Conscious Capitalism w/ Whole Foods Founder John Mackey #830

John Mackey is the remarkable entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of the natural and organic retailer Whole Foods Market. In over 40 years as CEO, John has led the company as it has grown from a single store in Austin Texas, to 540 stores in the US, Canada, and the UK. He also co-founded the Conscious Capitalism Movement and co-authored the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling book by the same name. He’s written a number of great books since then but we’re really excited about his latest which came out yesterday, titled The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism. It’s part memoir, part lessons in entrepreneurship, and we couldn’t recommend it enough. Join us as we have a great conversation around the origins of Whole Foods, if it’s possible to eat healthy foods that cost less, capitalism under fire, how John define conscious capitalism, what it takes to start your own business, and much more!

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Had of Money.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
I'm Joel and I am Matt and.

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Today we're talking conscious capitalism with Whole Foods founder John Mackie.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah so. John mackey is the remarkable entrepreneur best known
as the co founder of Whole Foods Market. That's right,
that Whole Foods, the natural and organic food store. In
over forty years, I CEO. John has led the company
as it has grown from a single store in Austin, Texas,
to five hundred and forty stores in the US and

(00:48):
Canada and the UK. He also co founded the Conscious
Capitalism movement and co authored the New York Times and
Wall Street Journal bestselling book by the same name. He's
written a bunch of great books since then, but we're
really excited about his latest which came out yesterday. The
book is titled The Whole Story, Adventures and Love, Life
and Capitalism, And really that's what we're gonna get into today.

(01:10):
We're gonna talk about entrepreneurship, We're gonna talk about capitalism, life,
maybe even what it means to play at a higher level,
and we're going to discuss all this through the lens
of an incredibly successful business, Whole Foods. John MACKI thank
you so much for joining us today on the podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Thanks for having me. It's I'm really looking forward to
our discussion.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Of course, No, John, We're so excited to get to
talk to you today. First question that we ask anybody
who comes on the show, though, is what's your craft
beer equivalent? And what we mean by that is Matt
and I spend a lot of money on good craft beer,
more than some people might think it's sane, but hey,
it's okay because we're still saving and investing diligently like
we know we need to be. So what's that for you?
What do you spend maybe what some people might think

(01:47):
is insane on that, Yeah, that you love even while
you're doing the smart thing with your money.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
Yeah. I'm a long distance backpacker, so I've liked on
the Appalachian Trail twice, the Specific Cross Trail, and there's
nothing all doing more than going out for several weeks
of long distance backpacking. And to do that, I have
to have really ultra light gear. So I keep and
they keep improving it. It keeps getting it keeps getting

(02:15):
lighter and lighter and lighter, exactly just like certain beers
get lighter and lighter. But in this case, the joke
is I'll spend about one hundred dollars to shave one
ounce off my pack load. So that's pretty crazy. So
whether so if a new tent comes out and I
can get an ounce or two off of that, I'll

(02:38):
buy the new tent and I give I give my
older gear away. But so if I ever added up
what I spend on ultra light hiking gear, it would
kind of terrify me. So I never added up. I
just know I can afford it, so I can't. I can't.
It's indefensible. I can't justify it except that I really
want to have it. So that's my craft beer equivalent.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
I'll love it.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, it those are two trails that so the at
being here starting right in North Georgia, it's basically in
our backyard. And so I feel like this it's been
something that's been on both of our mind's duel as
we've kind of got one of these days. Yes, that's
what we keep saying to itself. But John, let's kind
of go back in time a little bit. What made
you start a natural food store back in the seventies,

(03:21):
Because at this point, like we're very much used to
whole foods and the clones that have sprung up since then.
But it's certainly not like that was a proven path
to success or riches. I'm curious what caused you to
get into it back in the day.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
It's always interesting to say, where do I start the story?
In this case, I'll start the story when I'm twenty
three years old and I moved into There's vegetarian co
op and in Austin, and I called Prana House. I
wasn't a vegetarian, and I didn't really know much about
food at all. I just thought i'd meet some I
was interested to the counterculture. I thought, I admit really
interesting people in a vegetarian co op, and I did.

(03:58):
But I also had a food awakening. I learned that natural,
organic foods were healthier for people, for our health, for
the environment. I learned how to cook. I became the
food buyer for the co op, and I just got
super excited. Then I went to work for a small
natural food store called the Good Food Company. I became
the assistant managers of that store, and I remember coming

(04:19):
home back to the co op and talking to my girlfriend, Renee,
and I said Renee, What do you think if we
opened our own natural food store. It'd be fun, It'd
be an adventure. And she loved the idea. She said,
let's do it, mac Oman, and so we did. And
that first store was called Safer a Way, Safe Way,

(04:39):
Safer a Way. It was in an old Victorian house.
It wasn't a good location for a business, but we
began to learn about how to do a business, and
after two years there, we relocated it to a bigger location,
merged with another natural food store that we was from,
a friendly competitors with, changed the name to Whole Foods Market.

(05:00):
Was we hit the jackpot. That location was a fantastic location,
kind of by luck, and we were at a time
when people, particularly the young generation, sort of the counterculture,
the hippies, were very interested in different ways of eating,
sides the processed foods that our parents were feeding us.
And so that store just took off and it became

(05:22):
the highest volume natural food store in the United States
within about six months of opening. Then we had this
terrible flood which we talk about in the book, that
wipes us out. We eventually are able to recover from
the flood because of help from basically all the stakeholders.
But that caused us to want to create a second
store so we wouldn't be so vulnerable to a second flood.
That was one hundred year flood that occurred in our

(05:43):
first year.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
Yeah, reading about that in the book, the one hundred
year Flood, how did that not just completely demoralize you
as a young business owner. And the coolest thing to
me when you relay that story in the book was
the response not just from the people who worked for you,
but from the people who patronize your store as well.
What did you learn from that experience?

Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah, I don't think the words stakeholders had been invented
back in nineteen eighty, but or if it had, it
wasn't aware of it. But we were bailed out By
the first day after the flood. All these people were
cleaning up the store that were basically our customers and
our neighbors. They come into shop and saw what had happened,
and they just got in and pitched in and helped

(06:27):
us clean it up. Our team members worked without pay.
It took us thirty days to reopen. Our suppliers gave
us a new inventory on credit, even though we owed
them for inventory that we'd already had go down the river,
so to speak. The bank loaned us one hundred thousand
dollars on my signature, and there's a sub story in
that it turns out that the bank actually turned the

(06:49):
loan down, but the banker himself personally guaranteed the loan. Wow.
I didn't even find out about that until until maybe
twenty five years later. After that happened, and investors kicked
in some more money, so all of the stakeholders, they
didn't let Whole Food's Market died because why not? Because
they loved us, They cared about us. They wanted us

(07:11):
to come back from the dead, and we did. And
we never looked back after that except that we needed
to expand, and we started expanding and we never really
haven't never stopped since.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
The way you described it almost sounds like a leave
it to Bieber kind of moment, something from Prehistorica America
that might not happen to that. I don't know, do
you think that kind of moment a small business and
the support that they could get from all of the
stakeholders involved in that business. Can that can that or
and does that still happen today?

Speaker 2 (07:39):
In America.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
A great question. I'm not sure you'd have to know
what Austin, Texas was like back in nineteen eighty one,
very different than it is today. And everybody, nobody in
our store except for one of the co founders, Craig Weller,
was over thirty, so everybody was very young. There was
this sense of camaraderie. There was this there was this

(08:02):
sense of we're going to we're going to change the world.
We're gonna uh, we're different than our parents. We understand
things they don't understand.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
That.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
This was my generation, particularly in the counterculture. We were
in the New Age, and we really felt like we
were going to create, we were going to help change
the world for the better. That was, we were so idealistic,
and I think I don't know if that's still there today,
that there seems to be so much struggle in fighting,
and we're divided into these different tribes that seem to
have mutually mutual antipathy for each other. There was a

(08:34):
real feeling of love in that in that time, that
it was just something you did. Of course, you helped
your neighbor, you cared about your neighbors, you knew your neighbors,
so I can't speak for the rest of the world
today whether something like that would happen, but it definitely
could happen back when it did, so we're very fortunate
that it did happen.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
To want to take a step back, you talk about
making the transition from having that initial food co natural
food store combo in that Victorian house to opening a
legit storefront, because I think for a lot of listeners
that sort of like that pivot, that point in time
that is sort of the key moment when it comes
to entrepreneurship. What is it, I guess about that move

(09:18):
that caused you to be what you called a quote
unquote instant success. I mean you talked about it was
a fortunate location. Was it just the fact that you
had a storefront that folks were walking by?

Speaker 1 (09:27):
Was it?

Speaker 2 (09:27):
Or was it something else?

Speaker 3 (09:29):
It was a combination of several things. First, was it
really was a great location we did? It was in
central Austin. I'm literally a quarter mile from that location
that's sitting where I'm sitting right now. So it was
on a very busy strip thoroughfare. It had good visibility,

(09:49):
it had pretty good parking, but it was right in
the heart of you might say, you know, near the
University of Texas near downtown. Now it's in downtown, and
it had the population. DN City had the consciousness. We
didn't know any of that at the time. It was
only a half mile from where our other location had been,
but that was in a not on a busy street.

(10:11):
It was in an old house. We didn't know what
we were doing. I mean, Renee and I were just
you know, I was twenty four when we got safer
Way going, and she was only twenty. And then two
years later, so I guess I'm twenty six and Renee
is twenty two. And we just needed a bigger location.
Safer Way was too small. We were competitive disadvantage. And

(10:32):
I'd been awakened by a trade journal that showed up
on my house or showed up at our office one day,
called the Natural Foods Merchandiser, which was about sort of
these natural food supermarkets that were starting to spring up
mssus Gooch's in Los Angeles, Bredon Circus in Boston, Fraser
Farms in San Diego. And I got excited and I thought, well,
this is what we need to do. We need to

(10:52):
do a bigger store. And I went and toured those places.
I went to Boston, I went to la I went
to San Diego. Saw what they were doing, and I thought,
this will work in Austin. But we got to find
a location so and it did work in Austin. In fact,
it worked better in Austin than any other place. It
just we just took off. So there was a good

(11:14):
natural foods movement in Austin, but there was no store
like that first whole foods market, and it just captured
a huge market share. And because we were one stop
shopping I mean, Safer Way had been a vegetarian store.
We were selling whole foods, were selling meat, seafood, we
saw beer and wine. We weren't going to be holy
foods market. We were going to be whole foods market.

(11:34):
And so we became a place where you could get
all your groceries if you were living a natural, organic
food lifestyle. And that it was good timing, right location
and honestly, merging with Clarksville Grocery and put those two
stores together was also key to our success because we
brought in a lot more intellectual capital, so to speak,

(11:55):
a lot more retailing talent was on the same team
working together.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
Some of that Sam Walton playbook too, checking out those
other guys, what are they doing well? How can I
copy or mimic some of the good stuff which is
just smart business. And on that note, you know you're
getting this food education that's inspiring the launch of this business,
but you're also simultaneously having to get this business education.
You mentioned in the book that you're like devouring binging
business books. I think maybe as you put it, what

(12:21):
were you reading, what were you trying? Like, I'm guessing
you felt like with this launch, Hey, it's successful, but
I also feel like I'm underwater and I got to
come up for like, I got to figure this business
thing out at the same time.

Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, there were two big things that really helped me.
The first one was my father. My father mentored me.
It was really good for our relationship. He was very
happy when a sort of hippie son college dropout son
wanted to start a business because he could relate to that.
He had been an accounting professor at Rice University for years,
and then he'd gone into business himself and had become

(12:54):
a first a chief financial officer and later he was
the CEO of a public traded company called Life Mark
that was a hospital management company, and he and I
got very close. He ended up being my best man
on my wedding, and the father son bond really really
see minute around me starting this business because I didn't
know what I was doing, so I basically for the

(13:16):
first sixteen years, we never really made a major decision
that I didn't get approved by my father, so he
was very helpful. Secondly, it's I never took any business
classes when I went to school. If you look at
my resume, it's kind of like bus boy, dishwasher, boys,
camp counselor CEO whole foods market.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
I did not progression.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yeah, I didn't have that kind of background. I didn't
have an MBA or But what I had was curiosity
and I'm pretty smart and I've always been a voracious reader.
So I just began to read business books like crazy
after that. And first I got books from my father
that he recommended, and then I just go to the

