YouSaid · the spoken record

John Mackey

lines on the record: 163
first: 2024-10-29
most recent: 2024-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You know, I think success for me has been just being following my heart and being true to myself because doing Following my bliss at Joseph Campbell said, I've tried to follow my bliss, and I've been very successful by my own internal measurements because I have been true to myself. I have followed my heart, and it's led to me my life's been this grand adventure. I'm a very happy person. I have a lot of love in my life, I have a lot of friends, I do what I want to do, I meet cool people like you Yeah, to me that's a successful life is a life well lived, one that's true to yourself, true to your own values, true to your beliefs, and has a lot of love in it. I wouldn't imagine a successful life without didn't have a lot of love in it.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Exactly. Exactly. And confirmation bias is so powerful. People just confirm what they want to believe. So, you know what, if I could do Anything that would help the health of America the most, I'd probably want to change, I'd want to make nutrition education more something that would be emphasized in the schools and emphasizing particularly the medical schools because they're not given, doctors are given almost no nutritional, they come to believe that it has anything to do with health, that their potions and their elixirs, their drugs are the thing that will restore health, and that's not right. That's not true.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but then I think you can nudge it But then when you start using power to try to change people's behavior, how do you know that the people that take over the power will do it in an actually good way? It's like the good intentions of socialism, the bad elements take it over. And the next thing you know, the healthy foods are being eliminated because the people in power have, it's been co-opted.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a very challenging question because in general, I think people need to, these are adult, people need to make their own decisions, and I don't think you should be telling people they can't eat things.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not confronted with it, or they will be forced to. So it's very difficult. You have to meet the market where you find it. You have to give the market what it wants. And when the market, if you feel judged by people, you don't want to do business there anymore. So that's one of the reasons the people in Whole Foods Meat Departments were very unhappy that they were not getting good anny scores. So they didn't think this was a good, this is bullshit. This is not a good system.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What they would do is they'd dumb it down so that a lot of stuff that you think is red now would all of a sudden be green. And it's like because most of the food that we're selling in supermarkets is not good for people. And if you start telling the truth, one or two things is going to happen. People are going to be either stop shopping at your store because all that store selling is red food. I'm going to go to this other store that doesn't put all this red. It's the same food, but I don't want to know.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They'd have a lot of red products on their shelves, and people would ask them, why the hell are you selling all this red food? And so”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And getting people kill the messenger, man. That's not a new thing. They didn't like the message we were delivering. And because people knew that I was a plant based guy, they thought Mackie's trying to make everybody eat his diet. And all we were trying to do is give out the information of nutrient density per calorie. It was important information. But at the end of the day, I talked about how I had caved in. My team was not, they didn't want to keep doing it.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's not even close. And then all the vegetables were way up there, then the fruits are under that. Then you've got beans under that, then you've got whole grains. Then you've got nuts and seeds. All the whole foods are much higher nutrient density. Then you get into the animal foods. And this is what became controversial, is that the animal foods on a per calorie basis have fewer nutrients. This was very upsetting to people, and they got angry, people, and team members got angry about it. People that want to eat a paleo diet were angry. The people that ate a carnivore work diet, carnivore diet were angry because they really want, they like their animal foods, they're calorie dense. There's a lot of calories in animal foods. They taste good.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you know what happens then is that those get gamed. In the sense that there have been all kinds of rating systems that have tried to be applied, but then the food manufacturing companies, not only do they lobby, but they're constantly trying to change those rules so that their products look good. It's more complicated than you think because we tried to do something at Whole Foods. We actually did it. We called it, it was based on Joel Furman's work, an aggregate nutritional density index. So we were looking for nutrient density in foods. You can get how many vitamins and minerals and then the phytonutrients that foods have. And we raked, rated all our food, and we put up the ratings all around the store. Fresh vegetables, particularly leafy greens, are by far the most nutrient dense food you can eat nutrients per calorie.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The food system today, it gives the market what it wants. It wants calorie density, but it's killing us. It's making us sick. It's making us obese. We need to, people are always asking me as a plant-based guy, where do you get your protein? It's like in every food I eat, protein's not scarce. Where do you get your fiber? Because you're not getting fiber from those processed foods. You're not getting it from the animal foods. Maybe something like 90 plus percent of Americans have less fiber than is optimal for their gut health. We now know the gut is the first and most important part of our immune system. So that's whole foods. Whole foods are, you know, it's the definition is a little bit fuzzy. So a little bit of processing is not too bad. But the more you do, the worse it tends to become. And now we eat highly processed foods, not just three times a day. Some people just eat and eat and eat all day long.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biggest challenge humans have with our diets is that we evolved our genes preclude us or our genes we evolved in scarcity, we evolved with starvation was our biggest problem. Not for just the last few thousand years, but for tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. It just wasn't enough food. And so we've evolved to crave calorie-dense foods. And it's in our genetic structure. And we like foods that have a lot of protein or have a lot of sugar or have a lot of fat. Oil, pure fat, nothing but fat. Sugar, nothing but carbohydrate. High concentrations of protein. People always put in protein powders and things like that in their smoothies. We crave calorie density. We also crave salt because it was scarce as we evolved. And so as a result, the food”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you say take oil, royal or sugar, those are not whole foods. If you add oil, whether it be olive oil or seed oil, you're not getting a whole food. You're just getting the pure fat of that food. And what is sugar? Sugar is taking a whole carbohydrate food and stripping away the fiber in the germ until you're just left with pure carbohydrate.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I say whole foods, I mean a food that's as close to its natural state as possible, so it's been minimally processed. So, and that would be like the things I listed, fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, seafood. Those have been manipulated too, so I think you want to try to get animal foods that have not been grass-fed, for example, if you're a beef or they're not been animals have not been put in feedlots, have not been crowded together that they have lived out there sort of natural animal lives. So sort of natural meats, then you've got your beans, your nuts, your seeds, all your legumes, you're going to have things that are produced with minimally processing. So you can cook food, for example.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when we first started, we didn't have very many processed foods. We didn't have junk that we could easily sell. So we mostly sold produce and meat and bulk food. People cooked. I will tell you one interesting statistic. Our very first store was over 20% of our sales were in the bulk foods department, and we didn't have any candy back then. So it was just whole grains, whole grain flours, beans, nuts, seeds, things like that, whole foods. And today it's under 1%. 20% to 1%.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know the answer to that quite, but I do know that I knew and I know what our produce, I really don't think I should reveal those statistics because there's not public information. I don't want Whole Foods unnecessarily mad at me. But they were not as high as they were when we started out. And that's because the processed food industry incorporated our standards and made processed foods that met Whole Foods market standards because we'd sell it, but they were just meeting them, you might say.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“diseases, obesity, a lot of the autoimmune diseases are also related to that's more complicated, but diet is a huge factor in terms of how strong our immune systems are. So it's not that complicated. People make it, I mean, I always tell people if you want to, if you try to get your information from the internet, you're going to be confused.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, Warren Buffett's a good example because he's a terrible diet. On the other hand, he's got a great positive attitude, but he also doesn't take any toxins in other than his diet. He's not a smoker. He doesn't drink. He actually eats, he's not taking a lot of the things that wreck our health sooner than necessary. But yes, I think Warren has an incredibly positive attitude, and I think it's one of the reasons he's going to probably live to be 100 and still be trucking along. He's still sharp his attack. Other than, of course, he missed out on that Whole Foods opportunity. Then I think diet, though, is very important. I mean, I was a grocer. I do think the diet that people eat in America today is, you know, I mean, the statistics tell you all, 74% of Americans overweight, 43% are obese. We're dying from diseases like heart disease that are dietary. They're dietary.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually feel like First of all, I think the most important thing is attitude. I mean, a positive attitude, a sense of purpose and meaning, it's like The body, as long as the body feels like it has something it needs to do, it wants to stay alive. It's like, you can't dial me now. I got important work to do. And that's communicated through all the cells. It's like we're not done here yet. So I think, first of all, the mind and the attitude is most important for health and longevity. I know people that eat terrible diets, but have very positive attitudes that are remarkably healthy, even though they should be fallen apart. It's just that they're important.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More energy, positive attitude, and also Love Life's working on people's emotional and spiritual health as well, not that we're doing breath work, we're doing meditation classes, when psychedelic therapy is legal in California like it is in Colorado and Oregon. We'll be doing that under therapeutic sessions. So the whole idea is to help every person that becomes a member to become the very healthiest physically, emotionally, and spiritually that they can be. And hopefully if people start young enough and work with us long enough that these chronic diseases, they'll never get them. They're not inevitable. We're all going to die of something, but we should live to be 100 without these chronic diseases wrecking our lives. And be a sound mind and high vitality. And the wisdom, it'll be good for the planet because it'll have healthy old wise people being greater percentage of the population.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not very good at that. They might manage that symptoms of the disease, but they don't really prevent it or reverse it. So Love Life aims to change that, to disrupt that paradigm. We think now with the testing protocols we have that you can get, most people don't know how healthy they are. It starts with a good assessment so you can find out where you stand. And then once we had that, then the wearables, the data you can get from an aura ring, Apple Watch, Garmin, there's so many different continuous glucose monitor, we can begin to track peoples. And then once you have good assessments and tracking, then it's about the doctor works with you and a health coach to create kind of a precision individualized plan for you unique to yourself that allows you to become the healthiest version of yourself, to be more vital, more healthy, more alive, stronger immune system.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our healthcare system is now really a disease management system. And it's not preventative. It's not really dealing with lifestyle diseases. Our medical system's good if you have an infectious disease. It's good in terms of things like vaccinations, antibiotics, surgery, first aid. But the chronic diseases that kill people, obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, cancer.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, of course, you have a spa with massage and facials and things that you would get at any kind of non-medical spa, no Botox, but what you get at a good spa, pretty much like in a resort setting. Then we have pickleball. We have three indoor pickleball courts because we think play is important and pickleball is the community builder. Since I was trying to play pickleball about three years ago, I've made at least 50 new friends that I hang out with because of pickleball. And then the medical center, which is the most important part.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is. So I'm just telling you the parts of it. So you've got a gym, we've got yoga, we've got Pilates, we've got, we have a spa, we have all this recovery equipment from hyperbaric oxygen chambers to cryotherapy to red light therapy to infrared saunace, regular saunace, to cold plunges. There's other lymphatic massage suits you can wear and microcurrents that you can we've got lots of different biohacks there”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, love life is kind of a continuation of my hero's journey call to try to help people be healthier, first with natural and regaining foods and now with love life. It's a holistic experience. Membership Club is really what it is. And it's got elements. It's a plant forward Whole Foods restaurant. Got some animal foods in there, but it's definitely focused on people eating a lot more fruits and vegetables. We've got a state-of-the-art fitness center. We have all kinds of classes, spin classes, work on a huge.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To fail. Most businesses do fail. That's why I remember earlier on I said I got clear about death. I'm going to die. I'm going to live my life as an adventure. It's more fun that way. I can't guarantee it'll work out. If it doesn't, I'll learn and grow and do better next time.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Life is shorter than you think it is. It's too short to not be doing something that you really are passionate about, that you're drawn to. Don't do something because you're just trying to get safety and security. You probably won't be happy as you get older. You might have to change when you get older. So I always tell people, young people, it's like, what do you really care about? What are you passionate about? Go after that. Follow. I call it the hero's journey, or I got that from Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, but the hero's journey is one where you feel an inner calling, an inner drive, and you simply answer it. You do it, even though it's scary, and you go off on your adventure. You don't know how it's going to turn out. So Whole Fidge was my hero's journey. I'm on a new one with Love. I don't know how it's going to turn. I could fail. I mean, based on probability it will fail because most things.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first of all, just in general I get asked a similar question, slightly different. I get asked, what advice would you give a young person, entrepreneur or not? And the advice I'd always give is follow your heart.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other examples of times I had the, I bought the Amryon. I pushed to do.com. We can't let the internet opportunity escape us. $100 million we lost. So you know what? I've had my serious successes, but I've had enough failures to recognize I am far from infallible in my judgment and to learn to trust people that I'm working with and make decisions collectively. If they took a universal stand, I would almost say that the whole is smarter than me and just let it go. And I think any good entrepreneur would back down at times when the people they love and trust are all telling them this is a mistake. You got to listen to it.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the challenges that I think many entrepreneurs, every successful entrepreneur eventually faces and some don't rise to the occasion, and that is that success can breed ego expansion where you start thinking that you're some kind of universal genius. I think in my case, I had so many failures. If you get your face slammed in the ground a few times, you learn a little humility. I've remember Saferway was a failure for me, and we had to get into the first Whole Foods to make it successful. Then we had a flood. After nine months, we were bankrupt. And then I started some new stores, and one of my founders quit because he said, you're wrecking the company. These new stores are never going to amount to anything. You're diluting down our gold mine with these mines that don't have any gold in them.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you need both. You need the paradox. You do need creativity, but you also need structure. You need generative people and you need structural people. I, for example, Very generative I needed more structural people around me and also needed people to tell me when my ideas were full of shit because sometimes they really were and I needed people that I had a high enough trusting relationship with me and they trusted me enough that they could come in and just say, John, this is not going to work. And here's the reasons why it's not going to work. We can't figure out how to make it work. Now, every once in a while, I would say, I'll figure out how to make it work and go forward with it and figure it out. But oftentimes it's like, you know, you're right. I can't figure out how to make this work. We'll let it go. But how did this?”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that question sort of answers itself. The founder founded the company. So you can't fit the founder in another structure. It wouldn't be the founder any longer.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“my own. So I think a good entrepreneur, a good team builder is going to be able to build a team that complements their strengths and compensates for their weaknesses. That's a different thing than just being able to collect talent because it's like a difference between like a good basketball team is one that not just has a lot of talent, but it's a talent that can play well together where they're synergistic and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. You just have a lot of talented people who don't work well together and are backbiting each other, then they might be brilliant, but your team's probably going to lose.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, when you do that, people want to perform to a very high level of you because they don't want to let you down. And so I could see their potential. And the downside, the shadow side of that, you might say, is that oftentimes didn't see their weaknesses? Is that clearly? So I've oftentimes needed people on the team, like I particularly work really well with my chief financial officer Glinda Flanagan, because she always saw the downside in people. And she could see the shadow when I was blind to it. And she said, I don't think we should hire him. He's, you know, I know he's impressed you here because he's dazzled you, John. You think he's so unbrilliant and whatnot. But God, can you just see? He's kind of a slimy slime guy. I don't think we can trust this guy. I don't think he's going to fit into our culture. I found out the hard way that she was almost always right. When I'd overrule her and make hire somebody anyway, I'd always regret it. So I finally learned to say, I trust her judgment in this more than I trust.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question. And the answer is I never thought about it before, but yeah, absolutely. Of course there is. Sometimes those entrepreneurs that are driving forward, not sometimes almost all the time, they have to have other people on their team who correct for their faults because their faults generally are very, very big. For example, I'll take my own situation. I was I was never very good at hiring. And that's because I think people's weaknesses come out of their shrinks. One of my strengths was I see people's potential. I see their very best in them.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That creates a kind of charisma and it attracts people to them that want to work with them. I mean, people like, you know, everything I've read, people like Elon or Steve, these guys can be really, they can be very, they can be assholes at times, but they are so passionate about what they're doing. And they create sense, a sense of purpose that they draw very talented people that want to be on their teams. And those people stay for a long time. I do think the ability to create a great team is an underrated skill that I oftentimes think entrepreneurs. I don't know if they consciously create them. I mean, Steve Jobs used to say that he would only hire A listers because he says if you hire B listers, B listers will hire C listers. So he had these high standards of performance and he wouldn't sacrifice those high standards for what he did.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he He's able to attract these amazing people to be on his team. By the way, that's something I haven't talked about in entrepreneurs, I'll say right now. Entrepreneurs generally have a lot of charisma. They talk about Steve Jobs having, I never met Steve, they talked about Steve having a reality distortion field. And I think that's true of a lot of entrepreneurs. They're so passionate about their vision.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These guys came and helped bail him out a couple times when he was near, you know, when he might have failed. So he had friends and he had loyal friends who would help him in those crisis situations. But his boldness, I mean, the way SpaceX got created, he goes and visits the Russians to get missiles from him. And he thinks they're trying to sell them too expensive. So he just decides, well, I want to build my own rockets. It's like he figures out how much the materials are costing and he says, well, we can do this for a lot cheaper than they can.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that book for a lot of different reasons. But I know Elon a little bit, but I got to know him better in that book. And the thing that just blew me away, because I consider myself a guy who's willing to move aggressively and to seize opportunities and take chances. But what he did again and again and again, which always paid off for him, he was always willing to get up there like a person who'd won a bunch of chips in a poker game. He just put the whole pie. He'd put it all in. He could have lost everything multiple times. And it was like, that guy's either the most courageous, boldest entrepreneur I've ever seen. He's a damn fool. And you'd have to conclude now by his tremendous success and wealth that he's just the most brilliant entrepreneur because, I mean, in the book talk about some of his friends also, I know, like his brother Kimball or Luke Nosis.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had others hesitate, they're worried about their downside. You know, I don't know if you've read, have you read Elon Musk's biography by Walt Isaacson yet?”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An entrepreneur oftentimes sees a problem as an opportunity to be solved. Wow. And they frequently do solve it. So entrepreneurs also, they have to be very resilient. Really, you are going to, it's just nature of the beast. There's trial and error. There's failure. You're groping your way. You have an idea that could be very successful idea, but you don't exactly know how to put it into practice. Also, entrepreneurs are quick to see things that are working elsewhere. And it's like they can take ideas from one context and add it to another. That's something I happen to be really good at. I see an idea here and it's like, wow, we could apply this to love life or we could apply this to whole foods. That's a terrific idea. Let's make that work. There are also willing, as I told said earlier, oftentimes entrepreneurs are willing to go and move forward and others are not.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think different entrepreneurs have different, and I think there's not one size that fits all, but I'll talk about it in general terms, and I think there's a lot that have a lot of overlap. Well, most entrepreneurs are very creative. You know, I think the average intellectual does not understand how creative entrepreneurs are or how frequently intelligent they are because they're not maybe intelligent the way the intellectuals are. They're street smart. They also see opportunities. They see connections. Entrepreneurs are very future-oriented. They oftentimes see the world the way the world could be. They see possibilities when others see problems.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the tool shouldn't become the master. Some businesses become slaves to their business plan, and it's like we're behind the plan now. So what are we going to do differently to get us back on plan? It's like, well, don't do something stupid to try to get yourself back on plan because maybe your plan's wrong. And so the tool is something to help you think about the business, but it's the master if you start making business decisions to hit some stupid plan that you may have. Change the damn plan. I don't think I'll tell that story. It was about Amazon, they were a real planning company, and I had some problems with overplanning, but I don't think I'm going to get into details about that one.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business planning I have mixed feelings about it. I think that It's a useful tool, but you need to always rut, remember it's a tool, and it's a useful tool because it's good to think about your business. When you're doing business planning, you're going into a different frame of mind. You're going into what I call an analytical frame of mind. You're going to analyze where you're at and then you're going to create like a spreadsheet kind of projecting about the future and you're creating this plan around it. That's all very useful to do. It's good to think about your business that way from time to time.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I might have done the same More likely she would have. But that was a blind date and it was harder to meet people back in the day. You couldn't just have an app. And I thought I was being very clever at the time. I asked my married friends if they were single, is there anybody they'd like to be going out with? Because I wasn't going to get any tips from my single friends. And so fortunately, I had a friend that was married and he owned an art gallery and Deborah was a customer, so he got her meet her that way. So I think you're going to really like this woman. She's, you know, she's really, she's beautiful. She's smart. She's really sweet. Girl next door type that you like. And yeah, she was like my soulmate.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never thought about it. You're possibly right. My ego is hurt. And if I had other women that were ready to go out with me, I might have said, well, you know, that's her loss.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it worked because she did like the letter. She called me up and said, I wasn't going out with you again, but anybody that could write that good of a letter is worth the second date. So the second date went better and she likes to say by the third date she knew we were getting married. 34 over 34 years ago now.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, in that letter, I just kind of, kind of like I've done in this podcast, I just opened myself up and I just said, here's, I don't know exactly what I did wrong, but I knew I did something wrong. But here's who I am. I really like you. Here's who I think you are. I realize that I kind of blew the state, but it's okay. Even having one date with you is very special. And I think you're a very special person. I think I wish you the very best. I hope you have a wonderful life. This was before email. I stayed up all night writing this letter and polishing it and rewriting it. And then I stuck it under a door about 5 a.m. I mean, I had that very faint hope that it was a hail Mary Pass.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True, and it wasn't altruism on their part. We had been a very successful business, and they felt confident once we got back on our feet, we'd be able to pay them back. But still, they had to take at least a little bit of a leap of faith to do it.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's true. And think about it When you're with somebody who's always looking out for you, who's looking for a win for you too, you trust them. Your relationship deepens and with trust, there's so many more things you can do together. So part of the win-win-win is knitting people together. But there are people that don't think win-win-win. It's almost like you've got to be asking the question, is the person I'm dealing with, are they looking for a win for me too? Are they just looking to see how much they can get from me? So you need to have the attitude of win-win-win, but you also have to be conscious of people that are working from a different framework who might try to exploit you. And you need to be more cautious around them. But once you know you're dealing with somebody else who's operating from a similar framework, man, oh man, there's almost nothing you can't do together.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT