for people to change diets and lifestyles.
But if they do it in a communityof support with other people
that are on a similar journey, that's the secret of a A and
overcome addictions for people. They're doing it in a community
of support for people that are fellow travellers.
So if I didn't try this, I'd regret it.
(51:40):
I mean, if I, I'll regret it if I fail at it.
But if I hadn't tried, I'd always would have wondered.
I always would have wondered what might have been, and so
that would be a regret. Social science has shown to us
that the regret of the thing youdidn't do is more than twice as
painful as compared to the regret of the thing you did and
(52:03):
wish you hadn't done. I didn't know that, but I it
intuitively feels like that's got to be true.
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.
That's great. So imagine someone 20 years
younger than you has the pleasure of being able to come
up to you and say, I would love to take you for tea or coffee
next week for 20 minutes. And I'd love to have you show
(52:25):
up, John, with a a wisdom bumpersticker.
Not an actual physical one, but just like one in essence, a
piece of wisdom that you've learned along the way in your
personal life, in your in your work life, in your spiritual
life, a singular one that has your wisdom fingerprints all
over it. And what's the origin story
behind how you came up with thatwisdom?
(52:46):
What might that be? I think there's a few.
So let me let me try a few out for you because I think if I was
talking to a very young person, like in their finishing up
College in their very early 20s,my advice would be different.
My advice would be follow your heart.
Don't do things just because youjust want to have financial
(53:08):
security or you want to please your parents, or you're just
afraid to do anything else. Instead, I really do believe
we're all called to a hero's journey.
And yet fear, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, fear of being
(53:28):
rejected by friends or family pulls people back from answering
that call. Like I have a friend, for
example, who really wanted to bea writer and he went, he became
a very successful lawyer, but henever was, he never really was
happy in the law. And I remember, I don't know,
four or five years ago, he was talking about how he regrets
(53:50):
that he hadn't become a writer. And I said, well, hey, you still
could, you still could. And he says, no, I can't, I'm
too old. And he said only if you think
you are. But, but that was a regret for
him. He didn't follow his heart.
So I that's my advice to youngerpeople.
That's my bumper sticker. Follow your heart for younger
people. But then there's some other
(54:11):
things that I think that I've learned that I would share.
That would be my bumper stickers.
The first one I've already mentioned.
Look for the win, win, win. Look for what's good for you,
good for the person you're interacting with, but also good
for the larger society. If you think about it, Chip,
that's a complete ethical system.
There's no situation you'll everfind yourself in.
(54:33):
Well, that's not the best life strategy.
Win, win, win. If you take that as a framework,
you will find your life to be much more successful and much
happier. And the final one is a wisdom
that my wife has taught me. This is the most important one
of all. She says, you know, John, it's
much simpler than people think, simpler to understand, not
(54:55):
necessarily simple to execute, she says.
Just love everyone all the time,no exceptions.
And she says, you know, that makes things simpler because now
you don't have to figure out I love this person, but I hate
this person. You judge this person and you're
always sorting everybody into certain categories.
(55:15):
There's just one category. There's love everyone, all the
time, no exceptions. There's no greater wisdom than
I've learned in life than that one.
And that's what I'd most like topass on.
You married a very wise. Woman I did, I did.
I that's, that's by far the bestthing that happened in my life
was marrying, meeting Deborah and marrying her.
Well, I love you and I appreciate you.
(55:37):
You've been sort of from afar a bit of a role model for me and a
mentor. And I appreciate that, you know,
when I first showed you my peak model and this, this heart in
the, in the form of like this, this, you know, perpetuating
circle, I usually like that's it.
Culture leads and enthusiastic employees, loyal customers,
(56:01):
growing profit and growing market share and increased
profitability. You invest back in the culture
and, and, and you did it and you've done it and you have been
an inspiration to many so. Thank you.
You're not going to get away with just hands injuring it on
that. I'm just going to say right back
to you. You've been an inspiration for
me starting with Peak, starting with our work in conscious
(56:24):
capitalism. I so admire what you've done
with your, your Elden Elder Wisdom Academy because I, I've a
lot of people have gone to it and talked about it to me.
You're making a huge difference.You're helping a lot of people
be happier and wiser. And, you know, going through the
aging cycle, it, it, it can be challenging at times because
(56:47):
we're all getting closer to our deaths.
You've brought such wisdom and leadership to it.
You are you, you're a very good person.
You've done really good work in this lifetime.
I'm, I'm very proud to, to know you.
Thank you so much. So people should pick up John's
book, The whole Story. Spectacular.
A good read. We got a nice brief sense of it,
but it's much deeper read than what we could do in an hour.
(57:10):
Also check out Love Life and it's www.love.life I think.
Is that correct? That's.
It you got it. It's that simple, John, thank
you. I hope to see you soon and been
wonderful to have you here on mynew podcast, The Midlife
Chrysalis. Thank you for watching the
Midlife Chrysalis Podcast.
Purpose is one of the most important things for longevity.
When you have a purpose, you're communicating to the cells in
your body, hey, it's not time todie yet.
You got to stay with me. I've got to fulfill this
purpose. And guess what?
The body responds to that. The point is, is that a business
is a win, win, win. Life is fundamentally this
(00:20):
adventure of learning and growing and changing and
evolving. Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis
podcast with Chip Conley. Well, I'm excited about this
episode with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods Markets
and the new founder of Love Life.
The reason is John, in the, in the course of this episode,
(00:40):
talks about the lessons he's hadalong the way.
He's in his mid 70s now, but he's learned some things along
the way and he's built some wisdom.
And so you're going to hear about that.
You'll also hear about the fact that often it's not been a
crisis that's led to a transformation for him.
It's been some kind of sometimesplant medicine, some kind of
(01:01):
whole earth, whole life journey that might include breath work
or a spiritual journey that led him to making a decision that
really transformed his life. I hope you'll enjoy the episode.
You know, he's been a role modeland mentor to me for for many,
many years. So you'll see a lot of love
between the two of us over the course of this episode.
(01:22):
We've always appreciated talkingabout how business can be
different. And I'm just curious if you can
tell us a little bit about your origin story, how Whole Foods
got started, but especially the the ages you have been along the
way when you've had particular landmark occasions, including
ultimately the sale to Amazon. For the record, I've written
(01:47):
this is now a year old. I wrote The Whole Story, which
is a 403 page book that tells the whole journey.
It's called The Whole Story. It's it's my spiritual journey.
But when I started the business,when I started working on it
with Renee, I was 24. Renee, my girlfriend was 20.