(13:57):
bookstores and I would and if it looked interesting, I
would buy and read it. So I literally read hundreds
and hundreds of business books. I read everything Peter Drucker
ever published as a book in English. I've read biographies
about business people, and I just I studied it. And
you know what, when you're really motivated to learn something,

(14:19):
you absorb information so much more rapidly than you would otherwise.
Because I'm having to live it every day. I like
to say I was working during the day and then
reading at night, and then synthesizing what I was learning,
plus asking my dad lots of questions and putting the
ideas into business. And yes, I was studying our I
was studying I to say our competitors. But a lot

(14:40):
of these natural food supermarkets we ended up acquiring as
we got bigger, but they were scattered around the United
States and they were innovating too, and so well Whole
Foods could innovate, we could also learn from others innovations.
I've always thought retailing, you don't have any You can't
trademark things in retailing. Right, if you have a good idea,
your competitors we'll see it and they'll copy it. And

(15:01):
you need to see the things they're doing that are
better than you and copy those things. So I think
continuous learning was what Whole Foods was doing in continuous innovation.
So if you saw the way our stores progressed from
safer way to the first whole foods market to where
we are today. It's it's unbelievable. And it's just because
we kept learning, we kept growing, we kept evolving. I'm

(15:23):
a great believer in evolution. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
Well, and it sounds like you had such a passion
for the actual mission of what it is that y'all
were trying to I did.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
But also, remember you're building a team, So there's a
tendency media oftentimes it takes a gut somebody like Elon
Musk or Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, and they're like
Superman that do these amazing things. And they certainly are.
I know all three of those guys that are all well,
Steve's past, but they were all really brilliant entrepreneurs. But

(15:54):
the reality is, of course they had brilliant people on
their teams as well. They were able to attract really strong,
talented people and then the team together does amazing things.
And it's not just me that was learning. Everybody in
our team was pumped up. We were so inspired about
what we were doing. There was that doesn't exist as
a company gets older and the and the initial founders

(16:18):
begin to move on and retire and you get more
professional in your management, your intelligence or average intelligence probably
goes up, but passion as you professionalize, begins to go down.
And what we were long on in the early days
was passion. We were so excited. We just you know,
it was it was kind of we worked really hard,
but it wasn't hard. It wasn't work, it was fun.

(16:39):
It was play because we were so inspired about what
we were doing and we were learning and growing and changing,
and we just saw this unlimited future ahead for us. Well,
it's hard to convey it.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I love I love that that
you are, including of course the folks that helped you
to build it into what it is today. But I guess,
like I'm curious, So that sounds like a piece of
advice to take from this is just be cognizant of
the folks who that you're bringing in around you. But
not everybody has the same passion for the work that
you do. And I don't know, I guess I'm thinking
about We talked to someone recently who talks about taking

(17:13):
many retirements. You talked about you splurging on your ultra
light gear, like you would take months off from work
to hike the Pacific Coast Trail. Do you think that
that's a part of the key to staying invigorated and
excited about your work is to actually do the exact
opposite and maybe providing some distance from it.

Speaker 3 (17:31):
Yeah, that's not quite accurate in the sense that for
the first from nineteen seventy eight to two thousand and one,
I never took very much time off at all.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
Okay, well, he works for the.

Speaker 3 (17:42):
First twenty three years, and I gave up my twenties
and thirties. But then I was in New York heading
down to Wall Street when nine to one one happened
the second plane. When the second plane hit the tower,
we were probably less than half a mile from it,
and our car got We were heading down to meet

(18:03):
with the bond raiding agencies, not in the towers, but
very close by, and our car was showered by debris,
and I got out of the car and I thought,
my god, both towers are on both towers are on fire,
and that's got to be a terrorist attack. And so
it was like, we got to get the hell out
of New York. They're going to shut this city down.

(18:24):
I figured the airports would already be closed, and they
were but they hadn't closed the train station yet, so
we went straight to the train station, caught the last
train out of New York, got as far as Philadelphia,
rented cars, and drove back to Austin in a rental car.
And on that drive back, I got to thinking. I
was driving through the Appalachians, and I was thinking that, Man,

(18:44):
I thought about hiking this trail. There'd be so much
fun to do that, And I thought, why not. I
could have died. I could have died in the last
few days, and there's you know, I wanted to do
some other things. So it was after that event that
I began to get more balance in my life and
I was less of a workaholic, and I began to Yeah,

(19:04):
I did take a sabbatical, took four and a half
months off, like the Apalachian Trail, but that was the
last time I threw hiked to a trail and took
much time off. Even the Pacific Crust Trail, I was
taking it off. I section hiked it. So I would
take off a few weeks in the spring, in a
few weeks in the late summer, and then I think
it took me about five or six years to do

(19:25):
the whole trail.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
Okay, I want to talk about the products that are
being sold to Whole Foods, and it was certainly innovative,
and Whole Foods remains like a leader in the healthy
grocery space. In many ways, it seems like the unhealthiest
items on the shelves at so many grocery stores are
the most expensive, like per calorie, right, because you eat
like three bags of potato chips, it's really expensive and
you're still not full. So does being a healthy eater

(19:49):
in your opinion, does it have to cost a lot
of money. There are a lot of people who have
given Whole Foods a lot of flack over the years
because of expensive shelf prices. But I mean there's also
nutritionent is crucial to our ability to thrive as human beings.
I'm curious to hear your take on that.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yeah, I have some definite views on that. The first
thing is is that it's not expensive to eat calories,
even healthy calories. What's more expensive is to eat nutrients.
So most of the processed foods we get are high
end calories. And there's a reason why we evolved. For
most of our evolutionary history, calories were scarce and so

(20:26):
humans evolved to crave calorie dense foods. We like things
that have a lot of fat in them, have a
lot of sugar or refined carbohydrates in it. We like
things that have a lot of protein in them, and
we like things that have a lot of salt. In fact,
we can easily get addicted to foods that provide that,
and most of our processed foods provide lots of calories

(20:48):
for people, but not very many nutrients. But the reality
also is is that we spend less on food today.
We spend less than ten percent of our disposable income
on food. Think about what it was like one hundred
years ago. We spent up to fifty percent of our
calories on food if we didn't live on a farm.
Because food was relatively expensive. We didn't have the transportation,

