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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And business with you any longer. Same way with your investors if you're public like Whole Foods was, publicly traded. We could sell your stock if you don't like it. So you have all of these stakeholders and the business has to be managing to create a win for the customers, a win for the employees, a win for the suppliers, and the win for the investors, a win for the communities that you're part of. That's when I began to realize the importance of win-win-win was through stakeholder philosophy. But I'll take it one further. Once you really can internalize win-win-win in your life, and that's how you try to live, you're always looking with every person you interact. You're looking for a win-win-win. Good for you, good for me, good for all of us. It really becomes unethical system. You pretty much can just only resolve any ethical question by always going back, what's the win-win-win here? How do we all win? It solves almost all ethical questions. It's kind of an ethical code in and of itself.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did not always think that way. I think we're trained to think in terms of win-lose. I mean, think about almost every game, every sport. There's a winner and there's a loser. We're taught the way reason people don't understand that about capitalism, by the way, so I can tie this back into it is capitalism's a win-win-win-win game. It's good for all the participants. The people, customers don't have to trade with a business. If they don't like the prices or the service or the selection, they can go down the, you don't like Whole Foods, you can go down to Trader Joe's and got alternatives. If you don't like working for Whole Foods, you don't have to. There's plenty of other places you can go work at. So Whole Foods has to do a good job or people won't stay working there. If you don't do a good job with your customers, they'll trade somewhere else. If you don't do a good job with your suppliers, they don't have to trade with you. They can cut you off. They don't have to be business.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, whenever they go socialist, they start, like Venezuela is a great example of what one of the richest country in South America before Chavez got in there. And he had the richest oil reserves And they completely screwed it all up, which pretty much is always what happens.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“century when freedom broke through, and this great upward lift of prosperity, the genie got out of the bottle, and they've been trying to, intellectuals and people have been trying to cram that genie back in the bottle ever since. They haven't been able to do it yet. But if they ever do, then we're going to see progress from screeching to a halt and begin to go in reverse.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can always describe it as in these perfect terms, capitalism is always compared against its failures, and socialism is always compared to its ideals. And that's not a fair comparison. You have to compare reality against reality or ideals against ideals, because capitalism has noble ideals as well. And so if you just have complete laissez-faire capitalism, you end up with the mafia. You have to have somebody that keeps the violent people from beating up the ones who are their competitors. So there is no perfect solution to we have to muddle along with freedom and some regulations and do the best that we can. But it's going to be capitalism is really, it's never been done before. Economic freedom has always been under the thumb of other people throughout all history until the late.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It will always fail. It will never succeed. It's a dream that doesn't work. It always turns into a nightmare. But every generation is born, has to be the young are always idealist. I was a socialist when I was young. Before I started my own business, you know, surely we can create a utopia together. It'll be different this time. But human nature is not changing. And your ideals are safer way was an idealistic thing. And it's like, I had to meet the market where I found it, not where I wanted it to be. I just think that It's always going to be”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you end up using coercion in force to try to make the utopia work. It's very interesting. If you study like take the kibbutz in Israel, which was such a well-intentioned socialistic movement and the people that founded it were socialist. And it's what happens the first generation was so idealistic and made all these sacrifices thickabuts. The second generation, they're not quite as much into it. They want to have more private possessions. They're not willing. They don't want their children raised by the collector. They want to raise their children themselves. They want to have their own possessions. So you might say that individualism starts to creep back in. And by the third generation, they don't even want to stay in the kibbutz. They want to get the hell out into the rest of the world. The world's a big place. Lots of opportunities. So those ideals ultimately are not what most people want. So socialism is bound to fail.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Despite all the other failures which, by the way, they're not aware of, they just can rationalize those failures away. Well, that was Stalin, or that was Mao, or that was Castro, or that was Hugo Chavez. These were dictators. We just got to get the right people in. If we get the right people in running things, it'll be different this time. What they don't understand is the right people never get in because the people that are most drawn to power and control of others, the monsters, they eventually eliminate all the well meaning professors and put them in the gulags, and the dictators end up in power and in charge, and you lose your economic freedom and you end up these totalitarian nightmares that started well intentioned with good intentions, but when you take away individual freedom, almost by definition socialism cannot allow economic freedom. You can't allow individuals to make these decisions. People have to do”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very, in a capitalistic society where you have economic freedom and free markets, no one's actually running things. Markets are self-adapting and correcting. Many people are very uncomfortable without idea. They think somebody has to be in control of it all. And so they're willing to give up their economic and personal freedoms for the security of thinking somebody's in control. Someone's doing it. They believe that”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always tell people it's like if you want to use Sweden as an example, you got to take the whole shooting match. I would take the Swedish. If you gave me everything Sweden has, but they don't want to take the low corporate taxes. They don't want to take the universal. Healthcare. They don't want to take all the things of Sweden. They want to lock down the economy and they don't want to take all of Sweden. They just want to cherry pick it. But if you took it all, I'd probably be, because what the trade-off is they're going to have those big social welfare programs Sweden has and you're going to have higher personal income taxes, but you're going to have lower corporate income taxes and you're going to have more economic freedom. I'd probably take the Swedish package if you could all, but you'd have to give me the whole thing.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“School choice Sweden has universal school choice. Students can go to any school they want to. The students make the choices. The parents and students make the choices. School choices bitterly fought against the United States by the progressives and the teachers unions. Sweden's a very progressive country that's universalized school choice. Sweden has amazing freedoms in other areas and they're so far from socialistic it's just they have a I have a big social welfare program with their healthcare but they're also”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, just for everybody listening. Yes, per capita basis. Of course, there's much lower population there. Sweden's economic freedom index is lower than the United States. There are, I think, the United States is now up to about 18. Sweden is like number 15 or 16. Corporate tax rates in Sweden are like 20%. I always tell people it's like, so would you favor corporate tax rates dropping in the United States down to 20%? Well, no.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They didn't. No, they didn't. They stayed open. And they said that was a disaster. But now if you look at deaths for Sweden over the last four years from COVID, they're pretty good compared to much better in the United States, for example.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Socialism is a utopian dream that's failed. It's a god that failed. There are forty one countries in the last hundred twenty years starting with Russia, 1917, nineteen eighteen that have tried socialism. Every one of them has failed. All 41 have failed. Socialism has never worked. And when people talk about what about the Nordic countries, it's like they're not socialistic. If you look at the economic freedom index, which charts how economically free a country is, all the Nordic countries are in the top 25 in the entire world. And three of those five are ahead of the United States in economic freedom. What about Sweden? It's like, well, Sweden's my favorite example because when I talk about, when you talk about Sweden, it's like, okay, well, let's look at what Sweden does. Did they lock down during?”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was like in the United States two hundred years ago or one hundred seventy years ago, or even when I was a little boy growing up in Houston, Texas, and they had Jim Crow laws. They had racial segregation was legal. There's so much less racism today than there was. And in fact, we're the least racist we've ever been. There's always going to be inequality, but there's no more inequality today than there was at the founding of our republic. And that just people change in terms of where they are in that hierarchy, but there's always going to be inequalities because there's inequalities due to people's constitutional abilities, intelligence, the way their parents raise them, the communities they're born in. There's just lots of reasons why people become more, some people become more successful than others. My point is so...”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The amazing innovations that we have today in music, and it's the world is so much better than it was. The people that complain about the world being a disaster don't put in a historical context. Do we have problems today? Sure we do. Of course we do. We always will have problems, by the way. But these are different problems than we had when people talk about existential threat of climate change. And you'll see the existential threats are far less today than they were two hundred years ago. And it's been capitalism. Science plus capitalism has allowed humanity to prosper collectively. We're so much better off. It's not utopia. It's not perfect. And that's why socialism still holds such an attraction, particularly for young people, is they're born and they see, they don't see racism the way I see it in the context of what...”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The average lifespan was 30. Oh, by the way, so let's give it today only 6% of the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. It's gone from 94% to 6% in the last 250 years. The average lifespan 200 years ago was 30. Now it's across the planet. It's getting closer to 80. We've gone from about 77. I think it's 76 for men and 78 for women across the whole planet from 30. Illiteracy rates 200 years ago. 88% of the people alive couldn't read. Now it's under 10%. And childbirth, I mean child deaths and child deaths, children dying before their age of 10. That type of advancements we've made in vaccines, in antibiotics, modern dentistry.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first I'm like a I'm a totally enthusiastic capitalist, and meaning I'm not seen as unbiased in this when people talk to me about it because I know my history. I know what the world is like 200 years ago. As capitalism got started in the late eighteen century, the last 250 years, but just 200 years ago, these statistics tell you all you need to know. 200 years ago, 94% of everyone alive on the planet lived on less than two dollars a day in today's dollars. eighty five percent lived on less than one dollar a day.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It may not surprise you that Love Life has that in our structure there. That didn't really exist when Whole Foods got founder back in 1978. But no, we have two classes of shares. I've learned that lesson.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple of years, so they'd have less lower gains. Also, those gains that they need to make need to be the individual shareholders are oftentimes taxed on those situations, and the management is not thinking about taxation at all in those decisions. So it's almost as if they should be taxed first and then the distribution shouldn't be taxed at all. That would be another solution. I think there's many ways that you can make changes in regulations and laws that would make shareholder activists constructive and a good thing for business rather than what is today to be seen as their kind of pirates. So I do think its reform could be possible there.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are really making long term bets on the business and lets the team execute over the long term. That's really what you need. When you have short-term people that are just trying to make a pop to the stock price in a short period of time, which are what shareholder activists are trying to do, get a sale. I don't think that's good for the economy. And there's pretty simple solutions to it. We need to make a distinction in tax policy. Right now, a short-term capital gains anything less than one year. What I'd love to see is that if you held something for, say, ten years, maybe your taxes went down to close to zero. And if you sold it in less than a year, maybe they'd be much higher. Maybe they'd be 50 or 60 percent. So that you'd create these incentives to hold longer, and that would make a shareholder activist at least have to hold the stock for”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's like I'm not opposed to shareholder activists trying to help companies in constructive ways to become more successful and profitable. But I think it's a flaw in the current in the United States, flaw in our system, because we treat short-term shareholders with the same type of respect that you treat long-term shareholders. I think that long-term shareholders”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we had Whole Foods House Three Foundations Not only did Amazon not tell us we had to stop doing those, they contributed additional monies to it. So every one of our stakeholders was a winner in that. That doesn't mean that that merger has been perfect. There's been a lot of things. I talk a little bit about it in the book and stuff off the record I won't talk about here, but I had my share of disagreements with Amazon. I fought with them many times and ultimately that led to me to retire.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“suppliers out, but they studied our sales and they saw, wow, they picked up a ton of our suppliers. And so that was good for them. It was good for our investors, right? They got about a 30% premium on the deal from what the stock had been before Jana got involved. And then it was good for our government. They got a massive amount of capital gains taxes from the deal and good for our communities that we're a part of because Amazon did not change our philanthropic.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first two years of that merger, I hardly ever hear the whole paycheck narrative any longer. Pulfi Desilseen is expensive, but I don't hear that narrative any longer because we're far more competitive price-wise than we used to be. It cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars to invest that, but they think long term. They, Jeff and his team think, 10, 15, 20 years into the future. They're willing to make that investment. They raised our wages on one of our hourly people, Amazon decided we're going to, this was back in 2017 within 30 days of the merger. They said we're going to raise the minimum starting wage at 15 bucks. So that meant everybody got a raise because the people that were at 1525 and the gap, they couldn't stay at 1525. They needed to go up too. So pretty much every hourly person got a raise. It was good for our suppliers. They not only did Amazon not cutting them.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything. The thing I liked about And they really were asking great questions. And then that would lead to answers. I'm very candid. So I was answering very truthfully to their questions, unless I thought it would harm our business in some way. But they were, we'd ask them questions and they would be equally forthcoming. So it was a very, very good dialogue. Just they wanted to understand their business. They just, you know, and they were asking the right questions to how to understand it. Why are your same for sales going down? And then you could explain about competition and I could explain about, well, we know we can get it back, but we need to drop prices. So let me just tell you so that when the deal got went through, remember I was asking that question, what's the win-win-win solution for all of our stakeholders? The Amazon merger, every one of our stakeholders benefit from that merger. We really did drop our prices. We dropped our prices four times significantly.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These kind of professional financial types. Like, I thought they probably were. They were really good guys, super smart. You know, Jeff's really brilliant man himself, and he hired really brilliant people to work with him. But they were kind of regular people. They weren't stuffed shirts. They were really interesting guys with diverse and clever minds like Jeff. So I remember our team retreated after we talked for about three hours, and our team went to a restaurant to kind of process. And we're kind of looking around at each other saying, that was an incredible conversation. Wow, man, those guys are smart. I think we could do some amazing stuff together. And then we're looking around and I voiced it for the whole group. I said, maybe so, but do you think they like us too? And it turned out they did because they came down just three days later and six weeks after that first meeting, we had signed an agreement to get married to merge.