(02:08):
And then when I retired from Whole Foods.
Now, I just turned 69 when I retired from Whole Foods.
And that was how long ago, John?That was It'll be three years in
September. Along the way let's you know
from 24 to 69 that's that's quite a you know, for me with
(02:29):
you want to leave my hotel company.
It was just 24 years for you, itwas 45 years.
This the name of the podcast is the midlife chrysalis.
There have been chrysalis is that might have looked like a
crisis at the time, but they ledyou to having more wisdom as a
result. So along the way with Whole
Foods, what might have been a chrysalis that you had in your
(02:53):
40s or your 50s that related to the company that ultimately
turned out to be to to be a transformational experience?
In the whole story, I write of several of those.
There's not just one, There wereseveral transitions that
occurred over time. Even starting out the book I
(03:15):
talk about how I was actually taking a very large dose of LSD
when I was 20, had just turned 22 and and I had experienced ego
death or dissolving into the onethe one being and how that
changed me. I have to soon after that I
moved into a vegetarian. Co-op wasn't a vegetarian, but I
(03:37):
was interested in all things counterculture and I was looking
for the meaning of life. I was looking for my own hero's
journey And that, by the way, that's when Star Wars was just
coming out and I found it. I found it in food.
I, I moved into this housing co-authors vegetarian.
I became a vegetarian. I became the food buyer.
(03:58):
I became the I was passionate. I learned how to cook.
I was passionate about all things food.
I I'd never made the connection before then how important it was
to nourish the body and not justfuel it.
I thought I was a car and I needed to go in the gas station
like, you know, drive through jack-in-the-box or McDonald's,
fuel up and be on your way. So that changed everything for
(04:20):
me. And then we launched the
business and I suppose the next big thing that occurred that had
a big impact on me that is worthmentioning was at age
30/31/1984, I took MDMA for the first time it when it was still
legal. And that was a huge heart
(04:41):
opening experience for me. And I, I, I realized then, which
I've never forgotten, is that love is the most important thing
in life. And then I wanted to make Whole
Foods the happiest place to workin America.
And I wanted to, I wanted to open up love, to build a company
based on love. And so that was a huge
transformational point for me personally and for Whole Foods,
(05:03):
I might add, that also led to one of my Co founders was so
upset he had nicknamed me wacky Macky because I was, you know, I
was going off and I wanted to start a holistic health place
called Lifeworks. Oh, that's when I also started
doing breath work and I also started to meditate.
And I also studied the course ofmiracles, which I've been
(05:26):
studying ever since. So over 41 years now studying
that Course of Miracles. That's been a big part of my
spiritual path. And I think the next big
transition now we're getting into my 30s, right?
So I break up with my my first wife after about six years, and
that's obviously a big transformation.
I didn't have any children with her, but she had three
(05:47):
stepdaughters, of which I'm close to all three of them
still. They're all adults now,
obviously. But then I found my, my true
love. I found my, my soulmate,
Deborah. We've been together now 35
years. She's a very, very loving
person, the most loving person I've ever known.
And, and so I was on this path of love and then then I'm with
(06:08):
her. And so that part of my being is
really continued to develop through that relationship.
I went through this trans transition of breaking up in my
mid 30s, finding my great true love.
And meanwhile Whole Foods is continuing to grow and grow and
grow and grow and Co founders are leaving, new people are
(06:29):
coming on. The business is is is
accelerating. But I was in a really good space
for that to happen. So I do think the mid 30s was a
huge early 30s to mid 30s was a huge period of transformation
for me personally. And then really the next really
pivotal event was when Whole Foods was, we were attacked by
(06:51):
the shareholder activists who were trying to take over our
company. There were a couple of coup
attempts along the way in the journey that had a big impact on
me as well. But I'm skipping over those for
for brevity's sake. But then when this shareholder
activist came in, that ultimately led to the sale of
the company to Amazon. So that's something most people
don't understand. We didn't want to sell to
(07:12):
Amazon. We wanted to stay independent.
I just didn't think we were going to be able to do it and
they were going to take us over.They told us they were.
I thought we needed time to lower prices and and get it, do
a big reset and we weren't goingto have time to do it.
So Amazon was our best solution.And then of course, retiring
from Whole Foods now not quite three years ago, that was a big
(07:34):
transition as well. So there's lots of different
transitions over that or transformations over that period
of time. Yeah, but there's a lot to
unpack there. So let's start with the idea of
it. It feels as if, whether it was
through psychedelics or through breath work or other modalities,
(07:55):
personal growth and Wellness modalities, many of your
transformations were not necessarily a result of
something bad happening, but it was more like a mind opening
experience or a heart opening experience.
When it comes to Deborah. Is that pretty accurate, John?
Absolutely. And along the way, you know, I
think one of the things that's interesting that you you talk
(08:16):
about love. And as a Californian, I grew up
with this point of view, which was, Oh my God, people from
Texas, you know, business peoplefrom Texas are just hardcore and
tough. And then, you know, you've got
Southwest Airlines where the stock ticker symbol is LUV and
you have Whole Foods markets that was built on love.
(08:37):
Talk about what it was like to do business in Texas back in the
day. You know, long ago when you were
getting started and, and Austin,where you where you started was
a relatively small place, most people didn't know the cool, fun
hipster side of Austin. So talk about that if you don't
(08:58):
mind. One way I explain Austin to
people is I got there in 1972 and went to the University of
Texas my freshman year at Trinity University in San
Antonio. When I got to Austin, the metro
area, the MSA was 250,000 people, of which 50,000 were
students at the University of Texas.
Today, it's 2.6 million people. It's literally more than 10
(09:20):
times larger than it was still 50,000 students at UT.
So it was the state capital, butyou might say back in 1972, it
didn't have a tech industry really at all.
Dell, Dell Computer, Michael Dell was still in junior high
school, mid school, mid, you know, he's 10 years younger than
me. It was the state capital and it
had a university and it had a music scene.
(09:43):
Thought music scene goes way back.
So they were cosmic Cowboys because they had a country and
western and then sort of a rock'n'roll country synthesis.
That was kind of Austin. It was very inexpensive place to
live. No traffic, no, no traffic.
You could get anywhere in Austinin 10 minutes back then.
Although I will point out many of the roads people are familiar
(10:06):
with didn't exist. So the north part of Austin was
where where Round Rock is and where Dell Computer is.
It was just, you know, just fields.
So Austin's changed and grown a lot.
I mean, Whole Foods contributed to that growth.