(21:10):
we didn't have the processed foods. You couldn't get oranges
year round, you couldn't get people had gardens. And the
world's so much different today because food is relatively cheap.
People can complain about places like Whole Food's being expensive,
but in reality they're spending so much less money on food.
It's just expensive compared to what they think are the alternatives,

(21:31):
but those alternatives are giving them cheap calories. You can
go to a fast food restaurant and get calories cheap,
but those you're not getting nutrients. The nutrients that you
will get in fresh produce, fresh fruits and vegetables, beans,
whole grains, certain animal foods, but those are going to
be more expensive on a per nutrient basis. So if

(21:53):
you think to eat to maximize your nutrient density per calorie,
that's a whole different way to think about it. That's
not how most people think about it. But so I
don't think food's more expensive historically, and I still think
you can eat extremely healthy diet and not spend much
money on it if you will cook. The reality is
most people do not want to know how to cook,

(22:14):
and they don't want to cook. I cook. I like
to cook, and I get and I eat. I eat
a very very healthy diet, and it's because I prepare
most of the food myself, and I don't eat out
that much. And if I eat out, I eat the
simplest foods I can find on the menu.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
This is great money saving advice from John Mackie. Don't
have to do all these things of course, but he does. John,
We've got plenty more to talk to, and we want
to also make sure to cover sort of your view
of capitalism, how it works, and maybe how it actually
should work, and maybe how more people should actually view capitalism.
We'll get to that more right after.

Speaker 1 (22:50):
This our weak back to the break. We're still talking
with the founder of Full Foods, John Mackie and John.
We want to get into some more theoretical stuff and
some philosophical stuff, and particularly Matt and I, we love
the way you've talked about capitalism because yeah, it is

(23:12):
the best system ever devised by mankind, and it has
led to a burgeoning ability for people to build wealth
and enjoy a good life even I mean, just like
you talked about before the break, the last one hundred
years in the grocery business, prices have come down, options
have come up, like we're all better off for it.
You said that it's a myth that consumption drives our economy,

(23:33):
even though stats show that our spending seems to be
the main engine behind our economic growth. Why is that?
Why do you think that that spending is not the
main driver.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
That's putting the cart before the horse. It's Ultimately, innovation
and increased productivity that drives the economy upwards, not spending.
If there's no innovation, you can spend all you want,
but it doesn't make the economy get healthier and stronger.
It's the creativity of on entrepreneurs. It's the think about
the advancements we've had in the last thirty years. How

(24:05):
many people were using a smartphone thirty years ago, nobody was,
it hadn't been invented yet. How many people we were
just beginning to use the internet thirty years ago there
was no AI. Look at how AI promises to drive
the economy going forward.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Even lightweight hiking and camping gear right.

Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yes, exactly, there was no today. Because of Zoom and
technologies like that, people don't have to go into the
office every day. That's one of the silver linings, I
suppose from the pandemic. So that's not coming from spending
or consumer spending. That's coming from innovation and creativity of business,

(24:44):
mostly through entrepreneurs and the scientists that they that they
employ and align with. So progress is driven through entrepreneurship
and innovation. That's what keeps That's why capitalism so amazing
because it's this dynamic system of continued improvement, continued innovation,
continued progress. It doesn't ever stop if we allow it.

(25:06):
It just continues to move humanity up to higher and
hire and evolving levels. Most of people that don't like
capitalism are not good students of history. They don't compare
the world historically. I always like to put this challenge
to people, which is, I'll give you the entire history
of the human race. Tell me when it's better been

(25:27):
a better time to be alive than right now. There's
never been a time better to be alive than right now,
And almost every objective measurement you can come up with,
there's no comparison. If people don't realize that just two
hundred years ago, which is not very long ago, ninety
four percent of the people alive on the planet lived
on less than two dollars a day in today's dollars,

(25:49):
eighty five percent didn't even live on a dollar a day.
The average lifespan was thirty the illiteracy rate was eighty
eight percent. Only twelve percent of the world's population could
even read. It was a frigging nightmare.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
So why are we connect to the dots? Why has
an anti capitalist sentiment kind of become in voting.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
I think it's always going to be in vogue to
a certain extent because because human nature's not perfect and
capitalism's not perfect, capitalism gives people what they want to buy.
And we were talking about food earlier, and sometimes people
want to blame the businesses for selling this food that
is not healthy for people. Well, they're selling that food

(26:31):
to people because that's what people want to buy. And
I explained earlier that's partly their evolutionary past that makes
us want to crave calorie dense foods. But business and
capitalism will always give people what they want, even if
it's not the best thing. They'll give you pornography if
that's what you want. They will give you drugs if
that's what you want. They'll give you whatever you want

(26:54):
because that's how business can prosper and make a profit.
And because human nature doesn't want always what's good for it,
business is frequently blamed, but really the sins of its
customer base. That's the first thing. And also people look,
they look and they see that there's inequality, there's environmental problems,

(27:16):
there's racism, and they tend to they don't have a
historical context like, Okay, is there racism in the United States? Well,
sure there is, but a lot less than when I
was a boy, and when I was a boy there
was a lot less than one hundred years before that.
There's America has become less racist over time. Is there
income inequality? Well, yeah, sure there is. When hasn't there

(27:39):
been income inequality? I mean you could say, when when
maybe everybody was living on less than a dollar a day,
we had income equality, but it was horrible.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Equally, is that a better alternative?

Speaker 3 (27:52):
And they always compare real world capitalism not to real
world socialism, which has never worked. I mean, socialism has
been tried by forty one countries in the last one
hundred years. Every one of them's a failure. And then
what happens is they say, well, they didn't do it right,
or they gotta they got to Stalin and or they
gotta Mao, or they gotta Castro. They romanticize these socialistic

(28:17):
states until they're proven failures, and then they say, well,
they didn't do it right. So there's this utopian socialism
in people's minds that's just never been done right. So
capitalism gets compared against an imaginary socialism, not a real
world socialism. If people would be honest and look at
what socialism's done, it just fails every time. And you

(28:38):
know why it fails, because it goes against human nature.
People are not going to become altruists just because you
want them to become altruists. People are people are gonna
work in their own self interest. They're going to work
in the interests of their families. They want to get ahead,
they want they want a better life for their children,
they want a better life for their families, and that's
going to drive the economy. And socialism tries to get

(29:02):
people to sacrifice for the common good. That may work
in small groups or a family, but it does not
work on a larger scale. And that's been proven. It's
been proven so many times. It should just be empirically fact.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
Okay, So, speaking of working in your own best interest,
go ahead and define for us conscious capitalism and explain
why it actually differs from cold hearted capitalism, because I
think that's a lot of folks who point to capitalism
and they're thinking of what you said, which is well,
they're only certain looking to serve the shareholders. The shareholders,
they're seeking to achieve the highest profits possible, it's only

(29:39):
in it for himself. But explain how conscious capitalism comes
into play.

