The Spiritual Entrepreneur Behind The Whole Foods Empire: Conscious Capitalism, Win-Win Dealmaking, & Making Dreams Manifest

John Mackey is a visionary entrepreneur, co-founder of Whole Foods Market, and a pioneering advocate for conscious capitalism. This conversation explores John’s journey from hippie to CEO and his unconventional business philosophy. We explore conscious capitalism, purpose-driven entrepreneurship, value-based business success, embracing challenges, spiritual practices in leadership, and finding intention through service. He also shares insights on personal growth and organizational culture that could transform how you approach business and life. John is a true original. And this conversation is a masterclass in conscious leadership. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order 👉seed.com/RichRoll Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF 👉 boncharge.com Squarespace: Use the offer code RichRoll to save 10% off 👉Squarespace.com/RichRoll Birch: For 25% off ALL mattresses and 2 free eco-rest pillows visit 👉BirchLiving.com/richroll Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉gobrewing.com Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down, like, what am I actually gonna make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then, it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  You think when you wake up at night that you've woken from the dream, but you've only woken to a different dream. And love is the most important thing. I don't have that much time. What do I want to do with it? Challenge accepted.

• 1:18Rich Roll?

  John Mackey turned a small natural food store in Austin, Texas, into a $16 billion grocery empire and, along the way, forever changed how America eats and shops for food. The co-founder and former longtime CEO of Whole Foods Market, John is a natural-born entrepreneur, but also a curious and polarizing one. A pioneer of conscious capitalism, who lives remarkably modestly, John has always approached business as a spiritual practice, one that strives to reconcile things like love, happiness, gratitude, and oneness with the cutthroat pressures that accompany stewarding a massive Fortune 500 enterprise.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  You know what? I'm gonna do what I want to do, not what everybody else wants me to do. I'm gonna do what I want to do. Capitalism is an infinite game. The players change. It evolves over time, but the game goes on.

• 2:12Rich Roll?

  Now 70 and having sold his company to Amazon, John reflects back on his fascinating journey with thoughtful, earned perspective. Perspective on not just his successes, but also his failures. And the lessons he's gleaned along the way about not just business and entrepreneurship, but about life and what matters most. John is a friend whose story I'm privileged to share with you today. One I suspect you'll find surprising, perhaps refreshing, but definitely profound.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  As we are kinder and more loving, we begin to experience more kindness and loving back to us. You just have to be fully present right now. When you're fully present in the moment, you're no longer in your thoughts in your head. You are in the oneness.

• 3:02Rich Roll?

  Good to see you. You're a very proud, unbridled capitalist in many ways, but you're also a curious one because...

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I'm pretty bridled. I don't know. I mean, by definition, you have to play by the rules.

• 3:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I want to get into conscious capitalism and how you define that and how it's distinct from what we might call traditionally pure capitalism. But first, there's this other side to the coin, which is this deep spirituality that you have and a commitment to the interior life that I think is somewhat unusual for somebody of your stature and your position. But yet informs how you pursue your capitalist ideals in business.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true. I think I'm in some way so untypical of most business people. I mean, I am an entrepreneur. I never took any business classes in school. I didn't get an MBA. I've never took an accounting class. I never took a marketing class. I studied philosophy. I studied religion. When I was young, I was seeking the meaning of life. I've done all kinds of spiritual explorations from psychedelics, meditation, breathwork. And always questing to, as you say, I like the word interiority, to develop...

• 4:22Speaker 01

  In my interior part of my being as much as I grow as a human being to become a more caring, more loving person. And I just think that's, most business people aren't, they're, most business people are not entrepreneurs, A, and B, most entrepreneurs do not engage at this interior, an interiority level to the same degree that I have. And that maybe makes me just a little bit different.

• 4:45Rich Roll?

  From the get-go, really. I mean, you were sort of iconoclastic or a bit contrarian as a young person, refusing to read any book that was, you know, just because somebody told you that this was on the syllabus, like you wanted to only read the books you wanted to read, and had a sense of yourself, I don't know if it's confidence or just some level of conviction about what the right path was for you.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the right path came a little bit later, but, I mean, or came gradually, right? But I guess I got pretty clear at a young age, like, I mean, I'm just gonna say it, I was gonna die. I don't think most people really, they don't really focus in on it the way I did. I'm going to die, I'm going to cease to exist, this body, this separate ego is gonna disappear. So, I don't have that much time, what do I want to do with it? Most people play it safe in life. They, they're afraid, and they don't want to take a risk because they're afraid they'll fail, or people will laugh at them, or judge them. What I was conscious of, I don't have that much time, I'm gonna be dead. What do I, what am I gonna do with the time that I have to me?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  You know what? I'm gonna do what I want to do. Not what everybody else wants me to do, I'm gonna do what I want to do. And then it's a question of what, what do I want to do? And that's the discovery process that you go through, and that answer is interior answers, from knowing yourself, knowing your heart, knowing your soul, communicating with it, and following it, because it's a lot wiser than the, the separate ego that would like to run everything. So...

• 6:24Speaker 01

  I think that's what's guided me from the very beginning, even, and the book starts out with the name of the first chapter, where there's the prologue, when I'm coming down on this massive LSD trip, or experience. It's a heart open. Well, more than that, my ego died, my ego dissolved, and I was part of the one. And then, after that led me to move into this food co-op, and become a vegetarian. I wasn't a vegetarian, I just thought, man, I was interested in the counterculture. You know, I was interested, I liked hippies, and I thought, I'm gonna meet the coolest people living in a vegetarian commune, and I did. I met super cool people, they took me under their wing, I learned how to cook, I had

• 7:07Speaker 01

  a food awakening, I became a vegetarian, now I've been vegan for 21 years. I just awoke to my, that's my first inkling of my higher purpose was then, because I was so excited about this, I just couldn't read enough books, I studied, I read cookbooks, I still do, cookbooks are, I read your wife's cookbook, it's a great cookbook. And fun, fun to explore this whole world of food, and I got super interested in it. Went to work for a small natural food store, and I thought, man, this is within my realm of competence, I could, I could operate a store, pitch my girlfriend on it at the commune and prana house, and the next thing I know, we've launched Safer Way, so vegetarian store, I might add.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  So, that was when I was following my path, because I was, and you kind of know when you're on your path, Rich, because people say, how do you know if you're on your path? I say, it's simple, if you're happy, you're on your path, if you're not happy, you're not on your path. Because following your path is leading you down the road to your own awakening, to your own liberation, to your own evolutionary consciousness, and that's a happy journey, it's full of love and joy, and of discovery as you go along it. And if you, by the way, when you get super unhappy, ask yourself the question, have I stopped following my inner guidance? Because I, for whatever reason, and generally, when I get unhappy is because I'd lost my way. I had to get back to it.

• 8:32Rich Roll?

  I think for a lot of people, that's a very challenging and confronting question. That's generally met with resistance. Oh, well, you know, I can't, I can't change. I have responsibilities. I'm in this situation where, you know, I have to keep this job and we constrain ourselves out of fear or, you know, perception or, or the uncertainty of what might happen if we were to take a different tack.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Remember, I knew, I knew I was going to die. All the rest of the stuff.

• 9:05Rich Roll?

  And this is like the inciting incident. This is the genesis of it all. But where does that, where did that awareness come from? Like, how did you, how did you arrive upon that? Like, what, what was, what was?

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Everybody knows they're gonna die. They just choose not to think about it.

• 9:21Rich Roll?

  You brought this into the forefront of your conscious awareness for some reason.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Well, because...

• 9:27Rich Roll?

  At a, at a young age, when we don't really think about these things.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Because I'm studying philosophy and religion, right? I'm trying to figure out the meaning of life. And so that was a starting point for me because it's like, okay, I only have a finite amount of time. I could die tonight. I could die tomorrow. You just don't know when your, your number's up, so to speak. So what is it that I really care about? What is it that I really want to do? What is it that I really want to be? Those existential questions. I asked those questions and I continued to ask them. I still ask them. And that gave me a sense of urgency that I think most people like. Most people think when you're young particularly, I have a whole life ahead of me. It's like, I was quite aware, I'm running out of time. And what is it that I want to accomplish? What do I want to do?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Who do I want to be? So that... Awareness of death, the inevitability of it, which people do not like to think about. We'd rather put that out of our minds. And, uh, but it's very liberating to, to, to reflect on it because we are, there is no escape to it. We'd like, I mean, we will move on past this particular reality that we're in. And death can focus your energies in a way that nothing else can really. So it was, it, it really led to me to wake up in a lot of ways. It led me to, um, I guess because, you know, also I talked about it in the prologue, the first, the first chapter, the prologue and the first chapter is the game of life. And the last chapter is the infinite game.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  So there's this philosophical element running through, a thread running through the whole book until, until I have a conclusion to it all. I do share the meaning of life, or what I believe is the meaning of life at the end of the book. And I share it all the way through. The meaning of life is love. And to awaken to deeper, deeper, deeper levels of love, to express that, to become, as my wife says, John, it's a lot more simpler than you make it out to be. Just love everyone all the time.

• 11:23Rich Roll?

  The book is beautifully put. Thank you. The book is this, it's basically a beginning to end story where we, through your perspective, you know, go through everything that you went through to go from where you were to, to who you became. From the first market, safer way in the Victorian house, all the way up through, you know, IPOs and venture capitalists and, you know, eventually the Amazon deal, et cetera. And it's just peppered and littered with every obstacle you faced and how you overcame it. Every, every victory, every failure and reflections on all of those.

• 12:04Rich Roll?

  But for me, what stands out and, and makes your story so indelible and unique is, is the very thing that you just shared. Because throughout the book, When you're faced with a decision that you have to make, or there's a big moment in which clarity is going to be very important, you resort to your spirituality and to these practices that were so formative earlier in your life as a means of tapping into your intuition and trying to make sure that you are making not only the correct decision, but that you are honoring that intuition. And it's not like one particular practice.

• 12:48Rich Roll?

  I mean, you're an avid hiker. Nature is very important in this story and for you. There's the psychedelic practices, but there's also breath work and these retreats that you're going on repeatedly. Course of Miracles and meditation, et cetera. And you're very conscious to continually return to these practices and reference them throughout the book as instrumental in not just your success and making the best decision that you can, but as really fundamental to living an examined life.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna make a couple of points. One thing I haven't mentioned so far is, and it goes back to this meaning of life question a little bit, is that I really believe in the metaphor of the hero's journey. I actually believe every person's called to a hero's journey. And because that's a call from our soul. It's a call from within us. That's our path, is the hero's journey. And most people don't answer the call. They're too afraid, and so they don't. They settle in life. And I just answered that call, and I'm still answering it. I also had the second point is that I have the title of a chapter, which is a metaphor for everything you just said, which is evolve or die. We're constantly being challenged, sometimes with too much that we don't think we can

• 14:13Speaker 01

  deal with it. Those challenges are the best opportunity we have to learn and grow. The stress, and we know this is true in evolution, that a species is stressed and sometimes it can mutate and evolve, and sometimes it goes extinct. So, I had so many challenges at Whole Foods, four different coup attempts really, and lots of other problems and challenges, and I had to continue to grow, or I was going to die. And not maybe literally, but figuratively, I was gonna die and the journey would be over for me. So, it's kind of like, that kind of stress, if you view it in a different direction,

• 14:57Speaker 01

  or a different framework, which is what I did, that's the best opportunity we have to become a better person. All those challenges, although it's so unpleasant when we're in it, right? It's very, very difficult, but that causes us to have to go deeper within our being to find the answers, to become a different person. Sometimes the solution is that you have to go higher, you have to go deeper, you have to evolve yourself. Whole Foods was always causing me to, I always used to joke, Whole Foods is my ashram, because it's forcing me to grow as a human being. And I never really could sit on my laurels very long, I was constantly being pushed.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  And I do believe that's called a hero's journey, the hero's journey. If you study the hero's journey, the heroes constantly, you know, if you, Star Wars is a classic hero's journey, but The Lord of the Rings is a classic hero's journey, a lot of our favorite books and whatnot are hero's journeys, because the person starts out not wanting to take the journey. It's like, "I don't wanna do this, this looks really hard." And yet, they get on the journey, and then they usually have a mentor, an Obi-Wan Kenobi, in my case, it was my dad, that helps them in the early stages as they get their skills developed. Eventually, your mentors are taken away from you, they pass on, or they're eliminated, and you now are on the journey, and you have to figure it out, your soul is your only guide.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I just think this, I think it's a metaphor for my own life, but I actually think it's a metaphor for most people's lives. I really do believe in that. In that hero's journey, and if you can become aware of it, make it conscious, then you can be freer because you realize, oh, wow, I'm being challenged here. You don't have to be a victim. It's like, wow, this is an opportunity here for me to become a better human being. How do I do it? How do I do it? How can I rise to this challenge? How can we rise to this challenge?