Honestly, we, we were next to Dell and we're probably still
(10:27):
the second most successful large, let's say if Elon Musk
really moves his headquarters toAustin and that that will no
longer be true. But we, for a long time, we were
always #2 to Dell. We've seen it all grow up around
us. Based upon your the wisdom
you've cultivated over the yearsand I and I believe that our
painful life lessons are often the raw material for our future
(10:50):
wisdom, What advice might you give to that young 24 year old
or even a 44 year old John Mackey regarding both life but
also what it means to be aceo ofa company like Whole Foods?
1st, I'm going to say that I, I get asked that question a lot.
Honestly, the media almost always ask me that question
(11:13):
because it's you're, you don't intend it this way, Chip, but
it's kind of a gotcha question. Oh yeah, I definitely don't
intend it that way. No, no, they want you to recount
your failures. And I always answer it three
ways. The first one I say, well it
really doesn't matter because my20 year old self would never
have listened to me, so what's the point?
(11:34):
Or I say, well, don't get involved with Mary Kay.
You're going to be, she's going to make you miserable.
So just don't get involved with her.
He wouldn't have listened to that either, probably.
But so, but the real answer is, and, and this, this is really
true. I don't think I would have given
my 20 year old self any advice at all.
(11:55):
And the reason why is my life has worked out wonderfully well.
It's been a, it's been a fabulous journey for me.
Sure, I've made a ton of mistakes along the way.
And you can say, well, I could have saved myself from mistakes,
but those mistakes were how I learned and the learning, the
lessons that I learned made me the man that I am today.
(12:16):
And So what I really go back andtry to avoid those mistakes.
I don't think I would because itall worked out so well.
If it had been a disaster then maybe I would, but it's worked
out really well and I like the way I am today.
So and and and it's been a wonderful, wonderful life, so I
wouldn't change anything. What beliefs?
Or what beliefs have you outgrown over the course of
(12:39):
time? Or what new beliefs have have
you tried on and, and said like,yeah, that that's, that's sort
of a new way of looking at the world that is different than
maybe when I was in my 20s or 30s?
First of all, that's a. That's a, it's almost, that's a
really long conversation becauseI'll, I'll, I can say a few
things, but in general, I mean, what did I know when I was in my
(13:04):
early 20s? Very little.
So I would say that some things I can give you some beliefs of
outgrown. I was an atheist before I took
that large dose of LSD that whenmy ego dissolved and I saw, I
saw who I was part of the one being immortal and we as we all
(13:24):
are, not as a separate ego, but as a manifestation of that one
consciousness. So I've outgrown that and I see
that life is fundamentally this adventure.
It's a spiritual adventure of oflearning and growing and
changing and evolving. I've learned Love's the most
important thing in life. I've learned that the world is
(13:47):
an illusion, more or less. My is basically accurate that it
is that the world does mirror back to us our emotions and
thoughts and feelings. As we become more loving, then
that's how we show up. People are more loving towards
us if we're kind, people are kinder to us.
If we're judgmental and angry, people are more angry and
(14:08):
judgmental towards us. So in some sense, the world is
our mirror and it reflects back to us how we're showing up.
So I've learned that the best philosophy in life is what I
call a win, win, win philosophy.Good for you, good for me, and
good for all of us. I've learned that's pretty much
a universal ethical system. I just talked about this at Ted,
(14:28):
by the way, just a couple of months ago about the Win win,
win. That was my Ted talk.
So I've learned that that's a good way to interact with
everybody all the time. Would you say that conscious
capitalism is basically a win win win system and maybe
describe conscious capitalism? For people, yeah.
Well, I actually feel like capitalism itself rightly
understood as a win, win, win philosophy.
(14:50):
Not that everybody sees it that way or engages it that way, but
fundamentally business outrightly understood is
creating value for all these stakeholders at the same time
they're creating value for customers.
No one has to do business with Whole Foods Market if they and
most people don't. We got like a 3% grocery share.
So if people think it's too expensive or they don't like the
(15:13):
products we sell, then they shopelsewhere.
And so, but we have a lot of people because the business is
up to, I don't know, 23 or $24 billion a year.
We got lots of people that do like that business.
So the customers are benefiting and they wouldn't trade the
employees and the team members. They're voluntarily working for
(15:34):
the business. They don't have, they have other
job opportunities, don't have towork for Whole Foods.
And and many of them do move on,right?
They find a better job and move on, but they're working there
because it's a win for them or they wouldn't be doing it.
Similarly, our suppliers are trading with the business.
Well, the suppliers don't have to trade with you.
I mean, and every business is highly dependent on its
suppliers. And so that's, and it's, they're
(15:56):
trading with you for their own benefit, for their own gain.
Similarly, investors don't have to invest.
They invest because they want toget a return on their
investment. And the communities that you're
part of, they're obsolete, essential to the business
because you're not doing it in isolation.
You're creating value in these communities and if you have a
bad relationship with your community, the business is
(16:17):
really, really going to struggle.
The point is, is that a businessis a win win, win entity.
It's it's creating wins with allthese stakeholders, customers,
employees, suppliers, investors in the communities that they're
part of. That is ultimately a win, win,
win system. I contrast that because most
(16:37):
people think of businesses win, lose.
It's like, well, somebody's winning and somebody else is
losing in competition. But rightly understood, even the
even the even your competitors are winning.
This is how you make progress incapitalism because the
competitors push you to get better.
And you learn from your competitors.
They come up with ideas and waysof doing things you hadn't
(16:58):
thought about before. And so if you're smart, you'll
copy that and that'll make your business better.
And guess what? They're studying you.
So your best ideas are spreading.
I mean, Whole Foods changed. The people don't know this
because they're not. Most people are not old enough.
Whole Foods completely changed the grocery business.
It's so radically different thanit was before we got started.
Give us a couple. Give us two or three examples of
(17:19):
that. Well, the main thing was, is
that when Walmart got into, you know, they started out just
selling general merchandise, butwhen they started selling food,
when they went to the Super center model, super center model
that complete and that was back in the, you know, late 70s,
early 80s, that completely scared all the supermarkets.
How are we going to compete withWalmart?
So one thing they did was they just tried to look compete on
(17:41):
price. So they, they had to cut back
their, their stores got look more like warehouses.
They, they cut back on labor. They didn't do as much service.
They, they just cut everything the bone to make it as cheap as
possible. That was fine if all you cared
about was price. But if you wanted anything else,
then you were you were you weren't going to find it in the
supermarket industry if it. Whole Foods went a different
(18:03):
direction. We made our stores beautiful.
We focused on service to customers.
We began to sell natural organicfoods, which nobody else in the
supermarkets weren't selling those products at all.
And So what generally happened over time was the supermarket's
eventually saw what Whole Foods was doing and they began to
switch their strategies. They began to pick up more
natural organic foods. So it's spread around the
(18:24):
country. We saw, hey, Trader Joe's for a
long time wasn't selling any produce or, and, and then they
saw how well Whole Foods was doing it.
So they started selling produce and that helped their business a
lot. Walmart, Costco, they began to
imitate Whole Foods. They started picking up natural
and organic foods as well. The way we market, the way our
(18:45):
stores looked, the service that we gave supermarkets began to
decide, you know what, we'd rather compete against Toll
Foods Market than Walmart. And they began, I watched
Kroger, Safeway, HEB, Albertsons, they started making
nicer and nicer stores more and more beautiful with more and
more of the products that Whole Foods sold.
Whole Foods has had this major impact that most people don't
(19:06):
realize because they haven't been on this journey with us all
this time, watching the world adapt to the innovations that
Whole Foods created. So that, you know, we didn't do
that alone. The natural foods industry did
it as well. And we were part of that.
And we were learning from other natural food stores and they
were learning from us. But I'd say our natural organic
foods movement has changed the world and hopefully it was one
(19:26):
of not the main leader of that. And in many ways, you were maybe
the most highly high profile person in the movement and at
times with points of view, libertarian points of view that
that sort of surprised people inthe movement.
But what I would just say is that what I've always loved
about you, John, is you speak your mind.
(19:49):
You do not hold back. You also are open to new points
of view and you are a curious learner.
Would you say that's pretty accurate and and is that always
been the case? Yes and yes, But the thing has
changed for me, particularly over the last 10 to 15 years.
Chip is I still say what I thinkand feel, but I'm much kinder
(20:10):
and gentler now. Again, the world is my mirror
and it's if I would speak hard truths to people because I
thought they needed to hear it and they would just cause
reaction against it, they would cross their arms and get angry.
And that was not a good strategy.
It didn't work very well. So I still try to speak my mind,
but I try to do it in a kinder, gentler, more loving voice.
(20:32):
That is based on life experience.
I just regret it took me so manyyears to figure out.
Most people are not convinced byevidence, rationality, or logic.
Confirmation bias is far more powerful than I had realized, so
I have. I'm better now at communicating
because I'm communicating with love and instead of with sort of
(20:53):
passionate arguments that weren't persuading anybody
anyway. Yeah, you.
You. Certainly would have won the
debate society in high school orcollege.
You were a good debater. Well, AI was a debater and I
still debate publicly from time to time, but what I've learned
is that it doesn't work that well.
What works better is to be a good listener and really
(21:15):
understand the other point person's point of view so well
that you can articulate it back to them.
And then they can begin to trustyou because they feel heard and
understood. And then and only then can you
interject. Maybe an idea that they hadn't
thought of, but they'll be in a more receptive mode because they
don't have their armor on, because they're worried that
you're going to embarrass them or attack them in some way and
(21:37):
and make them look stupid. I'm more effective now in
communicating than I used to be.Thank you for that little dose
of emotional intelligence because that is exactly what you
just described. So I want to understand for you,
knowing that you had to sell Whole Foods three years ago and.
That was back in 2017, so it was8 years ago.
I retired three years ago, but Istayed on after Amazon bought
(22:00):
the I signed A5 year contract with Amazon.
After the sale, they wanted me to stay on, so I fulfilled my
commitment. Thank you for correcting me
because I want to know what it was like psychologically,
emotionally, to have that shift of no longer being in charge,
(22:21):
but certainly having influence. And how did that affect you on a
on a more deeply personal level?That's a great question.
So the first thing is, is that, let me just say, I mean, I
people tell me all the time Whole Foods is a different
company now that Amazon's boughtit.
And that's it's true. But what people don't often
(22:44):
understand is, is that there wasa huge win, win, win that
happened when Amazon bought Whole Foods.
So let me just tell you a littlebit, people don't know.
So our biggest problem the, the thing I talked about with Amazon
before we agreed to sell to them, I said, you know, guys, we
need to drop our prices. And these shareholder activists,
if you're selling something for a dollar and you start selling
(23:06):
it for $0.90, well, in the shortterm, their sales just dropped
10%. The same store sales drop 10%
and your profits probably drop 30 or 40% with that, with those
price reductions. Now, if you do it and you have
enough time, the world will get around.
Well, hopefully it's a lot less expensive than it used to be.
So I'm going to do more shoppingthere.
(23:27):
But there's a lag period where shareholder activist trying to
take over your company, you can't have, you can't, you don't
have the luxury of doing it. But that's what we needed to do.
Our competition, the supermarkets had caught up.
They were matching, they were beating us in price.
They were they were beginning tomatch us and get closer to
matching us in quality. Their stores were nicer looking,
(23:47):
better. We were faced with some really
tough competition. So we needed to drop prices.
We just couldn't do it as an independent company.
So one of my first conversationswith Amazon was, guys, here's
what we need to do strategically.
Are you willing to let us do this?
And they were. We dropped prices 4 times in the
first two years after Amazon bought Whole Foods.
That cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars in lost
(24:10):
profits, but it positioned WholeFoods in the they Amazon was
willing to think long term and let us do it.
And that's paid off because he very seldom healed the whole
whole paycheck joke any longer. It's because Whole Foods is far
more price competitive. We still think we have the
highest quality, but the gap between our prices and our
competitors is greatly lessened,greatly lessened.
(24:32):
Secondly, our team members benefited.
It was a win for them because 30days within 30 days of making
that deal, Amazon raised the hourly pay of everyone was on
not on salary, but everybody that was working for the company
hourly got a pay increase and the minimum went to $15.00 an
hour back in 2017, which is verygood pay in 2017 for the lowest
(24:57):
pay. And of course everybody else got
ratcheted up. That cost him hundreds of
millions of dollars to do as well.
But again, in positioned Whole Foods as a good employer slowed
down our turnover rates and people stuck around a lot
longer. And that was really good for the
morality organization. Our suppliers, our suppliers won
in that deal because Amazon studied all of our all of our
(25:19):
sales that, you know, they put it into their machine learning
and they studied our sales and, and they picked up a lot of our
suppliers that they had, they weren't using before, but they
had no idea how how good our sales were with them and, and
then they didn't make us drop any suppliers.
So Whole Foods was it was a win for our suppliers.
In fact, Amazon brought that same thing.