Speaker 3 (29:43):
Well, you know, it's very interesting when I explain conscious
capitalism to people who are are really diehard capitalists, and
I'll finish explaining it and they'll say, but that's just capitalism,
and I say, yes, that is exactly right. It is
just capitalism. But what ends up happening is is that
capitalism has been defined by its enemies, people that hate it,

(30:06):
mostly a Marxist critique of capitalism. It's all about the
money that they're exploiting, the workers, they are cheating their customers,
that they are spoiling, the environment that the people are
seeing as these you know, greedy bastards who only are
in it for the money.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
It's like a rapacious capitalism.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
Yes, exactly. Here's the thing. Are there people like that
in business? Absolutely? There are a rapacious capitalists because human
nature has that in it. Are there rapacious lawyers? Yes?
What about politicians? Yes? What about doctors?

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yes, I means yes, some of them are.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
That's why you guys are a team. But the reality
is business is not any worse than any of the
other professions or any of the other fields. Of work. Human
nature is in business. Human natures everywhere, and so you're
going to get some greedy, selfish people. But that's not
built in to business. In fact, just the opposite. Business
flourish is when it serves others. It has to serve

(31:11):
its customers. It has to create value for customers or
business fails. You can't make profits unless you're creating value
for customers. That's the fundamental truth. It's based on voluntary
exchange for mutual gain from mutual benefit. So business has
to serve customers. Business also ultimately has to serve its employees.

(31:32):
What do you mean it serves its employees. Well, of course,
because employees have choices. They don't have to work for
the business. If they can find a better job that
pays better, they'll go take that job. So you compete
for good workers and you provide jobs, You provide paid benefits,
opportunities to grow and learn, and then if you have
a good relationship, people stick around, they gain more intellectual

(31:56):
they learn more, and they get become more productive over time.
So your stake second stakeholder is going to be your employees.
And then you're trading with all these suppliers. They're trading
with you for mutual gain and mutual benefit. A business
like coal foods market literally has tens of thousands of
suppliers small around the world selling us food from every

(32:16):
which place on this planet. They're gaining, we're gaining. It's
a win win win relationship. So you have all of
these different stakeholders that are interdependent on each other. Most
people that don't like capitalism see it as this zero
sum game. Somebody's winning and somebody else is losing. If
Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, these are just greedy people

(32:38):
who took a bigger piece of the pie than they
really should have taken. That's not accurate. There's not this
fixed pie, and these guys aren't stealing a bigger piece.
They've earned a bigger piece because they've created more value
for their customers who voluntarily have exchanged with the business,
and they've prospered because of the value they've created. They've

(32:58):
become rich because of the value they've created. So business
is fundamentally and it gets into the second major principle
of conscious capitalism. Besides, all the stakeholders matter and they're
interdependent on each other, a principle. Actually the first principle
is every business has this potential for higher purpose besides
just making money. Does business have to make money? Of

(33:21):
course it does. If it doesn't make money, it will fail,
and it won't create value for any of the stakeholders
if it fails, if it's not successful. It's like z
Ed Freeman, the founder's stakeholder theory likes to say, my
body produces red blood cells. If I stop producing red
blood cells, I will die. It does not follow logically
that the purpose of my life is to produce red

(33:41):
blood cells. Similarly, business has to make money or it
will die. But it doesn't mean it exists to make money.
Doctors make a lot of money, but that's not their purpose.
Their purpose is to help heal people. Teachers educate, architects
design things, engineers construct things. They all are creating value
for other people. But they have to make money doing so.

(34:05):
So does business. It's really not any different, and it
has just been defined by its enemies. Is somehow or
another greedy because it has to make money. Food for people,
not for profit, as the food co op movement says.
But guess what If you don't make a profit, then
your business cannot grow. It cannot meet crises. It cannot expand,

(34:25):
it cannot buy new equipment. So profits are absolutely essential
to the business. So conscious capitalism higher purpose, the higher
purpose of business will always have something to do with
the value creation for its customers. Whole foods a highest purpose,
higher purpose is to nourish people in the planet. That's
why we started the business in the first place. We
want to sell healthy food to people, but had to

(34:47):
earn a living, and we had to make money in
order to be able to grow and give a return
to our investors to risk their capital with us. So
capitalism is this dynamic system. Conscious capitalism just means you
understand it and you know it has a higher purpose
than just make only making money. You know that it
has these interdependent stakeholders. You know that you have to
create a culture that people enjoy being in. So culture

(35:10):
is very important, and you need culture. You need conscious leadership.
You need leaders who are servant, leaders who are serving
the higher purpose of the business and are not just
trying to line their own pockets.

Speaker 1 (35:20):
It seems like in in the kind of maybe cold
hearted capitalism, if we're talking about that, we might be
talking about a short sighted effort as well. Maybe not
creating a business that stands the test of time. If
you want to create a business, if you want to
create a podcast that lasts for a decade or longer,
you have to serve the people, the listener's ears. What
is going to be helpful to them, what they want
to hear, not just what Matt and I want to create.

(35:41):
It's the same as any business out there. And guess
what if we start being becoming too self indulgent with
the content, then people are going to tune out and
go find somebody who actually helps teach them the things
they want to know about personal finance. We talk about
competition all the time in UH when we're talking about capitalism,
but you talk about cooperation and the importance and the
necessity of cooperation. I feel like competition gets all the

(36:02):
love and it gets all the score and too Maybe
why why is cooperation so key to making business work?