• 16:55Rich Roll?

  It also allows you to put a little distance between you and whatever you're experiencing because you understand that there's a framework at play here. Whole Foods is your ashram. You're in the dojo, right? And when life throws an obstacle at you, you don't have to be a victim. You can say, well, this is the hero's journey. Of course, there's an obstacle.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  I've got this.

• 17:20Rich Roll?

  Because this is the way it's wired. It's supposed to be this way.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  And even though I don't see the solution right now, I know there is one, and I will find it. I will find the win-win-win solution here. And a challenge accepted, and you rise to the occasion. Or even if you fail, you don't always rise to the occasion. Sometimes you get knocked down. That's okay, too. It's like, all right, that didn't work. I got to try something different here. But you're always seeking to thread your way through it and go on to the next challenges down the road.

• 17:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Early in your career, you're coming from the counterculture and the early years of Whole Foods, the market was the counterculture. Like, it's just embedded in the DNA of what you were doing. But with growth, suddenly, you know, it becomes, there's the threat of it being sanitized by the corporate forces that be. You're sort of castigated as wacky, macky, all of a sudden, when you're like, wait a minute, but this is how we got here, right? And you're also confronted with people that don't share this compulsion to grow that you have, right?

• 18:35Rich Roll?

  Which is the other kind of distinguishing factor about you because most people, once you've reached, I don't know, four or five stores or whatever, say, this is a good life. Like, why am I killing myself? We don't have to have 20 stores, 50 stores, 500 stores. What was it about you that felt so compelled to, you know, spread your wings so far?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Early in the book, I talk about how one of my co-founders, Mark Skiles, um, once we had opened the first Whole Foods Market and it was hugely successful. And it was, it was just, it became the highest volume naturally store in the United States and it was very, very profitable. And Mark really never wanted to do anything besides that because it was like, John, we've got it made. We can retire on this store. We don't have to do anything else. We get, we've hit easy street here. We can just, you know, just take these profits and split them up and, and we can have a great life. We're rich. Let's not blow it. He didn't want to, because opening more stores would mean risk. And then the first few stores we opened after that first store,

• 19:39Speaker 01

  they all started slow. They struggled. We went out into suburbia where the, it wasn't the hippies and it wasn't immediately embraced. And so he got so disillusioned with me. He's the one that came up with the nickname Wacky Mackie because I, here I was talking about, I'd done NBMA for the first time and I wanted to spread love. And he just said, gee, Wes, you're totally crazy. You're, we're running a business here. You know, I don't know, your new age hippie stuff is just crap. You know, you need to get control of yourself. So he and I had been good friends and we began increasingly to get alienated. The takeoff point for when I thought Whole Foods might really be a big company is we, we'd opened up and we had a good success, we had three stores in Dallas, one in Houston and one in Dallas. And they were, and they were all

• 20:24Speaker 01

  successful. And it's like, okay. My girlfriend and I took, Mary Kay and I took a vacation where we did a driving trip. We, and we, we drove all the way, we looked at stores in Southern California and we went up through Northern California and then we were backpacking, camping. It was six weeks after we'd gotten our Dallas store up and running. When we got to the Bay Area, this was like the origin of the counterculture. This is San Francisco. This is the summer of love. This is where the hippies originated. This, this is the nascent Silicon Valley. This is Berkeley. This is Marin County where the affluent hippies are hanging out. This is-

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And there were lots of good natural food stores doing a lot of business. There were no natural food supermarkets. And I remember talking to Mary Kay and I said, Mary Kay, you know what I'm thinking? She says, yeah, I know what you're thinking. I says, what are you thinking I'm thinking? You're thinking we ought to open up a store here. That's crazy. That's like, you know, 3,000 miles away. How are we, how are we gonna do that? And I said, I don't know, we'll figure it out. It'll be fun though. We're coming into the Bay Area. We've got stores in San Francisco. How cool is that? I just thought it would be an adventure. I, I see life as an adventure, Rich. Life's an adventure. And when you go on an adventure, part of it is unexpected things happen and you have to... But it's, but adventures are fun, aren't they?

• 21:50Rich Roll?

  What I like is that you're always throwing yourself into these unknown treacherous waters and figuring it out when you're in the middle of it. As most people like, oh, let's figure out how we're gonna do this. Let's be strategic. Not that you weren't strategic, but you weren't afraid to jump with both feet in. And that's, that's, you know, true in the very beginning when you're in the Victorian house and, you know, people show up and say you need all these permits and you're just like, well, we'll figure it out. You know, like plead ignorance, what, you know, like just trying to like, you know, Band-Aid your way through all of these situations. And, you know, it happens again when you're confronted with the fact that you're probably gonna need VC money and you don't know anything about that world.

• 22:33Rich Roll?

  Like, you're just, there's, there's a propulsion, like there's a momentum to it.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  I think that's, that is, I do, I do self-identify as an entrepreneur. I didn't even know I was an entrepreneur until I'd gotten, you know, several years into it and then, and I was talking to other people who are entrepreneurs and it's like, I'm just like these guys. The entrepreneurs, that's what, we like to figure things out as we go along. Mind you, in a good team, the entrepreneurs can also lead you right off a cliff. You need balance on the team. I needed my planners. I needed people thinking through all the details because otherwise I'd overlook things. It could be, entrepreneurs can be careless. And, and so on a good, functional team, I had my people that were, they were...

• 23:18Speaker 01

  They were crossing all the Ts and dotting all the Is and making sure that we had good plans, but of course, the entrepreneur is the one saying, "Follow me, follow me." But you need the planners to come along, too. So, both are necessary. A good organization, but there's an entrepreneurial spirit that I brought to Whole Foods that I think most, you know, if you look at these companies, Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneur, Elon Musk is an entrepreneur, Steve Jobs, a great entrepreneur. I mean, I'm sure the people leading Arowan now are entrepreneurs. So, the entrepreneurs are willing to go into the unknown. They're the adventurers. And I think back about it, I've always loved reading about adventurers.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, who can read Endurance for Shackelford and like, "Man, that guy was really a brave guy. I'm not sure I've been willing to try to do what he tried to do there." Or people, explorers and discoverers, it's like, I mean, that's the grand adventure of life. We're all, in some sense, on our own little explorations. And I think that's the energy that I brought to Whole Foods. That's why Whole Foods became a big corporation. All the other peers, they ultimately sold out to us. They just cashed in. They wanted what my partner wanted. They just got financial security. I got the adventure. I got the better of the deal.

• 24:39Rich Roll?

  And you stayed in it way longer than most entrepreneurs do. I mean, it's a story as old as business, that the entrepreneurial vision that gives birth to something special ultimately caves in on its own weight, once the vision, you know, leaves the building, right? You stayed in for a very long time. But I'm curious around what advice you give to the young entrepreneurs out there? Because when you started, being an entrepreneur wasn't like something people were clamoring to do. But now, like, being an entrepreneur because of technology, the technology industry is sort of a rock star thing to do.

• 25:23Rich Roll?

  It's more aspirational than it was when you began. But I don't think that it's something that you can teach any more than if you study acting long enough, are you going to become Daniel Day-Lewis? I think it's something you're born with. It's a very specific and unique. Energy and sort of lens on the world that you either have or you don't.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Yes, and what you said is true. However, entrepreneurs need to develop certain skills. And I'm a far more skillful entrepreneur today than I was when I was 24 years old. I still have this entrepreneurial spirit, but now I have, I've, I know a lot of things that don't work. I don't have to. We have reinvented the wheel so many times and made a lot of mistakes along the way. So you do, you didn't gain wisdom over time. It doesn't mean you have to lose your entrepreneurial drive or your entrepreneurial spirit. And it is a little bit, I think, when I was an entrepreneur, entrepreneurs were, they certainly were not romanticized as much as entrepreneurs are romanticized today.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Although increasingly the society is moving the other, the other direction. Now entrepreneurs are oftentimes castigated because they're, you know, they, they're taking too big a piece of the pie. Right? There, you, you have this worldview that there's a fixed pie and they don't see that entrepreneurs and business people are increasing the great societal wealth. They just see somebody like Elon Musk has, he's too rich, you know, it's unfair. He should get such a big piece of the pie. But everything Elon got, he earned because he was creating the most value in the world. Because he, SpaceX and Tesla are amazing companies that are transforming the world.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  So, most people don't see that. But if, in terms of advice to entrepreneurs, in some ways, the book is my advice to entrepreneurs. I'm, I, I wrote that book partly thinking that entrepreneurs are going to really like this book. They're going to identify with it. They're going to.

• 27:31Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  And I'm telling them about a lot, I warn them about venture capitalists, for example. I'm constantly warning these, uh, young entrepreneurs about VCs. You want the capital, but it oftentimes comes with such strings attached to it. You gotta be really careful. I call them hitchhikers with the credit cards. All I can think about is I want to get these guys out of the car before they hijack it and take it over and hire their professional management and throw the entrepreneur out on the side of the road. And I, I do think entrepreneurs sometimes are, they're not aware of such risk. They're just not thinking about it until they're on the side of the road. So part of the book is written for that.

• 28:05Rich Roll?

  Well, there's a difference between methodically kind of putting together a value-based business that can withstand the test of time versus what you see a lot of in technology startups, which is let's just raise as much money as we can, which is celebrated without really acknowledging the fact that you just gave away a gigantic amount of your company.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  And control.

• 28:35Rich Roll?

  But nonetheless, it's all about, you know, a rush to scale without any regard for, you know, sound economics or profit and loss, because once you reach gigantic scale, then you figure that out later and you sell it and exit.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting. I don't always think that's what the entrepreneurs want to do. Unless they, I think that's, that's one of the messages the VCs are putting in there, which is raise as much money as possible. By the way, you'll lose control of the business because you don't have the money and we do. And then it doesn't matter if you have a high burn rate. You just, because the VCs, if they can get, their model is they have a lot of failures, a lot of burnouts, but they have the big hits that the blockbuster that makes so much money that.

• 29:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, pays for all the other.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yes, it pays for all the other ones. But then there's a lot of dead bodies on the road of entrepreneurs who had good businesses and tried to scale them too quickly without, and then they failed. And so I have a very different perspective on that than I'm, and I understand that tech is one thing, but I mean, I'm starting a new business up Love Life, right? And we're not going to try to scale it super fast because I don't think we can execute it super fast. I actually found at Whole Foods, when we started to grow more than about 24% a year, our culture began to get seriously diluted. There's an optimum, if you try to go too fast, you can't take a culture with it.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  The culture is just, it implodes. It can't integrate. It needs, you ever heard of the rule of 72?

• 30:12Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  It's a good, good little adage. If you divide your growth rate into 72, it shows how fast you'll double your sales. So if you're growing at 24%, you divide a year, divide that into 72, in three years, you'll be twice as big. If you keep growing at that rate, three more years, you'll be twice as big as you were then. So 18%, divide that in and you get, it takes four years to double. If you're growing 12%, it takes six years. So it's a handy rule because when I found whenever Whole Foods was growing too fast, and it happened a few times, our culture began to get diluted. We were bringing people in before we could enculturate them.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  So this massive go-to-scale, you can't take a culture with it. You won't even have a culture. It's people are just trying to get rich. And you're not creating a long-term viable organization, in my opinion.

• 31:09Rich Roll?