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm thinking, what about Amazon? Because I knew they were getting, I'd read that they were getting more and more interested in the food retailing. I knew that Amazon Fresh was kind of struggling as a business, but they hadn't opened up any physical stores yet. And so I said, well, let's find out. And we called them up and they wanted to talk. And we flew into Seattle. And I had three executives with me and Jeff had three with him. And we had kind of like, you know, when you fall in love with somebody, you'll have this amazing conversation where your souls kind of meet. That happened on that conversation with Amazon that day. We talked about all the things we could do together and we got really excited about the technology. And they told us about they really wanted to be big in grocery and they thought Whole Fish could help them. And also I like the Amazon team. They weren't...”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I kept asking the question again and again and again what's the win-win win solution for all the stakeholders? And then one day I woke up right when I woke up. The idea flashed in my mind. What about Amazon? That was the question. What about Amazon? And I'd met Jeff the year before at this Microsoft CEO summit, and I hit it off with Jeff. We did a panel together. He was very interested in Whole Foods. We talked about Whole Foods a lot. He also was interested in science fiction and fantasy, and we read a lot of the same books like The Lord of the Rings. And he was into scuba diving. And I've been. All over the world. So we hit it off. We had a good rapport. So then he said, in fact, let John, this has been a great conversation. Let's get together sometime and let's talk further. And I said, well, you got my number, but I didn't hear from him. But here it is.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do they call it? The plug went out of the tub. And we saw the whole economy shrink. Our whole foods market stock dropped 90%. We were selling it three times our cash flow. We could have bought our company and paid for it in three years with our own cash flow. And so a situation like that occurred again. We would have failed. And so the going private option was one we seriously looked at, but then the private equity firms would have control of the business. Remember, I wanted to get those venture capitalist hitchhikers out of the cars. Now I'm taking them into the car, but they're definitely driving the car. You're not in control any longer. They're in control. And their agendas are very different. And I just thought it was very risky. You're risking the business. And if it works, they could make, well, they could make billions of dollars. That's why they'd be interested in going private. And so I couldn't find the right solution.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then after they get control of the company, the second step is they would pay back that bridge loan and they got from the investment banks and they would borrow longer term money using the company's own balance sheet to finance the loan, which means they would borrow, say they whole fees are sold to Amazon for $13.7 billion, took it private for the same amount. They'd put in about a billion and they'd borrow $12.7 billion. And so Whole Foods would be on the hook for the interest rates of that. Now, we had really good cash flow. We had EBITDA is very high. I think we were making about $1.3 billion in EBITDA when Jana bought us. So it's, again, I did the whole foods was failing in some way. That's just a media myth. So we could have serviced the debt provided that 2008 didn't happen again, right? In 2008,”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they knew that. Secondly, we could find a sympathetic investor, somebody who would buy us and give us the time we needed to turn the business around, drop the prices, and not worry. We'd be off the public markets. And the logical one, there are people that do that. Warren Buffett, it's like the best example. And we actually contacted Warren and asked him if he'd be interested. He has a good sense of humor and he said that, you know, I own Dairy Queen. But I don't think Holfi is a good brand fit for me. And so nothing came of that. And then it was maybe we could take it private. Am I going private would mean you'd work with a private equity firm or two, it's a kind of a two-step process where they would put up some money and they'd borrow money from the rest of the money they needed from a consortium of investment banks.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most obvious one is we'll fight Jana. All my competitive instincts were, you know, and we're going to beat those guys. And so that was the first thing. But we needed time to do that. We know we needed to reverse our same store sales decline. We needed to have a chance to change our prices. But if you're selling something for a dollar and now you're selling it for 90 cents in the short run, in the long run, that's a good decision probably. But in the short run, your sales just drop from $1.90. Your same store sales just went negative. Your profits, there's a lag period. Your profits are going to fall. And then maybe a couple years from now, when people become aware that you have these lower prices, you'll see your traffic go up and it'll end up being in really good business decision. We needed that time. Jana wasn't going to give it to us. So fighting them was going to be very difficult.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just tell you what's going to happen here. Let's cut to the chase. We're going to take over Whole Foods. Here's how we're going to do it. We're going to take over your board first. After we do that, we're going to fire you and any other management people that won't line up with us. And then we're going to put this up for a bit and sell it to the highest bidder. And there's not an effing thing you can do about it and walked out of the room. It's like, whoa, I don't think we're going to have a partnership with these guys. And, you know, we had our bankers. We had our lawyers. We began to look around for what I would call the win-win-win solution. How do we get a win for every one of our stakeholders? How can we do something that will be best for our customers, best for our team members, best for our suppliers, best for our investors, best for the communities that we're part of? I started asking that question. I was putting that question. You might say out to the universe, out to my soul. Give me an answer for this question. And we looked at all the different alternatives.