Speaker 3 (36:09):
Very very good insight? Of course they're both important. Both
competition and cooperation are important, But people focus on competition.
I think it's largely because of sports and games. That's
the metaphor we oftentimes use in business. It's about winning.
The thing about a game is that our sports is

(36:30):
there's one winner and a lot of losers. But in
business there's lots of winners. The sports metaphor breaks down,
and yet most people think in a kind of winner
take all mentality, which is the wrong way to think
about business. And in terms of cooperation, the cooperation you're
cooperating within your organization to create value for your customers,

(36:52):
and that camaraderie, that team work, that working together is
the way you business will be successful. If you don't
have that, if you have all this bureaucratic infighting, your
business is very vulnerable to other organizations who have that
higher degree of cooperation, they'll beat you in the competitive marketplace.
And the competition is important because unlike again a socialistic

(37:15):
situation which lacks competition, you don't have these businesses competing
with each other. So it's like going down to the
department of Motor Vehicles and standing in line and nobody.
None of the bureaucrats have any motivation to serve you well.
They're not rewarded and they're not punished based on their
service levels. But as you say it, if you don't
do a good job with your podcast, if you're not

(37:35):
creating value for your listeners, they have other alternatives. You're
not the only podcast out there, You're not the only
personal finance podcast out there, So you have to create
value for your listeners or your business will ultimately fail
in the long run. So you're right about their long
term nature of business. Business has to Yes, the ones

(37:57):
that cheat their customers, exploit their workers, steal from their suppliers.
In the long run, they're going to fail as businesses
because people have other alternatives in the marketplace, because competition
to serve customers is the basis of capitalism. And if
you fail in serving your customers and you won't serve
your customers well, if you're trying to cheat them, and

(38:18):
if you're exploiting your workers, they're the ones that have
to serve the customers, then you're also going to have
struggles in succeeding in the marketplace. So capitalism is this
system that channels cooperation and competition to create more value
in the world, and that's why it's so powerful and
why it continues to drive human progress upward to higher levels.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
I think that's the biggest difference between folks who have
an understanding of conscious capitalism and those who don't, is
just the timeframe because yeah, I don't want to say
any company, but you can cut corners in manufacturing, or
you can treat people poorly or underpay employees. And yeah,
maybe for a year or for like for quarterly earning

(39:01):
earnings or something like that, like yes, you will see, well,
oh my gosh, this guy is so good, Like how
was he able to turn this around? I think in
conscious capitalism you talk about Toyota who actually did this,
and there's an individual who was noted for some of
the Toyota's profits. But a few years later, those shortcuts
that he took started to.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
Come General motors, the general motors, they.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Started started to come back and bite them and bite
them in the butt because of those those corners cut.

Speaker 3 (39:27):
Yeah, they started squeezing their suppliers. Yeah, and in the
short run, the suppliers had they had to go along
with it and swallow it. But they didn't have to
renew those contracts and they could begin to favor other
automobile manufacturers who treated them better. So you can get
away with cheating somebody for a while, but you also
then develop a reputation. People hear about it and they

(39:48):
don't want to do business with you. So it in
the long running backfires. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
John, In the wake of COVID, we've heard so much.
We've heard the term greed flation bandied about quite a bit,
and we've specifically seen the finger pointed at grocery store
operators a lot. As someone who started a grocery store,
a highly successful one, it seems like the competition is
incredibly stiff, the margins are thin in that industry. It's

(40:15):
not like the internet business right where there's like two
competitors going out each other. There's a bunch of grocery
stores that people can choose from. Talk to us about greedflation,
is that accurate? And how do you combat those accusations?

Speaker 3 (40:27):
The food business is so competitive. I mean, it's one
of the most competitive businesses out there. And think about
who you've got as major players. You've got Walmart. That's
Walmart's biggest category of sales as food. They are the
biggest supermarket, the biggest food retailer in the United States,
and they're famous for their low prices. And then after

(40:49):
that you got cost Co, who's even cheaper than Walmart.
And so between those two golias that are incredibly difficult
to compete in price.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
You get the European entrance too, all illegal.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Right, we can have an interview with John mackew without
bringing up Aldi, my favorite low cost food provider where
you can also buy organic foods more now.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
Yeah, they have a because it's a limited assortment model
and they focus on just a few products that they
can buy us very aggressively on those few products, so
it's kind of a treasure hunt. You can't always get
what you're looking for. But that's and Trader Joe's, i think,
falls into that category as well as a as a
natural food sort of limited assortment, lower price. They keep

(41:29):
their overhead down, they keep their cost down. Whole food's
competed on the basis of service, quality and selection and ambiance,
so that people would we always believed correctly, I think
that people would many people, not everyone, be willing to
pay a little bit more to get highest quality, great service,
and a deeper selection in natural and organic foods and

(41:52):
as commonly you could find inte Trader Joe's, for example.
So that's the point. Like capitalism, rightly understood is like
a very complex ecosystem, and there are all these different
niches that exist within that ecosystem. So you can have
a cost Co and a Walmart and a Kroger, and
an HB and a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe's
and a Legal and an Aldi. You can have all

(42:13):
of these diverse food retailers all flourishing, all succeeding because
they have got different places in that ecosystem. They serve
different customers' desires. There's not one size that fits all.
Everybody doesn't want the same thing, and that's what allows
shared prosperity. And the market's complex because people have different

(42:36):
needs and desires. So the answer to your question is
the reason. If food prices are going up, it's primarily
due to the government's prices are going up because the
government continues to print more dollars than it has demand,
and that raises prices through the whole economy. It's not
Food is not singled out. If food has temporarily pricingre is,

(43:00):
it's probably more on the supply side because you had
something happened to crops that might have might raise the
or you have oil prices go up since most of
the agricultural business is based on fossil fuels, so there
can be a lot of factors, but it's not going
to be because there are these greedy grossers out there
trying to squeeze the last nickel out of you. They're

(43:22):
in competitive situations if their prices get out of line.
There are other alternatives in the marketplace. There is not
a grand conspiracy between all the food retailers to raise prices.
If anything, they're trying to figure out how to sell
it cheaper so that they can get a competitive advantage
on everybody else.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
I think what you said is true, the fact that
it seems so prevalent. It's just where that's where most
people spend most of their money every single month. It's
one of the points of transaction. It's one of the
transactions that we have where there's a very tangible feeling
of either handing over literal cash or you adding things
to your cart and taking that cart to the cashier
and then running ringing it up. It's sort of like the.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
Satin gas prices.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
It's like exactly, It's like it's like seeing the gas
prices per gallon. It's the gasoline price phenomena where we're
crazy sensitive to that because it's something that we frequent
so often that and that we look at as opposed
to it being something true, like you said, where there's
some sort of cabal if you.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
Kept all your expenditures, and you guys might do that
since you're personal finance guys. If you tracked all your expenditures, though,
you'd find that your grocery bills were far less today
than they would have been again twenty five, thirty, forty
fifty years ago. And we're spending a lot more money
on housing today than we used to have spend, and
we spend a lot more on more consumable you know,

(44:36):
look at the how much people every people Some people
trade their iPhone in every time a new addition comes out,
and you know, that's a lot of groceries every time
you buy a new iPhone. Or you might even have
a passion like idea for ultra light camping gear, and
I'm spending I probably spend more money on ultra light
camping gear than I do on groceries. So it's it's
it's you've got to have these things in the right context.