  Make the case for the value of culture. Why is cultivating a great culture so integral to the success of a business?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  It's integral to the long-term success of the business. The culture is, first of all, it's the purpose of the business, whatever the higher purpose of the business is. Secondly, it's your core values. And then it's your leadership principles, how you're managing the business, how you are executing day-to-day. And those things together are form that will call out the backbone or the scaffolding of the culture. And those things have to be real, they have to be sincere, they have to be... But all great enterprises, all great enterprises in the long-term, they either have great cultures or they fall apart.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Because eventually, what you're doing gets copied. And your culture is what, and gives you the competitive and long-term advantage of loyalty, of people that are committed to the organization, people that love what you're doing, people that are giving their heart and soul. They're not just professionals looking to get a notch on their resume and move on to the next best, highest-paying job. The culture is what holds it all together and creates the possibility of creating something really great in the long-term. I think culture's a very important job for the CEO, and most of the time, they don't, particularly in the entrepreneurial CEO, it's something they take for granted and don't pay enough attention to. It's a...

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Can you build something to last that doesn't have a great culture? I don't think you can.

• 32:52Rich Roll?

  And the degree of difficulty of maintaining a great culture as growth begins to escalate.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Is very difficult.

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  Becomes difficult, but that ultimately becomes one of the core, most important jobs of the CEO.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 33:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  That's how I see it.

• 33:20Rich Roll?

  Last time we did this was 2017 in a conference room in the Whole Foods offices.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Seven years ago, wow.

• 33:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, in Austin. And as memory, if memory serves me, I was actually surprised that you didn't cancel on me because you were in the throes of a very challenging moment in the history of Whole Foods. And I don't know precisely when we did it, but I know that the shareholder activists were chomping at your ankles. I believe that the talks with Amazon were underway, but I'm pretty sure that no deal had been sealed.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  So the reason I did that was I'd come out with the Whole Foods Diet. And the day that my book launch was, it happened to be coincidentally, but not coincidentally at all, was when Jana Partners announced their activist attack on Whole Foods. I had to cancel most of the book tour. I don't know, I canceled all the national television. I was supposed to go on to the Today Show and the morning show.

• 34:25Rich Roll?

  I think you had already gone to New York for that purpose and then you had to come home.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Well, and the very first place I spoke was at Goldman Sachs. The soon-to-be CEO David Solomon comes up and says, I know this is a difficult day for you, I know you must be in shock, but I want to let you know that Goldman is here for you. And then that could not be coincidence. Those guys invited me. I mean, are investment bankers really that interested in plant-based eating? I don't think so. It's not, it was not, it was all orchestrated, it was all planned. That guaranteed that I was not going to pick Goldman Sachs to be our bankers.

• 34:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's kind of a brilliant move, though. A little transparent, but nonetheless, smart, knowing that you were going to need a solid investment banker to help you navigate this quagmire.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  And we got it. We got a good one, but it wasn't Goldman Sachs.

• 35:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Have you had any run ins with Solomon since where you could say, hey, man, tell me the truth?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  After you sell your business, we sold to Amazon, then

• 35:27Rich Roll?

  They don't take your call.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  We have no future business. In fact, what was very bizarre is when we were negotiating with Amazon after we'd announced the deal, but we're trying to get the legal documents done and move towards the merger. I had the distinct impression that neither our bankers nor our attorneys were on our side because they had no future business with Whole Foods. All their future business was going to be with Amazon. So it's like we had nobody in the room that was really looking out for our interest.

• 35:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah. That's a sort of hidden truth in a lot of, you know, business relationships. I'm thinking of, you know, we're here in Hollywood and, you know, agents who are meant to be representing you, but they're doing deals with the studios. Like, who are they really interested in making sure they are in good stead with?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  I think it's true. They have, let's just say they have conflicts of interest. And sometimes they, they're professional enough, they're able to disclose the conflicts and maybe work around them. But a lot of times they're just transparently biased towards who's really going to be their, who they can get, who they're going to have the longest term relationship with.

• 36:39Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. And this bears some relevance and truth in this evolving relationship with Amazon, right? I remember at the outset of this relationship, and I believe we went hiking one time and you were sharing with me, your enthusiasm and your excitement about what might be as a result of this, this acquisition. And you talk about it in the book, but what are your thoughts? We're now, we're now, how many years? Seven years?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, seven years.

• 37:13Rich Roll?

  Post acquisition?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Well, of course, I was CEO for the first five. I've been out. I resigned almost two years ago. I mean, I left almost two years ago now. The honest answer, Rich, when people ask me, do I have the most common way people ask me that question is, do you regret selling to Amazon? And the honest answer is, I regret the circumstances that made that the best solution for us. And it was the best solution in those circumstances. Because we had to, we looked at what our other options were, and the other options were, A, we can fight Janet and try to keep them from taking over the company. But we needed time, we needed to drop our prices, we needed time to turn around the company, to get the prices down and get our sales and same-store sales growth up.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  That was going to take some time, this is about a two-year turnaround. I didn't think we were going to have time to do it. We met with those guys, and they did not want to work with us at all. They showed this PowerPoint presentation that was, a lot of it was inaccurate. They wouldn't give me a copy of the PowerPoint presentation. I said, I'd like to, can you give me a copy of that? Because I really think a lot of these things you're saying are not accurate. And they said, no, we're not going to give it to you. Yeah. And then, when I said, well, let's work together to help Whole Foods become more successful, they said, no, we don't want to work with you. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to take over your board of directors, and then we're going to fire you and your management team, and then we're going to put the company up for sale. And there's not an effing thing you can do about it. And they got up and walked out of the conference room.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  So, it's like, okay, we kind of know where they stand, they're not going to be partners at all, they're just, they're just in it for the quick buck here. So, fighting them was, of course, I'm a very competitive guy, so that was my first instinct, was we're going to fight these guys, we're going to beat these bastards. And then, then it was like, well, what are their options? We could take the company private, which is something we seriously considered. The problem with taking the company private is, is that the private equity firm puts in, they put in some money, maybe 10% of the money, but the other 90% is borrowed against the company's balance sheet, against Whole Foods' balance sheet. So, we'd have been taking on about $13 billion in debt. And the interest rates on that, just servicing that debt, would be enormous.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  If we hit like a 2008 downturn in the economy, the company wouldn't make it, we'd go bankrupt. I thought that was a too big of a risk. And then there was also the option of friendly hands, like we contacted Warren Buffett to see if he'd be interested, he'd be a perfect partner for us. But Warren just joked about it and said, I own Dairy Queen, I don't think it's, I don't think Whole Foods is a good brand fit for me.

• 39:46Rich Roll?

  It doesn't quite line up with his practice of hitting the McDonald's drive thru.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yes, he's very proud of his junk food diet.

• 39:54Rich Roll?

  That's right.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  So, Amazon was the best solution in those circumstances. And all in all, a lot of good things came from that merger. I mean, we were able to drop our prices. People don't realize, people don't really say the Whole paycheck narrative much anymore. Whole Foods dropped its prices four times in the first two years. It cost Amazon hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. They raised the compensation for all of our hourly team members within 30 days of the merger taking place. They didn't take any of our suppliers away. In fact, they studied our supply chain and then they picked up our best suppliers. So our suppliers gained from it and the shareholders gained from it. All of our stakeholders won in that deal. Now, we did lose control of the business ultimately, but they didn't try to change our culture.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  They didn't try to make us into Amazon clones. We became more centralized. Some things are a little different, but all in all, if I had to do it all over again, I'd make the same decision. But I will always wonder what would have happened if we would have fought. I mean, I'll always wonder that.

• 40:57Rich Roll?

  So, for people that don't know, Jana Partners was this private equity firm. They acquired something like 8.8% of the stock.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:07Rich Roll?

  It's a classic Gordon Gekko, Wall Street kind of maneuver.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  That's what they were like, by the way.

• 41:12Rich Roll?

  It's ripped right out of that narrative on some level. And it left you with very few options in order to survive. So, the decision to go with Amazon was the best opportunity within the constraints of a very unfortunate situation in which you found yourself. But, it wasn't the obvious choice. And I bring this up because I think it's indicative, reflective of the way that you make decisions. It wasn't like people were walking around saying you should think about Amazon.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:45Rich Roll?

  This was your idea at the time. It was Albertson's look like. It was going to be maybe your only option to find an exit out of this.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  I hinted this in the book, but I'm not going to make any accusations. I actually feel like there was a lot of pressure to take the company private. I was being courted by... By some big players like Mike Milken to take the company private. They really wanted to take the company private. You know, as I said, I just didn't think that was the best option for the company. And I didn't think private, putting the private equity company in control would have been the best interest of Whole Foods either. But there was a lot of pressure to do that. The Amazon thing happened because I was kept asking, the question I kept asking, I'm a great believer that if you have intentionality and you put it out into the world, if you, answers come. And the question I kept asking is, what's the win-win-win solution?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  What's the best solution for all of our stakeholders? I kept asking that question every day. I'd ask that question, what's the best solution? And I had met Jeff Bezos just coincidentally a year before at this conference we both were at, we both were on a panel together, the two of us, and we actually hit it off pretty well. Jeff is a, likes to read, so we talked about books, particularly like science fiction and fantasy. So do I. He also is a scuba diver, and we talked about that. And he's interested in Whole Foods, so we talked about Whole Foods some. And we kind of hit it off, and he actually said, man, this is a really interesting conversation. I want to follow up with you and we'll get back together. I just didn't hear back from him. So then I kept asking that question, what's the best solution? And then I woke up one morning, right when I woke up, you know how, you know, like I

• 43:22Speaker 01

  just woke up and all of a sudden this answer popped in my brain, and the answer was, what about Amazon? And it was like, whoa, what about Amazon? Hmm, I wonder if they'd be interested. They have the, they have the deep pockets. One thing I love about Amazon, which is I think very long-term. They really do make decisions 10, 15, 20 years down the road. That's the kind of leader Jeff Bezos is. So I knew they'd give us time to make, be able to drop our prices and reconfigure the company, and they did. In fact, after the merger happened. After I thought about it, then it was like, let's get together with them. So we contacted them, and Amazon was very interested. And just a few days later, we flew, I flew with three of my leaders from Whole Foods. We met with Jeff and three of his leaders.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  And I make this joke that When you fall in love, you have what you call the conversation. Where you have this conversation, you might stay up all night and talk and you just have this connection, this sort of soulmate connection. We had that, the very first meeting. We talked for like three hours and all the things we could do together. And they weren't the typical corporate types that I'm used to dealing with. They weren't Wall Street types. And all these were really smart, regular guys. And we talked about all the synergies we could create. So we had an amazing conversation. And then they followed up, two days later, and said, we want to send a team down, let's get going on this thing. And six weeks after that very first meeting, we'd signed an agreement.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  They were very, I love the fact that, once Amazon decides they want to do something, they really move all in on it. And they made a decision quickly, this would be a good merger for them. So, the deal happened pretty quickly. And, you know, was it perfect? No. Kind of like, most marriages aren't perfect either, but, all in all, I mean, again, I'd rather Whole Foods stayed independent. If that was really a viable choice, that would have been the choice I'd prefer, but I just didn't think we had that choice any longer, and this was the best solution.

• 45:24Rich Roll?

  In an alternate universe, you would still be happy to be at the helm?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  You know, I think in an alternate universe, I probably would have retired by now, anyway. I'm 70. I loved running Whole Foods, but, you know, there's a time to step aside and let the younger people take charge. All my peers, I was the last guy standing. All the people that I built the company with that were my age, people like Walter Robb, and A.C. Gallo, and Glenda Flanagan, and Jim Sud, they were all gone. So, everybody I was working with was 15, 20, 25, 30 years younger than me. So I didn't have anybody there that was like... You know, that I was, could share at the same level.

• 46:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  And they were eager. I could tell. They, they just kinda wanted to, and Amazon was running it and I was, I was bumping heads with Amazon a lot, you know, because I was never intimidated. And, uh.

• 46:17Rich Roll?

  That had an expiration date to it.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Yes. In the book, I described this thing that was kinda the trigger. I'm talking to Dave Clark, who was the CEO of Consumer. He was the, like, the number two guy at Amazon. Dave and I were fighting, and we have an argument via Zoom, Amazon's equivalent, Chime, about, I wanted to bring the people back to work at the offices. And this is February 2021. They had basically not been there for a year. But everybody else is going to work at the stores. Everybody else is working at our commissaries. Everybody else is going to our distribution centers. We just had this privileged class at our corporate offices that weren't working. And I thought, this is ridiculous. Vaccines, vaccinations are available. People need to come back to work. This is, this is bad for morale. Everybody

• 47:03Speaker 01

  sees that these people won't have to work and go into the work, go into work, and everybody else is. So I was trying to get permission from Amazon to do it, and Dave did not want to do it. And, and I, I triggered him because, A, I was pushing back, and I said, listen, Dave, you gotta trust me on this. I'm like, I'm the general in the field here. I know what's good for Whole Foods and what's bad. This is bad. This is bad for morale. It's bringing people down. I need to bring people back to the office. It's been a whole year, for God's sake. And he said, it's too, it's too soon. It's too soon. I said, look, trust me. Amazon, you don't have to come back to work. Fine. Stay all as long as you want. But this is what Whole Foods needs to do. Trust me. A general in the field. And that

• 47:45Speaker 01

  triggered him. He says, can't you just, for once, stop fucking arguing with me? You argue about everything. And I said, well, what do I, what do I argue with you about? Can you give me some other examples? I don't argue with, mostly I just go along. And he thinks about it, and he says, I don't have to give you any goddamn examples. I know that you do, and everybody else knows it, too. And so he's really angry and really triggered. But then I got some unvarnished truth in that anger, too. He said, you know, Mackie, if you didn't want to lose control of Whole Foods, you shouldn't have sold it to Amazon. And now you just kind of need to do what you're told. And it's like, whoa. Then when that conversation was over, it was like, I asked myself the question, why am I still here? Do they want me here? I don't think they do.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  I don't think they want me here. And I didn't make a pop decision, but I kind of made a decision that day. I think it's time for me to go. I waited a few months. You know, you got to let, it's such a big decision after 44 years to leave, that I had to let that kind of marinate to make sure it was really aligned with my heart and talk with good advice from my people I love and trust, like my wife and some of, and Glenda and some of the AC, some of the people I love and trust. And increasingly, I just saw this was the right decision. It was time to go.

• 48:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  And it opened up the possibility for love life for me.

• 49:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Sometimes you have to let something go to go on the next thing, right?

• 49:07Rich Roll?

  You do, right? Well, I think that story, even though it's, it's just, you know, kind of one incident, it gets at the heart of what's really important to you, which is like culture and people. And, you know, throughout the book, it's a, you know, it's a recurring theme that whenever a crisis strikes or whenever you're faced with some kind of decision that you have to make, it's the culture that you have constructed and protecting that always seems to win the day. And that incident made clear that there was a clash with respect to how you were perceiving culture or prioritizing.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  And I couldn't protect any longer.

• 49:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, imagine you're a father, you have children and, you know, he's basically saying, yeah, well, if you wanted to stake, if you wanted to keep control, you shouldn't have sold it to us. Now we're going to kind of do what we want to do.

• 49:56Rich Roll?

  So when you walk into a Whole Foods market now, I'm sure you do every time you travel, right? You walk in, walk around, you're looking around, like, are you looking at, oh, they did that? Oh, that's good. Oh, that's not so good. I would have done this. Like, what is, what is the emotional kind of response that you have?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And I have complex emotions about it. You know, one of the gifts I wanted to give my successor, Jason Beekel, who is, I did pick Jason and Amazon did agree with that pick. So I got the guy I wanted to take my place. And he's super smart, loves Whole Foods culture. He was our chief technology officer, then he became chief operating officer. And he speaks Amazon language because he's a tech guy. One of my gifts to Jason was, I'm letting this thing go. I'm bringing closure. I'm not going to be looking over your shoulder. I'm not going to be second guessing what's going on. I don't want to be in the loop. Anybody comes to me to complain about changes that are happening, I'm going to say, I'm sorry. That's not my problem any longer.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  You need to go talk to the Whole Foods people. I can't help you. I'm sorry. And so I deliberately stay out of the loop. I don't really know what's going on. I don't want to know what's going on. Occasionally, I get together with Jason and he'll give me a little bit about, telling me about, you know, what Amazon's doing. And it's like, yeah, I'm sorry. I can't help you there. I'm trying not to judge the changes. There are changes occurring. I see it. They're doing things that I wouldn't do. But that's the gift, right? They have to evolve it as they see fit and with Amazon's input. It's going to change. I can't do anything about that. It's kind of like your children grow up, Rich. You've done the best you can during colicating good values in them, but you're not in control of them any longer and they're kind of going to do what they want to do. And you just still love them anyway.

• 51:44Rich Roll?

  Here in Los Angeles, we have something called Airwan.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:47Rich Roll?

  You know, Airwan.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  I do.

• 51:48Rich Roll?

  You know, Airwan all the way from the beginning. Have you been into any of the Airwans in town here?

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 51:55Rich Roll?

  Because this seems to be the new, you know, kind of whole paycheck version of what, you know...

• 52:01Speaker 01

  It's good to be competing with somebody that's considered a lot more expensive than

• 52:03Rich Roll?

  It's sort of upped the ante in terms of luxury experience with food. And they don't shy away from their high prices. In fact, that's not a bug. That's a sort of feature. It's really kind of like a lifestyle brand or a beauty brand, almost, a prestigious thing to go to the store, which is a very different ethos than Whole Foods. But in some way, you could characterize it as an heir apparent or the next evolution of what like a high-end food market is and could be.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  So first, let me say, I have a lot of respect for Airwan. I think they do a really good job. If I was still CEO of Whole Foods, we would be responding to Airwan in a very competitive way. I would not cede that high-end position to them in LA or anywhere else without a fight. But I don't think that's what Whole Foods is going to do. We developed, we're testing it out first in the Denver area. We opened a high-end store we called Ideal Market, which was, had a lot of Erawani and elements in it. And we were gonna, we, that was gonna be the brand for our upscale answer to Erawan, gonna be Ideal Market, where we could do

• 53:16Speaker 01

  similar things that Erawan's doing. And, you know, I wanted to compete. But again, after I gave one-year notice, that's one of the things that got canceled when I, when I gave up my leadership CEO mantle. They decided, they didn't want another brand. They were willing to concede that part of the market to Erawan and just be the Whole Foods. We're, you know, we're very successful in LA, just as Whole Foods. So, I'm a very competitive guy, was not, I was not gonna concede that to Erawan. But I want to repeat what I started out by saying, they're doing a really good job. I have a lot of respect for them. And I, I think your competitors are the ones that can teach you the most. I don't like Whole Foods getting outflanked on the high end. So I would have fought.

• 54:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And if you suddenly found yourself reinstalled as CEO, would you resuscitate Ideal Markets and go to war with these guys?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  But I think-

• 54:08Rich Roll?

  In a win-win way, John.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  The beautiful thing about capitalism is you have competition, which makes you better. If, if there wasn't competition, you tend to rest on your laurels. You know, I have a great metaphor for it. Do you follow tennis at all?

• 54:22Rich Roll?

  Little bit.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Little bit. So the three greatest tennis players who ever played the game happened to all be about the same age. The three highest Grand Slam winners are Djokovic, Nadal, and Federer. They're, you know, Federer's a little bit older, and then Nadal, and then Djokovic. But those three guys, they won almost all the Grand Slams over the last 15 years. One of the other ones won it. Everybody else has won fewer Grand Slams, and each one of those guys has won by themselves in the last 15 years. They made each other better. They had to keep counteracting each other. They had to take their game to the next level. And that's the beautiful thing about competition and capitalism is it helps you to get better. Arowan would have helped Whole Foods to get better if we'd gone to compete with them

• 55:07Speaker 01

  directly like I wanted to. And guess what? We'd have made Arowan better, and Arowan would have made Whole Foods better. Who benefits from that? Customers do. Customers benefit from that, you know, struggle for improvement, to serve them better. And that's how you make progress in a free market capitalist society, and that's why humanity keeps advancing.

• 55:41Rich Roll?

  Most people who go on these MDMA psilocybin adventures like you have many times are seeking answers to questions, or they're looking to address a wound or heal a trauma. And I'm curious if there are pain points that motivated some of those experiences for you and what those might be.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  You know, I talk about the psychedelics three times in the book. First time is I just turned 22 years old, and I had a very massive LSD trip that was unscripted. I was, and I experienced dissolving in my ego and emerging into all that is the one. And when I try to explain that to people, it's very hard for people to understand this because we're so identified with our egos. Our egos are our separateness. Like, you're Rich, I'm John. It's a water bottle. That's Robin over there. And so we're, we think that's who we are. That's what we identify. And the essence of it is separation. We're different. We're unique. We're separate.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  And when you, when you have an ego death or your ego dissolves, that separation disappears. There is no separation between me and you, between me and this water bottle. There's only the one. And that is, I believe, the deepest reality is the oneness. Only because we're in the ego state of consciousness, we don't experience it. So that was the most important experience I probably, well, one of the most important experiences in my life, because before then, I just didn't really believe there was any deeper reality. There was spirituality, I believed in, you know, I mean, it's just, as an atheist, and there's no deeper spiritual reality, it's all just bullshit, opium of the masses, you know, opiate of the masses.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  That, you know, it's a hard, I was existentialist, it's a hard cruel world, you just get used to it, that's the way things are. And, uh, and I was like, all of a sudden, I'm dissolved into the one, and it's like, oh my God, every, it's not just that there's a spiritual reality, the whole thing is spiritual, the whole thing is this deeper oneness. And it's like, okay, well, how do I, how do I experience this, not through a drug, but through my normal life? And how can I get into this space all the time? That's the first book. And that led me to move into the co-op, which launched me on my, my hero's journey in doing Whole Foods. Then in 1984, while it was still legal, I might add, I did MDMA for the first time.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  And, and which now, I mean, it's, back then, it was called Adam, then it became called Ecstasy, and we had a rave scene that occurred, I was never in that rave scene, that occurred after I really didn't use it. And then, now it's called Molly, I think, among Shanks people. And that was a very life-changing, because I'd forgotten that love is the most important thing. And I had such an intense loving experience on the MDMA, I, I just saw, oh my God, love is the most important thing. You want to get back and dissolve the ego, and you want to be in the oneness? It's through love. Love is the gentle path to reintegrating into the wholeness of the oneness of the universe.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  And I just never have forgotten that, and I've gone back to it, and that led to breathwork in A Course of Miracles, and a journey, a gentle journey through The Course of Miracles of Awakening Deeper to Love. And then, the third time in the book, I talk about it, as I was transitioning out of Whole Foods, and I knew, after forty-four years, that was not going to be easy for me to do, and I wanted a really good separation, or a good letting go of that. And so I did a guided journey, inspired by Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind. It's like, as usual, Michael Pollan's, you know, he's at the cutting edge of what's going on, and oftentimes, he did it with food, and then he did it with psychedelics, I think.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  And so, I thought, well, I'm gonna do a guided journey, and so, I found a person that, I had a five-day retreat, where I basically, it was all very, very, it was very sacred, in terms of, I had to do preparation before I went in there, I had to, we did a lot of work around intentionality, what did I want to have come out of this, a lot of prayer around that, a lot of clarity about what I wanted, and then openness to what I needed to see, rather than what I wanted. And so, five days, five days of breathwork. And I actually found the breathwork to be more powerful, in this context, than the psychedelics, although the psychedelics were very powerful.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  There were combinations of MDMA and psilocybin, and-

• 1:00:30Rich Roll?

  Holotropic breathing?

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Yep. Well, no, the breathwork that my guy did was, I did a lot of holotropic breathwork, that was what, the breathwork I was taught in, and what I was doing, and that's what I started doing. And my guy, a woman, she said, you know, we're not gonna do the holotropic breathwork here, we're gonna do a gentler, circular type of breathwork. So she gave me a different breathwork. It was much gentler, and I could relax into it, in a way that I couldn't quite do with holotropic breathwork. She had me lot, focused a lot more on the circular breathing, of continuous, but more gentle breathing, and-

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  It was incredibly powerful and I'm a different person now. That was two years ago. And I've really never come down from it, to be honest. Different in what way? I just went deeper. I went deeper. I saw things. I had three, I had experiences I'd never had before in any other context. The first one was, I had never really completely loved myself, not really unconditionally. We all have an internal critic, Rich, that, you know, is finding fault, finds fault with everybody around us and finds fault in ourselves because we're not perfect. We make mistakes. We say things that hurt people or we do dumb things. And I have a, you know, powerful internal critic. And so I'd never really completely loved myself.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  And if you don't love yourself, it's very hard to really let other people love you because you're thinking, they don't really know me. If they knew me, they would, they say they love me, but that's because they don't really know who I am. Because I'm this, you know, horrible person that hurts people and says nasty things and, you know, isn't perfect. So I first experienced this unconditional love for myself. I got back in touch kind of with this inner child that had this beautiful heart of good intentions, really wanted to do good, really wanted to be loving and help people. And then I could see the ego, which was this like, kind of like this, think about the crabbiest little old mean man you can imagine. That was my ego, just mean, mean as a junkyard dog. And it's like, I could see that wasn't me.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  That wasn't really who I was. In my heart, I was this very loving, innocent child who just wanted to do good and love people. And so I felt this overwhelming love for that, that little child. And I also felt love for the internal critic. It's like, the internal critic is the ego, the separation. And it's like, I named it. It's Old Bob. Old Bob needs, he needs a little love too. And you know, just, Bob, cool down dude, I got this one. We're okay. Okay, nothing to be scared of, nothing to judge here. Be okay. So you constantly, I'm always reassuring Bob that things are gonna be okay. And then I had, then I had this unconditional love for existence.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Because I, I have this cap I like to wear that says, holy shit, we're alive. Because the miracle of life, to be a living being with trillions of cells that are cooperating together and going through this whole adventure of being a human being and in the flesh. If you just think about it and get into it, it's such an amazing thing. It's extraordinary. Holy shit, we're alive. What greater gift is there than to be alive? It's just amazing. So I felt this unconditional love for existence, for just life itself and just this particular reality that we're experiencing, this dream state that we're in, it's amazing.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  And then I felt unconditional love for all that is, for God, for the Creator. And it was like, I'd never experienced any of those things. And, and that all came, wave after wave after wave of this unconditional love. And I just was crying. I went, I don't know how long it went on. I cried for, could have been an hour, just crying. Because I was crying from being able to release this. And quite frankly, I'm not the same person as I was before I did that journey.

• 1:04:35Rich Roll?

  Incredible stuff. So what was it about this time that made it different than the other times and, and so profound? And you know, something that you can carry in your daily conscious awareness? Was it the breathwork piece?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  I think it was a combination of everything. I also, my guide was so loving. Created such a safe place, you know, and no, she kept telling me, you know, I just trust the process. Your soul is wise. Just trust your process. Trust the process. And, and I, she, I felt so safe with her there that it was able, I could, I could let go a lot more than I ever could in the past. I also think, Rich, that in this case, you know, I've Been on this hero's journey a long time. I was ready for it in a way I wasn't when, you know, 20 years ago. I've moved into a different cycle of life, which the spirituality part is the predominant part, the thing that's most interesting to me where I am today in

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  my life. And also, my wife is the most loving being I've ever known, and frankly, she's been working on me for 34 years. I've been her main project. I've been a difficult project for her. But, you know, she's a, she stayed in there, hung in there with me, and she sculpted me to a certain extent.

• 1:05:54Rich Roll?

  When I think of that inner child, or the young, the young John who's, you know, brimming with love, and I reflect upon the many ways in which life, you know, erodes our inner child, and hardens our edges, and turns us into our own worst critics. I mean, this is a, this is, you know, this is a primary malfunction of mine, so I'm very interested in this. I can't help but think about your mom in some regards. Like, she was a tough customer, and as much as you just wanted that approval from her, she was not giving it up, all the way to the end.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 1:06:36Rich Roll?

  And that had to be hard. I mean, you, you tell the story, but I want to hear more about that, because that's painful.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  My mother grew up, you gotta always put things in context. One of the things when you get older, you can see your parents, not as your parents, but you see them as human beings, and you see them in their own journeys in life, and their, so, like, my parents, my mother was a small-town, grew up in Bastrop, Texas, a small-town Baptist community, in the Bible Belt. No drinking, no dancing, no card-playing, no smoking, all of that. And, and she rebelled against, my mother actually rebelled against that. She smoked, and drank, and danced, and gambled. And, she, so she was a rebel. That might be where part of my rebellion came a little bit from my mother to a certain extent. But,

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  she also wanted to be respectable. She wanted, she wanted...

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Remember, women, the patriarchy was alive and well. My mother was a very intelligent woman. And, but the patriarchy was very powerful. And there were really no opportunities for women. I mean, they didn't become doctors back when they were there. They were allowed to teach. So my mother was a teacher. She got a college degree and she taught until, then she's supposed to be a homemaker. Right? So when she had children, she wasn't supposed to work. No, wife of mine's gonna work, was kind of the saying. I'm gonna be the breadwinner. And so my father was the breadwinner and my mother took care of the children. That was, we lived in the suburbs. This was leave it to Beaver time.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  And that was the romanticized worldview that my parents grew up in. And they remember, they grew up in the depression. So they didn't have anything. So, and then, my dad was 20 when Pearl Harbor and World War II broke out in America. Immediately, of course, signed up, everybody did. And he had to grow up really fast. He was in a war and now he gets married to his college sweetheart. And my sister's born pretty, uh, pretty early on, seven years older than me. And he couldn't follow his dreams. And my mother, she just, they just wanted to live in suburbia and raise a family and not be poor, because that's what they knew. And so, that was their reality.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  That was their own hero's journey at that time. I was more fortunate. I grew up in an affluent time. The money was not really, my parents, my dad was a college professor when I was young and then he went into business and became very successful there. My mother, though, really, she named me after her father, who was a doctor. She wanted me to be a doctor. At the very least, she wanted me to be respectable. And here I was, dropping out of college, uh, that was just unforgivable. Why would you drop out of college? What are you gonna do with yourself? And then I, then I was downwardly mobile, Rich. I became a grocer. That she could never, she never got her head around Whole. You're a grocer. You could have been a doctor and you're a grocer.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  For her, grocers were the people wearing the aprons, you know, just working at these little stores. And she just couldn't imagine why I would. I think she told me, she says, you know, John, I've seen all your IQ test. I've seen your aptitude test. You've got a great mind. You could be whatever you want to be and you've chosen to be a grocer. So she was always guilt tripping me about that and she didn't like Whole Foods. It was hippie gro- worse, it was a hippie grocery store. Which she just, you know, just thought was ridiculous. You know, you look at your hair. You've got this big Afro and you know, it's just embarrassing. A long beard. I mean, she was really embarrassed about me. She'd get together and play bridge with the other, um, her peers and their children were going on to law school and medical school.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  How's that fine son of yours, John, doing? Well, he's, he's a grocer.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  So on my, on her deathbed, the last time I saw my mother was 1987. She died very young. All those rebellions did not work out well for her health because she smoked. She's a heavy drinker, never exercised, worried constantly. Almost all the things that we know lead to bad health and shorten lives, she did them all. Last time I saw her, she'd already had a stroke. She was already partially paralyzed and on her bed. I knew she only had a, probably a few months to live and she said, John, I want you to do a favor for your, for your mother. You know, I'm dying. I said, yes, but hopefully not for a while. She says, yeah, I know, but I don't know when we'll see each other again and I just, I just want one, just, just promise me you'll go back to school. Just finish college. Do it for your mother.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, I was pretty young. I was like 33 then or 34, full of my own integrity. Very proud of what I was doing with Whole Foods. We only had about four stores then. And she said, uh, yeah, do it for me. And I said, mom. I'm not gonna go back to school. I said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna build Whole Foods into this great company and, and, and you'll see, it's gonna be amazing. And we're going to, um, I'm gonna get an honorary degree someday. Someday I'm gonna endow some university and they're gonna give me an honorary degree. And she said, oh, don't be ridiculous. Go back and make something of your life. And I, and I just said, I'm not gonna do it. Which is kind of a little bit of a minor regret because my more older, mature self,

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  gosh, I mean, I could've just lied and made a promise that would've given her comfort in her, you know, so she didn't die with her, being disappointed in her son. She really was disappointed in me. So, um, part of her rebellion is in me and, uh, but she never, she did not live, she died really a few days, a week, a week or so later after the last time I saw her. So she definitely was disappointed. I, I had, I had to break away from my mother. I remember the first time I dropped out of school and I dropped out and I wanted to hitchhike around America before starting out in New York. I was like, I'm going on an adventure. So I, I, she says, you're gonna go hitchhiking, you could get killed. And I said, nah, it's gonna be fun.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  I was going with a buddy, we're gonna be okay, be safe. And, and she was really scared and she said, if you walk out of that door, you can never come back. This is it. We're done. I gotta tell you, Rich, I hesitated at that door. It's like, wow, my mother is like telling me I'm not ever gonna be walking back in the house. And I thought about it, I said, that is so manipulative. If that's the way she really feels, fine. So I said, I'm sorry, Mom, I hope you'll let me come back in the house someday, but I'm going, I'm going hitchhiking. And so I, I did and needless to say, like, a few weeks later, I was talking to her and she said, of course you can come back home, please come home now. So, um, yeah, I, I struggled with the mother thing.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  We got off on this topic because we're talking about the internal critic. That, part of that is in, partly from my mother, I think, judging me as, you know, a failure, not, you know, downwardly mobile. That was struggling with my own desire to be my own guy.

• 1:13:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this sense of, of, of being less than and having something to prove and, you know, you know, being... Being someone who desperately wanted that approval and the way to get it was to just put the pedal to the metal on the business until it was so big, it would be undeniable to her.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  You know, that's an interesting question. I never quite thought about it that way. I wonder if part of my motivation there was, I'll show my mother. I, probably, but I don't, I don't, I don't feel that. It wasn't something I was conscious of. The thing that's left out of the story is, is that my father, I always felt I had his tacit approval for what I was doing. Not only did he become my mentor, but in some ways, I feel like he was living through me vicariously. Because he might have been an entrepreneur, but he didn't, he couldn't do that. And so, I always felt his support, even if I felt my mother's judgment, I always felt my dad had my back and was supporting me.

• 1:14:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  And so, that was very helpful.

• 1:14:48Rich Roll?

  Must have made for some interesting conversations between your dad and your mom when you were not around, though.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Probably so. He was probably defending me and she was saying, Billy, you know, he really looks up to you. If you would tell him to come back home, he would. And my dad was probably saying, let him be, he's okay. I'm pretty sure that's what he did.

• 1:15:09Rich Roll?

  What is it about this book, The Course in Miracles, that, that snapped you out of your atheism and, and gave you, you know, some kind of spirituality to hang on to? I mean, this book comes up a lot on this podcast. I had Marianne Williamson here. She talks about it all the time.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, I know Marianne.

• 1:15:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  And her book, Return to Love, was a really, really great book. So, the story there for The Course in Miracles goes something like this for me. So, I, I did the MDMA. I've had this heart opening experience. And then I'm doing, now I'm doing this holotropic breath work, which is taking me to new places. And one of the friends that I did that initial journey with MDMA, it was a guy named Curtis. And Curtis comes and he gives me this book. I call it The Course of Miracles and it's like, what is this? And he says, "Well, it's gonna sound kind of far out, but it claims to be. It's a channeling from Jesus. It's really incredible." I said, "A channeling from Jesus? That's gotta be, that's bullshit." And, because I had been, when I was 18, I'd very briefly, for about two years, I was a born-again Christian, coming out of high school.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  I kinda got a crush on a girl and she was into it and she got me into it and I did it and then I, I kind of, I ran into the problem of evil. You know what the problem of evil is? The problem of evil is, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving, why is there so much suffering and pain? How can that even exist? And that's the problem of evil. And the religions don't really come up with very good answers to that. And I didn't, the answers I got from Christianity, "Well, you know, we have free will and then we're making, you know, making these choices and it's not God's fault." And it's like, that just didn't seem to be true to me. It just didn't make sense.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  So, that was really why I stopped being a Christian, just the problem of evil. So, I went, started reading The Course of Miracles with a kind of a bad attitude, like, "Yeah, I'm gonna prove this wrong." And I, and around 50, page 50, 60, 70, somewhere around there, reading the text, and then I come across this statement that basically answered the problem of evil, or at least had a unique twist on it that, that really spoke to my heart. And it said that, you know, "Lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, you've looked around and you've seen pain and you've seen suffering and you've seen great wrongs occur, and every time you blame God for it."

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  What's never occurred to you is that you are asleep and you are dreaming this. You are dreaming all of this pain and all of this suffering. And God just wants to help you wake up. Once you wake up, you will see that it's your dream. You're dreaming it. And it's the reason it's a powerful metaphor is, think about this. When we dream at night, we are in the dreams. Have you ever had a dream you weren't in?

• 1:18:11Rich Roll?

  Of course not.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Well, who are all those other characters that are in the dream? They seem to be acting independently of you. Well, how can they be independent of you if you're dreaming them?

• 1:18:20Rich Roll?

  I've thought about this.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Yes. So we wake up, and have you ever had a lucid dream? A lucid dream is when you become conscious that you're dreaming. And then you can take control of the dream. Whatever you imagine begins to take place.

• 1:18:38Rich Roll?

  I can't say that I've quite gotten there. I've had the first part, but not the second part.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  So if you get back in that state, the way to go into the lucid dream is not easy. You have to really focus on something. I mean, and it's interesting, in the Don Juan, Castaneda books, Don Juan said, "Look at your hands, focus on your hands." And what happens if you have an intensity of focus? You will stay in the dream, but you become conscious that you're dreaming. I've actually, I haven't done this for a while, but I've actually had dreams where I actually think I stayed days in that. I went about my business and woke up.

• 1:19:18Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  That one of the challenges sometimes is that the two things that are difficult for me are, one is, it could be a sexual fantasy that takes you out of it. Or I really liked flying. So I get, you know, the best dreams are flying dreams. So sometimes the flying does a way, gets me going on it. And so, anyway, the point is, just getting back to the Course of Miracles is that, the Course argues that you think when you wake up at night that you've woken from the dream, but you've only woken to a different dream. You're still dreaming. You're still creating experiences all around you. And so the Course says...

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  We're gonna help you wake up fully. And you wake up through opening to deeper love. And you do that through forgiveness. Instead of that internal critic that judges you all the time and judges everyone else, we begin to let that critic go. We begin to practice forgiveness. We begin to practice kindness and compassion and gentleness. And as we, we're starting to take control of our dream. We're starting to become more conscious in the dream. We're trying to make this dream a lucid dream. And when we do that, then everything begins to shift around us. As we are kinder and more loving, we begin to experience more kindness and loving back to us. As we forgive people, we begin to feel that we're also forgiven.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  As we are kinder and gentler, we begin to experience a kinder and gentler world. So, the whole point of it is, you're sleeping still. You begin to wake up by understanding that you're dreaming, that you're sleeping, and then begin to practice forgiveness and opening your heart to more and more love. And then you, of course, teaches that you transform this dream into a dream of love. And then, once it's completely a dream of love, there's no separation and you're fully awake. That's my working hypothesis. And it seems to be happening for me, so I'm gonna keep going with it.

• 1:21:18Rich Roll?

  In the game of life, in the infinite game, right? Like, approaching, approaching life with, "Okay, here's the, here's the game board and here's the rules." Practicing these rules will allow you to transcend the constraints of conscious perception and, and allow you to see things more broadly and as they truly are, which is that we are not separated, that everything is one. And this, you know, transmission of energy outward translates into energy that gets aimed in your direction favorably.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:22:00Rich Roll?

  Do I get that right?

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Yes, beautiful.

• 1:22:02Rich Roll?

  I like that. That's really powerful.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  And so the hero's journey now goes into, how can I just love everyone I'm around all the time? Just love everyone? Do I sometimes, and I don't always do that, by the way. I have an internal critic that judges me and judges other people. But what I've learned, and I also learned this in the Course of Miracles, is that the past doesn't exist. All that exists is the present moment. So when we forget and we do something unkind, we make a judgment, or we attack someone, that's in the past. In the next moment, we can choose love again. If we forget, it's okay. That's in the past. Now, we can choose love. So we get a new chance every next instant.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  And then as we practice, we get more skillful at extending love until that's what we're doing all the time.

• 1:22:56Rich Roll?

  Where do you get tripped up most with this? What's the handicap?

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Such a great question. You know, I think where I get tripped up is the little tiny judgments. Like just driving over here, you know, somebody cuts you off and you're driving and it's like, you know, you judge that person for cutting you off. Or someone says an unkind word to you and your ego takes offense at it. So you have to practice being conscious and you have to be aware, you have to be present. And when you're fully present, you don't get tripped up. But we get lost in our thoughts. You're right, we get into our mind games. And in the mind games, we start to practice judgments. And we get defensive. And we can criticize and attack others. We begin to have these little things. He shouldn't have said that to me. That was really an asshole thing to do.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  So we start having the judgments in our minds. And so we have to go back into the present moment. There's the power in the now, power in the present moment. There is no judgment in the present moment. In the present moment, there's love. Stay in the present moment.

• 1:23:58Rich Roll?

  So over the course of your career, when you've had to kind of face and navigate, some pretty heavy situations. Early on, there's the 100-year flood that you have to figure out. And then later, all these coup attempts. There's the Wild Oats indictment story, the Howard Schultz letter. Like, there's a lot, a lot of shit gets thrown at you, right? And you're like at the helm of this increasingly...

• 1:24:27Rich Roll?

  You know, larger and more powerful company. It's a lot of responsibility and that's a lot of heat to shoulder. So how do you like, what did you, what did you like, return to, or what were the practices that helped keep you grounded? So that you could, you know, walk through these with some level of equanimity, you know, practice these principles that you just shared and, you know, ensure that you are, you know, visiting your intuition and making the best decision and kind of detaching yourself a little bit from what's happening.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  So, good question, great question. And first of all, I don't always deal with it well. I mean, right? I mean, I forget.

• 1:25:08Rich Roll?

  You're a crusty bastard sometimes.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  I can be, exactly. So I don't always deal with it well. I haven't always dealt with it in the past well. So, but you really question is how do, how can I remember? And, and I always do ultimately remember. But it helps because I have a good daily practice, right? And, you know, I start my days off with, first I do spiritual reading, usually in the Course of Miracles. Then I do gratitudes because gratitudes are a total heart opener. Then I do sort of intentionality, could call it prayer and another way, for what I really like to see happen in the world or in my relationships. And then I meditate.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  And then I'm going to do exercise after that and do my smoothie and get on with my day. So that's the grounding. If I, if it's very important that I have my, I get up early. It's very important that I have that 30 to 45 minutes of centering. If I get the day off right, then I usually can go well in the day. I had to do it today, so the day is a good day. Sometimes when I'm under a lot of stress, it's like, oh God, I just can't deal with it. I just, you know, it's like, I can't do my meditation. I can't get my consciousness. It's so all out there and then, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm all shook up. But the practices are even more important when we're under intense stress. If all else fails, a breath work can be very, very powerful.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  I do a breath work and you can do it yourself, but it's easier to do it if you just have a breath working friend come over and guide you or be with you while you're doing the breathing. That just sort of like cleans you out and gets you really well centered.

• 1:26:45Rich Roll?

  So what is the form of meditation that you practice? And what is the breath work practice specifically?

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  The meditation practice, I was, I studied TEM, so I did transcendental meditation. And I had a mantra for, I don't know, 40 years. And then it was interesting, when I was doing the guided journey, my soul gave me a new mantra. It said, "I want you to practice this from now on." And the new mantra is, on the inhale is "I am," "I am," or "Om." And the exhale is "love." And "I am love." And "I am love." And over and over and over again. I've done that with several other people and they all find it very powerful. So I'd urge you to try that sometime.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  Just a very powerful meditation to just "I am love." And in terms of the breath work, there's lots of different kinds. I do some other kind of breath work stuff now that other people have shown me. I will show you one when this is over with, you might want to just try. Because it's very simple and very powerful and only takes a few seconds to do. I'm not sure, I think, I think we should do that off camera.

• 1:27:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we could do that. Of course, everyone's going to be like, "You didn't tell me what the breath work practice is?"

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  You will be an initiate, so you can, you can share that afterwards.

• 1:28:08Rich Roll?

  I will, I will share that.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  But in terms of the breath work that I, I do is this continuous circular breathing. The key to breath work is, you know, to lie down, generally lie down. And, and you can do this on your own, you don't need a guide at all. But you're basically just doing continuous, deep breathing.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  For a circular breath where you bring it in and then into your belly and then out to your chest, but if you do that, you'll begin to have transcendent experience. Stuff comes up from deeper part of your being. Most people get scared and they stop breathing. The trick of it is to not let fear stop you from doing it. Keep breathing, keep breathing. And that's why a guide helps you to remember to keep breathing. And you can do that on your own, and I almost promise you, if you will do it, but I'm saying you need to do it for an hour, if you're gonna really have the most effects, or even two hours. So that's why having a guide to get you to keep breathing, because your ego doesn't want to keep breathing. The

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  ego is not in control. The ego, old Bob, gets shown to decide, and the soul is beginning to speak to you. So the breath work, we're gonna have breath work at Love Life, and I just think that's such a, for people that are scared of psychedelics and have no sense of transcendence, breath work is a very easy way to have a transcendent experience, to get in touch with a deeper spiritual reality within your own being, and it's just simple breath.

• 1:29:45Rich Roll?

  When you do it on the daily, I assume you're not doing it for an hour?

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:29:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a shorter one, but I guess I'm asking because I'm curious.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  That's the one I'm gonna show you when we finish up here.

• 1:29:55Rich Roll?

  With experience, are you able to then drop into that state, you know, in a more facile way, because you've done it so many times, so you don't have to go for an hour? You can kind of connect with it more quickly?

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  The truth is, is that all you have to do to connect with it is just, this is a mindful type meditation, but so you just have to be fully present right now. And when you're fully present in the moment, you're no longer in your thoughts in your head, you are in.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  You're in it. We're always there. We're just off dreaming our thoughts. But when we can be fully present in that present moment is the deepest part of our being, our soul, and it's love. That's what's there. When we remove the blocks to love's presence, that's what we experience. And that is in the moment. It's just hard for people to stay in the moment.

• 1:30:47Rich Roll?

  What is your relationship between that and your kind of creative voice or your ability to craft a vision and then pursue it?

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  That all comes, all the creativity comes from the source. It all comes from within us. So when you're, when you are less blocked, your creativity is flowing fully. And it's, I say your creativity, the deeper creativity of the universe is flowing through you. A good way to think about it is you're like a channel for it. It's flowing through you.

• 1:31:28Rich Roll?

  I get in my way way too much.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Of course, so do I. Yeah.

• 1:31:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  It's practice.

• 1:31:35Rich Roll?

  I do want to talk about love life, but before we do that, there's one other thing that I, that I want to dig into a little bit. There is the spiritual John and there is the entrepreneur slash capitalist John. These things are not necessarily in conflict, but I'm sure at times perhaps there's some tension between the two. And I would imagine there is also some tension that you're always trying to find balance with between the idealist John and the realist John. And if your story is anything, it's one of idealism in a, in

• 1:32:17Rich Roll?

  the context of how you create something meaningful in the real world.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, it's, that's really, actually a really great question. And it's one I've personally

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  It's a challenging question. What I've struggled with my entire business career is I'm very idealistic. One of the things that I figured out pretty early on, remember my very first store, Safer Way, was a vegetarian store. I like to tell the, it's true, but it's also kind of a joke, that Safer Way, we were very pure. We were vegetarian. We didn't sell any coffee. We didn't sell beer and wine. We didn't sell sugar. And we did almost no business. And then when we went to Whole Foods and we started selling meat and seafood and alcohol and coffee and some sugar, the sales exploded. So there's this

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  constant dialogue between the idealist of what you want to create versus the reality of the marketplace. And I always like to say, you have to meet the marketplace where you find it. You can work to evolve it over time, but it's in dialogue with it. Another good example in the book is when we were dealing with the animal welfare issues. We wanted to lessen animal suffering. And so we developed our five-step animal welfare rating system at Whole Foods. And we brought in the activists, who are all vegans. We brought in the scientists, the veterinarians and the scientists. We brought in the suppliers,

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  who are skeptical. And we brought in Whole Foods people. And we looked for win-win-win solutions. How do we create better welfare here that the market will be willing to pay for, right? So that's how we developed sort of this five-step standard. And it's not a perfect system, but it's helped billions of animals have a...

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  A better life before they're slaughtered. And so it's made a difference. But it has to, the idealism always, it's kind of like, I always talk about looking for win-win-win solutions. A win-win-win solution is good for you, good for me, and good for all of us. And I generally believe there is a win-win-win solution to almost every problem. When I was talking earlier about when we found Amazon as the solution, that was a win-win-win solution. It was the best thing for every one of our stakeholders. Every one of our stakeholders was better off because of that merger. That's why they were the best solution. However, sometimes trade-offs, I can't come up with a, I'm unable to find a non-trade-off

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  solution where there's nobody losing. And so then that's when it gets tough. That's when the idealism and the realism clash. I like to say that's a failure of imagination. There was a creative solution. We just couldn't manifest it. And I, but sometimes you have, you run out of time. So you just don't, you run out of time and you end up making trade-offs. Those things are sort of the reality. And I don't have as much trouble as other people do about it because I always feel like I'm doing the best that I can, and we're making progress, but it's not perfect. It's not, all the idealism can't be realized.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  But because I think, well, this is progress. We'll do better next time. And so I have a saying, that's not my saying, it's a common saying, but it's one I really believe in, that perfect is often the enemy of the good. It's better to make the good, to make the incremental step that's an improvement, realizing it's not necessarily perfect, not where you want to be, but it's an improvement. And that we, we take these steps of improvement and the world advances. It just, that's frustrating to the most idealistic people who want to transform the world into utopia overnight.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  But in reality, people change their minds, change their habits, and all, they do it slowly and...

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Incrementally.

• 1:36:40Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  And so I reconcile myself to the facts that I still have my ideals. I mean, a great example is my first store was vegetarian. I'm vegan now, 21 years. I'm never going to eat animal foods consciously again in my lifetime. I'm an ethical vegan. But does that mean that all my stores have to, or my businesses have to reflect that idealism? Well, you can try to do that, but the facts of this are that only 2% of Americans are vegetarian and only half of 1% are vegan. That is a very, very small market. When you try to force people to eat a certain diet against their will, they're just going to reject your business.

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  And so then your business is going to fail and then you haven't done any good at all. You failed. So you have to look at what's possible. And you're in this dialogue with the marketplace. You're trying to persuade people, but ultimately you have to satisfy the market where you find it, which is one of the reasons a lot of people don't like business, because business is messy, because it has contradictions in it, because it's, it's, can be chaotic. I have a high tolerance for chaos. As you can, anybody that would go into my man cave at home and say, how the hell does he find anything around here? And including my wife, who's constantly trying to reform my man cave. It's my one part of my house I completely control.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  There's never going to be anything but chaotic in there. It reflects me. So chaos is, is part of it. But for me, it's like, that's okay. It's okay. We're doing the best we can do.

• 1:38:18Rich Roll?

  How far you can push idealism without, you know, breaking the viability of the enterprise itself, right? And it is an, to sort of further explore the, the animal welfare subject specifically.

• 1:38:37Rich Roll?

  You're an ethical vegan, have been for a long time. You are making a personal choice to not barter and trade on an individual level in these products. You don't consume them, but you're lording over this enterprise that is buying and selling untold millions of pounds of this every single year. And there are the idealistic vegans among us who would like to take you to task for that, right? Like, how can you live with such dissonance? You're not actually living your values. You're not a real vegan. Ergo. You know, I'm thinking of somebody like, there's some uncompromising voices in this

• 1:39:21Rich Roll?

  community, like Gary Francion. You're perpetrating harm because you are greenwashing this thing and making people feel better about this choice. You have to ask yourself, would the world be better off without Whole Foods Market and us having to go to Albertson's instead, right? But I would imagine there is also a toll, like a psychic toll, that you're kind of dancing around when the compromises you make require the business to be somewhat at odds with your own kind of ethical, moral compass.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, I... That was part of the, remember when I talked about on that guided spiritual journey when I had that unconditional love, is I saw my intentions were really good and that I am doing the best that I can do. And the people that judge...

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  The challenge I always put back is, hey, if you think you can do a vegan grocery store, do it. Don't just talk about it, do it. You think you have a better way, show it, do it. And if you do, I'll copy you and try to do it better. It's so easy to be the critic. You know what's hard in the world is to actually go in and do things that make the world better. It's easy to say, you're not doing it the right way. Well, what are you doing? Are you doing anything at all besides criticizing me? So that is always a challenge I put back on people now that say, you should be doing this. It's like, why should I be doing it? You're the one that feels this way, why aren't you doing it?

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  And no one today has ever taken that challenge up.

• 1:41:18Rich Roll?

  And yet, I would imagine the idealist in you appreciates idealism and values those voices because they are quick to let us know where we are on the map of our own moral landscape.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  I listen to the criticisms, obviously, and appreciate it. And I'm always looking for new ways to break through, right? The food thing is really difficult. I have found that people are very reluctant to change the way they eat, not just for ethical reasons, but for health reasons. I mean, Americans are very much addicted to very unhealthy foods, calorie-dense foods that are processed foods, fast foods that are destroying their health. And it's, I mean, in some ways, Whole Foods failed there too, because we had a better way. When we started out, bulk foods were 20% of our sales. Now they're under 1% of our sales.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  People don't, they don't want to buy bulk beans, and most people don't really cook anymore. They just, they want, it's a complicated thing because our evolution of calorie density was so scarce for most of human evolution that we crave calorie density. Anything that has a lot of protein, a lot of fat, or a lot of carbohydrates in it are foods we like to eat. And I might add salt, foods that have a lot of salt in it.

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  When we were not getting enough calories, that was survival. That helped us survive. Today, it's killing us. Because today, we can eat all these calorie-dense foods all the time, and the market gives it to us. You want to eat ice cream? You can eat it every meal. Absolutely. You want to eat candy bars? They're there. You want really salty stuff? Have a go. It's destroying our health. So, in a sense, you're meeting the market where you find it, you're giving it what it wants, but the market wants stuff that's really not good for them. And so, my idealism is compromised in the sense that I look what people put in their baskets. I see what sells. And it's oftentimes the least healthy things that we're selling

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  that would sell best at Whole Foods, which is unfortunate. So, again, I can't make those choices for people. I wrote a book about it called The Whole Foods Diet. I put out there what I think is the ideal diet. Eat a Whole Foods, plant-based diet. If you do, you're probably going to live to be 100, and you're going to have excellent health. You're not going to die from heart disease, cancer, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I can't make people eat that way. I can only lead by example. And I still lead by example in all my own idealism. It's how I show up in the world. And I guess I don't feel guilty about it. I really do feel like I'm doing the best I can do. And love life will be the same way. There'll be little compromises we have to make because the market demands it.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  It won't be perfect, but it's going to be good, and it's going to help a lot of people.

• 1:44:19Rich Roll?

  Well, let's talk about love life. Many years ago, I met Diego Tassoni and his incredible wife Veronica Menon. We became fast friends. They opened a restaurant in Miami, in Wynwood, called Love Life. When our mutual friend, Dan Buettner, moved to Miami, I was like, "Dan, you got to meet this couple. They're amazing." Dan, in turn, introduced them to you. And now, you guys have formed this partnership, and you're on the cusp of this sort of flagship opening for this new venture called Love Life. So, what is this? And why, John, after 40-some-odd years running Whole Foods,

• 1:45:02Rich Roll?

  are you so enthusiastic about another entrepreneurial venture?

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  That's a lot to unpack there.

• 1:45:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  First, going back to Love Life. We did acquire... Veronica and Diego's business, Love Life Cafe, and when we talked about that a little bit earlier. And I do like their food, and I do like them personally quite a bit. There are some challenges there. They relocated the restaurant, but the food is really excellent, and that's where we got our name. So I love that name, Love Life, because I don't mean, "How's your love life?" I mean, "Love life." Love your life, love life itself. The miracle of life is incredible. And so, we made that the name of the company.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  After we bought them, I said, "This is a brand, I think we should name our company Love Life." And I've had this dream, this dream goes all the way back to 1985. Soon after I, in 1984, I'd done MDMA for the first time, I'd done the breathwork, I studied the Course of Miracles, and I was on this, in my own consciousness, development. And I wanted to open something with some friends that was called Life Works. It was gonna be where we put our, in 1985, we opened up a Whole Foods Market, and we had a consciousness bookstore called Book People, and we wanted to do Life Works, which was gonna be a meditation, yoga, breathwork center.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  And it was like, wow, we could have a, it was gonna be small, it was 3,000 square feet, and we put it, I thought, I saw we could put this where we put Whole Foods, and had a whole dream about it. It was a good dream, but the woman that was doing the breathwork, that had introduced me to MDMA, she ultimately, right at the last minute, decided she wouldn't want to invest. And so that kind of tanked the deal. It's like, well, she's the, she's the inspiration for this, and she doesn't want to take the risk. I get that, but do I want to take the risk? And does my friends want to take the risk? So we decided, maybe the time's not right for this yet. That's forty, almost forty years ago. That dream never went away.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  I've always wanted to open some consciousness centers to help people to become the healthiest versions of themselves, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And that's what Love Life is going to be doing. Today is Monday. Tomorrow, we open a soft opening, but we're opening up our very first flagship location in the Los Angeles area here. It's going to be in El Segundo, kind of down in the Beach City, south of the airport. It happens to be located, one, there's a, there's a Home Goods, and then there's a Whole Foods Market. This is one of Whole Foods Market's highest volume stores in Southern California is in this particular center.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  And so, we're going in there, because I think there's almost, almost a hundred percent overlap with Whole Foods customers and potential Love Life customers. So they're already coming into this area. And this, we took over an old Best Buy. And so there's really five components to the, the Love Life location. The first one is, we're going to have a healthy restaurant. And, and it's going to be primarily vegan, it's going to be primarily plant-based, but it's what I call a plant-forward restaurant. Meaning, everything starts out vegan, but we're going to let people add on, if they

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  want to add on some fish, or chicken, or beef, which we're buying all from Whole Foods. So it's all Whole Foods Market. It's gone through their certification processes. And, again, that's the perfect scene to me. The good, I, we'd opened up a Love Life Cafe back in Culver City back a year ago. It lasted only four months and failed. We lost millions of dollars on it.

• 1:49:05Rich Roll?

  And what did you learn from that failure?

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  I learned that-

• 1:49:09Rich Roll?

  The location was not great.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  That vegan restaurants are failing all over the United States, is what I've learned. And, there's a lot of reasons for that. I think, I think the young generation's not into it as much, for one thing. Secondly, I think that, when you have that discussion, the internal politics of where you're going to go eat, and it's like- The vegans all, I'd eat only at vegan restaurants, right? But if you're with a friend and it's like, "Well, let's go to True Food Kitchen because they have vegan stuff there, or you can eat that, but then I can get fish and I want to eat fish, I want some animal protein." So that's the compromise. And so, the pure vegans losing out in those conversations because unless people are willing

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  to eat vegan that one night, the internal politics of where you're gonna go eat, oftentimes, it used to be that you couldn't get vegan stuff. Now, most restaurants have vegan options. So, that's my explanation for why vegan restaurants are beginning to fail. But again, this is a great example of perfect being the enemy of the good. We're gonna have a plant-forward restaurant, it's gonna be primarily vegan. If you want to eat a whole foods plant-based meal, you've got it here. And you've got a lot of different choices. And you can get it without any oil, without any salt, you can get 100% whole foods, you can add on to it if you want, oil if you want, more fat if you want, salt, you can get that too.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  We're gonna, trying to meet the market where we find it, while keeping the ideal of a whole foods, plant-based diet there and clear for people that want to eat that like I do. So, cafe, first thing. Then we've got a fitness center, a gym, a really nice gym, think of Equinox in that regard. And then we've got, so we're gonna have yoga and Pilates there as well, we got a separate yoga studio, separate Pilates studio. And we have a really nice spa, so, things that you would get in any spa, from massage to facials, to wraps, to scrubs, all the different kind of things you can do in a spa.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Not a medicinal spa, you can't get Botox, but you could get, it's not a medical spa, but stuff you get in a traditional spa. We have all kinds of recovery modalities, from cryotherapy to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, to cold plunges, to regular saunas, to infrared saunas, and other esoteric, sort of biohacking type equipment that we're bringing in for people to make recovery.

• 1:51:45Speaker 01

  We have three state-of-the-art indoor pickleball courts for fun and for community. And these are really, I just, I'm into pickleball myself.

• 1:51:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're a big time into that.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  And, and these are really good courts. People are gonna join Love Life to play pickleball. I know they will. They'll take the other stuff they're not even interested in just to be able to have a great indoor facility to play with. And then the most important part is the medical center. We are gonna have, this is gonna be, we're gonna have all kinds of alternative health, including the medical doctors. So we will have, we'll have acupuncturists, we'll have Ayurvedic medicine, we'll have traditional Chinese medicine, we will have physical therapy, we will have chiropractic, we'll have all kinds of different practitioners

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  there. But we'll also have, starting out with two medical doctors that are trained in functional medicine, integrative medicine, and lifestyle medicine. So if you ask the question to most people, "When do you go see a doctor?", the answer you get is, "Well, when you need to, when you're sick." We kinda wanna change that paradigm, Rich. We want, we want people to, the doctor's job becomes a different job. The doctor's job is to help you optimize your immune system and your health at the highest level possible, so that you don't need to see a doctor. Because in general, when you get a chronic disease like diabetes, type 2 diabetes, or obesity, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, they don't actually,

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  the medical system doesn't cure you. They just prescribe pharmaceutical drugs for you to manage your symptoms. And we, A, wanna prevent you from getting those diseases in the first place. We now have such amazing technology that can, that can test and get your baseline established, and then wearables like my Apple Watch here, or an Oura ring, or Garmin that can, can, and we're gonna download all this information. We have an amazing technology app that people will get when they become members. And

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  We can begin to create a customized, precision, individualized plan for you. Say you came in, we put you through a battery of tests, we got your baseline. And it's like, then we work with you to say, okay, how do we get the healthiest version of Rich Roll here? And then you're gonna have a coach and we'll have a doctor working with you and we'll track your progress over time. And so that's the physical portion of it, but we're also gonna be doing meditation, we're also gonna be doing breath work, we're also gonna be doing Pilates and yoga classes. We're also helping you, and so I'll jump to the, yes, and when psychedelic therapy

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  is legal in California, MDMA, and psilocybin, like they are legal now in Oregon and Colorado, when those are legal here, we will also be practicing that. I really do believe the combination of those two psychedelic drugs is amazing scientifically for PTSD. It's been proven again and again and again to really help and help people break through that are depressed or have difficult PTSD. So, the whole idea is to help each individual that's a member become the healthiest, best version of themselves, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

• 1:55:07Rich Roll?

  If I was to design a mall that I basically wanted to spend all my time in, it would pretty much look exactly like that. Like, I could live at a place like this. Like, that's unbelievable.

• 1:55:23Rich Roll?

  I wish it was closer to my home than El Segundo, but this is an incredible vision, but it's also lofty, it's very ambitious, and obviously, it's very cost-intensive.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:39Rich Roll?

  I would imagine you had to raise a decent amount of money to execute on this.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  It's got a lot of my personal Whole Foods wealth into it.

• 1:55:48Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:55:50Rich Roll?

  That's exciting. I mean, that's basically the solution, the antidote for what ails our modern Western society.

• 1:56:00Speaker 01

  And the great thing about this is, is that, um, once we prove this idea works, not only are we going to open up more units, but capitalism goes to work. Other people will copy what we're doing, and the ideas will spread. And so, the world will be a different place 20 years from now. And people that, um, people will be thinking about this stuff differently 20 years from now. I will tell you, about the first 20 years Whole Foods existed, uh, before our brand got well-known, people come into our stores, and if you knew what supermarkets were like, you probably do, uh, know what they were like 40 years ago. They were terrible. They were really terrible places. And, uh, Whole Foods changed

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  the, changed the industry. They, they started copying us. Over time, they copied our, they started to up, up their quality. They started to do natural, organic. They, um, made their stores look nicer. Um, we had this major impact over time. Uh, but about the first 20 years, people come into Whole Foods for the first time, and they say, "Oh, my God, I've never been in a place like this. This is, this is incredible. I love this place. This place is great." I still hear people saying, "I'd love coming into your stores." Why? "I don't know. It feels good when I'm in the stores." It's like, that, by the way, is culture. They feel the culture of Whole Foods when they're in the stores. So, I believe the same thing's going to happen in the Love Life. When people go into this Love Life

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  that we're opening up tomorrow, they're going to say, "This place is incredible. Oh, my God. How come nobody's done this before? This is a good idea. I wish this was closer to where I live. When are you going to open one close to us?" Um, that's exactly the, that's what we want people to experience. Because I do think this is an idea whose time has come.

• 1:57:48Rich Roll?

  What is the near and distant ambition for this? Like, how many of these locations? Obviously, this is your proving concept.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  This is the infinite game. You know, I talk about the infinite game, which a couple of great books have been written on the infinite game. I don't, I did not make this up myself. But an infinite game, a finite game is like, if I go play pickleball, there's rules and you, it's a finite game. You play, there's a winner, there's a loser, end of game, start a new game. An infinite game never ends. An infinite game is one that can go, intends to go on forever. So like, life is an infinite game. DNA is replicating, going on, evolving, changing, mutating, but it's meant to continue to go on indefinitely. Eventually trying to figure out how to get off the planet before supernova hits and get into some other galaxy. So DNA is replicating.

• 1:58:42Speaker 01

  Similarly, business or capitalism is an infinite game. The players change. It evolves over time, but the game goes on. People are always trade, always creating and trading with each other. That's going to continue. Well, I see Whole Foods as an infinite game. It's out, I hope it outlives its founder and founders. It will go on, maybe not forever, but for, intends to be an infinite game. Love life is something that I want to be going on long after I've passed on the scene. But I intend for love life to outlive me and to go on and to hopefully do much good in the world long after I've left it to be an infinite game. So that's what I get people, "Why, you're too old. Why are you doing this?" It's like, "You don't understand.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  I'm doing this partly because my soul is guiding me to do this," but people don't really understand that. But it doesn't matter. I don't have to be around to see it fully flower.

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  If I didn't do this, I would regret it the rest of my life. I would always wonder, "Oh, my God, you chicken shit. You knew you had the call and you didn't answer it because you were scared, didn't want to sit on your money." And it's like, no, I would, my internal critic would have a field day roasting me. This is like, I feel called to do this. My soul is saying, "Do this. It's an adventure. It's part of the continuous of my hero's journey. So, we're gonna do it. If it doesn't work out, well, sometimes reality knocks you back.

• 2:00:09Rich Roll?

  Do you think about legacy?

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  No. I mean, the honest truth, I don't. People ask me that question all the time. And I, the best metaphor I can give to explain it, people ask Picasso, it's like, you know, what's, what's your favorite painting that you've ever done? And he said, "The one I'm working on right now." Right? Those other paintings are in the past. What he's creating right now is what he's most interested in. I think it's the same way with entrepreneurs. What I'm interested in is what I'm creating now, not what I've created in the past. And legacy is thinking about looking back and what you've accomplished and looking at it and saying, "Well, you know, it's your legacy." Or looking forward, trying to anticipate what your legacy will be.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, I'm just trying to be in the moment, creating now, not worried about the legacy. It'll take care of itself, one way or another.

• 2:01:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, it's a beautiful vision and, and it's a gift, you know? I, I would absolutely love to go to a place like that every single day.

• 2:01:11Speaker 01

  Well, stop by.

• 2:01:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm your perfect customer or something like that.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you probably are.

• 2:01:16Rich Roll?

  But I think, uh, the moment is right. You know, the culture is receptive to this.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  I think so, too.

• 2:01:23Rich Roll?

  And people are frustrated with the healthcare system, which is something you have a lot of opinions about and have written about. And the problem is that there's no other, like, solution.

• 2:01:37Rich Roll?

  Other than, you know, going to, you know, trying to root out or find some obscure, you know, clinician who sees things the way that you do, and that comes at a cost and is, you know, but the fact that you consolidate all of these things under one roof and create a system in which everything can kind of be tracked and there's purpose and direction and intentionality behind how all these things are interacting with each other, I think, is really a fantastic one-stop solution to all of this.

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  I know, it's an adventure. I'm very excited about it. It's gonna be, we're gonna have all kinds of challenges and setbacks and problems. I mean, doctors, for example, they have totally different views, you know, and doctors don't, they're, they're not really employees. Doctors are independent. You can't, you can't really tell a doctor how to practice. So every doctor's gonna have their own philosophy, their own way of healing, and you gotta, you gotta get doctors that match up well with your, with your members, that have good synchronicities with the, or synergies with the, with the members. And you have all these alternative healings. And so here's one of the challenges. When does biohacking become snake oil salesmen?

• 2:02:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  How do you discern what's really effective versus what's scientific? What's cutting edge and what's just, you know?

• 2:02:56Rich Roll?

  Right, because you could fill an entire Best Buy with just a bunch of crazy equipment.

• 2:03:02Speaker 01

  We have some crazy equipment. We do.

• 2:03:05Rich Roll?

  Right, but it's what's, what's efficacious, what is still we're not sure about, and what is just a waste of money.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. That's, that's one of our challenges, is to discern. Because we are cutting edge. We're on, you know, we're, we're crossed over to what controlled scientific studies have said, you know, and, and so, but ultimately, the doctors are gonna say, we want to do this, or we don't want to do this. And so you gotta, you gotta pick doctors that you sync up pretty well with.

• 2:03:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  I'm pretty excited about it. It's a new, it's a new adventure, Rich. It's good. It's, it, in life, we need new adventures.

• 2:03:44Speaker 01

  We do.

• 2:03:45Rich Roll?

  Well, you certainly have a lot of energy. So it's working for you, buddy.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Adventures give you energy.

• 2:03:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I love it. And I wish you luck. Is the opening, the soft open tonight?

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  No, tomorrow morning, nine o'clock. We're missing about half of our gym equipment. That's why it's a soft opening, stuck in customs someplace.

• 2:04:04Rich Roll?

  I'll drop in in August for the real one.

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  August 10th is the official grand opening with media coverage and we'll have everything will be working then, for sure.

• 2:04:15Rich Roll?

  Beautiful, man. Well, I think we did it. How do you feel?

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel good.

• 2:04:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Come back and share with me once you've, you know, have some, some stories to tell about love life. I'd love to hear more about it. And I'm at your service, my friend. I think what you're doing is laudatory and beautiful. So thank you for coming and sharing with me today.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  The new adventures of love life.

• 2:04:35Rich Roll?

  That's it. The infinite game.

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  The infinite game. Thanks, brother.

• 2:04:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:04:53Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast

• 2:05:37Rich Roll?

  running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors.

• 2:05:45Rich Roll?

  And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at ritual.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler

• 2:06:24Rich Roll?

  Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.