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To maximize shareholder value, and so this particular group of activists was Jana Pardner's, and We met with him soon after they took a position to find out what, you know, if we could work together to try to create more value for the shareholders. And they had this PowerPoint presentation and they showed it to me and my leadership team, a couple of my directors. And there were some things in it that were accurate and there were a lot of things that were not accurate. I asked them, could I get a copy of that presentation that you're making? Because I'd like to address some of these concerns. I don't think everything you put in there is accurate. I'd like to correct the record. He says, no. You can't have it. And I said, Well, why not? And he says, Well, we don't want to.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were making more mistakes in favor of the customers than others, but it's just on the things like cut fruit. You have a little tear weight and you could be off a penny or two. But if you have an ambitious weights and measures Department of Consumer Affairs, it's kind of an extortion thing. And that's what happened to us both in California and New York, generating massively negative publicity that drove our sales down. We lost a lot of customers from that what happened in New York. What we needed to do was we needed to be able to drop our prices across the whole company. But we began to start that happening. We got attacked by activists. Activists are shareholder activists. We've been attacked by lots of other activists over the years, from animal rights activists to a variety of different kinds of activists. But these were particularly shareholder activists. They don't think the business is being managed.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Whole foods, you know, We weren't in. People think we were like failing or in decline, and that was not true. Whole Foods was actually incredibly successful. We had, at the time, the activists, investors invested in Whole Foods, we had the highest sales per square foot of many public food retailer. We'd had the same sales growth of 8% over a 30-plus year period. Almost every objective measurement, Whole Feast was the most profitable food retailer, grocery store operator out there. We had so many wonderful things going for us, but competition was catching up with us. We were being copied the whole paycheck narrative. The media just ran wild with that. And we were increasingly being tacked by governments. I talked to him in the book about how we had the first California and then in New York attacked us for mispricing, which we weren't deliberately mispricing anything.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a little over two years ago, unaided spiritual journey, I experienced, I got really in touch with my inner child, this little boy that was so very beautiful and so idealistic and so loving and just wanted to help people. And it had been hurt as we go through life. We get wounded. And the little boy had had many wounds. But he was still this beautiful little boy. And I saw him very clearly. I saw this childlike of myself. And I realized that my entire life, I had tried to do good and I'd made a lot of mistakes. I'd hurt people, but I knew that at the core there was this good person that really loved. And I saw that, and that was the first time I really, I think, unconditionally loved myself.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love yourself unconditionally. Of course, you're asking great questions and you're also leading me through the book pretty well. In my case, my whole life in some ways has been an attempt to be able to accept myself because I have had it. I think everybody has internal critic. We don't just have internal critic. That internal critic is judging everybody else and then frequently judging ourselves is inadequate, not perfect. And in my case, in some ways, the whole life adventure and you get back into the deep thing about the way I was raised, my parents, I was kind of raised where if I brought a home a report card and had all A's in one B, it was like, what are you going to do about that B, son? It's like there was no, like, that's really great, fantastic report card. And then when I'd have failures, you know, my own self-judgments would be pretty intense. So I think you come to love yourself. And what I experience when I finally did it, and it was just a few years ago now,”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of my life purpose, life mission is to, because I just, that's what makes life worthwhile. Everybody that gets to the, and they're on their deathbed, imagine you're on your deathbed. Do you think he'll be thinking, God wish I'd made more money? I wish I'd been richer. I wish I'd been more famous. I wish I'd had more power. Now you're going to be thinking about I wish I'd told my son how much I loved him. I wish I hadn't let that relationship go. I wish I hadn't said those things. Your regrets are always going to be about relationships and the ways that love failed in your life. I mean, if that's the clearest indication that love's the most important thing is because that's what happens when you're dying is you're looking back and you're thinking about the people that you loved and didn't love well enough. You're not thinking about the other shit. You've let it go. And so I've just been clear about that for a long time.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I've had glimpses of it many times. I mean, I talked about it the first time I had that ego death and LSD that I had this realization that we were all that was just the one being it was all founded ultimately on play and love and games. And then when I did MDMA for the first time, Adam, MDMA, Ecstasy Molly, when it was legal back in 1984, that just burst my heart open. And I wrote it down. Never forget this. There is nothing more important than love. And of course, you will forget it. But once you had that deep connection to it, you never quite forget it. And then my spiritual path took me studying the course of miracles, doing breath work, doing meditation. I wanted to go deeper into love, and so that's just sort of been a life.