(44:57):
But you're right. Food is something you see for equently
when if you shop yourself, and so you'll notice prices
going up and it bothers you because it's in your face.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Yeah, So to speak totally. And I get the desire
to maybe point the finger, but it's a misplaced desire because, yeah,
there again so much competition in that industry. All right, John,
we have just like a couple more questions to get
to with you, including we want to talk about people
listening to the audience who want to start their own
business what is the best way for them to go
about doing so? In twenty twenty four, we'll get to
a couple more questions with John Mackey. Right after this,

(45:37):
we are.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
Back from the break speaking with John Mackie, the founder
of Whole Foods. And John, you say that you want
to and this is a quote, empower individuals to contribute
their creativity and that human creativity is not limited. And
so what does it look like you think to just
raise up a new generation of entrepreneurs in order to
unleash their creative spirit in order to build businesses that

(45:58):
are that are going to thrive today.

Speaker 3 (46:00):
You know, it's one of the reasons I wrote I
wrote my new book, The Whole Story. I wrote it
for many reasons, but one of the reasons I wrote
it was for entrepreneurs. This is an entrepreneur's story from
the very beginning, when I didn't know anything and we
were making lots of mistakes. Could we almost didn't survive
to learning, growing, changing, evolving. So it's my friends and

(46:21):
our entrepreneurs that have read the book gets super excited.
It's like, then this just spoke to my heart. I
really loved your book. So it's easier to start a
business today than it used to be. Capital is so
much easier to get than it was to get when
we started out Whole Food's Market. I mean, the venture
capital business had just been born in any kind of

(46:41):
It was just getting started really back in the late
seventies and early eighties down in Silicon Valley. So now
you have angel investors you have, it's so much easier.
And because of the social networks that we the social
networks we have today that we didn't have then, as
well as you have all these incubators. The capital used

(47:02):
to be scarce. It's not scarce any longer in terms
of businesses. So if you have a good idea, you
can get it funded.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
You can also start a digital business. And thirty years
ago digital businesses is starting a business online on the
Internet wasn't a thing. And now there are so many
successful people who launched something online. They have an idea
and they can create a one person, two person business
that supports their whole family.

Speaker 3 (47:26):
And it could be a worldwide business as well.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
Yeah, with just a few people working for which is
insane to think about. Really. And by the way you mentioned, yeah,
you're kind of your book and kind of the vibe.
I feel like your book had Shoe Doog vibes, which
is like the highest praise I can give to a
business memoir because Phil Knight's book is just so classically excellent.
But you get put in not just you can put
in your shoes as an individual going through all this stuff,

(47:52):
but you also learn like a lot of business stuff
along the way. And that's what made Shoe Doog so powerful,
just like, hey, this is the story of how business
gets built and it's not always pretty, uh and yours
wasn't always pretty either, but there's so much we can
learn from learn from it. What advice would you have
for listeners who have a burning desire to start something,
who who want to start a business, who are hear

(48:12):
what you've been able to accomplish, granted through a lot
of hard work, a lot of effort, but who say
I want to do something similar, I want to create
something great. Where would you tell them to start first?

Speaker 3 (48:21):
I want to say, Shoe Dog was the book. That's
my favorite business book I've ever ready. That was the
benchmark we used in writing the whole story. It's like,
that's our benchmark. Well, not a book is good or
better than Shoe Dog, So that was, Uh, that's I
praise if we're in the same category with them. And
another point I want to make is that compared to

(48:42):
the past, like when we started to try to do
Wholefoods dot com and then Whole People dot com, there
was no software as a service. There was no that
didn't exist, a salesforce. Dot Com hadn't really gotten going.
I hadn't done their business yet. There was no uh,
no shop of if you wanted to do a digital business,
there was You had to build everything from scratch, super

(49:06):
expensive to do and the tech talent was very expensive
and it was scarce. So today you can start a
business and you pretty much you don't all your account
and you're legal. Everything you want you can pretty much
get as software as a service, and so you don't
have to make the same capital allocations. So so much
easier today.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
But there's another business, typically a fairly inexpensive one there
to support you in the stuff that you don't want
to do or you're not great at.

Speaker 3 (49:28):
That's exactly correct. So you can really focus on what
you are good at, and you can outsource pretty much
everything else. So you know, the best advice I can
give people that want to start a business is started,
just get going on it. Most people are too afraid
to just get going and afraid of failure. They're afraid
of they don't know enough. But as my book points out,

(49:51):
I didn't know enough either. I didn't know what we
were doing, but I was willing to make mistakes and learned.
And if you're waiting, I'll tell you, I'll tell you
a story. So well, I get it. Invited to speak
at business schools a lot, and one of the if
I speaking in an NBA class, one of my questions
I get when we get into Q and A. And
then I ask questions too, And one of the questions
I asked the group of students is how many of

(50:13):
you plan on starting a business someday like I did.
Dependent's on the business school, but oftentimes I get at
least three quarters of the people raise their hand some
day they want to start a business, and then I say, okay,
how many of you going to do that? Immediately after
you get your MBA very few hands stay up, and
I say the ones and hands are up. You guys

(50:35):
are going to start your own business. The rest of
you are kidding yourselves. And what happens is people have
a dream to start a business, but they always have
excuses not to. In the case of the NBA students,
it's like, well, I got a lot of school debt,
I've got I got a two hundred thousand dollars offer
from Amazon or from Goldman Sachs and a bonus. I'm
going to take that, but someday, I'm going to come

(50:56):
back to my business dream. Somedays then they get it,
and they get they have families and they have big houses,
and their lifestyle goes up and they never find their
way back, so to speak. So my best advice I
can give you, if you're going to start a business,
stop waiting and start it. And they oftentimes say, I
hear VC say, I only want to invest in an

(51:17):
entrepreneur who's got at least one or two failures under
their belt, because they all learned from that. The point
is that you'll not learn until you start. But once
you start, there's a certain power in starting. There's a
great quote quote by Gerda that talks about once you
truly commit to something boldly and you move forward, the

(51:39):
whole universe kind of shifts. You start having, you start
meeting the right people. You have all these interesting synchronicities
if one thing. Once your entrepreneurial mind is turned on,
you start to see other possibilities and people become possible
resources to you that you've never thought about before, and
so you have to begin it. But once you begin it,

(52:03):
I'm going to actually say that world, the universe begins
to shift and work your way, work for you instead
of against you. And you'll have to do that to
understand what I'm saying. But I've talked to lots of entrepreneurs.
I know hundreds of entrepreneurs, and they all tell me
the same thing. Once I really committed, the world started.
You know, the right people showed up at the right time,

(52:24):
the right circumstances happened, and we moved forward and became successful.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
Yeah, until you start, you are still behind the veil.
And once you step out from behind that veil, that's
when you start to begin to see those possibilities.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
I'm a great believer in Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey,
and I really believe you know, I felt called at
this Hero's Journey. I think entrepreneurs feel a call to
a hero's journey. I think everybody gets a call to
a hero's journey, but most people are too scared or
too frightened to answer that call. I just want to
encourage you that to answer the call whatever is in

(52:57):
your heart, to go out and do the thing. So
that are your call to do that your heart is
calling you to do. Your life will be so much
more interesting and so much more fun. It'll be a
grand adventure if you just had the courage to answer
that call and pursue it. So I urge your listeners
to do that exact thing.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
Well, I heartily agree, John Mackie, thank you so much
for talking with us today. We're gonna, of course, link
to your new book that just came out yesterday, and
I know you've got it is John mackey dot com.
We're folks can learn more about you. What you're up to?
Is that right?

Speaker 3 (53:27):
That's John pmacky dot com.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
Oh I forgot. Okay, there you go. Yeah, well we'll
link to everything, John, and man, we so appreciate your
wisdom and your time today. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 3 (53:37):
I've really enjoyed our conversation. Guys. I wish you the
very best in everything that you do in your own
entrepreneurial journey.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
So that was an incredibly fun conversation. And my only
regret is that we hit stop after we officially ended
the podcast, and we thought we were about to leave,
and then we just fired back up for like another
ten or fifteen minutes. Yeah, and we don't freaking have
any of that to share with listeners, but I am sorry.
A lot of wisdom, lot of money, listeners, a lot
of joy I mean, yes, oh my gosh, John, I

(54:04):
think it came through in our conversation, in our interview
with him, but like I feel like, I don't know
when when the interview's over, I feel like he had
the freedom to be even more of yourself. And folks,
I'm happy to let you know that John was even
cooler than he seemed on the interview.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
I've always been a big fan, so I was glad,
so glad to get to have him on and okay,
so I'm gonna give my bigel he said he talked about,
he said, just start it going right. But the cool
thing too, is it that's that's not just empty rhetoric
for him to mind, That's not just advice to somebody else.
He's taking his own medicine because he has launched another business,
which we didn't even get into in the conversation, a

(54:40):
new business, Love dot Life, and it's, uh, the first
location is launching in Los Angeles here in a few
months time. And so I don't I guess I love
that John takes his own medicine. And then he talks
about it as being this passion pursuit all the way
through founding Whole Foods, and his new business, Love dot
Life is also another passion business. And so yeah, if
you want to start business. I love what he said

(55:01):
too about the guys holding their hands up whether or
not they're going to start a new business or not.
You're filling yourself. It's a passion, isn't there. You're you know,
And because like let's say, Matt, there's.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
Some I think it's I think maybe for them what
they would say it was like, well, no, no, no, I'm passionate,
but life gets in the way and all these other
things stack up against you, and you've got to be
I'm in a dovetail. Okay. So this is gonna be
my big takeaway too, which is that you've got to
be willing to take the risk. And you know, we
kind of talked about the the upsides and the benefits
of starting a business today, where like where you have

(55:28):
all of the technology at your fingertips in order to
get a business started. And while that is true, what
we also have is this thing called social media that
raises to the highest level perfection. And if you are
so obsessed with perfection and the fear of making a
mistake keeps you from taking risks, well you're never going

(55:48):
to get started to begin with. And so it's man technology.
It's this double edged short and so therefore I think
we have to make sure that we are including the
aspects of technology and innovation the things that make our
life better, including the things that are leading.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
Us astray and just yeah, distracting us too. It's part
of being us where our larger life goals may build
something easier than ever before. You can also get distracted
by the technology of the tools than ever before. So yeah,
use them to your advances. The digital minimalism strategy that
Cal Newport talks about absolutely using the proper tools to
your advantage in the right quantity and discarding the rest.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
So all right, let's introduce our beer, because you and
I enjoyed a peak mosaic and this was a beer
by Hot Butcher for the world. What did you think, buddy, This.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
Is one of the best beers I've had in a
long time. So good. I was overjoyed drinking this beer.
While we talked to John, I.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Just looked at Yeah, this is a big beer, which
is which is why it was what ten?

Speaker 1 (56:41):
That's right? So okay, So in my mind this was
basically the juiciest hot Bomb that I've had in recent memory.
To Hot Butcher, I've only had a few of their beers.
I think they're out of the Chicago area maybe, but
it was right. I love what they're doing and I
will drink all the Hot Butcher beers until they stop
making them or sending them to Atlanta.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
It's like New England Hazy Concentrate and all other breweries
should make their beers based on this beer like this
should be like the Mother got like the mother or
the starter or whatever when it comes to sour dough
for all the all the sour dough lovers out there,
and I feel like this should be the mother for
all the other hazy New England's out there.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
If our local Georgia breweries would try to replicate this,
I'd be thrilled, even just like their their half hearted
attempt would be them.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Among the stars.

Speaker 1 (57:26):
Yeah, this was delicious. So all right, everyone, we'll put
links to everything that it's related to John his new book,
which of course is a fantastic read. We'll put that
in the show notes up at how tomoney dot com.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
That's right, and so until next time, Buddy, best Friends Out,
Best Friends Out,