(25:41):
We could see what their sales volume was as well.
And in some cases we picked up some of the products that they
were doing really well for Amazon that we didn't really
know about. It was good for our investors
because there was a 30% increasein the stock price when Amazon
bought the company. So they they all got, they got
paid off and made a nice gain onit.
It was good for our, our foundations because not only did
(26:03):
Amazon not cut back Whole Foods Markets, Whole Planet Foundation
or Whole Kids Foundation or Whole City Foundation, they gave
money to them. They helped us improve the
mission of those organizations. And I suppose finally the
government gained because there were lots more taxes paid by the
shareholders by the higher wagesthe team members were getting.
(26:24):
It's a, it was a win, win, win all around.
Now, that being said, of course there were some problems.
There were some cultural challenges that Whole Foods had.
In general, Amazon was respectful of Whole Foods's
culture. They weren't.
But you know, there's a certain arrogance when you buy a company
that your culture must be better.
You wouldn't have bought them inthe first place.
I ultimately did leave the company because of disagreements
(26:44):
I was having with Amazon's leadership.
That was the catalyst for me to to leave.
It's your, your original question was how did that, you
know, feel not having control any longer?
You know, I still had a big influence on Whole Foods, but I
was losing most of those arguments, not not because it
was rational, but because of power.
You know what the final straw was, was back in 2017 when they
(27:08):
bought us and then you COVID hitin 2020.
And then a year after COVID had hit, all of our team members
were going to work every day except the ones in our corporate
offices. They were working remotely.
And I just thought that was terrible for the morality
organization that we had this sort of privileged elite.
Everybody else had to go work, but our privileged elite could
(27:30):
work at home. So I talked to Jose, talking to
Amazon about, I said, look, I this is terrible for our
culture. It's terrible for morality.
I got to bring these people back.
It's been a year. The vaccinations are out now.
I'm, I'm going to do a call backto office and they, they
wouldn't let me do it. And I, I remember talking to the
guy I was reporting to Dave Clark, who at that point was one
of the three CE OS at Amazon. And I said, Dave, look, this is
(27:53):
terrible for morale. You can see that we really need
to bring people back. It's the cultures fraying as a
result of this. And he wouldn't let me do it.
And I said, trust me, I'm the general in the field.
Trust me, I know what's best forWhole Foods and he just lost it.
Then he said, you know, he just,and I describe it in detail in
the book, he used a lot of F words and that I was, you know,
(28:15):
why can't I just shut up and take orders?
I, I, I've seen the, I've seen the quote that must have been
that must, I mean again on a personal level, how did you
metabolize that? I realized when I left that day,
I think, I think it's time for me to go.
But that's such a big decision because after, after that, at
that point, after 43 years, 44 years, and I love Whole Foods.
(28:37):
It's my daughter, it's my child.I love it so much.
But I, I didn't come to a hasty decision.
I sat on it for several months, talk to people I love and care
about, examine my own heart. Is this, what's the right thing
for me? What's it, what's the win, win,
win? What's good for me, what's good
for Whole Foods, what's going tobe good for the world at large?
And there was something else I wanted to do, which is, you
(28:59):
know, love life and my, my shirt.
I want to create this holistic Health Center.
I wanted to do it. And I really felt like that it
was time for me to move on. I'd done what I could do.
I couldn't protect Whole Foods anymore from Amazon.
I was losing all the fights, allthe arguments.
And I had a passion. I wanted to go try this.
And I knew I'd regret it if I didn't try it.
(29:20):
So I did another. I did a guided spiritual
journey. I'd read Michael Pollan's book.
It's so funny, I was just about to ask you, did you use fat
medicine or psycho dogs or any, or any kind of, you know, a
spiritual journey to help you with this?
Because that seems to be a themefrom the past.
I did a five day not to make thedecision, but before I retired
(29:41):
from Whole Foods I knew I was this transition was going to be
very difficult for me. So I did a five day guided
spiritual journey that had plantmedicines, breath work.
I did 5 days of breath work as well and I journaled and it was
all done in a one-on-one with the therapist in a retreat like
setting. I had a huge breakthrough and I
(30:01):
tried describing the book on thelast day.
It breath work not in ceremony, not on plant medicines.
It all came together and I and Ijust felt.
I felt for the first time in my life I felt unconditional love
for myself. I saw my innocent child that had
made a lot of mistakes but wanted to do good, had a
beautiful heart. I saw that child.
(30:23):
I love that child. For the first time, I really
felt unconditional love for myself.
Then I felt unconditional love for the the miracle of
existence. It is a miracle to be alive.
My God, it seems so incredible to be a living being with
trillions of cells. We get to see and move and touch
and feel and love and have friends and create things.
(30:43):
It's a blast. It's a miracle.
And I had unconditional love forall of existence and then
finally had unconditional love for the Creator, for all that is
God that we're part of, right? It's not separate, but part of
that. And it and it was just, it's
just and I just cried and cried and cried.
I cried on how long it was just cry, crying of joy.
(31:04):
That really helped me make the transition.
And Michael Pollan's book, you know, I read how how to change
your mind and that that influenced me.
You know what? I'm going to do my own guided
spiritual journey here. I made a lot of inquiries and
found a really great, great woman I worked with and.
And yeah, highly recommended. Michael was just here in Santa
Fe and, and so he's a, he's a big fan of MEA.
(31:26):
And so this is a perfect bridge to talk about what you're doing
now, because in many ways, for alot of people at 69 years old,
they would get to a place and say, OK, I'm going to retire or
I'm going to just, I don't know,be on a bunch of boards or, you
know, whatever, whatever is being boring.
(31:48):
I totally agree. You know, John and I have a lot
in common. So, but instead for you, John,
you chose to take a path that isvery simpatico to the path I've
I've chosen as well. There's a lot of comparability
between what you're doing with love life, which amazing name
and what we're doing here at MEA.
(32:10):
So tell tell our listeners and and our big community about what
love life is about. And your first location I know
has opened in LA and you probably have other locations
opening soon. What is love life?
How's it going and what are yourbiggest lessons so far?
That's I'll unpack that. There's a lot to that actually.
(32:30):
The first thing what love life is it's it's a it's a one stop
holistic health membership club.So our first locations in LA
down in El Segundo Beach cities,Manhattan Beach, and it's
located literally like next doorto one of Whole Foods Market's
(32:50):
most successful stores in the Southern California.
So I, I had the advantage. I know all of the best stores
Whole Foods Market has. I know what their sales are, at
least I did, you know, my date is a little stale, but I, I know
the directions. And I'd like to say if this idea
wouldn't, if it doesn't work in LA, it won't work because LA is,
(33:11):
is really a very special place and in the forefront of a lot of
Wellness and eating and health trends in America.
So, but I would have opened the first one in Austin if we could
have found a location. So I'm very picky about real
estate. If you, if you don't get that
right, then that might be the end of the, the, the journey
(33:32):
right there. So we found a great location in,
in El Segundo in LA area. It's an old Best Buy.
So it's, it's big, it's 45,000 square feet.
That's a big, big box. And then we, we have a healthy
plant forward restaurant. It's not a vegan restaurant, but
it's plant forward, it's healthy, it's Whole Foods,
(33:52):
primarily plant based. We have a state-of-the-art
fitness center and gym. We have a yoga studio, we have
Pilates studio, won't surprise you.
We do breath work there. We've got a great spa, so
massage facials of the differentthings you might get in a high
end resort spa or really good high quality day spa.
(34:14):
We have all this recovery modalities and biohacking stuff,
so from cryotherapy to pimp machines to hyperbaric oxygen
chambers, red light therapy, infrared saunas, regular saunas,
coal plunges, big steam room, a lymphatic compression suit that
(34:38):
people can wear. So we have all of these recovery
modalities and healing accelerants.
We also have 3 pickleball courts, indoor pickleball
courts. That's a community builder for
us. But really the most important
thing we're doing is that we have a, we have primary medical
care for people. Our healthcare system, as we
know, is broken in many ways. And one of the ways it's broken
(35:01):
is we're operating on a system that I call a plumber's model.
When do you hire a plumber Chip?When something's not going well.
That's generally when people seea doctor when something's going
wrong, and that's probably OK through much of history, but
it's what killing people today are.
Chronic diseases, heart disease,cancer, obesity, type 2
(35:26):
diabetes, stroke, autoimmune diseases.
These develop in most cases overdecades, and they are very
impacted by our diet and lifestyles.
People are still seeing a doctorfor the plumbers model.
And by the time you're going to have a heart attack or a stroke
or you get diagnosed with cancer, wow, it's all they're
(35:48):
going to do is mostly deal with your symptoms.
They can't really reverse those diseases through most cases.
You know, one, maybe one or two cancers that can be, can really
be contained with drugs. But for the most part, they're
just dealing with the symptoms. So our, our vision with love
life is we now have very sophisticated testing protocols
(36:11):
that we can use. So we're going to do
comprehensive testing with people and find out the
baseline, where are they? How healthy are they?
What are their opportunities? We're, we're all on a health
journey, right? So how far along are we on our,
where are we on our health journey?
And then if people start workingwith us, we can create a plan
for them to become healthier. Then we begin to track them.
(36:35):
So things like Apple Watches andaura rings and continuous
glucose monitors, I know AI is going to be a big thing.
We're going to be we're going tobe wearing like one of my
friends was showing these meta glasses.
I think they are that that take pictures.
He's got AAI that he talks to where these things are going to
(36:57):
be integrated into our life. So we're going to have up to
date tracking of our biometrics and there, so we're going to be
able to monitor ourselves. We're going to be able to then
we retest you create a plan. So the doctor and we have a,
what we call a, we have a WellCare team that works with
our members to help them make certain changes in exercise and
(37:19):
sleep and stress management and diet that and then we track the
progress over time. So first you test, then you
treat, then you track and then you transform.
That's that's the four TS. And so that's what we're trying
to do. We're trying to help people
become the healthiest version ofthemselves, not just physically,
(37:39):
but also emotionally and spiritually.
So we do have breath work. We do have meditation classes,
we do do yoga classes. We will do psychedelic therapy
when it's legal in like it is now legal in Colorado and Oregon
and will someday. And New Mexico and New Mexico
now, yeah, it just, it just passed in April and it won't be
(38:05):
publicly available for two or three more years, but in two or
three years is the first time anybody's hearing it.
We will be offering psychedelic actually it's psilocybin,
specifically medically assisted psilocybin cohorts here at our
2600 acre ranch in in Santa Fe. That's really great to hear.
And and in my own journey, when I did the guided spiritual
(38:31):
journey, the medicine plant medicines were were psilocybin
and MDMA and different combinations of it.
I and that's very powerful healing combination because the
MDMA is in a pathogen. It opens our heart.
The the, the psilocybin's like spirit.
It takes us deeper and that combination, I mean, you know,
(38:53):
we know that science is showing us that people that have this
PTSD that, you know, veterans, Navy Seals, that they can, you
know, talk therapy isn't going to solve their problems.
They need to do deeper, deeper dives.
And I so I'm very hopeful that that plant medicines, you know,
started out as a therapeutic model and, you know, we'll see
(39:18):
where that leads to. That's how they did marijuana,
right? Started out as medical marijuana
and then they legalized it as people's.
The world didn't come to an end.This first of all, I love this.
I love love. I love, love life.
If you go visit love Life, if you ever come, if you get to LA,
let me know. I'll get you AVIP tour.
It is an amazing place. I am literally hanging out with
(39:39):
Rich Roll 2 days from now, so inLA.
Tell Rich. I've contacted him a couple
times. I mean, I did the podcast with
him. I just can't, I can't have been
able to get him to visit it. Oh gosh.
Why don't you guys come visit? We'll get your day passes and
you can you'll like. I, you know what, I've, I've
been actually write him. I've after this guy after we're
done here, I'm going to, I'm going to text him and just say,
(40:01):
you know what, we're hanging outon Thursday.
Maybe we you come a few minutes early because we're actually
we're at the LAX. Oh well, we're 4 miles.
We're 4 miles South of LAX. All right, we got it.
We got this is going to happen, I think and.
When you get it confirmed up, let me know.
So I want to notify them that you're coming so you get.
Yeah. Oh, my gosh.
OK, so this is really the culmination of a journey from
(40:24):
conscious eating to conscious living to conscious medicine or,
you know, healthy natural medicine.
It sounds too good to be true, which I love.
I like the idealism. What's been the.
What has been the biggest surprises to you or challenges?
(40:45):
Because when you start somethinglike this and you're dealing
with, you know, the wallet of your consumer and they're used
to spending this kind of thing by having the health insurance,
you know, paying for it. How do?
How is? How are you making it work
financially without getting intothe details?
That's a great question. And we're not profitable yet.
(41:08):
So let's just state that out front and we made some
acquisitions that didn't work out for us that I mean the
company started kind of during COVID times and like we had a
vegan cafe in Florida that was profitable when we bought it.
And then we moved into a bigger location.
I'm really just a block away andthey didn't do well in that new
(41:30):
location. So then we, we bought a online
coaching business called Mastering Diabetes and then that
actually also did not work out for us.
So we made some, so we made someacquisitions and we bought a
telehealth business, which is also struggled.
So the acquisitions have not worked out well for us.
(41:50):
The holistic Health Center is growing very nicely and it's
just growing, growing every day.It's got a nice pace to it, but
it's still probably, I estimate that our current sales growth
rate, we're probably will be profitable about a little, maybe
a little less than a year from now.
Well, that's good. I think so too, a year and a
half to profitability is pretty good and with a particularly
(42:12):
with a major capital investment that we made.
So, but one of the things that we've learned is that you know,
we have you don't have to be a medical member.
So we also have just a fitness and recovery member that's less
expensive. So we aren't getting as many.
So you can have a fitness and recovery membership, or you can
(42:33):
have an A medical only membership, or you can have an
optimized membership and medicalonly doesn't give you access to
the the facilities, but you may want our doctors.
And so that's actually growing pretty nicely.
But together we're only doing, Ithink about 30% of our members
are actual and medical members that have the medical part.
(42:54):
So that there are people are using US for fit for pickleball,
fitness workouts classes. And that's fine.
Only the vision, of course, was we really want people to be
doing the. Whole the whole holistic, yeah.
Hoping is is that as people get more comfortable there that
we'll be able to convert, trade up a lot of the people in the
(43:15):
second year to get medical. We haven't gotten to the second
year yet, so we don't know yet. No, that's great.
What would you say you've been along term, long term advocate of
health. What do you think people get
wrong about longevity? You know, what is, what is,
what's the common belief people have around longevity or health
(43:36):
that you think is maybe over hyped or it could be even
something that you're currently offering that you think is like,
OK, people want it, but I'm not sure it's all that valuable.
I'm going to answer that question, but I first I'm going
to show you that what I think one of the most confusing things
is so how many one out of how many people do you think lives,
(43:58):
Americans live to be 100? Oh, it's .001% or something like
that. If you were to transfer that
into a, how many out of 100 is that one in 101 in 1000?
I mean it'd be 1. I didn't be one out of every
10,000. You know, Chip, you're the,
that's not correct. You're the first person I've
ever asked that question to thatit was on the low side of that.
(44:19):
I mean, it's one out of about one out of 3 to 4000.
Americans make us to 100. Most people guess.
Believe it or not, most people guess one out of 100, or even
two or three out of 100. In the future, yes.
But most people, most people think a lot of people live to be
100. And it's very, very rare you
know that, But most people don't.
So that that's something people get wrong in terms of longevity.
(44:42):
The other things are that peopleare looking for a technology,
their hack, they, they really dobelieve that we're going to be
able to live to be much longer because the singularity is
coming. And the major advances we've had
in longevity have primarily beensimple fixes like sanitation,
(45:04):
getting cleaner water was a huge.
And then if you, if you know, you're, I mean, here's here's
something people don't know is that for almost the entire
history of the human race, the average lifespan was about 30.
And it only went up first in, inWestern Europe and United
States. And then it spread to the rest
of the world. It started to go up in the late
19th century and it started to go up because a people started
(45:30):
to have better, cleaner water. That's, that was the single
biggest problem was tainted water.
You got, you got, you died from dysentery or cholera or you got
some kind of waterborne disease.So sanitation.
And then it was vaccinations andthen antibiotics.
You know, we didn't have antibiotics until, you know,
penicillin was invented in like 1943 for that.
(45:53):
If you had a, if you like a got shot or you, you cut yourself,
you might have to amputate your arm or your finger or whatever
to because of blood poisoning. So sanitation, vaccines,
antibiotics or the primary reasons we started to see
lifespan go up. Also more food I mean just
(46:15):
enough calories was a real problem.
Of course now we have too many calories to process foods and
and one thing people don't know is America spent United States
spends far more money per personper capita on healthcare than
any other nation in the world. But we only rank like I forget
it's either 40th or 50th 48th yeah 48th and longevity there
(46:35):
you have it despite the factory spend more money than anybody
else. So clearly that's not, it's not
a, it's not a good sustainable system.
So I think people are looking for longevity in all the wrong
places. It's going to start, it's going
to start with basically being a healthier diet.
Stop eating all the processed foods, the sugars, the calorie
(47:00):
dense foods. They're they, they really, they
really hurt us in the long run. I mean, I think Michael Pollan
said it really well. Eat real food, mostly plants and
not too much. That's a good formula.
And that means don't we eat a lot of potato chips and
Coca-Cola and foods that are just, you know, or Michael also
(47:21):
said, if it comes from a plant, eat it.
If it's made in a plant, don't. I think lifestyle and diet are
something people really radically underestimate.
That's the thing people have gotto get right first and then the
bio hacks and things like that are going to be additive.
But we are making progress. I, I make the joke that I'll
probably live, I'll, I'll probably live to 1000 at 8:00.
(47:43):
But I'll it'll, I'll be, I'll be100 years old for the for 900 of
those years. Well, let's talk about that.
So, so I think the chances you live to 100 are pretty good.
Do you think you would ever retire and what what is the word
retirement mean to you in in thepresent day as opposed to 50
years ago? Retirement was a different
(48:04):
thing. Well, people didn't, you know,
people didn't live that long. So and they were, they were a
lot more blue collar workers andfarmers.
And by the time they got to be 65, they were worn down and they
didn't have hip replacements andthey didn't have, they didn't
have thing for their backs. And they were just really, I
mean, I remember most of the menwhen they got to be in their 50s
(48:25):
when I was a boy, they all use canes women too.
I mean, they're, but mostly men,you don't see very many people
using canes these days and it might be temporary because
they've had a hip replacement or, or they had a knee
replacement, so they have to useit temporarily.
The answer is no. I mean, I think what I've done
is I've downshifted. I'm still very purpose driven.
(48:46):
I'm not working as hard as I didwhen I was building Whole Foods.
You know, I mean, I worked really hard for many decades and
now I'm not prepared to do that again.
I want to, I want to travel more.
I want to spend more time with my friends and people I love.
I want to read more books. I might write some more books.
I want to have a more human paced lifestyle than I had when
(49:07):
I was, you know, in my 20s and 30s and 40s.
But still, purpose matters. I think purpose is, oh, this is
very important for longevity. I think purpose is one of the
most important things for longevity.
When you have a purpose, you're communicating to the cells in
your body, hey, it's not time todie yet.
(49:28):
You got to stay with me. I've got to fulfill this
purpose. And guess what?
The body responds to that. I think that that so purpose
really helps people to live longer.
A lot of people when they retire, they don't have a
purpose any longer and they just, they're dead in a few
years. They just kind of rot like die
on the vine, so to speak. So retirement has been proven to
(49:49):
accelerate your mortality by twoyears.
Oh, there you go. I'm not, I'm, I'm not going to
retire everything. Two last questions 1 is a
question I love asking at MEA because you know, as we get
older, the what gets most valuable in our life is time.
Time is what's scarce. And so the question I would ask
you and then let me, let me preface the question by how I
(50:10):
might answer it 10 years from now.
What would you regret if you didn't learn it or do it now?
So anticipated regret about something that you know you may
regret 10 years from now is a form of wisdom.
It is a catalyst for taking action.
And for me, when I moved to, youknow, to Baja, to Mexico part
(50:33):
time, learning Spanish and learning to surf was something I
learned in my late mid to late 50s at a time where, frankly, I
had a mindset that said I was too old.
But that anticipated regret helped me to see that.
Yeah, I don't, I don't want to have that regret in the future.
We don't have anticipated regretat 20, but we certainly do have
it at 50607080. So what might you regret if you
(50:57):
didn't learn it or do it now? Well, the, the, the most obvious
answer is love life falls into that category.
It's like, OK, Chip, I feel likeI know how to help thousands of
people now, but eventually millions of people to live
longer, have a healthier, more vital life because part of what
you have, we're creating with love life, which I didn't
(51:18):
mention is a, is a community of people.
It's very difficult for people to change diets and lifestyles.
But if they do it in a communityof support with other people
that are on a similar journey, that's the secret of a A and
overcome addictions for people. They're doing it in a community
of support for people that are fellow travellers.
So if I didn't try this, I'd regret it.
(51:40):
I mean, if I, I'll regret it if I fail at it.
But if I hadn't tried, I'd always would have wondered.
I always would have wondered what might have been, and so
that would be a regret. Social science has shown to us
that the regret of the thing youdidn't do is more than twice as
painful as compared to the regret of the thing you did and
(52:03):
wish you hadn't done. I didn't know that, but I it
intuitively feels like that's got to be true.
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.
That's great. So imagine someone 20 years
younger than you has the pleasure of being able to come
up to you and say, I would love to take you for tea or coffee
next week for 20 minutes. And I'd love to have you show
(52:25):
up, John, with a a wisdom bumpersticker.
Not an actual physical one, but just like one in essence, a
piece of wisdom that you've learned along the way in your
personal life, in your in your work life, in your spiritual
life, a singular one that has your wisdom fingerprints all
over it. And what's the origin story
behind how you came up with thatwisdom?
(52:46):
What might that be? I think there's a few.
So let me let me try a few out for you because I think if I was
talking to a very young person, like in their finishing up
College in their very early 20s,my advice would be different.
My advice would be follow your heart.
Don't do things just because youjust want to have financial
(53:08):
security or you want to please your parents, or you're just
afraid to do anything else. Instead, I really do believe
we're all called to a hero's journey.
And yet fear, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, fear of being
(53:28):
rejected by friends or family pulls people back from answering
that call. Like I have a friend, for
example, who really wanted to bea writer and he went, he became
a very successful lawyer, but henever was, he never really was
happy in the law. And I remember, I don't know,
four or five years ago, he was talking about how he regrets
(53:50):
that he hadn't become a writer. And I said, well, hey, you still
could, you still could. And he says, no, I can't, I'm
too old. And he said only if you think
you are. But, but that was a regret for
him. He didn't follow his heart.
So I that's my advice to youngerpeople.
That's my bumper sticker. Follow your heart for younger
people. But then there's some other
(54:11):
things that I think that I've learned that I would share.
That would be my bumper stickers.
The first one I've already mentioned.
Look for the win, win, win. Look for what's good for you,
good for the person you're interacting with, but also good
for the larger society. If you think about it, Chip,
that's a complete ethical system.
There's no situation you'll everfind yourself in.
(54:33):
Well, that's not the best life strategy.
Win, win, win. If you take that as a framework,
you will find your life to be much more successful and much
happier. And the final one is a wisdom
that my wife has taught me. This is the most important one
of all. She says, you know, John, it's
much simpler than people think, simpler to understand, not
(54:55):
necessarily simple to execute, she says.
Just love everyone all the time,no exceptions.
And she says, you know, that makes things simpler because now
you don't have to figure out I love this person, but I hate
this person. You judge this person and you're
always sorting everybody into certain categories.
(55:15):
There's just one category. There's love everyone, all the
time, no exceptions. There's no greater wisdom than
I've learned in life than that one.
And that's what I'd most like topass on.
You married a very wise. Woman I did, I did.
I that's, that's by far the bestthing that happened in my life
was marrying, meeting Deborah and marrying her.
Well, I love you and I appreciate you.
(55:37):
You've been sort of from afar a bit of a role model for me and a
mentor. And I appreciate that, you know,
when I first showed you my peak model and this, this heart in
the, in the form of like this, this, you know, perpetuating
circle, I usually like that's it.
Culture leads and enthusiastic employees, loyal customers,
(56:01):
growing profit and growing market share and increased
profitability. You invest back in the culture
and, and, and you did it and you've done it and you have been
an inspiration to many so. Thank you.
You're not going to get away with just hands injuring it on
that. I'm just going to say right back
to you. You've been an inspiration for
me starting with Peak, starting with our work in conscious
(56:24):
capitalism. I so admire what you've done
with your, your Elden Elder Wisdom Academy because I, I've a
lot of people have gone to it and talked about it to me.
You're making a huge difference.You're helping a lot of people
be happier and wiser. And, you know, going through the
aging cycle, it, it, it can be challenging at times because
(56:47):
we're all getting closer to our deaths.
You've brought such wisdom and leadership to it.
You are you, you're a very good person.
You've done really good work in this lifetime.
I'm, I'm very proud to, to know you.
Thank you so much. So people should pick up John's
book, The whole Story. Spectacular.
A good read. We got a nice brief sense of it,
but it's much deeper read than what we could do in an hour.
(57:10):
Also check out Love Life and it's www.love.life I think.
Is that correct? That's.
It you got it. It's that simple, John, thank
you. I hope to see you soon and been
wonderful to have you here on mynew podcast, The Midlife
Chrysalis. Thank you for watching the
Midlife Chrysalis Podcast.
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