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Point, you get diminishing returns. It's no longer bringing you any kind of happiness. It's now a burden. So I got clear about And I didn't think my accomplishments were that big a deal. Other people are accomplishing stuff as well. So I didn't spend a lot of time comparing myself to others, either people that had less or had more. I was too busy creating the next painting because that was what was fun. That was what was exciting. That was where the joy and the love came. And then the relationships with the people that you're doing it with that's the real satisfying part.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, well, no, it was the second time I met him because I'd met him at this conference and we'd hit it off. But when we were going up there to talk about maybe Amazon buying Whole Foods, we were meeting at Jeff's Bode House, which is next to his mansion, like Washington. But they wouldn't tell us who the meeting place was until we landed. And then they gave us an address. When we got there, we were searched. Our car was searched because they were worried about somebody trying to kill Jeff. And I was thinking to myself, I would never want to be so rich and so famous and so powerful that I couldn't live a normal life that I didn't have any anonymity. That was like a real wake-up call. It's like I'm sure Jeff from one of the most envied people in the world, but I would not want to have to live my life like that. So a little bit of fame, a little bit of money, a little bit of power to a certain point is gratifying to the soul. But past that.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Awareness the time was running out and that I needed to get on with stuff. And so the successes I had, it's like I once heard that somebody ask Picasso what his favorite painting was. And he said the one I'm working on right now. And so I never, I don't think that stuff corrupted me because I didn't care about it. To me, it was creating the next thing. It was the next thing I was doing that was fulfilling me. I didn't think money or fame or power would really be satisfying, and they weren't. I remember when I met Jeff Bezos for the first time, we were”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, of course, other people might tell you that they didn't think I stayed that grounded. But I think I did stay pretty grounded. And I think it's because You know, I have this whole background in philosophy, and my book is kind of about my own spiritual journey. And I got really clear at a pretty young age, like back in my existential days, back when I was in my late 20s and then the psychedelics took it to another level. I got really clear about death. What I mean about that is that we're all going to die. I got that at a very young age. And most people, they're always in denial. There's a big denial of death that when you're young, it's like, well, that's what old people do, but I'm not old. And then I got my whole life ahead of me, and they just put it out of their mind. I was just aware that I only had so much time that what do I want to, so my big question is, what do I want to do? with the time that I have. And so I've always had this.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money or the most fame and the most power and other people's coveted those things. And they always felt like they could do a better job. The coup attempts were always, I think, well intended or They people doing them thought they were well intended, they thought they really would do a better job than me. And if I could just get out of the way, then they would be able to wear the ring. And I wasn't going to just get out of the way, so they did what they could to get me out of the way. I think that's where the coups came from. And I just think partly human nature.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great metaphor because there are three things that I have found are very corrupting for most people, not everyone, but most people could be corrupted by money. Fame and power. Because what people want is love and they think those things will give them love if they have enough of them. If you have enough money or power or fame. But in fact, those things do not satisfy the soul. And most people can easily be corrupted and addicted by those things. If you have money, you start to compare yourself to people that have more money than you and you're dissatisfied. If you have fame, you have certain Instagram followers or you see who has more and you want more. It doesn't really lead to happiness. She get more. And power, you see this with politicians, they want more power. And these things, again, do not satisfy the soul. The ring of power is corrupting. Well, in this case, I'm the CEO. I'm getting the most.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I use a good metaphor, but it's only for the people that know something about the Lord of the Rings. Fortunately, the movies came out, but those books had a big influence on me when I was younger. I think I read those, the three books five times before I got out of high school, it was kind of like my cult reading thing when I was a teenager. And then, of course, the movies came out. I've seen them multiple times. In The Lord of the Rings, there's this one ring. The Amazon now has the rings of power show on, and they're showing how these rings were made, which is not actually in the Lord of the Rings. So it's really, really interesting stuff. The one ring, the ring of power, the”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Professionals sometimes have trouble letting go of that because they worry that this loss is going to be a blemish on their resume. An entrepreneur, I don't think quite thinks that way.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, of course, I mean, that's the job of the entrepreneur is to see things as professionals. It would not see, or the professionals are making a more calculated decision on, is this good for my career or not? Or if this succeeds, will it really help my career? But if it fails, will I end up getting fired? The entrepreneur is just going to, they're going to take a more of a, let's try it. Let's see what happens. And if it works, we'll give more money to it. If it doesn't work, we'll discontinue it. I've never had a problem. It's always been pretty easy for me to try things, make mistakes, and admit that it's a mistake and discontinue it. It's like, we tried that. It didn't work. It's okay.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT